See how Batavia’s PapaNicholas prepares coffee beans

Chances are you’ve seen the smiling, suspenders and bow-tie-donned image of PapaNicholas Coffee founder, Nicholas A. Papanicholas, on a bag of beans of at your local supermarket. But you may not know that coffee came from a small local factory on Raddant Road in Batavia.

Papanicholas grew up working for the family business, Aroma Coffee, which started in 1897 before striking out on his own in 1984, starting PapaNicholas Coffee in his Wheaton home.

Nowadays, three times a week, 20 different kinds of green coffee beans arrive at the Batavia facility in 150-pound burlap sacks. That amounts to about 100,000 pounds of green coffee beans. Those beans yield about 50 different varieties of coffee. They are roasted in the morning and packaged as ground or whole bean coffee by the afternoon. Also, coffee beans are roasted to order, so they don’t sit around in the warehouse waiting to be sold.

To bring out the individual taste characteristics of each bean type, beans are slow roasted separately in small batches in a temperature range of 400-500 degrees. Blending for different varieties happens afterward.

Selling more than 1 million pounds each year, Christopher Papanicholas says of his late father, “He wanted everyone to enjoy a good cup of coffee.”