Walking With the King: A Story About Glenn Kroneberger

“Hello again, friends! How in the world are you?” the radio crackled as a young Glenn Kroneberger ate his bowl of shredded wheat. Every morning during breakfast, Glenn and his family would listen to “Walk With the King,” a syndicated radio program by Dr. Robert Cook, who served as the president of The King’s College from 1962 to 1985.

Once the program was done, Glenn and his two older brothers would grab their backpacks and scurry off to school. As the boys ran out the door, Glenn’s mom would always repeat Dr. Cook’s closing tagline from the show: “Walk with the King, and be a blessing!” Glenn didn’t know it then, but this phrase would become his life’s mission statement, challenging him to use his gifts to serve God and bless others.

Pursuing Young Dreams

Glenn grew up in the suburbs of Baltimore during the 1970s, the youngest in a family that was grounded in God and gifted with a love of entrepreneurship. From an early age, Glenn and his two brothers were always looking for new businesses to start, eager to earn some spending money.

Every Fourth of July, Glenn’s mom would drive her three sons to the fruit wholesaler at the Baltimore docks. There, these young entrepreneurs would buy crates of fresh lemons, filling the back of their 1969 Volkswagen Squareback to the brim. Once home, Glenn and his brothers would slice each lemon in half and insert a striped peppermint stick into the center, creating a lemon stick, a long-time Baltimore summer tradition. They’d then sell their lemon sticks at the local parades, hawking their sweet and sour treats to the crowds until they sold out.

But lemon sticks weren’t the brothers only business. When they got older, they bought a snow cone machine and a variety of flavored syrups. After building a wooden stand and setting up the equipment in the driveway, the Kroneberger snow cone business was born! Their business model was simple; one brother would run the stand and make snow cones, while the other two brothers would fan out through the neighborhood and drum up customers.

When they weren’t starting businesses, Glenn and his brothers loved to gather around their kitchen table and discuss their latest business ideas. While Glenn’s dad worked for a Christian ministry, he was an entrepreneur at heart and enjoyed encouraging his sons in their business dreams.

As they’d sit around the table, Glenn’s dad would often tell his sons stories about their great-grandfather, who had started Kroneberger Coffee Roasters in Baltimore in 1905. While Glenn’s great-grandfather eventually sold the business, a picture of him sitting in his 1920s Ford delivery truck with his name written on the side still hung next to the kitchen table, reminding the boys of their family’s entrepreneurial past.

Given these experiences, when it came time for college, Glenn knew that he wanted to study business. The only question was where? Glenn’s older brother Bryan, influenced by Dr. Cook’s morning radio programs, decided to attend The King’s College in Briarcliff Manor, New York. Once at King’s, Bryan would always invite his kid brother up to visit and to join his friend group on their winter ski trips. Glenn was struck by the group’s camaraderie and knew he wanted that kind of college experience.

So Glenn enrolled at King’s, ready to study business and see how God might use his gifts. After the initial ups and downs, Glenn fell in love with King’s. He especially appreciated how each professor began their class with a short devotional and prayer. This set the tone for each class, challenging Glenn to approach business through a Christian framework.

An Opening for Success

After graduating from King’s in the early 1980s, Glenn followed his two older brothers to Miami, where he took a job selling tropical plants for a large nursery to grocery store chains. He eventually grew tired of the corporate culture, though, and spotted an opportunity for a business; he could become a plant broker between the nurseries and the grocery stores.

So at 26, Glenn started his first business as an adult, buying thousands of tropical plants from different nurseries and reselling them to national grocery store chains. While the plant brokerage business took off, after several years of success, Glenn decided to move back to Baltimore. There, he used his profits from the plant business to open up two restaurants with his middle brother Jeff.

But the restaurant business was tough, and as the years passed, they found themselves working harder and harder for less and less money. Eventually, burnt out on restaurant life, Glenn told his wife Nancy, “We need to get away and think about life.” So they booked a flight to Sarasota, Florida, hoping that a weekend somewhere else would bring clarity to their future.

Soon after they landed, Glenn and Nancy fell in love with Sarasota, eventually deciding to sell the restaurants and move their young family to Florida. As they settled in Sarasota in 2003, Glenn wasn’t sure what was next for him.

