Photo: Chris Emeott
Popular coffee cart evolves into charming neighborhood shop.
It’s cliché, but Zach and Sara Zschernitz of Edina Coffee Roasters literally put the cart before the horse. In their case, they put the coffee cart before the coffee house.
Before opening their Edina Coffee Roasters on Cahill Road, the husband and wife team ran a portable coffee cart. Coffee had been their dream ever since they met as ministry students in 2006.
Zach and Sara Zschernitz are the proud owners of Edina Coffee Roasters, which opened its doors in November 2023.
“We talked about getting into the coffee business all the time,” Zach says. “The early 2000s was the renaissance of the coffee industry. I grew up working at Caribou and Dunn Brothers as everything was happening.” He then was the head of coffee for The Lynhall, but then COVID-19 happened.
“I was laid off, and Sara wasn’t working,” Zach says. “Sara looked at me and said, ‘Why don’t we do what we had always talked about?’ I looked at Sara and said, ‘You want to do that now?’”
She did. Sara grew up sharing coffee with her grandparents and their friends. “Coffee was their tradition,” she says. “It was special.”
From the start, Edina Coffee Roasters wanted to be that kind of special. “We want to be about great hospitality, and we want to be about great coffee,” Zach says.
Espresso Tonic
So Zach and Sara roasted their own beans, and they brewed and served their own coffee. They were so good at it that their coffees can be found on the shelves of Lunds & Byerlys. They even designed their own packaging.
They also popped up at art fairs, farmers markets, athletic events and private businesses. Connections made at the pop-ups, in turn, led to wholesale partnerships. It even led to the discovery of the shop’s location. It was at a pop-up where Zach met Jyotiee Kistner, co-owner of Muddy Tiger. Like Edina Coffee Roasters, Muddy Tiger was a food truck, which recently opened a shop in the Cahill area. It was Kistner who told Zach about the space. At the time, a brick-and-mortar store was not on his radar.
“I remember telling one of our employees that the plan was to open a shop in two to three years,” Zach says. “Two weeks later, I told her about this place.”
They got the keys to the shop in September and had a grand opening in November. Their location on Cahill Road was long considered a coffee desert. The closest coffee shop is about a mile away on Industrial Boulevard.
Latte
A text from a neighbor, who had just sold their house, reads, “We’ve been talking about the need for a coffee shop in this area for seven years, and now you come?”
Zach said the neighbors, moms in particular, have been more than supportive. “I’ve seen the Facebook threads,” Zach says. “They talk about the need for a neighborhood coffee shop, and they talk about how they
have to support it.”
Sara remembers working a soft-opening shift with Zach on one of their first Saturdays. “I looked out over the front of the shop and saw that all the tables were filled,” she says. “Coffee brings people together. It’s what we talked about when we were back at school.”
Edina Coffee Roasters
7031 Cahill Road
Facebook: Edina Coffee Roasters
Instagram: @edinacoffeeroasters
