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Lucia Solis was one of the first people who made me passionately curious about coffee. As a fermentation and processing specialist, she helps people all across the industry understand the role of microbes (like yeasts and bacteria) in shaping coffee’s flavor and characteristics. This topic can be complicated, but Lucia shares her expertise through education; workshops; and by hosting her own podcast, called Making Coffee.

Fermentation is a nearly universal step in coffee processing. Coffee beans are the seed of a cherry, and fermentation helps remove all the mucilage around the seed so it can be dried, roasted, and consumed. But fermentation does so much more than that. In coffee, the process works slightly differently than in other fermented foods, and folks like Lucia are using fermentation not just to uncover and express exciting flavors, but as a powerful tool to give producers more consistency and resilience to climate fluctuations.

This episode does it all. We break down what the fermentation process looks like and how we’ve historically misunderstood its potential. Towards the end, we also get deep into niche coffee debates and scientific conversation. Here’s Lucia.

Ashley: I was hoping you could just start by introducing yourself.

Lucia: Yeah, sure. My name is Lucia Solis and I’m a former-winemaker-turned-coffee processing-specialist.

So that means I studied winemaking at UC Davis and went to working in wine in Napa Valley. I did that for almost 10 years—like nine-and-a-half years—and then I switched over into coffee.

I came in through coffee sort of in the back door, from the microbiology/fermentation side, and now I live in Antigua, Guatemala, where I was born. So I'm kind of back full circle. Even though I was educated and raised in the United States, I was born [in Guatemala], my family is from here, and when I wanted to be closer to coffee post-pandemic, my husband Nick and I decided that we needed to get out of the U.S. and just be much closer to coffee farms.

We live on a coffee farm now; we process coffee and I go back and forth between education and processing. I hold workshops and just generally do coffee education for coffee producers. But, of course, anybody in the coffee industry, all along the chain, is welcome to enjoy fermentation, microbiology—which is pretty niche, so you have to be quite a coffee enthusiast to want to know about coffee microbiology. But that's basically what I do: I try to focus on education.

Ashley: It's so funny that you have to be really into the nitty-gritty of coffee to be focused on some of the things that you cover in your workshops, or on your podcast. You also host a podcast called Making Coffee—but you yourself weren't really a coffee drinker until after you started getting involved in fermentation with coffee, right?

Lucia: I would say I was a coffee professional who didn't drink coffee, meaning that I made my living, like I was able to pay my rent and I paid my expenses, from working in the coffee industry while not being a coffee consumer.

I didn't drink coffee regularly as a part of my life and my ritual until my 30s, because I didn't come through coffee by loving coffee. I came in through loving microbes.

My first love is microbiology. I was, 13, 14 years old in chemistry class, biology class in high school and I was just like, “This is it. This is the thing.” I knew very young that this is what I wanted to do with my life and that I would somehow—I don't know—it would be something that my life would be involved in.

And then again it took me to wine, and now I'm in coffee, and who knows where I'll end up in another 10 years? But yeah, it took me a long time to like coffee, to make it part of my life. That wasn't really what drew me to it.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Lucia: So being born in a coffee-producing country—it's a big part of the culture in Guatemala to grow coffee, not necessarily to drink it—I surprisingly had very little contact with coffee.

I would say the way that I grew up with coffee is because my mom is a coffee lover. And she's somebody who had a really strong coffee ritual to make her lattes. We had a very nice espresso machine in our home, and she makes her daily latte.

I think I, just being like a young, jerk, teenage daughter, really rebelled against anything that my mom liked. And she was so into coffee that I was like, “I'm so not into the thing that you're into.”

So I was very anti-coffee-culture, like at least that consumer part of the culture, for a long time, even just working in it, until I finally fell in love with it. So coffee was always around.

I grew up in the Bay Area as well. So I had really wonderful cafes near me. We had Ritual and Blue Bottle. It was just like something really close by that we could always go to, so I loved the cafes, like I liked that part of it, but I just wasn't into coffee and I'm now, I'm fully converted.

