Michael Schultz

Expertise: craft coffee, café owner, entrepreneurship food and beverage industry, restaurant industry

Coffee insight: The majority of people who visit cafés also brew coffee at home, so cafés aren’t just about the coffee—they’re about the experience as well.

Coffee fun fact: Michael jokes that as a coffee shop owner, he’s “a legal drug dealer.”

After decades of working toward a position as a restaurant executive, Michael’s perspective on his career shifted after he lost his father, who’d had a career in the clergy. “When my dad passed away,” he recalls, “I had thousands of people coming and telling me, ‘Let me tell you a story about your dad…’ … I didn’t want [my] legacy to be, ‘Your dad was great. He got the stock from $4 to $22.’”

So two days before his wife gave birth to their first child, Michael took the leap into entrepreneurship with a close friend who worked in coffee and tea distribution—with a retail concept Goddess and the Baker, a café in the Chicago Loop.

Running Goddess and the Baker gave Michael new insight; he realized that while he loved third-wave coffee, there was a lot about the industry that he didn’t like—especially the lack of variety in choice. There simply weren’t venues where customers could order chef-crafted food and choose coffees from a variety of coffee roasters. In spite of a lot of naysayers, he set out to build a café where customers could choose from different roasting companies, roast profiles, and brewing methods. What started as a single café in 2016, today is an award-winning, with cafés in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Dallas.

Fairgrounds also became an integral piece of Michael’s contract food service company, Infuse Hospitality. “Fairgrounds was really our showcase [of our] capabilities in creating and executing and growing super-cool on-trend concepts,” he explains. Today, Infuse services 40 million square feet of custom food and beverage solutions across North America—from cafés to corporate dining facilities to resorts.

Michael says that when he started to think about the legacy he wanted to leave behind, he knew it was about creating change and designing systems that would make the world better. For Michael, “…every single thing that I do, the return on my investment is, maybe if I do this, someone will come and tell this story to one of my children one day when I’m gone. The diamonds in this world, for me, that I spend time seeking out, are the ability to repair the world and make it better while I’m here. To make people feel good, to give them opportunity, to give them something that provides an opportunity for a better life for them.”

For Michael, our daily cup of coffee extends beyond the caffeine boost. It’s a sacred self-care ritual, and you should embrace it, because you take that renewed energy and turn it into a positive impact on the world in the rest of your day.

“Money, you can make more money. Time, we don’t know how much of it we have and once we spend it, it’s gone,” Michael says. “And so taking time for yourself to take a moment, no matter what’s going on in the world, to take that first sip of a hot beverage and have a calming moment or that cold beverage or to sit in a café that makes you feel like you’re on vacation for a couple of minutes.”

Community is at the very heart of the concept behind Fairgrounds. When he was considering names for his café, Michael said the idea of the fair resonated deeply with him. Fairgrounds are venues that embrace choice-—choices of food, activities, experiences. But fairgrounds are also venues where communities gather and unite. He wanted the name Fairgrounds to evoke nostalgia and memories of “a time that we remember all kinds of different people coming together.”

That’s what he wanted to build with Fairgrounds—a place where people could gather and come together. Fairgrounds, he says, is “really a place where anybody, no matter what you believe in, what you look like, whether you’re a coffee novice, you’re a coffee expert, you’re the coffee farmer, you can come there and just enjoy being around others in a really curated space.”

Fairgrounds Craft Coffee and Tea: https://www.fairgrounds.cafe/

Infuse Hospitality website: https://infusehospitality.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-schultz-1291515b/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.