Dazbog Might Look Soviet, but It’s 100 Percent Local

At any Dazbog location, the decor and branding may give the impression that it's a foreign-owned Russian coffee company. The stores and packaging follow the distinctive Soviet red-and-gold color palette, and the five-point star often appears on the walls of the shops, as well on its retail bags of coffee beans, which include blends named Troika Espresso and KG (which was recently renamed KO Blend).

But Dazbog is local; its five-story headquarters, which also includes a manufacturing and roasting facility dubbed the Red Square, is visible to commuters traveling on I-25. According to the company, it's Colorado’s largest independent coffee roaster and purveyor. Its founders, brothers Leonid “Leo” and Anatoly “Tony” Yuffa, fled the Soviet Union in 1979 with their family when Leo was nine and Tony was fifteen.

“We escaped because of the oppressive government, very discriminatory, very oppressive,” Leo recalls. “So we escaped in ’79 with, really, the shirts on our back, and came here with not a word of English and about $800 to our name.” He elaborates: “Our parents really sacrificed everything. Our father, from childhood, only had one leg. He was handicapped. He was very discriminated against. [In the Soviet Union], people who are handicapped are considered not even human. And so our father, on crutches, took our family of five and said, ‘You know what? Anywhere else with nothing is better than where we are here.’”

The family emigrated directly to Denver. Leo always wanted to start a cafe, and after graduating from the University of Colorado Boulder, he started researching the business model and importing/exporting espresso equipment. In 1996, he convinced Tony to join him in launching Dazbog, Russian for “god of richness." Since then, the private company has opened more than twenty stores, hired over 100 employees, and even expanded to Wyoming.
Leo and Tony are hardworking immigrants who have achieved success in the embodiment of the American Dream. So why make Dazbog’s branding so reminiscent of a country and culture their family escaped from?

Both deny the link between their brand's signature red and Communist red. The brothers instead point to their origins of being a craft boutique brand and putting their coffee beans in brown Kraft paper bags. “And then we introduced some color to it, and people really loved when we introduced red. ... The company is always known for its red color,” Leo explains.

“It’s Coca-Cola red. I think it’s the color of energy, and coffee is energy, and that’s more the idea, the energy factor," Tony adds, and both emphasize that they have only ever thought of Dazbog as a Colorado-based company.

With the ongoing war in Ukraine, Dazbog has been public about its support for the country — Leo and Tony's father’s side of the family is from Odessa, the southern port city that sits on the Black Sea. The Dazbog website home page displays a prominent “We Stand With Ukraine” banner, and the red-and-black color scheme is now interrupted by the blue and yellow of a Ukrainian flag. The home page also notes that the company will send $3 to the International Committee of the Red Cross for each purchase of a bag of its Svoboda “Freedom” Blend.

However international their heritage and aid efforts are, Leo and Tony are still laser-focused on Colorado. “We’re the local guys,” Leo emphasizes. The brothers are proud to have grown up in Colorado, and proud of the fact that 100 percent of Dazbog's manufacturing is based in the state. They have plans to expand, as well, with six new stores currently under development.

“We’re local. We support the community here locally; they support us. This is where we’ve been. ... We’ve been here since day one and haven’t moved. We love Colorado. We immigrated to Denver, to Colorado, and this is really where we have our roots,” Leo concludes. “[It's the Colorado community] who have made it possible for us to do what we did.”