Joth Ricci, CEO of Dutch Bros, tells Oregon DECA students across Jackson and Klamath counties about his unusual career path to becoming a beverage industry executive and about his "smile shaped" growth strategy for the coffee company's national expansion during a presentation Wednesday at Phoenix High School.

Teen business students from across Southern Oregon had the rare opportunity Wednesday to ask all their burning questions to the CEO of one of the country’s fastest-growing coffee chains.

Jonathan “Joth” Ricci, CEO of Dutch Bros until the end of the year, told Southern Oregon DECA students from high schools across Jackson and Klamath counties about his unorthodox career path, as well as his work helping orchestrate the Grants Pass coffee chain’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange and developing the chain’s eastward expansion.

Ricci shared with DECA students from Phoenix, North Medford, South Medford, Crater, Ashland, Henley and Klamath Union high schools how he went from being an “odd jock kid” from Corvallis who worked odd jobs as a teen to a distinguished executive who has worked as CEO of six companies over the past 27 years.

Those CEO stints include beverage industry standouts such as Jones Soda Co. in the late 2000s, Portland’s Stumptown Coffee Roasters during the third-wave coffee boom in the mid-2010s and Dutch Bros starting in 2018.

“The beauty of beverages is that everybody drinks them,” Ricci told students.

His career path, however, may have taken a completely different turn had Sandy High School not passed him up in the early 1990s for a junior varsity basketball coaching position. He ultimately took a sales job that led him to a career path that took off climbing the corporate ladder at Johnson & Johnson.

“My lesson is don’t try to over-orchestrate your path,” Ricci said. He described how in his more than three decades in business “it rarely works out the way you think it will.”

Much of Ricci’s presentation shed new light on his time at Dutch Bros, including the initial public offering (IPO) in September 2021, the implementation of its app and the company’s expansion strategy.

Ricci told the teens seated in the Rose Theater at Phoenix High that when Dutch Bros launched its smartphone app in February 2021 it “broke the internet.” He said that Apple initially pulled Dutch Bros from the App Store because the download traffic was so much stronger than typical.

Dutch Bros has grown to 23,000 employees this year, including about 5,000 added in Texas over the past three years. The company is currently building a new roasting plant in the Dallas suburb of Melissa, Texas.

The company had 319 stands when Ricci started in 2018, and as of 2023 had 754 locations in 11 states. Ricci further said that that he helped develop “a very clear road map to 4,000.”

“We built a smiley face strategy,” Ricci said. He described plans to continue expansion east across the southern United States, moving east from Texas through the Southeast before eventually moving north.

“Dutch Bros is just getting started,” Ricci said. “There’s opportunities for growth for years to come.”

A DECA student in the audience asked how long it might be before Dutch Bros expands to the northeastern U.S. Ricci said that because real estate works so differently in places such as New York, the company may never reach quite that far — at least not in the growth strategy he charted for incoming CEO Christine Barone, a former Starbucks executive.

“The Northeast is a different market … Dunkin’ Donuts is a really strong competitor,” Ricci said. “I’m a big believer in a disciplined strategy for growth.”

Another student asked if he’s faced any difficulties since going public. No question from the students appeared to be off-limits, and Ricci spoke frankly about the initial public offering.

Ricci said it was an honor to be at the New York Stock Exchange and shared a memory of being interviewed on Wall Street the day of the IPO. He remembered having one earpiece with Bloomberg TV and another with a reporter in London.

“Good luck — this is about to get aired in every country in the world,” Ricci remembered a British voice telling him.

Ricci said Dutch Bros is a “different business from where we were five years ago.”

Going public brings in new resources for growth, but he also described feeling exposed because the money a CEO makes is public.

“But it makes you a better company,” Ricci said.