As young athletes growing up in Newhall California, brothers Kyle and Mitch McMullen never dreamed that their destiny lay in coffee. In fact, the more likely road they would travel appeared to be sports: Mitch, co-founder and CEO, Newhall Coffee Roasting Company, is a former professional basketball player who played for the Atlanta Hawks and proudly cites the time he spent as “Moses Malone’s punching bag” among his professional credentials. Eventually, however, Mitch went on to play in the professional French league where in addition to being Team Captain, Team MVP, leading scorer and leading rebounder he returned from Europe with, among other things, a love of coffee and the coffee house experience.
	Kyle, is a track and field athlete who threw the Javelin and Discus for San Diego State University. After college he worked in the film industry where he honed his product marketing and sales expertise. But wanting to own his own business led him to the launch of Java N’ Jazz – the second of two family-owned and operated coffeehouses in the Santa Clarita Valley in 1997. In 1994 the search for great coffee beans to make great coffee they wanted to serve in their coffeehouse led them to the purchase of their first micro-roaster for the purpose of roasting beans for their own store. However, once customers got a taste of their coffee, the word spread – and Newhall Coffee Roasting Company was born – officially launching operations in 1995. With the opening of a second retail location and wider awareness of the taste of Newhall Coffee – local restaurants and companies began asking to purchase their micro-roasted beans and business expanded, eventually including corporate clients like Dreamworks SKG who began purchasing their micro-roasted beans in 1996 – and then ABC Studios, ESPN Studios, Warner Brothers, Toyota and other companies and clients with discriminating tastes. Today the brothers’ efforts have resulted in a company that is selling coffee beans far beyond the boundaries of Newhall and in quantities never imagined when their love affair with coffee first began. With year-to-date growth in excess of 400 percent the brothers are producing enough coffee to brew more than 4 million cups per month while remaining true to their initial commitment of creating great tasting coffee by micro-roasting small batches of high quality beans and delivering them to their customers within 24 hours of the roast while becoming the premier “micro-roaster” of Los Angeles.