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September 30, 2024 PAID POST » Business
Published September 30, 2024 at 3:51 p.m.
It’s not hard to find a coffee and a quick bite to eat around Vermont, but if you’re craving a maple latte with rich, Vermont-tapped syrup or a fresh-baked pastry made in-house, Black Cap Coffee & Bakery is the spot. Owner Laura Vilalta has grown Black Cap’s single location in Stowe to four coffee shops around the state, all with a commitment to sourcing ingredients from as many local businesses as possible, from the coffee to the cream to the flavors.
Black Cap has gained a reputation for the quality of its products over the years. When Vilalta originally bought the Stowe business in 2012, it was focused solely on the quality of the coffee, but over the years, as she opened more locations, she noticed a demand for baked goods, too. So, she adapted, hiring New England Culinary Institute-trained head baker Ashia Messier to lead a six-person team of bakers. They supply all four locations with pastries made fresh that day. But don’t just take our word for it — the reviews online speak for themselves.
“Okay. This is the first review I’ve ever posted, but this was hands down the best pastry I’ve ever had in my life,” enthused a customer visiting from Philadelphia. “Jealous of everyone who lives here and has access to this regularly!”
Lauren Morris, director of HR for Black Cap, eats the pastries regularly. “This is the first place I’ve ever worked where I enjoyed the food,” she said. “I actually have to keep myself from taking things here because it’s all so delicious.” Morris noted that Messier is always searching for new ways to source local products for her recipes — for example, by using King Arthur Baking flour out of Norwich for all of the pastries.
It’s not just the ingredients — items from local businesses are all over the shelves for purchase at any Black Cap location, from Queen City Kombucha drinks to soaps and lotions from Elmore Mountain Farm.
Morris’ favorite drink is the maple latte, which is Black Cap’s specialty. Every single ingredient in it has a local connection. The syrup is from Lamb Family Maple out of Waterville, the coffee is roasted by Brave Coffee & Tea in Waterbury, and the milk is from Monument Farms Dairy and Mansfield Dairy.
“We really try to give back to the Vermont community by supporting other small businesses in Vermont like us,” Morris said.
Black Cap Is Woman-Owned and Local
Vilalta, a Stowe resident, is originally from Barcelona. She had a career in marketing and taught at a Spanish business school before deciding to move her family to Vermont in 2010. She bought the first Black Cap location, in Stowe, in 2012. In 2015, she hired Danielle Dolisie as the general manager after meeting her at a spin class that Dolisie instructed. As a team, they opened three more locations, in Burlington, Morrisville and Waterbury.
“We say Black Cap is a great place to eat, meet and work,” Vilalta said. “The service is good, the quality is awesome, and we are open every day, and we make a point of that.”
Most of the decision makers on Vilalta’s team are women — including head baker Messier, operations manager Maria Cabezas and HR manager Morris, who started out as a barista in Black Cap’s Burlington location.
Vilalta quickly noticed that Morris was essential. “She demonstrated my value by giving me more and more responsibility over time,” Morris said. “It became clear to me that this was a place I could grow both personally and professionally.”
In April 2023, Vilalta hired Morris as Black Cap’s director of HR, a new position for the growing company. As Morris began attending classes for her HR certification, Black Cap covered the cost and paid Morris for her time in class. “They noticed what skills I had and helped me develop those skills. This isn't an opportunity I would have gotten at a huge corporation or big chain,” she said.
There are so many things that set Black Cap apart from those larger companies, Morris explained. For example, Black Cap donates its day-old pastries to local food programs rather than selling them, to eliminate waste and give back to the community.
The Black Cap barista experience is different, too. Black Cap employees don’t just print out an order on a ticket and pass it off to the next worker on the assembly line. They make an effort to get to know their customers. “I like to know not only my customers' names and orders but their preferences as well. I want to make their drink how they like it, even if they forget to ask because they haven't had their morning caffeine yet,” Morris said.
The local partnerships also make a difference, Morris added. She has a close relationship with Black Cap's local vendors. If she notices that the shop is low on decaf beans, she sends a text message and someone will deliver beans that day. As Morris explained, "We support each other."
