Blue Bottle Coffee founder James Freeman's immediate interest in Japanese coffee shop culture was sparked by a 2008 tour of Tokyo coffee shops accompanied by a friend who worked at UCC in San Francisco.

He credits his visit to coffee shops such as "Chatei Hatou" in Shibuya, "Cafe de Rambre" in Ginza, and "Daibo Coffee Shop" in Omotesando, which he visited with his friend, who also worked at UCC in San Francisco, as a turning point for him.

The third wave movement gained momentum in the 1990s, but Blue Bottle Coffee, founded after 2000, is another pioneering third wave coffee shop committed to transparency in its origins, and has now become a global phenomenon.

Blue Bottle Coffee was founded in 2002 in Oakland, California, by freelance clarinetist James Freeman.

Freeman began his business by roasting small batches in a 186-square-foot (approximately 17 square meters) flower shed and delivering the beans to local customers by bicycle.

Around the time Portland, Stumptown, and Chicago's Intelligentsia were being established, the third wave of coffee was also emerging in Durham, North Carolina.

Counterculture Coffee is a specialty coffee roasting company based there. Since its founding in 1995, the company has been known for its commitment to education and sustainability. Operating as a wholesale-only roasting company with a nationwide network of training centers, it has become a leading brand in the US specialty coffee industry.

Like Stumptown, Intelligentsia is a company known for pioneering the US coffee third wave movement.

Intelligentsia Coffee was founded in Chicago, Illinois in 1995 and specializes in high-quality, freshly roasted specialty coffee.

Intelligentsia was founded by Doug Zell and Emily Manzi, who moved to Chicago from San Francisco.

The founders were frustrated by the lack of freshly roasted coffee in the city. They opened their first coffee bar on Broadway in the Lakeview neighborhood, selling beans roasted in-house in a vintage Probat roaster to ensure freshness.

In the 1990s, Starbucks became a place that offered a "third place," with Frappuccinos and cappuccinos taking center stage, and espresso and blended coffees becoming ingredients on the menu rather than the main focus.

At the same time, specialty coffee culture, a reaction against commodity coffee, was beginning to spread in the United States. A genre known as the "third wave" was born, offering carefully crafted specialty coffee in a format similar to the coffee bars that Starbucks' Howard Schultz was initially inspired by in Italy.

In the early 1990s, Starbucks stores in California—especially during hot summers—began experimenting on their own.

Baristas blended coffee, ice, milk, and flavor syrups.

Inspired partly by blended iced drinks popular in the region

One of them was a Frappuccino from a company called Coffee Connection.

The drink concept and the name “Frappuccino” came from Boston-based chain Coffee Connection, where owner George Howell and his team created a blended coffee, milk, sugar, and ice drink in the early 1990s.

After Howard Schultz became CEO of Starbucks, espresso was not sold as a niche Italian drink. Instead, it was reframed for the American mass market.

He clearly recognized that straight Italian-style espresso was too intense and unfamiliar for most American coffee drinkers of the late 1980s and 1990s, and he adjusted Starbucks’ concept accordingly.

Schultz saw in Milan that Italians happily drank small, strong espressos at bars, while most Americans were used to large cups of relatively weak, “bland” coffee.

The acquisition of Starbucks in 1987 was undertaken by Howard Schultz, the current CEO of Starbucks, in order to realize his vision of Italian-style espresso bar culture in the United States.
Schultz, a former Starbucks employee, was inspired by the local "bar" (stand-up cafe) culture during a business trip to Italy in 1983 and wanted to create a "third place" between home and work in the United States.

Italian restaurants began to gain popularity in the U.S. around 1970.
High-end restaurants in New York and chains like Old Spaghetti Factory and Spaghetti Warehouse became popular.
Originally, the U.S. was a multi-ethnic nation with a large Italian-American population. However, during this period, the number of Italian restaurant chains nationwide increased, spreading the habit of eating Italian food and experiencing Italian culture among other ethnicities.

Starbucks itself was founded in Seattle in 1971, but initially it was a specialty store selling roasted coffee beans and equipment, not a cafe chain serving espresso drinks. 

Around this time, dark roast coffee, like the Italian roast popular in Europe, was beginning to become popular, influenced by California's Peet's Coffee. 

However, espresso had yet to become widespread. 

Coffee was generally perceived as something to drink cheaply in large cups.