Ashley: How did you make the jump from winemaking to coffee?

Lucia: So I wasn't looking to make the jump. I was really happy making wine, living in Napa Valley—and this opportunity came to me.

I was recruited by Scott Laboratories who is—they are supplier of all kinds of wine supplies, basically. So you can buy your corks, you can buy yeast, you can buy enzymes, all kinds of filtration media. They sell a lot of different things that you need for winemaking, and so I was a customer of theirs for like six or seven years so I knew the owners really well, we were friends. There's lots of interaction.

This was in early 2013, that Scott Laboratories was looking to expand their yeast sales from wine and beer into other markets, so they wanted to expand into coffee and into cacao—this was like a pet project of one of the owners, because he worked a lot in the wine industry in Baja California and Mexico.

So he saw that Mexico has both wine and coffee and he just started getting interested in it and so he's like, “I want to do this,” but he couldn't do it. “I need somebody who knows fermentation, who speaks Spanish, who would be willing to open these doors.” And [he] offered me the position.

For me, I was like, “I like what I'm doing—I'm good.” I initially said no to the offer, but he was like, “You know, just think about it. I think you'd be really good at it.” I had a really wonderful mentor, Michael Silacci, the winemaker of Opus One, where I was working, who I approached about this.

I said: “Alex, Scott asked me if I would be interested in this position. What do you think about it?”

He agreed with Alex. He's like, “I think you'd be good at it. I think it would be a good opportunity for you and if you don't like it, you can come back.” So he made it really easy for me to take a leap and to accept the offer.

In the first years in, 2014, 2015, I was doing both: I was still working in the wine industry in Southern California, like San Diego area and Mexico, and then other times I started traveling to coffee mills in Central America. I'd go to Guatemala, go to El Salvador, Panama, and Costa Rica, and start doing coffee fermentations with some of these wine yeasts from the Scott Laboratories profile.

And just to be clear: the Scott Laboratories who was a yeast supplier is not the same Scott Laboratories that developed the SL varieties in Kenya. So those are, coincidentally, two Scott Laboratories who were doing coffee things early on but have nothing to do with each other. It's just a funny coincidence that they have the same name.

So that's how I got into coffee. That's why I mentioned sort of coming in the back door. It was about fermentation and microbes, using my skills in fermentation to just try to do this coffee flavor project for this company. Then in 2016, I stopped working for them and I went independent. So now I'm an independent coffee consultant.

But that was really rewarding work and that set the foundation for trying a lot of different commercial yeasts in many, many different—into 13 different countries, a lot of different mills, trying to match certain yeast strains to coffee varieties and different altitudes, different conditions, different varieties. So I got to do some of that work which was really cool—but it wasn't research. It was more application.

Ashley: That's an interesting distinction, and I think something that you're really good at is using words really intentionally.

I also think that you are a very clever metaphor-maker, and one of the metaphors that I heard you use on one of the episodes of your podcast is that having fermentation on coffee farms and only really thinking about fermentation as a vessel to remove all of the layers around a coffee seed is like having an F1 racing car and using it only to buy groceries.

So with kind of that framework in mind, let's talk about what fermentation is.

I think for a lot of people maybe listening to this show or even myself, I feel kind of inept really understanding what fermentation’s possibilities are.

I kind of understand it, I think, from a very rudimentary level in certain aspects: like I obviously have some background in coffee, so I kind of understand a little bit of the nitty-gritty. But as the word fermentation, I would say becomes—I'm going to use quotes; we can't see each other right now, so know that I'm using air quotes—”vogue,” and it's becoming something that roasters put on bags and start using all of these different terminologies for, like co-fermenting or anaerobic fermentation which you have mentioned is an oxymoron—or not an oxymoron—it's redundant.