One night, though, Glenn and Nancy invited another couple over to their home for dinner. As the two couples talked after the meal, Glenn’s friend saw the picture of his great-grandfather’s coffee-roasting truck hanging on the wall. “Glenn,” he said, “Have you ever thought about getting into the coffee roasting business?”

Unbeknownst to his friend, Glenn had already been thinking about this, and he ran to his office and grabbed an inch-thick folder that he’d filled with ideas about a coffee roasting business. As the two friends talked, they made plans to open up a new coffee business called Sarasota Coffee and Tea. Glenn would focus on the wholesale side, while his friend would run the retail shop.

The two friends soon bought a coffee roaster and took out a lease on a cafe, bringing the business to life. Glenn used his sales experience to establish accounts with restaurants and churches, while his friend focused on the retail shop. But just six months into the business, a wrench was thrown into Glenn’s coffee-roasting dreams.

After attending a coffee trade show together in Atlanta, Glenn’s business partner told him on the drive home that the coffee business wasn’t right for him and that he needed to get out. Glenn was blindsided. He hadn’t planned on operating the business by himself, but they figured out an exit plan for his friend and Glenn became the sole owner of Sarasota Coffee and Tea.

Glenn's entrepreneurial instincts took over, as he closed the retail shop and put all of his efforts into the wholesale business. He used his relational gifts to develop a devoted customer base, who were won over by the high-quality coffee beans. As the business grew, Glenn hired more and more employees and expanded Sarasota Coffee and Tea’s presence throughout Florida and the rest of the country.

A New Opportunity to Help

But a unique opportunity came when Glenn received an unexpected phone call from the owner of a large Sarasota restaurant. The restaurant owner had just met a businessman from Indiana who was trying to sell a shipping container full of unroasted coffee beans. Intrigued, Glenn gave the man a call.

The businessman turned out to be Martin Graber, a Christian man in his 80s who owned a large cabinet-making business. Martin had just been in Nicaragua on a mission trip, where he’d met Diego, a coffee farmer who was about to lose his farm to a predatory bank.

Moved by Diego’s plight, Martin came up with a plan to bypass the bank and buy a full shipping container of beans himself. That’s why Martin wanted to talk to Glenn: would he be interested in 37,500 pounds of green coffee beans?

Glenn wanted to help, but he first had to answer one question: was the coffee even any good? So Martin overnighted a sample to Glenn, which he roasted, ground, and brewed. “Wow,” Glenn thought to himself as he sipped the coffee, “This is some of the best coffee I’ve ever tasted!” Sarasota Coffee and Tea bought the entire shipping container from Diego’s farm and began roasting and selling the beans.

As the years went by, Glenn’s partnership with Diego continued to grow. Glenn purchased more and more coffee beans from Diego, helping him to escape financial bondage and provide his workers with better pay and new benefits like health insurance and school scholarships. Diego’s farm flourished, and grew from harvesting one shipping container full of beans each year to seven!

Inspired by this work in Nicaragua, Glenn started a sister coffee brand called Fresh Cup of Hope. Fresh Cup of Hope works to support local coffee farmers in Central America by buying their coffee and helping them follow better farming practices. Glenn also donates a portion of the profits to Feed the Children, a non-profit that works to alleviate child hunger throughout the world.

Today, twenty years after he started Sarasota Coffee and Tea, Glenn has grown it into a thriving company. Despite a pandemic-caused dip in its wholesale business, its e-commerce sales have doubled since 2020, setting the company up for future growth.

Through all of the ups and downs of Glenn’s entrepreneurial journey, he’s always sought to live by Dr. Cook’s encouragement to walk with the King and be a blessing to others. He adopted this phrase as his life’s mission statement, using it to guide him through his daily life. He also continued his mom’s tradition with his own two children, saying it to them every day when he dropped them off at school. To Glenn, “It’s a daily reminder of who we serve and how to live our lives.”

This multi-generational motto has helped guide Glenn to impressive heights, whether he’s helping a Florida restaurant find the perfect coffee roast or enabling farmers in Central America to live better lives.

How can other people put this phrase into action in their lives? “Don’t be afraid to dream,” Glenn encourages. “Ask the Lord for a vision for your life and He’ll provide it. Then don’t be afraid to act.”