PIQUA — Winans Chocolates + Coffee held two ribbon-cutting ceremonies in downtown Piqua on Thursday, Oct. 13, celebrating the opening of a new coffee roastery and a new home office building.

“We have doubled our production square footage,” Winans Chocolates + Coffee CEO Wilson Reiser said. “Between these two new buildings, we’ve added another 16,000-square-feet.”

The new coffee roastery is located at 222 Spring St., in a re-purposed garage that used to be Vern’s Auto Sales. The new home office, which also includes a new gift basket assembly and fulfillment center, is located at 124 N. Main St. in a building previously occupied by Francis Office Supply.

“Things were getting pretty tight in the chocolate factory,” Reiser said. “We had our chocolate factory, our coffee roastery, our shipping and fulfillment area, our offices and our gift basket location all under one roof in September, and now we’re in three different buildings.”

“This is our first dedicated office space,” he said. “One of the main things we do is franchising. We have 19 locations, five are company operated locations in Shelby County and Miami County; the other 14 are franchise, so that means we help support their operations. There’s a lot of administrative work that goes on, and a lot of office stuff that has to happen.”

Winans Chocolates + Coffee has grown faster than ever before in recent years. Around half of the company’s retail locations were opened between 2015, when the company opened its current production space in the former Piqua Daily Call building, and 2021.

The expansion took several years to complete, and cost approximately $1 million to purchase and remodel the coffee roastery building alone.

“It’s been in the works since about March of 2020,” Reiser said. “We bought the building and started making plans, but we did not start construction until January of this year. The cost of the building with acquisition is just around $1 million.”

“We were able to maintain a lot of the things that made it special,” he said of the former auto repair garage. “Like the sliding garage door, and we were able to expose the planking on the ceiling.”

The new coffee roastery also features special Hartzell fans that were designed just for this project.

“We have these Hartzell fans that Hartzell re-engineered for us, to be able to put on the ceiling,” Reiser said. “They were just installed this week, and we think they look pretty cool.”

Winans Chocolates + Coffee was originally started by Max Winans, but the Winans family has been in the baking and confectionary business since the early 1900s, through five generations. Winans Chocolates + Coffee has been serving small-batch roasted coffee for over 25 years.

“We think that this is one of the best specialty coffee facilities in the region, and we’re very proud of it,” Reiser said of the new coffee roastery. “We’re excited to roast coffee here for many, many decades to come.”

The new buildings are also a major investment in revitalization for downtown Piqua.

“We’ve been here for generations now,” Reiser said. “What we do is all very manual and it’s a hand craft, so we need to keep everything pretty close together so we can keep an eye on what’s happening.”

“We’ve had a lot of support from the city,” he said, “and from stakeholders who had an interest in seeing these buildings be revitalized, and have businesses come in that are going to add to the community and really be a catalyst for other investment in Piqua.”

“Their investment in the city of Piqua is so appreciated,” Piqua Chamber of Commerce Director Kathy Sherman said. “They have really stepped up to the plate.”

“The building next door was recently purchased, and it is being renovated,” Sherman said. “That project is going to be a real estate office for Keller Williams Real Estate.”