DW
Dana Whitfield
Co-founder & Chief Executive Officer
Our company
From a garage in 2011 to a 186,000 sq ft plant.
Our story
Cold Start began when two night-shift nurses got tired of bad gas-station coffee. Dana Whitfield and Tom Archuleta started steeping cold brew in food-grade buckets in Tom’s garage and selling it at the Kessler Falls farmers market. By 2014 they had a co-packer; by 2017 they had bought the old Halvorsen Foundry building on Foundry Road and installed their own brewhouse and first canning line.
Today we run three canning lines, an automated cold brew extraction system, our own clean-in-place (CIP) system and an on-site wastewater pretreatment plant. We employ 240 people across three shifts and ship to more than 1,900 retail locations.
Timeline
- 2011 First batch brewed in a two-car garage.
- 2014 Moved to a regional co-packer; launched in 120 stores.
- 2017 Purchased the Foundry Road facility; Line 1 commissioned.
- 2020 Line 2 and the automated extraction system come online.
- 2022 On-site wastewater pretreatment and water recovery plant opens.
- 2025 Plant-wide network and controls modernization project kicks off.
- 2026 Line 3 high-speed canning and nitro dosing go live.
Leadership team
TA
Tom Archuleta
Co-founder & Chief Product Officer
RS
Renee Okafor-Shaw
Chief Financial Officer
MR
Marcus Reyes
VP, Manufacturing Operations
PN
Priya Natarajan
Plant Engineering Manager
Leads controls, reliability and the Line 3 project. 12 years in food & beverage automation.
GL
Greg Lindqvist
Director of IT
Runs IT infrastructure, networking and the plant network modernization effort.
JC
Jenna Cole
Communications Manager
Media inquiries: jenna.cole@coldstartbeverage.com