Larry’s Coffee enters new era under Raleigh owners

Jessie Lotrecchiano and Sandro Niessen now own Larry’s Coffee, the Raleigh roaster that has spent three decades turning a tucked-away Five Points site into one of the city’s most recognizable independent brands. They bought the company from founder Larry Larson last July, and the transition has been framed as a Raleigh succession rather than a break from the business’s roots.

That continuity matters because Larry’s was built as a place, not just a label. The company says it started in Five Points in 1994, when Larson turned what had been a passion project after he dropped out of graduate school at NC State into a coffee business with a local following. Its campus still reflects that origin story: a cluster of three buildings with a roastery at the center, solar water-heated floors, rainwater-driven restrooms and a passive-solar clearstory.

The brand’s reach now extends far beyond that corner of Raleigh. Larry’s bags are sold at Lowe’s Foods, Sprouts and smaller regional markets, and the company supplies coffee to seven university dining programs, WakeMed hospitals and roughly 250 wholesale hospitality accounts across North Carolina. On its wholesale side, the roaster says it has created custom blends and supported coffee education and environmental efforts for UNC Dining, Duke University, Elon University, WakeMed Hospitals, The Umstead Hotel and SAS Campus.

That mix of retail visibility and institutional business is what makes the ownership change more than a simple changeover at the top. Larry’s has long been tied to Raleigh’s identity as a locally made, sustainability-minded company, and Lotrecchiano and Niessen are now responsible for keeping that identity intact while preserving the distribution relationships that have carried the brand into grocery aisles, campus dining halls and hospital break rooms statewide.

The company says it is now 100% independently owned by Lotrecchiano and Niessen, who work on site in Raleigh. For Wake County, the question is not whether Larry’s will keep roasting coffee in Five Points, but how the new owners balance growth with the details that made longtime customers treat the business as part roastery, part neighborhood landmark.