The most dangerous year in La Marzocco's history also seeded its future. Its next big customer base is now forming in a format built around the same pressure that nearly broke the company: the cost of a skilled human pulling a shot.
In June 2026, survey fieldwork for the National Coffee Association found that 47% of American adults had drunk an espresso-based beverage in the previous week, up from 37% in 2020. Among adults aged 25 to 39 the figure was 60%. The growth is concentrated in a format that would have puzzled the Seattle pioneers of the 1970s: the drive-through stand. Dutch Bros and 7 Brew have together opened roughly 2,000 of them since 2019, and one investment firm's reading of their disclosed pipelines puts another 2,000 on the way by 2029. La Marzocco, the Florentine machine maker whose equipment helped build the American espresso habit, now sits inside De'Longhi, which acquired it in December 2023, when La Marzocco's revenue was estimated at €240 million.
The story usually gets told as a steady ascent from one forgotten machine in a sandwich shop to a global brand. The more useful version is a loop. Three times, a coffee format took shape in the Pacific Northwest, one channel came to dominate La Marzocco's sales, and the company's fortunes then depended on what that channel did next. The current drive-through boom is the third pass through that loop. It differs from the second in one way, and the difference is not the one most observers would name first.
A Year to Sell One Machine
In the mid-1970s, Kent Bakke and a few friends bought a soup and sandwich shop in Seattle's Pioneer Square and found an old Italian espresso machine left behind by the previous owners. Bakke began tinkering with it and could not stop. By his own recollection there were about eight espresso machines in Seattle in 1977, and he tracked down their owners, including the operators of Café Allegro in the University District. He presented himself as an espresso machine technician so he could take the machines apart and learn how they worked. The posture was a fiction at first. Within a few years it was simply true.
A friend saw what Bakke had stumbled into. Nobody in the region could service these machines, and nobody was importing them. In 1978 the two men went to Italy to look for manufacturers. In Florence they kept seeing La Marzocco machines in cafés, arranged a visit to the factory in the hills above the city, and met the Bambi family. Giuseppe and Bruno Bambi had founded the company in 1927, patented the horizontal boiler in 1939 (turning the tall vertical machine sideways so several group heads could run at once), and introduced the dual boiler in 1970, separating brewing water from steaming water so each could hold its own temperature. Bakke left with exclusive US distribution rights and shipped two machines home.
It took him a year to sell one of them.
The demand problem was cultural, not mechanical. Bakke and his partners put a La Marzocco on a cart and wheeled it to events so people could taste what espresso was, and they called it a "cappuccino machine" because that phrase landed better with American ears. The friend eventually sold the cart, and it became Monorail Espresso, the first commercial espresso cart, which still runs cafés in downtown Seattle. For years the business covered only Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. Through the 1980s the carts multiplied and a new kind of café spread across the region, with the machine placed in front of the counter and a barista working it in view of the customer. That was a different proposition from the diner pot warming on a back burner.
The numbers that followed show how narrow the base was. Before Bakke, La Marzocco had sent only a handful of machines outside Italy, to the UK and Australia. By the early 1990s, the United States accounted for more than half of the company's unit sales, and that American demand came almost entirely from the Pacific Northwest. A Florentine factory had become, in practical terms, a supplier to one corner of one country. Among the roasters Bakke worked with to build that market was a bean and tea seller founded in 1971 that did not open an espresso bar until 1984. Howard Schultz bought its 11 stores in 1987 and merged them with his Il Giornale. The company was Starbucks.
The Customer Who Became the Company
By late 1992, Starbucks had 165 shops and about $25 million in fresh capital from its IPO. Schultz told Bakke he planned to open 350 more stores the following year. Bakke flew to Florence to ask the Bambis to raise production, and they refused.
Their reasoning deserves more credit than it usually gets. Italian labor law made an expanded workforce a permanent commitment. The Bambis were looking at a single foreign customer whose order book could double their headcount, and they judged that if that customer's demand ever dried up, the fixed cost of the new workers could bankrupt them. They were reasoning from the downside, and on the downside they were correct. Twelve years later the demand did dry up, and almost all at once.
