Carl Landman Company Inc. (Landmark Coffee)
Pioneers in Gourmet Coffee Bean Sales and Marketing

Carl Landman Co. was established by Carl Landman who began selling gourmet coffee beans in 1957 for the JJ Adams coffee roastery located in an abandoned sardine cannery on the now famous Cannery Row in Monterey California. At that time, gourmet coffee beans were only available in a handful of family-run storefront roasteries in the North Beach section of San Francisco and a few other, similar Bohemian neighborhoods in other major US cities. As a representative of JJ Adams, Carl was a pioneer in widening the distribution of high quality coffees in Northern California. He was the first to sell a wide variety of fresh gourmet beans in 12oz bags to major grocery chains of the day such as Safeway, CO-OP and Purity stores. His customers also included a number of Delis and independent grocery stores (At that time, there were far more of them than there are today).


In the mid 1970's Mr. Landman began representing United Coffee Corp. which was then located on 3rd St. at the edge of the bay in San Francisco. The company was owned by the Mountanos family, a third generation Greek-American family roastery. Carl developed a simple brown-craft, 12oz bag line of fine quality coffees for United Coffee. The bags were labeled simply "Coffee Beans". This soon became a well known brand in many major grocery chain stores through the US.


Carl Landman ended his relationship with United Coffee after its sale in 1981. Finally, after years of representing other coffee roasters, Carl along with his wife Doris and son Jim established their own brand, "Landmark Coffee Beans". The beans were roasted and packed by a new (separate) roasting company, Peter James Coffee Ltd. located in Mountain View, CA. The business thrived and continued to supply supermarkets and a few deli's throughout the country. In the mid 80's Mr. Landman was able to convince the then new "Price Club" to test a few varieties of coffee beans in two pound bags. The new idea of selling fresh roasted gourmet coffees in value pack bags to Club stores at a deep discount was an immediate hit.

The club store business grew much more rapidly than the grocery business which was then consolidating. Along with consolidation came a new phenomenon known as "Slotting Fees". Carl found this new practice to be morally reprehensible. He firmly believed an item belonged on a store shelf because consumers liked it, not because someone was paying for it to be there. This resulted in the sale of Landmark's grocery store business.

Landmark Coffee continued to focus on its Northern California club chain business until Price Club merged with Costco in the mid 1990's. Shortly after that, a decision was made by the new management to discontinue Landmark in favor of a brand of gourmet coffees that had been carried by Costco for many years. Fortunately, Carl’s son Jim who was now running the company, was able to switch Landmark Coffee over to Sams Club (along with hundreds of loyal fans) At that time, Sam’s Club was new in the region. Landmark Coffees have been sold there ever since.

Today, Landmark Coffee continues to flourish selling value packs of high quality coffee beans to Sams Club, Smart & Final and Wal-mart Super Centers throughout the Northern California region. Landmark Coffee also sells these same coffees nationally through online shopping at www.landmarkcoffee.com.

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