HANNA CITY – After talking with a friend, developer Ron Gulley knew that building a successful coffee shop in rural Peoria would need to be at a good location and unique.

He settled on Ill. Route 116 and shipping containers.

“I decided to use them because nobody else is,” he tells the Community Word. It “made for a better destination. Plus, this stretch of 116 gets 12,000 to 18,000 cars a day.”

So, a block west of Gil’s Supper Club here, about a dozen shipping containers stand, becoming The Coffee Can.

“I ended up doing hours of research,” says Gulley, a 59-year-old visionary who used to work in the HVAC business. “Then I got hundreds of pieces of HO Scale [model train] items and stacked them and moved them around. I sat in my shop re-arranging them for about a year until I came up with a design.”

The scale-model shipping containers provided the visuals, and Gulley got some informal advice from an architect, he says.

“Once I understood what I wanted, it was just a matter of physics,” he says.

And acquiring the long rectangular metal boxes.

He found what he wanted at USA Containers, a rural Warren County company that buys, sells and sometimes customizes shipping containers.

USA Container president Mike Alecock says, “We go to Chicago, and sometimes St. Louis, and buy them and haul them back in a specialized trailer.

“We sell them for anywhere from $3,000 to tens of thousands of dollars, depending on what the customer wants and modifications we might do on our end.”

Gulley explains that his are the “one-trip” type of shipping container.

“They build them in China, which ships them here filled with cargo; they unload goods here, and then the containers are left here,” Gulley says.

As far as uses like Gulley’s planning, “there’s nothing like it around here,” he says.

In fact, it’s so new that Peoria has no requirements yet. Hanna City, where Gulley lives, has local zoning, so Gulley worked out a redevelopment deal with the village. A curious Peoria County inspector visited and remarked how The Coffee Can experience might help Planning & Zoning draft regulations.

But using shipping containers isn’t unknown elsewhere. Chicago has “Boxville,” a commercial small-business incubator on East 51st Street near Washington Park, where independent entrepreneurs opting for this approach instead of investment-heavy bricks-and-mortar sites include Good Thoughts Tea Co., Synergy Foods, and The Greenhouse.

The containers – about 8 feet wide, 8½ feet tall and either 20 or 40 feet long – also are used as apartments in Arizona, Florida, New York and Utah, plus Amsterdam and Germany. In the United States, Alecock’s company sells them to be concession stands, construction-site job shacks, hunting cabins, livestock sheds, mobile offices and more, he says.

“They’re really flexible in usage,” he adds.

They’re also durable, Gulley says.

“They’re water-tight and air-tight,” he says. But “you need to make cuts and insulate them, attach them and seal them back up.”

The process may sound simpler that it’s been for Gulley, who’s been coordinating the project for months, when he’s run into unforeseen hitches.

“There have been obstacles all along the way,” he says, shrugging. “So we change plans [to] make it work”
Besides building delays, there were unpredictable consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, from social-distancing to supposed supply-chain disruptions and cost fluctuations.

“That held us up, and then we had to deal with an underground fuel storage tank from a former gas station that had been here,” he says.

Now, however, progress is accelerating, and Gulley hopes for a fall launch, when he plans to be open 5 a.m.-7 p.m. seven days a week, offering various coffees and teas, soft drinks and specialty beverages, and light breakfast and lunch items, all served in indoor seating or at a drive-through window, with an upstairs room available for meetings or parties.

“I want this to be a ‘destination,’” he says, “a flagship, with many more to come.”

Asked whether he considers himself a “sustainable” businessman, he replies, “I did reuse everything out of the cans for one thing or another on the project, so I guess I’m a recycler.”