Maybe we can start to peel some of the layers back on that and talk about what fermentation is and how we've looked at fermentation historically in coffee. So I know that's a big question—maybe we can start kind of really fundamentally, and talk about what is fermentation in coffee.

Lucia: Sure. So one kind of warning for your audience is if this topic is interesting to you because you have seen it a lot, or you just have a latent nerd inside of you that enjoys these topics—one of the the themes that will always follow us into this topic of fermentation or microbiology is that it is incredibly complex and incredibly nuanced.

If you are a person who really likes certainty and clarity and black-and-white, then a lot of these conversations, especially around the topic of coffee, are going to feel very uncomfortable, because a lot of the answers are “it depends” and “maybe” or “if this, then that”—like, they're very, very sticky and very messy.

That's where I get a lot of my ideas for the podcast, or a lot of my communication comes from like untangling this, like, giant ball of yarn. So I just wanted to say that this is very normal, to be confused.

But your very simple question of what is fermentation: The way that I define fermentation is from the microbiology perspective, where it's a metabolism. It's a way that microbes, like yeast and bacteria, get energy.

In coffee, these microbes are breaking down the glucose that is found in coffee fruit and they're metabolizing it to get their energy, and the byproduct, the happy accident, is that by doing that, they create these metabolites, these flavor precursors that can get into the seed and that later, we can perceive them in our cup—but it's just the way that these microbes get energy.

I think one of the things that happened is we didn't talk about fermentation for a long time because we really focused on the roasting element giving the flavor of coffee. I think a lot of people were really surprised that coffee was fermented, because we were used to thinking of fermentation in our breads and our beer, in our wine and our cheese and our yogurt.

The other clarification that I like is that, yes, coffee is fermented, but I do not describe it as a fermented food in the way that those other products that I mentioned are fermented foods. If you have grapes—if you don't have a fermentation, you will never have wine. If you have milk and you don't have a fermentation, you will never get cheese or yogurt or kefir or some of the other products.

Coffee: If you don't ferment coffee, you will still get coffee at the end of the day. The fermentation is completely unnecessary for you to enjoy your final beverage—and yet, almost every coffee of all time has some element of fermentation, because these microbes are in the air, they are on the skin of the fruit, they're in the soil, they're in our water, they're on the equipment, so you can't really escape them.

We can't get away from the fermentation. It's both probably every coffee you've ever had has had some level of fermentation as part of it. You have to try really hard and use special equipment to not ferment—the default is fermentation. But also, you can completely skip the fermentation and just have coffee. So I think that also helps us kind of keep the fermentation element of coffee in context, meaning it can be really important and it's also completely irrelevant in another sense.

Does that make sense?

Ashley: That makes total sense. So let's maybe even try to clarify further what we mean by the idea that coffee doesn't need fermentation.

So you said it really well with the idea that you have grapes; you have grape juice—you're never going to get wine without fermentation.

I think you used one example in one of the episodes of your podcast I was listening to, where the only way you could really get coffee without fermentation—and even so, this is not even totally right because fermentation happens just by, like ,you touching a coffee cherry and there's microbes everywhere—is if you remove…

So coffee—most listeners know this, but just to give a little bit of an overview—coffee is the seed of a cherry, and there's all these layers around the seed that we want to remove, essentially, from that seed to get to the thing that we want to drink. And to remove all of that stuff, usually farmers use some level of fermentation to get some of that stuff off.

If you were to use mechanical processes to remove all of that stuff to get to the seed, then maybe you could say that that coffee wasn't fermented. I think that that was the example you used. I think you even tried to think of another way that coffee could not undergo fermentation and then you were like, “Nope. That's it actually.”

Lucia: Exactly like you say—that the fermentation's role in coffee is to remove this mucilage layer, this thick, gelatinous, pectin-rich sugar layer that is an obstacle for us to get into the seed. Because if you don't deal with that layer, then your seeds stick together. They clump, they can get moldy. You can't move on to the next phases of drying and roasting the coffee if that stuff is still there.

