Long Grove resident who founded Gloria Jean’s Gourmet Coffees dies at 82

Gloria Jean Kvetko of Long Grove, the founder and namesake of the international brand Gloria Jean’s Gourmet Coffees, has died at the age of 82.

Kvetko opened her first shop in historic downtown Long Grove in 1979, intending it as a stand-alone family business. But the venture grew into a nationwide presence of more than 220 stores before she sold the company in 1993 to a buyer that took it aggressively international.

Today the brand has more than 600 locations in 40 countries.

Even after selling, Kvetko maintained an ambassadorial relationship with the company and its fans.

“She loved it,” said her son, Tom Jaworski. “When you have a passion that runs that deep, it never goes away.”

Kvetko’s first entrepreneurial venture was Gloria’s Studio One beauty shop in Wheeling in the mid-1970s. But it was the coffee shop she bought a few years later that changed her and her family’s life.

The next steps came when first Northbrook Court and then Woodfield Mall asked her to open shops in their malls.

“And then it just went from there,” Jaworski said. “She started flavored coffee. Nobody else did flavored coffee.”

The 1980s was a time when many simple, inexpensive items like coffee made the leap to specialty or gourmet quality and found an eager audience, he noted.

“It was a simple treat you could do for yourself,” Jaworski said of the rise of Gloria Jean’s. “She just hit it at the right time. I don’t think she was expecting hundreds of stores in Australia.”

Kvetko’s sons Tom and John Jaworski played integral roles in the company’s early expansion. Tom served as director of real estate and helped bridge the transition to nonfamily ownership.

Kvetko’s later role as an ambassador for the brand didn’t include appearances at most new openings, but she was a popular guest at a Gloria Jean’s convention in Hawaii, and in 2017 she attended the brand’s return to the Stratford Square Mall in Bloomingdale.

In addition to her sons and their wives, her survivors include two grandchildren and their spouses and a great-granddaughter.

A visitation will be held at 3:30 p.m. Friday, June 28, until a memorial service starting at 7 p.m. at Glueckert Funeral Home, 1520 N. Arlington Heights Road in Arlington Heights.

Interment will take place privately at Memory Gardens Cemetery in Arlington Heights.

For more information or to offer condolences, visit GlueckertFH.com.