A Williamstown institution has new ownership.

On May 24, just over four months since the business went up for sale and more than 30 years since Tunnel City Coffee opened its doors, longtime owner Paul Lovegreen handed over the keys to its new owners Jamal Stockton, Janine McCarl, and Neel Patel.

Lovegreen founded the shop in 1992, initially under the name Cold Spring Coffee Roasters. He changed the moniker to Tunnel City Coffee in 2004 as a reference to the nickname of neighboring town North Adams, Mass., which is connected to the Boston region via the 4.75-mile Hoosac Tunnel.

The business — which sold for $850,000, according to The Berkshire Eagle — also includes a second retail location on the campus of MASS MoCA that Lovegreen opened in 2016, as well as a coffee roastery in Norad Mill, where beans are freshly roasted every day.

Though Lovegreen’s successors are new to the coffee industry, they bring a diversity of business expertise to the venture.

Stockton comes from the finance world, where he spent the last 20 years at Fidelity Investments as a corporate executive, in addition to guest lecturing at Harvard Law and Northeastern Law. He recently relocated from Boston to Williamstown with his wife and co-owner McCarl — who works full time in product commercialization for a product research firm — and their 1-year-old daughter. The couple’s friend, Patel, has been in the Williamtown area for the last six years and owns The Spirit Shop on Cole Avenue, as well as several other local businesses.

The new owners sat down with the Record to discuss the purchase, the latest changes they’ve made to Tunnel City, and their vision for the future of the shop. The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Luke Chinman (LC): How do you all know each other? I know two of you are married, but how did you all and Neel meet?

Jamal Stockton (JS): I met Neel at The Spirit Shop buying wine, probably for a holiday party, and that was it. We became friends.

Janine McCarl (JM): Fast friends.

LC: How did this business venture come together?

JS: We had been long-time customers of Tunnel City Coffee and also love coffee. I had transitioned my career to focusing on start-ups, and we also have ties to Central America and spend a lot of time in the coffee-growing areas and regions. It was a great business, and after speaking to the former owner, Paul Lovegreen, and looking at his business model and finances, it was a no-brainer.

JM: I think it was just a general conversation, honestly, among us as soon as we found out that the shop was available to purchase. Neel has a lot of small business experience, so I think for all of us, we kind of looked at it and said, “Yeah, we could do this.”

LC: Now that you’ve been owners for four months, how’s it been going?

JS: It’s awesome! [Laughs.]

JM: It’s been a lot of fun.

JS: You get to drink coffee and your office smells like freshly roasted coffee everyday, so what’s better than that? The staff is fantastic — Paul did a great job of hiring over the years, and we’ve brought on some new folks that are awesome as well. From our perspective, the transition was extremely smooth in every aspect of the business. We really took customer and staff feedback to see what things need to be addressed immediately, and we’ve implemented those over the last three months.

JM: And the community’s been incredibly supportive throughout everything, so we appreciate that from them and from the employees we have working for us.

LC: What are those immediate changes that you made — both things that the customer would see and things the customer wouldn’t see?

JS: From the customer’s perspective, the first thing is operating hours. During the pandemic, the previous owner had cut back hours to 2 p.m. [Mondays through Thursdays] — for good reason, because you kind of see the business taper off after 2. But we immediately extended hours, especially now that the students are back, so that we could be open until 4 and 5 p.m., which I know was a hit with folks. 

Another thing was technology: As you can imagine, it changes quickly, and the old system needed to go. It was failing and sometimes not working properly, so we swapped out the point of sale system. 

And then some small things, like people wanted more savory items, so we recently added avocado toast to the menu. And we’re experimenting with some new menu items to create a little more diversity. Over at MASS MoCA, we offered breakfast — that was mostly bakery items and coffee — but we expanded the menu there to help the customers.

JM: We also increased the amount of artwork we have for sale, and Jamal, you can speak a little bit about the initiative we have with some of the College students.

