The garage roasters who turned a mountain-town coffee problem into Canada's number one organic brand

A café with no good beans

The origin story starts with a problem, which is usually the best way for one to start. Elana Rosenfeld had moved to Invermere, a small town in the Columbia Valley of the Rockies, to be near the mountains. She opened the Blue Dog Café, bought a cappuccino machine, and then ran straight into the obvious issue: there was no good coffee to put through it. As she later told Kootenay Business, if you owned a restaurant and wanted good coffee, you had to order it from Calgary or Vancouver.

So in 1996 she and her then partner Leo Johnson decided to fix it themselves. They put a roaster in a garage out in the Rocky Mountains, learned the craft, and started Kicking Horse Coffee. The name came from a piece of mountain folklore about an explorer kicked by a horse and revived by coffee, which is exactly the kind of bold, slightly irreverent branding that would later carry blends named Kick Ass and Smart Ass onto polite grocery shelves across the country.

“Really, my whole take on business is ethics and values and also creating the kind of world I want to see.”

The part worth stealing is that the ethics were not a marketing layer added later. Rosenfeld built the company around certified organic and Fairtrade sourcing from the start, then let the bold flavour and irreverent packaging do the talking on the shelf. That combination, a values-led supply chain wrapped in a brand that did not take itself too seriously, is what let a tiny mountain roaster out-position much larger coffee companies in the grocery aisle.

What they actually make

The blends: The core of the line is a family of whole bean and ground coffees with names you remember: Kick Ass (the signature dark roast, all chocolate malt, molasses, and licorice), 454 Horse Power (a heavy, earthy Indonesian dark roast), Grizzly Claw, the balanced medium-roast Smart Ass, and Three Sisters, a well-rounded blend of light, medium, and dark roasts.

The certifications: Every blend is certified organic, Fairtrade, and kosher. The beans are arabica, grown in Central America, South America, and Indonesia, and roasted in the Canadian Rockies. That trio of certifications is the spine of the brand, and it is consistent across the entire range rather than reserved for a premium tier.

The positioning: Kicking Horse leans on four words it prints right on the bag: organic, Fairtrade, no BS, and roasted in Canada. The throughline is that you can buy a deeply ethical cup without paying a specialty-shop premium or decoding a wall of jargon. Bold name, clean credentials, grocery price point.

Why people love it

Kicking Horse has the kind of loyal following most coffee brands only wish for. Its bestselling Kick Ass dark roast carries thousands of reviews on Amazon.ca at a 4.7-star average, and the brand's own product pages routinely show review counts in the hundreds with roughly nine in ten landing at five stars. The appeal is part flavour and part attitude: drinkers like that it is genuinely strong and consistent, and they like that a bag of fully organic Fairtrade coffee sits at a normal grocery price. The irreverent names give it a personality on a shelf full of earnest beige packaging, and the mountain-town, founder-led backstory gives people a reason to root for it.

How it compares to other Canadian coffee roasters

Kicking Horse sits in a busy category, but it occupies a distinct spot: more grocery-ready than most craft roasters, more bold and irreverent than most ethical-coffee brands, and built for a mainstream shelf rather than a specialty café back bar. Here is where it lands next to other Canadian roasters you might find nearby:

Categories and positioning reflect publicly listed information on each brand's site as of June 2026. Pricing intentionally omitted because it varies materially by retailer. See the live product links below.

The growth story operators should pay attention to

Kicking Horse is a useful example because it grew in the order most founder-led CPG brands should aim for. It proved the product locally, built a genuinely differentiated brand, and earned national grocery distribution before it ever needed to chase scale through ownership changes. What began as a two-person operation in a garage became a multi-million-dollar business employing roughly 120 people and the number one organic Fairtrade coffee roaster in Canada.

The capital story tracks that growth rather than driving it. A private equity firm, Swander Pace Capital, took a controlling stake in 2012. Then in May 2017, as Canadian Grocer reported, Italy's Lavazza Group acquired an 80 percent stake in a deal that valued Kicking Horse at about 215 million CAD. Rosenfeld kept a 20 percent stake and stayed on as CEO, and the company kept roasting in Invermere. That is the kind of outcome a brand earns when it sells from a position of strength: a global buyer with a presence in around 90 countries, and a founder who stayed in the chair.

What the press is saying

Where to actually buy it

Each link below goes directly to a Kicking Horse collection, a specific blend, or a live retailer listing, not just a homepage, so you can add a real bag to your cart without hunting:

For the full range and the latest stockists, browse all coffee on kickinghorsecoffee.ca or check the brand's store locator to find a bag near you.

Frequently asked questions

Bottom line

Kicking Horse Coffee is the kind of brand a founder can learn from before they ever buy a bag. Two people in a mountain-town garage spotted a problem they could not solve at the store, fixed it with an organic Fairtrade roast and a brand bold enough to be remembered, and earned their way onto grocery shelves across the country and a 215 million CAD exit with the founder still in the chair. The coffee is genuinely good. The playbook behind it is the better reason to pay attention. If you want to try it, the Kick Ass dark roast is the simplest place to start.