Kalve Coffee expands into fourth market, accelerating European growth
Kalve Coffee is using Paris and a Portugal push to test whether a Baltic specialty brand can scale without losing its edge.
Kalve Coffee is trying to prove that a Baltic specialty brand can travel. The Riga-based roaster and café chain, founded in 2017 and operating since 2019, said its European footprint took shape in 2025 with entries into Estonia, Lithuania and France, plus two Paris coffee shops in the 15th and 9th arrondissements.
That Paris push matters because it shows Kalve is not treating overseas growth as a one-off. A French business registry record shows a KALVE COFFEE secondary establishment at 40 Rue Desaix, created on November 1, 2025, while the company’s annual report says the group consolidated four companies across Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and France by December 2025. Kalve has also said it is preparing to launch operations in Portugal and open a new café in Vilnius, extending the map even further.
The numbers help explain why the company believes it can keep moving. Kalve raised €1.16 million in a December 2024 IPO, with 1,255 investors subscribing and the offer oversubscribed by 16%. Nasdaq listed the shares on December 6, 2024, and the proceeds were meant to support international expansion and production capacity. By 2025, turnover had reached €5.3 million, up 55% from €3.405 million in 2024, coffee production and sales hit 109 tonnes, and headcount climbed from 56 to 106. Kalve also said total assets reached €2.8 million at the end of 2025 and that the number of coffee machines leased to customers increased 2.4 times.
For a company still young by European specialty standards, the brand signals are as important as the balance sheet. Kalve says it is Latvia’s first B Corp-certified company and the first in the Baltics to earn that certification, and it won Roast Masters 2025 in Amsterdam after finishing second in 2019. In February 2026, co-founder Gatis Zēmanis said the company had “declared ourselves on the big European stage,” a line that fits the pace of the rollout.
The real question now is whether Kalve is exporting a distinctly Baltic coffee identity or proving something broader: that specialty coffee, if the standards are tight enough, can cross borders as a brand-led format. Paris gave the company a visible foothold. Portugal will show whether the model can keep scaling without losing the edge that got it there.
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