JS: The students reached out to us from The Art Seen, which we love — we’re passionate about art and music, as you can imagine, living here. We hosted a gallery for them for free over at Spring Street, and that was successful, but we wanted for them to be able to monetize that and sell their artwork. The best place to do that is over at MASS MoCA, so we offered them the space to hang their artwork over there, which has also gained a lot of attention.

And we updated the website — we just had to modernize that to make it easier for people to go online, look at the artwork, look at some of the music, and to obviously shop for coffee. And then we created an official brand logo. We think the name is great — people recognize the name — but what we did was add a tunnel to the logo to refresh the brand to make it a bit more recognizable. 

LC: Down the line, what kinds of things are you hoping to change about Tunnel City?

JS: The first thing that’s top of mind for us is sustainability. You can imagine there’s a lot of consumer waste with any café, and given what’s happening with climate change, we feel that we have to do something to make the cups more recyclable or compostable. But also a bit more importantly, where you have the biggest impact is in reusable cups, which is a mindset shift for consumers. It’s a matter of convenience for them to be able to throw something out with a one-time use, and we want to introduce a reusable cup program, which is something we’re talking to the school’s sustainability officer about to see if we can collaborate.

The other thing we want to do, and this also requires collaboration with the Town and the College, is to look at how we might be able to provide deliveries, especially in months when it’s cold outside — because you can imagine it slows down and people want to be able to get coffee any time of the day without having to trudge out in the snow to get it. We’d like to deliver the cups, people reuse them, and then they put them in designated areas, basically like throwing them out. You need some buy-in from the College and the Town before you can do things like that, but I know those are things customers would really like.

LC: That seems like a major operation. Would you acquire more staff to do something of that scale, or do you think you already have the capabilities now?

JS: That’s a great question, and it’s a little bit of both. What happens in downtime is that you have a little bit more capacity from your existing staff when it’s slow. You’re likely not doing deliveries when it’s slammed on a Saturday, you’re doing it during the middle of the week to make it easier for people to get coffee — you know, your Tuesdays through Thursdays. But if you fully scale it, you need more staff, and so we would hire people to manage that operation. Especially if we start doing reusable cups, because reusable cups need a washing machine facility in order to do that. 

We’re also thinking about how to get students involved in an entrepreneurship and innovation cooperative program so that you can learn how startups work and also learn how an actual business runs from accounting, marketing, branding, supply chain management, and strategic planning. These are all areas that we have extensive experience in, and we think that the students would benefit from getting prepared to go from college into the working world. 

LC: That makes me think about the student-run coffee shop on campus, Goodrich Coffee Bar. How does that factor into the way you think about your business? Do you see them as competition? Would you want to partner with them?

JS: I think it’s great that the students are running their own café because you get first-hand knowledge about how to operate a business. It’s not competition for us if people want to roast and serve their own coffee. Please do! There are lots of cafés. But when we think about things like reusable cups and sustainability, that’s got to be a collaborative effort. The Town has to get behind it in order to support one type of system that can be reused. We would need to collaborate with other businesses to make that happen.

LC: Would you consider collaborating with Goodrich?

JS: Any small business in the Town that’s using and purchasing cups. Yes, that would be one of the businesses.

LC: What about expansion? At this point are you thinking about scaling Tunnel City to more locations, or are you focused on the three spots you have right now?

JS: What you’ll see in the industry is most folks are focusing on wholesale and online sales. There’s business reasons for that: The cost of coffee, the cost of labor, and the cost of generally high expenses for businesses like leases are expanding at a rate that exceeds inflation. When that happens, it’s a bad business model to open retail stores where the margins are not in your favor. So anyone that’s trying to get into the coffee business and is trying to scale it as a retail business is making — from our perspective — the wrong move.

LC: Are there any other aspects of the business or being new owners that you’d like to highlight?

JS: We’re part of the community, so while this business is important to us, what matters more is that we’re raising our kids here, that we have a good business the community can rely on, and we just get to meet people. This is fun for us. Like I said, you get to drink coffee everyday, so it’s just awesome.