When Jason Prefontaine was growing up in Canada, he and his brothers would help their father fill orders for the family business, which supplied instant coffee, tea, and soups to offices in Alberta's financial and oil center, Calgary. Later, with a degree in computer programming and a flair for photography, he turned to a very different venture: selling espresso machines.

But it wasn't about machines, he recalls, it was about how to treat customers and how to create value for them. Then as now, there were a few big names, all Italian: Faema, Simonelli, La Spaziale, San Marco, Marzocco, La Cimbali. In 2007 he moved to Seattle, which had evolved, thanks to Starbucks, into the epicenter of North America's coffee culture.