The sign on the door says people first, coffee always. Tony Santoro was a schoolteacher roasting beans in a popcorn popper when he and his wife Becky started Enderly Coffee in 2012, and the motto came before the roastery, the wholesale accounts, the Walmart shelves and the Yelp ranking that placed the cafe 23rd among the best coffee shops in the country.
The name came before all of it too. Enderly Park is the west Charlotte neighborhood the Santoros have lived in for well over a decade, and Tony has been direct about why he set up there. He grew up poor near Detroit, he told Charlotte Magazine, and he is an advocate for the underdog.
It started in the backyard
Becky and Tony fell in love over coffee at Michigan State, where she worked at a campus coffee shop, according to the company’s history and an interview with Lost Worlds Brewing. Both became teachers in Charlotte, and roasting was Tony’s backyard hobby until 2012, when he took what he called a leap of faith and started a wholesale roasting company, the two of them building the brand slowly while raising four children.
The first cafe opened on June 28, 2018, at 2620 Tuckaseegee Road, in a 1940s grocery store where Tony imagines nearly every neighbor once shopped. By then the roastery was six years old and supplied restaurants, offices and churches across the city. The company later moved roasting to a 3,000-square-foot facility near Freedom Drive and Interstate 85, Charlotte Magazine reported in 2024.
The people behind it
Two former school teachers, in Daily Coffee News’s description, who wanted the cafe to include elements both from and for the community. The long communal table and the shelving were built from wood salvaged from bygone local farm structures, including poplar from a barn owned by a beloved dairy farmer whose family sold the land to the county on condition it never be developed; it is a park and bird sanctuary now. The design firm was Dogwood Farm Design, and the neighborhood nonprofit Project 658 was a partner from the start.
Tony’s business choices follow the motto. He admits he undercharges for some specialty coffees to keep an approachable entry point for anyone who wants to visit, he told Charlotte Magazine, and he is more concerned with decent wages and benefits for his seven employees and with paying the Guatemalan and Honduran small farmers who supply his beans through direct-trade partnerships. One of the hardest choices for an independent roaster, the magazine wrote, is the decision not to scale. The Santoros envisioned the business as a community asset as much as a moneymaker.
The cafe was built to belong to the block. Art on the walls came from local nonprofits, the poplar in the tables came from a farm the county now keeps as a park, and the roastery’s growth was deliberately slow. When the cafe opened Tony told Daily Coffee News the company would relocate roasting closer to the shop and might eventually experiment with ready-to-drink products, but that for now the focus was growing wholesale and running the cafe very well. The cafe held its grand opening later that summer.
What you actually get
The cafe is a bright, small room, a handful of tables, with a yellow espresso machine that has been the brand’s color since the beginning. The Guatemala Quetzal roast is a signature, the lattes and matcha draw the regulars and the croissants get mentioned in reviews more than croissants usually do. Wholesale is the larger business: Enderly’s beans appear on menus and at breweries across the city, and in 2022 Walmart put its Charlotte Born & Roasted bags in 37 stores from Boone to Cheraw as part of a program stocking 85 local roasters nationally. For a small business like ours, Tony said, that’s a pretty big deal.
The company describes itself as a west Charlotte small-batch roaster aiding neighbors by turning modest profits into great works of compassion, and its stated belief is that we are all better when we lift others up, from the farms to the neighborhood.
Enderly’s beans show up in places a small roaster’s usually do not: the company supplies restaurants, offices, churches and white-label accounts, and the brewery Lost Worlds in Cornelius serves it as its house coffee, with Tony explaining in an interview that coffee and craft beer share a unique connection in how they are made and who makes them. Yelp’s 2022 ranking placed Enderly among the top 25 coffee shops in the United States, one of two Charlotte-area shops on the list, and it did so for a room with room for a handful of tables.
Why it matters
Third-wave coffee has a reputation for a coolness that shades into contempt, and the Santoros built Enderly against it: a roaster whose beans are as good as any in the city, served in a west Charlotte grocery store at a price the neighborhood can pay, by a company that chose not to grow past the point where it could pay its people well.
Two teachers named their business for their block. Fourteen years in, the block has a coffee shop with its name on it. That was the point.