CEO Christine Barone brings Dutch Bros’ headquarters – and its next growth spurt – to the Valley.
At Dutch Bros’ new Tempe headquarters, the workday begins with a trip through the “game-day tunnel,” a dark-blue hallway of warped racing checks, looping neon and ’90s skater slang. Think The Jennifer Hudson Show’s “Spirit Tunnel,” minus the singing staffers.
As corporate vibes go, it’s a fitting entrance for a company known for sugar-rush-inducing drinks and infectiously friendly baristas. That surprisingly inimitable combination has made Dutch Bros a massive hit in Arizona since its first always-backed-up Valley drive-thru opened near Arizona State University in 2007. In 2025, the Oregon-born company made the Valley its home, moving its headquarters to Tempe.
For Christine Barone, who joined Dutch Bros as president in 2023 and became CEO the following year, keeping that buzz alive requires more structure than the company’s freewheeling personality suggests. “As you get bigger, you actually have to build in a lot of processes and systems,” she says, likening the formula to a custom espresso with a caramel drizzle, “so the 10 percent of magic on top can always be there.”
A systems wonk with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics and an MBA from Harvard, Barone, 52, once imagined applying her facility with numbers to astrophysics rather than oat milk lattes. In conversation, she moves briskly from lofty ideas about culture and leadership to such decidedly earthbound concerns as shop music playlists (each gets to pick their own, but “no bad words”).
Playing den mom to a staff of upbeat, slightly overcaffeinated workers comes naturally. Growing up in Maryland as the oldest of three children, Barone helped her mother run an in-home daycare, keeping the kids engaged and the household moving.
That early lesson – that even fun needs managing – now plays out on a larger scale. Dutch Bros’ “magic” originated with brothers Dane and Travis Boersma, who launched the company from an espresso cart in Grants Pass, Oregon, in 1992, with the goal to “be ourselves, rock music, make great coffee and hang out with people,” as Travis later said.
Barone sees her role as building an organization capable of carrying that Spicoli-esque dream forward. “I really enjoy understanding what someone’s vision is and then doing all the work to say, ‘This is your dream on the hill. How do I help get it there?’” she says.
She’s had practice. Barone worked at Starbucks during Howard Schultz’s second act, then spent nearly seven years leading True Food Kitchen, created by Andrew Weil and Sam Fox. She now guides Dutch Bros alongside Travis, its executive chairman. (Dane, who died of ALS in 2009, remains a leader in spirit, celebrated through the company’s Drink One for Dane fundraiser.)
Behind the scenes, getting that fun-forward dream up the hill involves an inordinate amount of logistics. “A lot of the stuff that actually has to be done might be the boring stuff,” Barone admits. “Like making sure that everything that’s supposed to show up behind our back door shows up on time and in full.”
When Dutch Bros went public in 2021, industry analysts worried growth might manage the magic right out of it. But Barone insists corporate structure hasn’t made the shops feel corporate. “As you scale, there’s always this challenge of putting in all these edicts from corporate headquarters. For us, it’s about: How do we make the job easier each day for our shop teams, or make it so they can really spend their time connecting with their customers?”
The shops still get to color outside the corporate lines. “If one of their regular customers is having a really bad day and they want to hook them up with a free drink, let’s make sure that we can make that happen,” Barone says.
The expansion has pulled the corporate operation far beyond its Oregon roots. Grants Pass remains home to a roasting plant and parts-fulfillment warehouse, but to grow from 1,262 shops nationwide to 2,029 by 2029 (that’s Barone’s math nerdiness at play), Dutch Bros needed a deeper pool of finance, technology and marketing talent – plus an airport connecting it to increasingly distant markets. Tempe offered the workforce, proximity to Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport and an established base of Dutch Bros fans. “When you added in that brand awareness, with a really accessible airport, it pretty much narrowed it down to being the Phoenix market,” Barone says.
Serendipitously, Dutch Bros’ move to Arizona also put the company within handshake distance of 65 former Salad and Go locations across the Southwest when the latter chain shuttered in August – each drive-thru shop tailor-made for Dutch Bros’ own service model. Valued at $105 million, the deal figures to help Barone hit that 2,029-shop goal a little quicker.
The Valley suits Barone on on personal level, too. A mother of three, she’s already got the lifestyle down: hiking with her husband during the cooler months and swapping the trails for early-morning pool workouts in summer. “It’s a nice way to wake up and be a part of the desert and the heat – without feeling it quite as much.”
There’s also a bit of nostalgic symmetry to the move: Tempe represents the Boersma brothers’ first road trip in their expansion journey. Back in the 2000s, Dutch Bros’ earliest foray outside the Northwest was that shop near ASU. Two decades later, the company’s national headquarters sits just down the road, with the Papago Buttes filling the two-story lobby windows.
“It just feels so fitting that we’ve ended up in Tempe,” Barone says. “It feels like us.”
– Jimmy Magahern
Work Hard, Play Harder
Tempe has long merged office parks with amusement parks – with varied results.
- In 2006, Google opened a secretive engineering outpost near ASU stocked with a pool table, free-snack kitchen and complimentary meals – an “interactive environment,” designed to encourage creativity. The experiment lasted only two years
- GoDaddy went considerably bigger in 2014, opening a 150,000-square-foot Tempe tech center equipped with a giant slide, climbing wall, pedal-kart track, skate park and playing courts.
- Dutch Bros’ headquarters includes ’90s arcade cabinets, a gym, indoor pickleball court, guitars and amplifiers by a coffeehouse gathering area and a boardroom with a speakeasy. The pickleball court rules declare “No jerks” and “Vibes over victory.”
