It all started with a love of coffee and a horse trailer.
Melanie Clark would drink at least two cups of coffee a day while working as a nurse at MercyOne in Des Moines for 18 years. During her time there, she cared for families and their newborns in the NICU.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she was working as needed in the NICU, leaving her time to brew up a new idea in Granger, a small central Iowa town of just over 2,000 residents. She had lived there for more than a decade, but never had a place to grab coffee.
“It’s a small town, and there’s not a coffee shop, and I was a huge coffee addict,” Clark said.
She ended up grabbing her cups of joe from the hospital coffee shop.
With time on her hands, she and a friend decided Granger needed its own coffee shop. With a lack of available real estate in the small town, the next best thing was a coffee trailer.
Lucky for them, her friend’s family owned a farmstead in southeastern Iowa.
So, down the worn and winding backroads of southeastern Iowa, they traveled to the Hinterland Dairy in Donnellson, where Clark bought a horse trailer that would quickly change central Iowa’s coffee scene.
“It was born from loving coffee and drinking coffee,” Clark explained.
In 2021, Vintage Road Coffee Co. took to the roads in the modified trailer, paving a new path for Clark. Little did she know it’d grow much bigger.
From the NICU to the coffee shop: ‘It’s all about making people feel taken care of’
Clark first took her converted coffee trailer to farmers markets and had pop-ups around the Des Moines metro. As the COVID-19 pandemic waned, she was hired by companies to bring her coffee trailer to treat their staff after coming back into the office.
But the more Vintage Road Coffee Co. traveled, “it became harder and harder to keep my normal job,” Clark said.
In 2024, Clark left MercyOne in Des Moines to pursue Vintage Road Coffee Co. full-time. But she quickly came back —this time in West Des Moines — not as a nurse, but to serve her coffee. She opened a coffee counter in MercyOne West Des Moines Medical Center in April 2024.
“To be able to come back and serve our people and the patients and families again,” Clark reminisced. “That was awesome.”
And, in January 2026, the first inklings of her coffee shop dreams became reality when she opened a storefront in a historic Granger bank, located on Broadway Street, the town’s main road.
“It was something we had dreamt about from the beginning, and it was funny it came six years later,” Clark said.
Now Clark’s days look like a cup of cold brew early in the morning before the Granger shop opens, making sure the trailer is stocked for the day ahead. And another cup of coffee when she’s brewing up coffees for the regulars — who she knows the names of and orders by heart — and perhaps another when she checks on the MercyOne West shop, as well.
Sometimes you’ll even find her back in the trailer.
“The whole goal for me has always been about hospitality,” Clark said, drawing a parallel between her two loves of nursing and bringing coffee. “The caring for people, knowing them, remembering — it’s all the same.”
Kyle Werner is the breaking news and public safety reporter for the Register. Reach him at kwerner@registermedia.com.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Former NICU nurse fulfills dream of opening coffee shop in Granger
Reporting by Kyle Werner, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Kyle Werner, Des Moines Register | USA TODAY Network
