Todd Carmichael and JP Iberti opened the first La Colombe café in the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood of Philadelphia in 1994. The name is French for the dove. A full roastery followed in 1995 and began supplying restaurants and hotels.
New York cafés followed in Tribeca in 2007 and SoHo in 2009. In 2013 the company partnered with the Clinton Foundation to found the Haiti Coffee Academy, set up to train smallholder farmers. The Draft Latte, previously on tap in cafés, went into cans in 2016.