Bakke read the same order book from the other side. He saw a customer with capital, a growth plan, and no alternative supplier with comparable standing, and he saw the Bambis' refusal as the opening it was. He first proposed building machines under license in Seattle. Piero Bambi, ageing and without an heir, offered to sell him the company instead. In 1993 Bakke's investor group bought 90% of La Marzocco and promised to protect the Florence factory and its workers. In 1994 he opened a plant in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, and its Linea Classic machines went onto the counters of more than 2,300 new Starbucks locations by the end of the decade.
Both readings of the 1992 order book turned out to be accurate. The Bambis correctly identified the concentration risk. Bakke correctly identified the growth. The resolution was that Bakke took on the risk the Bambis had declined, and he placed the extra capacity in Ballard rather than Florence, where Italian labor law would have locked it in. The Seattle plant was in effect the hedge the Bambis had wanted, built by the man who bought them out.
Meanwhile, a specialty coffee scene was forming around the Starbucks wave. Intelligentsia and Counter Culture were founded in 1995 and Stumptown in 1999. La Marzocco's Seattle pedigree made it the default machine for this group. Stumptown's Duane Sorenson later said that when he launched, he "didn't even think about using an espresso machine other than a La Marzocco." The company sponsored the first World Barista Championship in 2000 and kept sponsoring it through 2008. None of this changed the arithmetic. By the early 2000s, Starbucks accounted for roughly 90% of La Marzocco's unit sales.
The Automation Shock of 2004
In 2004 Starbucks decided to move to fully automatic machines, in order to standardize quality and cut training costs. That rationale matters for everything that follows. Starbucks was not abandoning espresso. It was abandoning the expense of teaching thousands of employees to make espresso by hand, which was exactly the skill La Marzocco's machines rewarded.
The immediate threat was worse than the lost orders. Starbucks was positioned to release something like 5,000 used La Marzoccos onto the secondary market, enough to undercut the company's independent sales for years. Bakke pressed Starbucks management to limit the damage. The details are disputed and only partly documented. La Marzocco bought back some machines to strip for parts, and Starbucks reportedly agreed to destroy others. Even so, an estimated 1,000 or more machines reached the secondary market between 2004 and 2006, and not every one went through official channels. Randy Phillips, a former Starbucks technician, told The New York Times that he and colleagues were told to take the machines apart and haul them to the recycling yard. "I definitely let a couple slide out the back of my van," he said. "We all did."
Starbucks had trained a generation of baristas on La Marzocco machines and then, by automating, took away their reason to stay. Those same baristas could now buy the equipment they knew at secondhand prices. Phillips described former Starbucks baristas buying used machines and opening their own cafés. Hundreds of specialty roasters and shops opened in the early 2000s, Blue Bottle, Joe Coffee and Ritual among them. Roasters supplied beans and often resold machines, and each barista who became an owner brought an equipment preference with them. The skill Starbucks had automated out of its stores turned into La Marzocco's new distribution channel.
Bakke closed the Ballard plant and moved all manufacturing back to Florence. The capacity built to serve one customer was retired once that customer left, which was the outcome the Bambis had feared, except that it happened in Seattle and not in Florence. Dave Bise, who heads La Marzocco Home, described the episode in 2025: "the departure of Starbucks proved to be the on-ramp for our next chapter."
The on-ramp was small at first. According to the company's current chief marketing officer, who joined in 2009, La Marzocco built 1,625 machines that year on company-wide revenue of around €4 million. The company had survived, but it was tiny.
From Café Counter to Kitchen Counter
What came next was a long period of building around people instead of around one account. The Strada, released in 2009 after consultation with thirty top baristas, was billed as "a machine by baristas, for baristas." The KB90, named for Bakke and released in 2019, introduced a patented straight-in portafilter to reduce the wrist strain baristas develop from twisting the handle hundreds of times a day. That design is still proprietary to La Marzocco. Both products were aimed at the barista as the customer whose loyalty would decide the purchase, which is the lesson 2004 had taught.
