Gloria Jean Kvetko in front of the Gloria Jean’s Coffees kiosk inside the Stratford Square Mall on Feb. 3, 2017, in Bloomingdale. Starting with a small gourmet coffee shop in Long Grove that she and her then-husband bought as a hobby — and with no expectation of making money — Gloria Jean Kvetko went on to expand the chain first locally and then nationally, even before Starbucks became the coffee juggernaut that it is.
Born Gloria Jean Lehnert in Chicago, Kvetko grew up in the Northwest Side Irving Park neighborhood, in a house on North Bernard Street. She attended Roosevelt High School and Wright Junior College before marrying her first husband in 1962 when she was 21 and settling in Prospect Heights. Several years later, Kvetko and her then-husband, who was a homebuilder, chose to shift gears and buy and overhaul a small Long Grove boutique coffee store.“It was a hobby thing, where they thought that they could do together, with her design expertise and his construction knowledge,” Jaworski said.
Soon after reorganizing and rebranding the Long Grove store, the couple were asked to open a store in the Northbrook Court shopping mall in Northbrook and at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg.“It started to consume them,” Jaworski said. “So they sold the beauty shop and Ed got out of construction.” After selling the business, Kvetko took a little time off before starting a new fast-food, carryout restaurant venture called Harvest of the Greens, designed for shopping malls and food courts. Featuring healthy food, the eatery opened first in the food court at Gurnee Mills Mall in Gurnee.
After successfully fighting breast cancer, Kvetko enjoyed traveling the world with family, friends and with a cruise group, her son said. She also was a huge fan of numerology, according to a close friend and neighbor, Sheri Meketa.