Lauren Roberts doesn’t like to let a good business go to waste.
In 2015, Roberts, along with her sister Hannah Kuehl and their mom, Jennifer Byers, bought the Capitol Hill vegetarian eateries City O’ City and WaterCourse from founder Dan Landes when he was ready to get out of the restaurant industry. Roberts was a manager at City O’ City and had always wanted to open a vegan business with her mom.
And in November last year, the family trio decided to help one of their most loyal clients enter retirement. Roberts, Kuehl and Byers purchased Colorado Sun Tofu in Northglenn from owners Henry and Stella Han, and they plan to move the local tofu manufacturing business to Trinidad, three hours south of Denver, this summer.
“We’ve been fortunate to buy these incredible legacy businesses and become stewards of these institutions, so we can keep them around,” Roberts said.
Roberts, her sister and mom wanted to diversify their portfolio when the pandemic hit, in case of future restaurant industry disruptions. They had previously planned to purchase a former school in La Veta, a small town an hour northwest of Trinidad, with Sexy Pizza owner Kayvan Khalatbari for a development project, including workforce housing, last year. But in the 11th hour, their builder pulled out, and the deal fell apart.
“We were committed to making it work, but housing was such a big part of that project, so we just weren’t able to do much on our own,” Roberts said. “But really the scope of our work, which we’re doing now in Trinidad remains unchanged, which is focusing on bringing high-paying jobs, paid apprenticeship and business focused on manufacturing and export into rural communities.”
The City O’ City and WaterCourse owners then decided to shift their attention to Colorado Sun Tofu and Trinidad, where Denver developer Dana Crawford has also been active since 2016, working on restoring the old opera house, the Fox West Theatre and other projects.
“Trinidad’s local government wants business, so they offer a lot of incentives to lower some of the overhead,” Roberts said. “The state also has incredible grant opportunities for businesses, especially focused on exports. We wanted to have a business that’s not reliant on local volume and focused on building up the workforce by offering education, resources and support services, which just seemed to fit the needs of that community. I’ve also been drawn to Trinidad as a Colorado native because of its uniqueness, architecture, and history, and being so close to Arizona, New Mexico and Texas could allow us to be a little hub on the border.”
Roberts, Kuehl and Byers have been running the Hans’ former Northglenn plant since November, but they purchased a nearly 10,000-square-foot former Coca-Cola warehouse in Trinidad and plan to move Colorado Sun Tofu there in mid-June.
“With no exaggeration, this was an operation run by a husband and wife, who worked 12 p.m. to 1 a.m. every day, 7 days a week,” Roberts said. “It was more like a shop and less like a plant, so they would service some friends through wholesale and around 30 clients they built up. But they had no time for marketing or creating standard operating procedures, like a HASA plan, to get into larger distributors, and no website because they were working nonstop. Talk about lessons in work ethic.”
Roberts and her family have been scaling operations, building a team of eight employees and getting picked up by big distributors like Shamrock Distribution and small independent distributors working with Asian restaurants and Korean grocery stores around town. Trinidad locals Siobhan and Craig McCann will manage the plant for the family once they move. The business already sells tofu to Denver restaurants like Apple Blossom and Mercury Cafe, and they hope to get their product in local Natural Grocers and Whole Foods grocery stores in the near future.
“Most of the tofu you buy are from large manufacturers, so by the time you get it’s not very fresh or processed. But this is a unique product handmade within non-GMO, organic soybeans from Iowa and really simple ingredients. All of our dishes have some component of the soy milk, the soft tofu or firm tofu in them, and I think it’s what makes our restaurant products so good, which is why we wanted to get into this business because we believe in the product.”
They’re also offering paid apprenticeship opportunities through the National Restaurant Association Educational Foundation’s Hospitality Sector Registered Apprenticeship. The program, launched in 2017, provides employers with accredited training programs for line cook, kitchen manager and restaurant manager positions, and Colorado is one of four states piloting it.
“Apprenticeship is in many ways going to be a big part of the future of our industry in terms of professionalizing and legitimizing career pathways,” Roberts said. “In Trinidad, we will offer the manager track for the apprenticeship program. We also aim to broaden the program to encompass entrepreneurship more broadly, as many folks who work in the service industry go on to start their own business.”
Roberts and her sister want to call Trinidad a second home. They purchased the former house of Ed West, the man behind the town’s historic Fox West Theatre, which was built downtown in 1907. The home was built in 1890 with all the original trim, finishes and gas and electric lamps.