The home line took the same logic into kitchens. The Linea Mini arrived in 2015, and the Linea Micra in November 2022 at about two-thirds of the Mini's price. A brand built entirely for commercial cafés now sells more home machines than commercial ones by volume, though the expensive café machines still produce most of the revenue. The installed base also moved away from the big coastal cities. Onyx Coffee was founded in 2012 in Rogers, Arkansas, a town of about 60,000. Its founder, Andrea Allen, won the US Barista Championship in 2020 and finished second at the World Barista Championship in 2021, and in 2026 Onyx was ranked the best coffee shop in the world. Its counter runs on ModBar, La Marzocco's under-counter system. One investment firm's equipment review counts La Marzocco machines in 13 of the 25 top-ranked shops on that list and in eight of the top ten. That count is the firm's own and has not been independently checked, but the direction is consistent with every other account of the brand's standing.
By 2023, when De'Longhi took control, revenue had reached roughly €240 million, about sixty times the 2009 figure.
The Drive-Through Rhyme
The third pass through the loop is underway, and the core pattern is the same. A format developed in the Pacific Northwest, the high-speed drive-through stand, is being rolled out nationally by a small number of fast-growing chains. Their growth is outpacing that of the company whose 2004 decision nearly sank La Marzocco.
The usual reassurance is that La Marzocco no longer depends on any single customer, and that is correct. De'Longhi's filings put the United States at about one-third of La Marzocco's sales. China is now its second-largest market, and Shanghai's café count rose from 6,200 in 2021 to more than 10,300 in 2025, according to local industry figures cited by the US Department of Agriculture. Carol Liu, who ran three Shanghai cafés, called the brand "a standard for every good coffee shop" back in 2017. India's Blue Tokai reported 240 cafés in July 2026 and is targeting 800 by fiscal 2030. Indonesia's Kopi Kenangan has more than 1,300 locations across Southeast Asia, and both chains use La Marzocco machines. In Europe, Coutume has grown to 15 shops in Paris and beyond, and Spain's Syra Coffee has gone from one Barcelona café in 2015 to more than 50. No customer anywhere is approaching the 90% share Starbucks once held.
That diversification addresses the risk of 2004. It does not address the reason for 2004. Starbucks did not leave because demand for espresso fell. It left because a large chain growing quickly found that hand-pulled shots and the training they required were a cost that a fully automatic machine could take out. The drive-through format is built for throughput even more than Starbucks was. Its economics depend on cars per hour, and its labor model depends on staff who can be trained quickly. The original source material claims that La Marzoccos are "once again keeping the lines moving" in these stands. How many of the chains' stands run on La Marzocco equipment, and under what contracts, is not established in anything reviewed here, so how exposed the company is to this channel is an open question. What is clear is that if a drive-through chain ever runs the same calculation Starbucks ran, the answer is likely to be the same one.
Here the third cycle differs from the second, and the difference is not what most would expect. The 2004 defection turned out well for La Marzocco because Starbucks had first trained thousands of people to use manual machines, and those people became café owners. A drive-through model designed for speed may never build that pool of craft skill to begin with. If such a chain moves to automation, it would release used machines without releasing a generation of baristas who prize them. The secondhand supply would arrive without the demand that absorbed it last time. La Marzocco's diversified revenue base means this would be a dent, not an existential threat, but the channel that rescued the company in 2004 would not be there to repeat the rescue.
Read across all three cycles, the pattern is about where a premium machine's value sits. It does not sit with the chain that buys machines in bulk, which will often replace them as soon as speed and training costs make the case. It sits with the people who learned the craft on the machine and later control their own counters. La Marzocco's history suggests that a fast-growing chain can be an excellent buyer and an unreliable foundation. The thing to track in the drive-through boom is less how many stands open than how many skilled baristas come out of them.