Fermentation was actually a very sophisticated—or is a very sophisticated—way to describe something that is not very sophisticated at all. So by saying producers are doing a fermentation or applying a fermentation actually implies a lot more control and a lot more intention than is historically or traditionally found in coffee processing.

So what it was is you get these fruits, and again, you have to get to the seed. So what most producers can do, or do even still today, is they remove the—it's called pulping the coffee—you remove the outer skin, the cascara, and then you have this mucilage layer and basically then you do nothing. You just wait.

The coffee gets put into a tank and then left alone completely. It's not mixed. It's not stirred. It's not touched. You just do nothing, and that's the fermentation, and then eventually the coffee is basically rotting, right? So the microbes are eating all of that mucilage layer and then eventually the seed is clean and then you can go dry the coffee.

I think that's also really funny, of this picture of like, somebody intentionally fermenting—but the reality is like, oh, you just like let the coffee rot and don't touch it and that gets your seed clean. So I think that being able to use this word, this very sophisticated word is—like we're sort of getting lost from the beginning.

Ashley: What your explanation sort of implies is that, historically, fermentation was not a very intentional process.

I think even you've said that fermentation was almost viewed as like a step that you had to get over. Like, “Oh I have to do this nuisance-like thing because I need to get all this stuff off the coffee seed. This is actually just taking time.”

How has the historical understanding of fermentation—how did that affect how we understood where flavor comes from in a coffee bean?

Lucia: So the other thing to mention—with this idea of how fermentation was used historically—is that the role was to remove the mucilage from the seed and move on.

There's consistently, historically, been a push for coffee producers to ferment as quickly as possible and have that rapid turnover rate in their production. Then, on the other side, on the consumer side, we are used to thinking about fermentation as a place of flavor enhancement from these other beverages, from these other examples—and that longer fermentation times are better. There's just a really big disconnect between how producers have historically used fermentation and thought of it and then what consumers are expecting from their fermentations.

So because the push for coffee producers has been fast fermentations—it wasn't just being able to get paid more quickly. They also noticed that, well, if they didn't wash the coffee as soon as possible, if they waited, if they left the coffee basically rotting longer, then it would take on the flavor of rot. For many coffee producers still today that I talk to, the word “ferment,” like fermented coffee, means rotten coffee. It means defective coffee.

They still associate this word with a negative, and yet they're talking oftentimes to consumers that are like, wanting a 500-hour fermentation, or asking for these really novel processes, not realizing they're not really speaking the same language and often have opposite goals.

One of my guiding lights and one of my favorite quotes from Danish physicist Niels Bohr is that, “The opposite of a profound truth is often another profound truth,” so the fermentation could completely damage your coffee and give it a really, really nasty flavor—and that's where most producers stopped and coffee just moved on. The same tool, depending on how you're pulling the lever, can get you different things.

There’s another quote that I like a lot, but it's this idea that we often talk about the same things but we have not yet agreed what we're talking about. So we're all talking about fermentation: Producers are talking about it, consumers are talking about it, educators are talking about it. But we all have a different definition.

For some people it's this thing that creates flavor. For other people, it’s the thing that ruins my coffee. For other people, it's basically rot, but we're still using the same word. So going back to the earlier point about how, to me, words matter, because I just see us kind of going around in these circles. It's really hard to move forward when again, we haven't even agreed on the baseline.

Ashley: I want to ask you more about words because now I can't remember if I said this on record or if I said this to you before we started recording—but you were one of the first people who really made me think about terminology really specifically and how important it is to define terms and make sure that we understand what people are talking about when they use certain words.

Another thing that I saw on your website when I was doing research for this episode was that fermentation can kind of work in both ways, so you are—no, this isn't from your website. Actually this is from an interview I did of you in 2018 that I forgot that I did.

