The communal table near the center of the room was built from poplar salvaged out of a barn that once belonged to a dairy farmer. It does not need to be. A coffee shop could use any table. But Tony Santoro made a different choice there, as he has at nearly every decision point since he first started roasting beans in his backyard fourteen years ago.

That table tells you what Enderly Coffee Co. is.

The Long Road to Tuckaseegee Road

Tony Santoro grew up poor near Detroit. He became a public school teacher in Charlotte, taught at Eastway Middle School, and was named Teacher of the Year in 2013. His wife Becky taught alongside him. They were the kind of people who built their professional lives around other people’s children.

In 2012, Tony started roasting coffee as a hobby. He was not trying to build a brand. He was a teacher who liked coffee and had a backyard. But the hobby grew into a wholesale operation. He and Becky began selling beans to local businesses and running distribution out of a roastery near the intersection of Freedom Drive and Interstate 85.

For six years, Enderly Coffee existed without a cafe. That is worth understanding. The Santoros were not aspiring restaurateurs who needed a concept. They were community builders who happened to be roasting some of the best coffee in Charlotte. The cafe at 2620 Tuckaseegee Road opened in June 2018, not because the business demanded it, but because Tony wanted to plant something permanent in a neighborhood he believed in.

He and Becky live in Enderly Park. They chose the west side of Charlotte deliberately, at a time when most specialty coffee investment in the city was pointing elsewhere. That choice was not a financial calculation. It was a statement.

People First. Coffee Always.

The motto is printed plainly. The business operates plainly around it.

Tony has traveled to Guatemala and Honduras to meet the small farmers whose beans he roasts. These are direct-trade partnerships, not marketing language. He knows the people growing the coffee. When he brings those beans back to Charlotte and runs them through his 15-kilo AMBEX roaster in the 3,000-square-foot roastery, the chain of custody is short and documented.

He also deliberately undercharges for some specialty coffees. He knows his numbers. He knows what certain roasts command on the specialty market. He prices them lower because he wants anyone who walks into 2620 Tuckaseegee Road to feel like they belong there. The yellow La Marzocco espresso machine behind the counter is a brand signature, one of the first things you notice walking in. It signals quality. Tony’s pricing signals something else: that quality here is not meant to be exclusive.

The cafe has a play area for children. Parents sit and have a conversation or a moment alone while their kids are occupied. That is not an accident. It is a design decision made by two people who spent their careers thinking about what families need.

When the City Needed Coffee

In 2020, when COVID-19 closed dining rooms and redefined what a small business could do, Enderly Coffee organized Coffee Drops for front-line healthcare workers. Community members sponsored the effort. The company donated 800 pounds of coffee through hospital drops across Charlotte, getting it directly to people running on nothing and working without a break.

They did not pause operations to do this. They pivoted. E-commerce launched. Home delivery began. Partnerships with local bakeries filled gaps in what customers needed. By the time the worst of the pandemic passed, Enderly Coffee had grown 150 percent. The business that was structurally designed around generosity turned out to be structurally resilient.

This is not coincidence. A business built on real relationships with its community does not lose those relationships when things get hard. It leans on them.

What the Network Looks Like Now

The wholesale side of Enderly Coffee reaches restaurants, offices, churches, and coworking spaces across Charlotte, including CoCoTiv. White-label partners carry the beans under their own names. In 2024, the company partnered with Walmart to place their locally roasted coffee in 37 stores stretching from Boone, North Carolina to Cheraw, South Carolina. Walmart’s campaign that year supported 85 local coffee roasters nationwide. Enderly was one of them.

They employ seven people. The focus, Tony has said, is on decent wages and benefits. Not the minimum the market will accept. Decent.

Yelp ranked Enderly Coffee the 23rd-best coffee shop in the United States. Google shows a 4.9 rating across more than 280 reviews. These numbers matter less than what they confirm: people who come here tell other people to come here.

The cafe hosts pop-ups with local businesses like Shelves Bookstore. A subscription coffee program keeps the roastery connected to customers outside the neighborhood. Every piece of the operation points back to the same thing.

The Foster Care Connection

Becky Santoro co-founded and directs Foster Village Charlotte, an organization supporting foster families. She and Tony have four children, two of whom came to them through the foster system.

This is not a side story. It is context for understanding what kind of people build a business this way. The Santoros are not performing community investment. They have organized their entire lives around it, at home and at work. The coffee shop is one expression of a value system they live inside of.

“We all build up this Charlotte coffee economy together,” Tony has said.

That sentence contains a philosophy. Not I built this. Not we outcompeted that. Together. The Charlotte coffee economy, not Enderly Coffee’s market share. Tony Santoro is a man who grew up without much, became a teacher who won awards for how he showed up for his students, and then built a business in a neighborhood most people were walking past.

At 2620 Tuckaseegee Road, the barn-wood table is full most mornings. The La Marzocco hisses. Someone’s kid is in the play area. A bag of single-origin beans from Honduras is on the counter, priced the way it is on purpose.

The backyard hobby is long gone. What replaced it turns out to be something harder to build and more important to have.

Enderly Coffee Co. is located at 2620 Tuckaseegee Rd, Charlotte, NC 28208. Online at enderlycoffee.com.