Specialty Coffee Wiki

Dayglow

Properties3
descriptionThe Los Angeles café and online shop that sells other roasters' coffee rather than only its own — a "maximalist multi-roaster" opened in Silver Lake in 2017, and winner of the 2024–25 Sprudge Design Award for Outstanding E-Commerce / Web Site.
tagsorganization, roaster, retailer, cafe, usa, los-angeles, subscription, design
aliasesDayglow Coffee, dayglow.coffee

8 min read

Dayglow

Dayglow — also written Dayglow Coffee — is a Los Angeles coffee company that runs cafés and an online shop selling coffee from a large, rotating list of other roasters, alongside a subscription service and its own roasted coffee.12 It opened its first location in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, in 2017, founded by Tohm Ifergan with his cousin Philippe.1

Why it is in this wiki: Dayglow won Outstanding E-Commerce / Web Site at the second annual Sprudge Design Awards, announced on 17 January 2025 after a public vote.3 It is also one of the clearest working examples of the multi-roaster shop — a business whose product is curation rather than roasting, which is an unusual thing to find among the companies in this wiki.

The company

AttributeDetail
BrandDayglow (also “Dayglow Coffee”)
BaseLos Angeles, California, United States14
First locationSilver Lake, Los Angeles — opened 20171
FoundersTohm Ifergan and his cousin Philippe (surname not published)1
ModelMulti-roaster café, online store and coffee subscription, plus its own roasting145
Online shopdayglow.coffee — ships internationally4
RecognitionSprudge Design Award, Outstanding E-Commerce / Web Site, 2024–253

The multi-roaster idea

Most cafés pour one roaster’s coffee — usually their own, sometimes a house roaster plus a guest. Dayglow does the opposite on purpose. Ifergan describes the shop as a “maximalist multi-roaster”: instead of the two or three roasters a café would normally carry, it stocks coffees from many roasters at once, domestic and international, and rotates them with the seasons.1

His stated reason is simple: “My goal was simply to seek out and offer what is currently the best of the best for both my community and online.”1 He also concedes the obvious cost of doing it — buying small amounts from many suppliers is, in his words, “less cost efficient” than buying a lot from one.1

Two consequences follow, and they explain why Dayglow reads differently from a Sey Coffee or an Onyx Coffee Lab in this wiki:

  • The catalogue is the product. What Dayglow sells is a shortlist — an argument about which roasters are worth drinking this month. That is the same job a good bottle shop does for wine.
  • Its own record is thin by design. Dayglow does not buy green coffee at auction under its own name, so there are no lot prices, scores or farm relationships attached to it the way there are for a roaster that buys direct (see What is not documented below).

The company also sells a coffee subscription — a recurring shipment drawn from that library of roasters rather than from a single roastery’s output — and ships to many countries from its online store.45

Timeline

YearEvent
12017Dayglow Coffee opens in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, founded by Tohm Ifergan and his cousin Philippe1
2Summer 2019A second, “tiny subterranean” location opens in West Hollywood1
32019 (planned)A stall in a Chinatown food hall and a coffee counter inside a Chicago brewery owned by Ifergan’s brother are announced as forthcoming1
42022Dayglow’s own roastery is founded, according to the company’s own shop copy — see the verification note below6
517 January 2025Wins Outstanding E-Commerce / Web Site at the 2nd Annual Sprudge Design Awards3

To verify — the 2022 roastery and its founders

Dayglow’s own product-page copy is quoted as saying the company “founded its roastery in 2022 with the combined forces of Chris Gatti, Melissa Gatti and Tohm Ifergan.”6 That page could not be read for this note — every attempt at dayglow.coffee returned an HTTP 429 rate-limit error — so the year, the two Gatti names, and how the roastery relates to the café business founded in 2017 are all unconfirmed. No source read here explains whether the roastery is the same legal entity as the cafés, a separate venture, or a rebranding.

To verify — a second, Chicago-based "Dayglow"

A PitchBook company profile for a firm called Dayglow describes an operator of a specialty coffee roaster headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, founded in 2018, having raised $250K with investor Capital Q Ventures.7 That contradicts every other source, which places Dayglow in Los Angeles from 2017. It may be a holding company, an entity set up around the Chicago outpost mentioned in 2019,1 or a different company with the same name. The profile was not read directly and no connection between it and the Los Angeles business is established. Do not state a Chicago headquarters, a 2018 founding, or any funding figure as fact.