But you talked about how, for one farmer, really manipulating the fermentation process can be really beneficial if they're in a cooler climate and their fermentation's taking way too long. On the converse, if someone is living in a very hot climate, fermentation can also help them slow down that process or do whatever they need to do to circumvent what could happen if it's too hot and their coffee goes bad too quickly.

It's really interesting to hear you reflect the idea that fermentation lives in both of those dualities, if that makes sense.

Lucia: Well, not just both of those dualities, but many, many more.

We're using the same tool of fermenting the coffee, liberating the mucilage, and in those two scenarios, they're opposite climates and potentially opposite goals. But we're still using the same tool. We can use a fermentation to buy us more time in the hot scenario, and maybe elongate the fermentation so that you can get more impact of flavor [in the other]. Think about it like a soup—you want those flavors to marinate and if you can, simmer it for longer. You can get more flavor development.

In the cold sense, there's diminishing returns—you will plateau, and more time doesn't always mean more and more and more and more and more flavor. In those situations where I've had clients, coffee producers that have coffee mills or farms in incredibly cold climates, really cold nights, they really struggle to get their fermentation. This is frustrating for them because space is limited and so if they're not able to turn over their tanks, they could maybe not have enough space for the incoming coffee cherry, meaning that it's either going to rot on the vine or rot on the tree—then that also impacts their economic viability because they're not taking advantage of all of their resources. So there's a lot of reasons why you would want to cut down your fermentation.

The other reason for this particular producer that I use in the example, his fermentations were taking so long and the mucilage was so stubborn, they would wash the coffee and then it would kind of stick back to the coffee seed and they'd have to use even more water.

By doing a fermentation in a different way, using a particular yeast strain that was able to dissolve the mucilage much more efficiently, he was able to reduce his water usage by half, just by changing the type of yeast that was in his fermentation tank.

This tool can be used in very different climates for different varieties for different goals and I think, too often, we think of fermentation in a very narrow way, and I just love to bring these examples to open up the multiverse of all of these different things that we can do with yeast—the least interesting of which, to me, happens to be flavor.

Ashley: Of the ways that I was able to experience some of your work is I went to a workshop that you did called ‘Worms and Germs,’ and it think it speaks to that idea of flavor kind of being like, the last thing on the list, in a way.

One of the coffees that you had us taste was, I think it was [two of] the same coffees. One was grown at a very low elevation, and elevation is one of those things that we prize in coffee—we talk about it constantly: “This was grown at 2,000 meters above sea level,” or what have you, and that's a marker of quality generally.

But elevation is kind of a finite resource—and then there's also kind of the nexus of climate change which I'm sure fermentation could really be a useful tool in.

But the coffees that you had us taste were so markedly different, and it was really interesting to have you talk about how fermentation can be an enhancer for these finite variables. Essentially it's almost like looking at a science experiment: You have your independent and your dependent variables, and there are certain variables that are fixed, that you can't change.

I wonder how you approach your work when you're working with a farmer. How do you take in everything that you're experiencing on a farm to come up with a solution that makes sense for them?

Lucia: I love that question. But first I want to kind of address this idea of flavor diversity, because I think it speaks to one of my personal pet peeves, which is this idea of a coffee hunter. This idea of going and finding these gems out in the wild.

I think that the old-school mentality was the only way to get flavor diversity, to have a broad range of offerings for our coffee consumers, is to go to all of these different places and to make sure that your menu has a coffee from Kenya and a coffee from Sumatra and a coffee from Guatemala and a coffee from Colombia, because that was the diversity of flavor you had to have to be that different.

I think that now what we've opened up with processing and with the world of microbes is that you can get a microcosm of flavors from the same place. You can take one coffee and treat it differently, process it differently, and then also using different microbes in your fermentation or the way that you dry it, you can get this rainbow of flavor in one place.

I think that's a really important tool for a lot of producers to be able to use, is that you have the power in the way that you treat your coffee to get all of these different flavors. That kind of dovetails into the second part of your question, is how I approach designing fermentations for my clients.