The Sweet Spot
Black Cap’s maple syrup also comes from a supplier nearby. Justin Lamb often describes the process of maple sugaring with an old cliché: “It’s a labor of love.” In early spring, Lamb and his wife, kid, cousins and in-laws head out to tap the trees on their land in Waterville. After about 4,100 taps, they boil the tree sap by putting it through a reverse osmosis machine that separates the sap from the water. From there, they boil it down to make the sweet, rich maple syrup that makes a latte from Black Cap Coffee & Bakery taste so delicious.
“That real Vermont maple syrup flavor — you can’t fake that. It tastes so good,” Morris of Black Cap said.
Justin Lamb has fond memories of heading out to sugar as a kid on his family’s property with his grandfather. Back then, it was just a hobby. “We had a small sugaring arch, and we’d tap 450 trees. We’d sell a little, but we mostly gave it away to family and friends,” he recalled.
That changed in 2014 when he went pro, turning Lamb Family Maple into a real business. After five generations of sugaring in Vermont, Lamb saw the potential and started to grow it through retail and wholesale accounts.
An old friend, Tippy Tilton, who ran the now-retired Tilton Family Maple, connected him to Vilalta. Tilton used to supply Black Cap, but when he decided to retire, Vilalta asked him to recommend another local family business.
“We greatly appreciate our partnership,” said Lamb, adding that those local partnerships are extremely important to his family’s business. “Because of Black Cap’s success, people from in and out of state can buy our products there. It really helps us get our name out.”
Black Cap Sources Local Ingredients From Its Neighbors
Brave Coffee & Tea has a deeper relationship with Black Cap: The coffee shop's original owner, Chris Townsend, sold it to Vilalta in order to focus on Brave, his roastery. A couple of years later, Townsend sold the roastery to one of its employees, Scott Weigand. But since Vilalta began running Black Cap, one thing hasn’t changed: Every single coffee bean in all of Black Cap’s locations is roasted in Waterbury, and as Black Cap has grown, Brave has grown right along with them.
“Every time Laura’s opened a new location, she’s given me a call and asked, ‘Hey, do you think you can handle one more?’” Weigand said with a wide grin. “And every time, I’ve said, ‘Absolutely, let’s do it.’”
Brave has about 30 wholesale accounts and 150 subscribers to its home delivery coffee service, but Black Cap is its biggest account. “They’re so essential to our business,” Weigand said. The small coffee roastery has a staff of three employees — Weigand and two part-time hires who help him roast and package the coffee. They do all of their work out of a small warehouse in Waterbury, just down the road from Black Cap’s Waterbury location.
“It’s great working with Laura. We’ve both helped each other out a lot, working together for 10 years,” Weigand said. When he started at Brave, he was a total newbie when it came to roasting. He came in and learned everything for the first time — including running a business. “I’ve learned a lot from her,” he said of Vilalta.
Those local connections are a big part of what makes the state such a great place to live and work. “In Vermont, local businesses are such a vital part of what we are. ‘Made in Vermont’ really means something, and it starts with supporting each other,” Weigand said.
And, sometimes, hiring each other: Weigand’s 15-year-old child will soon start their first job, as a barista at Black Cap in Waterbury. As Weigand said, “It’s a full-circle moment.”
They could be the Black Cap barista serving up your next maple latte, which has traveled throughout the state to make it to your table, with ingredients sourced from many hardworking Vermonters. For visitors or locals in the state, that’s a sip of coffee you can’t get anywhere else in the world.
Black Cap Coffee & Bakery Locations
BURLINGTON
802-540-1744
42 Church St., Burlington, VT 05401 map
STOWE
802-253-2123
144 Main St., Stowe, VT 05672 map
MORRISVILLE
802-521-7197
53 Lower Main St., Morristown, VT 05661 map
WATERBURY TRAIN STATION
802-560-7913
1 Rotarian Place, Waterbury, VT 05676 map
This article was commissioned and paid for by Black Cap Coffee & Bakery.
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