Lebanon coffee roaster feeds shelter cats

Inspired by her love for coffee and shelter cats, Zanetta Kok founded Kitty Town Coffee: a Lebanon-based coffee roaster with the tagline “drink coffee, feed cats.”

The business donates a week’s worth of food for one cat for every bag sold, rotating the beneficiary monthly. For September, funds are being donated to the Humane Society of Lebanon County. In October, funds will be donated to the Pet Pantry of Lancaster.

According to the Kitty Town Coffee website, the business has funded nearly 1.3 million meals in 2026, and nearly 5.3 million since it began roasting. The business offers various roasts (all named after real cats) and has expanded to also offer teas, syrups, and merch.

Zanetta explained that she worked as a barista as a high schooler at Cumberland Coffee & Tea, which also roasted its own coffee. After graduating from college, she and husband/co-founder Kenny Kok decided to buy old popcorn poppers to roast coffee in their garage.

“In the back of my mind, I just said, ‘One day, I want to roast coffee,'” said Zanetta. “It wasn’t even a business venture, so to speak, it was just like, I want to see how to roast coffee. After I graduated from college, I wanted something fun to do, so I was like, ‘Let’s do this coffee roasting thing, just as a hobby.'”

Once the couple’s coworkers began asking about buying their roasts, Zanetta and Ken started to think about starting a business. Their first coffee sale, Zanetta explained, was a fundraiser for a local animal shelter.

Then, Kok’s cat, Sydney — an elderly stray she took in while at college — died suddenly, which pushed Zanetta to start the business and donate money toward other strays. Sydney would become the namesake of the business’s first original blend.

“I was already sort of thinking on that line, but then when she passed away, it just kind of rocked my world and I was just like, ‘Okay, we need to do this,'” said Kok. She recalled thinking, “‘Life is short, you don’t know what’s going to happen, I need to start this business.'”

Growth of the business was slow at first, Kok explained, with the couple moving from their garage to a commercial former steel mill site in 2019.

In 2021, Ken came up with the business’s tagline, which Zanetta said helped customers understand their mission.

At around the same time, she said, they gained traction with online ads and social media, causing an increase in orders which eventually led to them outgrowing their location. They moved to North 25th Street around a year ago.

“In the very beginning, it started with an order here and there, a fundraiser here and there,” said Kok. “Over time, we started figuring out how to advertise on social media and stuff, and five orders a day turned into 20, which turned into 100.”

Kok said the new location offers more space, totaling 25,000 square feet, and more visibility. Some of the area is still walled off, allowing the company room to grow.