The founders of the Cambridge brewery Lamplighter are looking to step aside and transform it into an employee-owned company. Meetings were planned for Monday at each of its locations to introduce the plan, according to a company email sent Saturday to announce the meetings.
Lamplighter opened in 2016 in a 10,000-square-foot former auto repair shop on Broadway in The Port neighborhood; a 7,000-square-foot taproom and production space called Lamplighter CX opened in February 2022 in the North Point neighborhood’s Cambridge Crossing development. The company, which now has around 60 employees, was founded by AC Jones, who serves as chief operating officer, and Cayla Marvil. Jones and Marvil, a couple, have been on parental leave, the email said.
“In 2022, AC and I began exploring ways to transition ownership to employees. At the time, we were beginning to think about stepping away from the day-to-day business, and employee ownership was exciting for a lot of reasons,” said Marvil in the email, which was shared with The Independent.
The model is not wholly new to Cambridge. The six-person Boston TechCollective based in Inman Square, which provides information technology to businesses, went employee-owned in 2013. The Circus Cooperative Cafe, formed from the remains of the Darwin’s Ltd. cafe chain – shut down by the owner after workers unionized – opened as a 14-person worker cooperative in September 2023 in the Riverside neighborhood.
There’s a Massachusetts Center for Employee Ownership, and Cambridge’s Community Development Department hosted a workshop in May 2025 about “Employee Ownership as a Powerful Succession Strategy.”
The Lamplighter plan arrives shortly after a Feb. 27 vote in which around 45 of Lamplighter’s workers voted to unionize – the first Massachusetts brewery to do so, according to its collective bargaining representatives at the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 1445.
Despite that vote and the subsequent and ongoing six months of contract negotiations, Marvil’s email made clear this is the first notice to workers of a transition to an employee ownership trust that is well underway. “I’m aware that this is quite the announcement to send out, and there are likely a multitude of questions,” she wrote.
Work to form the trust, complete the transaction structure and get required consents from investors began in January, and Lamplighter Brewing has applied to the state Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission and Cambridge License Commission to reflect the ownership change “and thus reached the last step needed to finalize the transition,” Marvil said.
Though Marvil and Jones had been working toward the trust for four years, there were triggers to go forward that included years worth of stable cash flow and elimination of their personal bank debt from guaranteeing a loan to build Lamplighter CX, Marvil said.
Marvil and Jones also have a holding company called Barley Smalls LLC created in 2019 that has offices at Lamplighter in The Port.
Approvals are expected in October, and then “I’m proud, excited and thrilled to share that Lamplighter will officially transition to 100 percent employee ownership,” Marvil said. The co-founders would remain as advisers and seats on the board and the governing trust stewardship committee “but will not be employees, owners or participate in any future profit-share.”
Changes ahead
The company’s Canaan Khoury will be chief executive, reflecting current responsibilities for day-to-day leadership, Marvil said. Khoury comes from a family of wine and beer makers in Palestine’s West Bank – his father founded Taybeh Brewing, the first microbrewery in the Middle East – and earned a mechanical engineering degree at Harvard focused on the winemaking process, according to an alumni profile from Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Nominations and elections for the initial employee stewardship seats are expected “shortly” and the board will set a profit-sharing pool to be distributed annually, likely starting with March, according to Marvil’s email. Staff are eligible for profit sharing after six months with Lamplighter if they average at least eight hours of weekly work; they will be like shareholders, but with no cash contribution or risk, while “from a day-to-day operational standpoint, Lamplighter will continue in much the same way it always has: Roles and responsibilities remain the same, everyone remains a W-2 employee, managers continue managing, and we continue operating within the same frameworks and values that have always guided the business.”
The email said Lamplighter woulds share information about the transition with the union, but it is “not intended to disrupt, replace or alter our relationship” with it, Marvil said. “The union will continue to represent bargaining-unit employees in collective bargaining and other matters within its legal role.”
The meetings were scheduled for noon to 1 p.m. at 284 Broadway, The Port, and 4:30–5:30 p.m. at 110 N. First St., North Point.
Requests for additional information were sent Sunday to Marvil and UFCW Local 1445, but there was no immediate reply.