To verify — how many cafés there are now

The locations above come from a 2019 interview, in which the Chinatown and Chicago sites were still forthcoming.1 Whether they opened, and which Dayglow cafés are trading today, is not documented in anything read for this note. Treat the list as a 2017–2019 snapshot, not a current directory.

The design award

The Sprudge Design Awards are an annual prize run by the coffee news site Sprudge, decided by public vote across roughly two dozen categories, and judging design — packaging, café interiors, websites, photography — rather than how the coffee tastes.3 Dayglow’s win was in Outstanding E-Commerce / Web Site in the 2024–25 cycle, announced on 17 January 2025.3

That is a fitting category for this particular business. If your proposition is a curated library of dozens of roasters, the website is the shop, and browsing it is most of the customer experience. There are no cupping scores or prices attached to the award — it is a readers’ vote on a shortlist, closer to a magazine poll than to the blind, scored judging of Cup of Excellence or the World Barista Championship.

What is on the shelves

A third-party specialty retail directory listing Dayglow’s own coffees in mid-2025 showed lots including Ninga Hill (Burundi), Cloud Nine (Honduras, described as a delicate, floral Geisha), Edinson Argote (Colombia, also Geisha) and Infernal Cleansing (a natural-processed Java from Colombia).4

That is a snapshot, not a permanent fact. A shop built on seasonality replaces its list constantly, and retail prices move with each harvest — so no fixed price level, altitude or score can sensibly be recorded here for “Dayglow coffee” the way it can for a farm’s auction lot.

What is not documented

The research behind this note looked for what this wiki normally records about a coffee business — auction purchases, cupping scores, competition placings, prices paid — in Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, Specialty Coffee Association and Coffee Quality Institute material, and found nothing naming Dayglow.

That absence is what you would expect rather than a hole in the search. Those systems record producers and the buyers of record at auction. Dayglow buys roasted coffee from other roasters and sells it on; it is a retailer and curator sitting one step further down the chain, so it would not appear in a green-coffee results table even if every coffee it sold had won one. Compare Klatch Coffee or Angelino’s Coffee, Los Angeles-area roasters whose presence in this wiki is essentially a record auction price — a completely different kind of record.

Also unrecorded anywhere read for this note: ownership structure, staff numbers, revenue, and the surname of the co-founder given only as “Philippe”.1

Footnotes

  1. Interview: Tohm Ifergan (Dayglow Coffee) — Food GPS — read via WebFetch; source of the 2017 Silver Lake opening, the founders Tohm Ifergan and his cousin Philippe, the summer 2019 West Hollywood location, the planned Chinatown and Chicago sites, and the “maximalist multi-roaster” description and quotations ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7 ↩8 ↩9 ↩10 ↩11 ↩12 ↩13 ↩14 ↩15

  2. Dayglow — official online shop — the company’s own store; returned HTTP 429 on every attempt made for this note and was not read directly ↩

  3. Announcing The Second Annual Sprudge Design Award Winners | Sprudge — the official results announcement of 17 January 2025, source of the Outstanding E-Commerce / Web Site win and the public-vote method ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. Dayglow — Los Angeles Coffee Roaster | CoffeeSter — read via WebFetch; source of the Los Angeles base, the subscription and online-store model, international shipping, and the catalogue snapshot ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  5. Dayglow | Food and Beverage Manufacturing — LinkedIn company page — the company’s own profile, describing a direct-to-consumer subscription with a large library of international roasters; LinkedIn blocked automated reading, so this was not read directly ↩ ↩2

  6. Dayglow — Dayglow collection — the company’s own page carrying the 2022 roastery claim and the Gatti names; returned HTTP 429 and was not read directly ↩ ↩2

  7. Dayglow Company Profile: Valuation, Funding & Investors | PitchBook — the profile describing a Chicago-headquartered “Dayglow” founded in 2018; not read directly and not established to be the same company ↩

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