First, usually I spend a good amount of time at their facility—I try not to do as much virtual consulting. I really like to be on the ground and understand their limitations, whether it's access to water, whether it's access to labor, how much climate change, how much pests and diseases are pressuring the area. Then I like to reverse-engineer the simplest possible protocol that I can.

My designing strategy is very minimal because for me, the goal is reproducibility and scalability. One of the biggest complaints I get from coffee producers is, “I do the same thing every time and I get a different result. I'm picking from the same farm, I'm fermenting for the same number of hours in my same tanks and then when I go to taste the coffee they taste differently.”

That makes a lot of sense when you understand microbiology and where some of these contaminations could be coming in and the role that temperature and pH play—that's kind of what I helped them unpack. But I think that's been part of why we've needed the coffee hunter, is because we haven't given producers the tools to know how to consistently reproduce their good results. Does that make sense?

Ashley: That totally makes sense. It makes me think of the idea of, how does one determine the value of what they have, and if they can't reliably and predictably understand what a coffee's going to taste like from one tank to another, from one harvest to another? That severely limits the power of a producer to create value, for the value to start there.

You've talked about this on your podcast, too—that the coffee supply chain works in reverse in a very bizarre way: That a lot of the way that we value coffee or the way that we dictate—I don't want to say trends, but just the way that things happen—comes from consumers and roasters versus coming from the farmers themselves, and I have to imagine unreliability is one of the key reasons. I mean colonialism is too, but the unpredictability of a harvest is probably one of the big reasons why that process happens in reverse.

Lucia: Absolutely and yes, unreliability, but unreliability because of colonialism meaning that these were new, novel crops that were introduced into unfamiliar environments, to unfamiliar people who don't have the decades or centuries of history to know how to treat disease, to know how to actually process this.

One of my pet peeves of comparing coffee and wine is that we don't often acknowledge that with wine growers, there's a lot of cultural and historic knowledge because of how long the grapes have been growing in that certain area. There's a lot of power that the growers have because they know their product really well and wine definitely works from the producer out—the price of the wine bottle depends on how much you paid for the grapes.

But the same is not true for coffee—the price of the coffee bag, of roasted coffee that you buy, is rarely proportional to what the initial coffee cherries cost or what the producer was paid for that. So I think that when we try to compare coffee to wine, we don't realize like this complete power disparity that grape growers have that coffee producers don't have. And when we use that analogy we kind of provide cover and then we can kind of overlay this very romantic idea of the coffee grower because maybe we know some winemakers or we see like that wine style and it's just not true in coffee.

I think that it lets us talk about the lovely and kind of like romantic and fun things about wine without addressing this systemic power imbalance that came from this crop being forced on a lot of people and oftentimes pushing out their native crops and pushing out their subsistence crops just to grow coffee for other people. So like, it's kind of icky.

Ashley: Yeah, it’s definitely icky. I want to talk a little bit about the power of fermentation when it comes to climate change, because one of the things that it feels like we talk a lot about in coffee but we maybe necessarily haven't faced in a really tangible way is that coffee is going to change drastically.

Coffee has already changed drastically. So have you seen fermentation playing a bigger role as climate change continues to affect farmers?

Lucia: Yes, and I think actually I just lived this with a new variety that is a hybrid. It's an H1 variety here on the farm in Guatemala, and my usual microbes are having a really hard time fermenting this rust-resistant variety.

I'm not a geneticist so I'm not sure about this, it's just my observation, but these hybrid varieties tend to have thicker mucilage—at least the one that I'm working with—and it's taking much longer for that mucilage to dissolve, so it kind of screwed up my [plan].

I had a chart: I ferment for 36 hours and then I go to the patio and then I know how much cherry I can receive. I know how many people I need to be on the patio to be raking this coffee and moving it and because this mucilage was just behaving in a way that I had never encountered in 10 years, it was taking twice as long and it just [sparked] this chain reaction of screwing up when I could receive cherry and how much space we had on the patio.

