Momentum Coffee

Tracy Powell spent his career building spaces. Technology campuses, co-working environments, real estate developments — places designed to bring people together and keep them there. When he and his wife Nikki decided to open a coffee shop, that instinct didn't change. “You always have to keep things new and happening in the space to keep people interested in coming back,” Tracy said. Coffee was the draw; the experience was the product.

Momentum Coffee opened in 2020 — in the middle of COVID, which was not the plan. Their first concept was Momentum Coffee and Co-working, combining Tracy's background in co-working space development with Nikki's vision for a community-rooted café. That first location became two, then three. Today Momentum has three locations across Chicago, a wholesale program, a catering and events business, an e-commerce presence, and a coffee pod side project in testing. The Bellwether Shop Roaster is at the center of all of it.

From a traditional roaster to something people actually stop to look at.

Momentum had been roasting before Bellwether — on a Civets fluid bed roaster at a separate location, which meant Tracy was driving out to roast, then driving back to deliver coffee to each store. It worked, but it was tethered to a place and to his presence. When he encountered Bellwether at an SCA conference in Chicago, he was intrigued but non-committal. “I was like, yeah, I don't know, we'll see, we're working on it.” He purchased shortly after.

The machine went into Momentum's South Loop location — the shop that sits just off the McCormick Place Convention Center, where hundreds of conferences bring visitors from across the country and around the world. The placement was deliberate. Tracy describes the Bellwether as “eye candy” for the space, and in South Loop that's not just aesthetics. It's a conversation starter that walks in every day wearing a different name tag. Visitors from London and Belgium have stopped mid-order to watch a roast in progress, asking questions about green coffee, about how different countries drink it, about what makes this different from the bag they'd buy at a grocery store. “It really just adds a lot of conversation around what you're doing,” Tracy said. “People see the beans, they see the bags, they see the green coffee — and then all of a sudden they start to say: oh, so that's what coffee looks like before you roast it.”

That's what Tracy calls Momentum's “bean to cup theory”: the journey from green beans to finished drink, visible in real time, in the same room where someone just ordered their latte. It's a differentiator that no amount of good sourcing or skilled baristas alone can replicate — because you can't see it if it's not happening right there.

Switching without losing a single customer.

Momentum had been roasting Kinetic — their house drip blend — and Velocity, their espresso, for four and a half years. Regulars knew both coffees well. “Coffee folks can be a little picky,” Tracy said. “Especially the ones that come in every day. They can detect when something's off.” He knew that from experience: a mix-up between the regular and decaf once sent a customer straight to the counter. She knew.

The prospect of switching roasters after four and a half years was genuinely nerve-wracking. His wholesale and café partners asked immediately: will it taste different? Tracy sent samples of both coffees to Bellwether's coffee team. They matched the profiles, loaded them into the machine, and sent them back. Momentum ran a taste test. “Nobody can tell the difference. I haven't had one person say this doesn't taste like the coffee you used to do.” That result — no customer detecting a change after years of daily loyalty — was what gave Tracy the confidence to make the switch fully and talk his partners into it.

“Nobody can tell the difference.”

Tracy Powell

Roasting in the afternoon, running the business all day.

Tracy roasts about 100 pounds a week and spends roughly 8 to 10 hours doing it — typically in the afternoons, while the café is running around him. The continuous roasting kit with auto loader is what makes that possible. He loads several batches, steps away to pull shots or ring up customers or handle a wholesale inquiry, and comes back to beans ready to go. “Before this type of machine, you would just be roasting — I mean, you're literally not walking away from an active roast,” he said. “What the Bellwether allows us to do is do 3 or 4 batches, run off to grab milk, come back, it's still rolling.”

He bought the continuous roasting setup from the start — because he already had three locations and knew he wasn't going to be the person sitting at a roaster all day. For a one- or two-person operation, the ability to roast while ringing up customers isn't a convenience; it's the only way the math works. And in South Loop, there's a secondary benefit: when the line backs up, customers don't stand there staring at the back of the person ahead of them. They watch the machine.

“When Spro's happy, the shop's happy.”

Tracy Powell

Three coffees. Four revenue streams. One machine.

The Bellwether opened up product development in a way Momentum's old setup couldn't. Tracy can now order a small quantity of any coffee from the Bellwether Marketplace, roast it, test it on customers, and decide whether it's worth scaling — without committing to 400 pounds of something he's not sure about yet. That's how Inertia, Momentum's third coffee brand, came to exist: discovered through Marketplace experimentation, tested with customer feedback, added to the lineup once it proved itself.

The same low-risk testing logic now applies to wholesale, events, and coffee pods. Momentum has fielded orders for 160 bags of Kinetic at a time — corporate gifts for conference attendees, branded coffee to represent Chicago at events. They supplied all the cold brew for Vegan Dale, a major summer festival in Grant Park, running multiple cold brew batches simultaneously. Tracy is manually filling and testing coffee pods to explore home subscription without needing outside manufacturing commitments. None of these channels required a separate roasting infrastructure. They required the machine he already had.

“Everybody's not gonna come into Momentum every day,” Tracy said. “But we want people to drink Momentum every day.” The pods are the most recent expression of that idea — the café experience, portable, for the mornings when someone can't make it in.

Three locations. One Momentum way.

Ask Tracy what the hardest part of running a multi-location café business is and the answer comes immediately: consistency. “Location one, this is how we do it — we call it the Momentum way. And location two decides maybe they wanna do it somebody else's way.” Building systems that travel across every store, that give every employee the training to deliver the same product and the same experience regardless of which door the customer walked through — that's the ongoing work.

The Bellwether supports that consistency from the roasting side. The matched profiles mean every location serving Kinetic or Velocity is serving the same coffee Tracy has been making for years. The Marketplace provides a reliable, fast-shipping supply — typically 2 to 3 days — with Bellwether communicating around holidays so Tracy can plan ahead. About 50% of Momentum's green coffee comes through the Marketplace; the other 50% comes from a local supplier around the corner for situations where he needs something quickly.

For large orders or unexpected spikes, Bellwether's roasted coffee service offers a backup — Tracy can order roasted coffee directly if volume ever exceeds what he can produce in-house. That safety net is part of why scaling into wholesale felt manageable rather than risky.

The next 12 months, Tracy says, look like more of the same — Momentum's same principles, bigger footprint. “A lot of what we do in this business is performative. People like to see things happening.” The roaster in the South Loop window isn't decorative. It's working. And in Tracy and Nikki's model, anything that's working gets built on.