A massive coffee bean roaster will need to be disassembled and moved to a new building in north Richland when Treasure Valley Coffee of the Columbia Basin opens its new headquarters, along with a retail store, in the Horn Rapids Business Park this summer.

The $1.9 million investment includes land bought from the city of Richland.

The family-owned company is a licensee of Treasure Valley Coffee Co., based in Boise. The local operations was started by John Roskelley, whose sons are the current owners.

Roskelley began running the company out of a Kennewick garage in 1997.

Since then, it’s grown to include 10 distribution routes in Eastern Washington and northeastern Oregon and two routes in western Washington.

The new building will be at 2009 Logston Blvd., just off the bypass highway and close to the B Reactor Museum.

“We have had this dream for quite a while,” said Chris Roskelley, who owns the business with his brother, Paul Roskelley. “It’s probably been about four years in the making.”

The finished building will be about 17,000 square feet, with about 800 square feet dedicated to a retail shop named Roscoe’s Coffee, a nod to the nickname held by Chris, Paul and their father. “They’ll be able to come in and get any mixed drink, hot or cold, including our signature mixed drinks,” Chris said. “There will be a drive-thru and we’ll have about six to eight blends available so customers will be able to try coffee or try our blends before they buy it.”

Work on the building began in mid-December and is scheduled to be completed in late summer. It will be a sizable expansion from its 11,000-square-foot building off Chemical Drive in east Kennewick.

Chris said the decision to move and expand was not only to increase the size of the company’s operation, but also to increase their local name recognition.

“We’ve been here for 20-something years, and since 2010 we’ve been doing roasting,” he said. “As far as I know, we have probably the biggest roaster in the Tri-Cities, and people don’t know what they have here. You say, ‘Treasure Valley’ and they’ve never heard of us, because we just deliver off of trucks right now. But if someone can drive by and drink Roscoe’s Coffee, then they’re going to know it’s local.”

Paul Roskelley has taken on the roasting role of the operation.

“It’s a little bit art, but mostly science,” he said, as a huge roaster, equipped with a digital monitor, processes 150-pound sacks of raw, or “green,” coffee beans in 18 minutes.

Beans are cooled from nearly 450 degrees to room temperature in just a couple of minutes, and then sorted and sent through another machine to be bagged into one pound and five-pound bags.

At the Kennewick site, Treasure Valley Coffee roasts about 3,000 pounds of beans a week, usually in a couple days. It expects to increase that amount in Richland.

The company is proud of its efforts to stay mindful of its environmental footprint, using a method during roasting to recapture heat after burning off carbon dioxide, allowing it to recirculate, using less fuel for the roasting process.

Treasure Valley Coffee employs 26 people, with about half made up of the distribution drivers who run the wholesale delivery routes. Also on the payroll is the general contractor for the Richland project, a family friend who is a now Treasure Valley employee.

In addition, the wives of both brothers run the front office and handle the books for the family company.

Graphics are made in-house and it’s a company-wide effort to create the blends local to the Tri-Cities.

Treasure Valley Coffee has about 40 blends available, using only grade one and two coffee beans, with about a dozen of those blends developed in Kennewick.

The brothers get by on a minimum of three to four cups of coffee a day, but Chris says he’ll have a whole pot when he’s traveling.

Coffee fuels the drive to keep building the family business. “If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” Chris said.

Treasure Valley Coffee: 509-582-2683; tvcnorthwest.com; Facebook.