A Yellowstone Actor and Three Oil Guys Bought a 25-Year-Old Texas Roastery. Now It’s in 1,700 Walmarts
For roughly 20 to 25 years, a small coffee roastery in San Angelo, Texas — Longhorn Coffee Company — was run by a U.S. veteran named Scott Decker and his wife, Laurie. In 2022, four men bought it: Karl Pfluger, an energy-finance executive who had worked for former U.S. Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans and later became president of Oryx Midstream Services; Paul Anderson, an oil-and-gas veteran based in Midland; Aron Marquez; and actor Cole Hauser, best known for playing Rip Wheeler on Yellowstone. Pfluger, Anderson, and Marquez had met Hauser at a dinner in Florida and bonded over a shared, fairly simple set of values around hard work and ambition. When Pfluger later found out the San Angelo roastery was for sale, he brought the idea to the group — and Hauser signed on not as a paid spokesperson, but as a full co-founder who helped buy the business.
The group brought in Arlyn Davich as CEO ahead of the brand’s public relaunch. Davich has a genuinely unusual resume for a coffee company: she has an MBA from Columbia, founded a fintech company called PayPerks that she grew to an acquisition, served as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Walmart where she led strategy for Allswell (Walmart’s first owned direct-to-consumer brand), and later ran her own fractional-CMO firm, Little Fish. She became Free Rein’s CEO in July 2023, three months before the company’s public launch.
Free Rein Coffee Company launched to consumers on October 11, 2023, roasting internationally sourced beans — from Colombia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Hawaii — at the original San Angelo facility, and marketing itself as “100% roasted in the USA.” The founders hired the Austin-based branding agency Preacher, known for its work with Yeti, High Noon, and Maker’s Mark, with an explicit goal: make Free Rein feel like it had already been around for 50 years, something people would stumble across rather than a brand-new startup. The company built its identity around western and ranch imagery and a mission it calls “Serve Those Who Serve”: a cup donated for every bag sold to veterans, first responders, teachers, and nurses, plus a 20% discount for anyone who verifies as active-duty, veteran, first responder, nurse, or teacher.
Growth from there was fast for a small regional roastery. By the podcast’s own count, Free Rein had served more than 250,000 direct-to-consumer customers and collected more than 10,000 five-star reviews within about two years of launch, and had donated more than 60,000 cups to veterans, first responders, teachers, and nurses. The company’s first major retail push came in September 2024, when it landed in more than 1,700 Walmart stores nationwide plus Walmart.com — a scale jump for a brand that had been direct-to-consumer only for less than a year. A month earlier, in June 2024, actor and entrepreneur Mark Wahlberg joined as an investor and brand ambassador, a distinct and smaller role than Hauser’s; Wahlberg said the partnership was “a natural fit” given his own history with veteran causes, and Hauser described him as sharing “a similar patriotism and passion for supporting veterans.”
The product line has kept expanding alongside the retail footprint. The original lineup launched with six blends at $15.99 for 12 ounces, in whole bean, ground, and Keurig-compatible pod formats. In October 2024, Free Rein partnered with the hat brand Stetson on a limited “Cowboy Coffee Kit” — a Trailblazer blend paired with two American-made ceramic mugs — sold through both brands’ sites and at a pop-up during the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas. In January 2025, the company launched a premium Reserve Collection of five small-batch blends, including a Hawaiian Kona, sold both direct and through Walmart. By 2026, the lineup had grown further to include a protein-added “Harder Working Coffee” line and a limited blend called Indivisible, tied to the country’s 250th anniversary. One investor, Dallas-based Rogers Healy of Morrison Seger Venture Capital Partners, has projected Free Rein could reach $250 million in net revenue by 2029 — a forward-looking estimate from a backer, not an audited or company-reported figure, but a sign of how aggressively the people funding the brand are betting on it.
Free Rein is riding two trends at once. Specialty coffee itself is a genuinely growing category — one estimate puts the global specialty coffee market at $35 billion in 2025, on track toward $52 billion by 2031, with specialty coffee’s share of daily coffee drinkers climbing from about 39% in 2020 to 46% in 2025 — and roughly 40% of specialty brands are leaning harder into direct-to-consumer subscriptions and e-commerce rather than wholesale alone. Layered on top of that is a distinct wave of celebrity-founded coffee brands: Robert Downey Jr. co-founded Happy Coffee, which has expanded into Target and Sprouts; George Clooney has a long-running paid partnership with Nespresso. Free Rein sits closer to the Downey model than the Clooney one — Hauser isn’t a paid face, he’s an owner who helped write the first check — which is part of why the founders have leaned so heavily on the idea that this is a real business with a 25-year-old roastery underneath it, not a celebrity name slapped on a private-label bag.
In this episode, Karl, Paul, and Arlyn talk through buying a small-town roastery sight-unseen, building a brand with an actor as a working partner instead of a spokesperson, and what it actually took to go from a direct-to-consumer launch to 1,700 Walmart stores in under a year.
Listen to the full conversation with Karl Pfluger, Paul Anderson, and Arlyn Davich on Apple Podcasts
Make sure to check out Free Rein Coffee at: https://freereincoffee.com/
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