We figured it out, but I was really surprised that change was so significant that I saw it in my fermentation tank. So I think that the microbes that have been traditionally fermenting coffee that are just spontaneous and wild may not be able to keep up with the new varieties that we need, because of the more disease pressure and climate change pressure for coffee producers.

I think that's something that maybe people haven't thought about and I hadn't seen it until this very year working in the mill.

Before we wrap up, I want to say that there's a way that we're talking about this that I get really excited about in terms of the identities of certain yeast strains and what flavors they can produce and how we can marry the yeast strain and the coffee variety into creating some flavor.

I could see how some people could be kind of uncomfortable about that and thinking that are we just doctoring coffee and creating flavor that's dishonest.

Because a lot of the conversation that I do see is this idea that we value transparency and really wanting to exemplify the taste of the place, and I have many episodes about terroir—that's definitely a topic that I really like to talk about. But in a nutshell, I understand how it makes people uncomfortable, but I'd like to make a little bit more effort to talk about how yeast works and that it's not creating a flavor that isn't there.

It is part of its metabolism to consume the sugars as well as other minerals and nutrients that are in the coffee medium and then its byproducts just happen to be these aromatic flavor precursors. And because yeast and bacteria are completely part of the skins and the identity of these coffee cherries—I don't think that they're two separate things, the same way that we humans can't really separate our bacteria DNA from our human DNA—like, we just are our microbiome.

I do still think that you can have transparent coffee that is honest coffee that is fermented in this way and that we're not like, faking flavor or we're not creating something that's not there. It's still a very natural process which is different from perhaps an infused term where you are maybe drying with citrus rinds to try and get the aroma of citrus into the coffee seed.

I'm not saying that infusion doesn't happen. But fermentation is not that infusion—fermentation is flavors that are generated from a metabolism and not like essential oil drops that you're putting into the tank or something like that. Do you think that's clear?

Ashley: I think that is clear. I'm trying to even go backwards a little bit on parsing out that tension because I think that that's like, a super niche tension. It's one that I see all the time—but it's not necessarily something that, as a consumer, I think you would see, so I'm trying to unpack it a little bit.

I would say if I'm trying to explain it, and maybe you can correct me on this, I would say in, like, the last five years there has been “concerns”—again in air quotes—about things that we add to coffee.

It seems like in the muck of all of that, fermentation has kind of been thrown in there and there has been questions about, are we manipulating the flavor of a coffee by adding certain things—like you were saying, like citrus rinds to the drying beds. And fermentation is not that.

I think it gets confusing for people when they see like, pineapple processed or something like that which is, if I'm right about this—I think I'm right—is a process called co-fermentation where fruit is thrown into a fermentation tank to aid along in the process, because pineapples have their own microbiomes. But that's not there to necessarily infuse this thing with pineapple. It's there to be part of the fermentation process—does that make sense?

Lucia: Exactly, and I think that that is a really good point to remember, is if you add fruit at the fermentation stage—if you add mangoes, if you add strawberries, if you add pineapple to your fermentation at the stage where the coffee still has all of its mucilage on there—all of those fruits are just providing like more fuel. It's more gasoline for the fire of fermentation.

But you're not going to get a one-to-one flavor. Your coffee will not taste like pineapple. It will not taste like mango if you put mango at that phase. I do think that a pineapple fermentation is more confusing than it is helpful because then it gives that impression and then you have consumers—you're kind of priming them to be like, “Do I taste the pineapple, do I taste a tropical flavor?” which is not directly translatable.

This is a problem that we have in science, is our words and our terminology are pretty bland so people don't want to use some of these words.

I think you’re right: For consumers, maybe this is not a concern. It's more for coffee industry people in the middle that I see a lot of this resistance to the purity like pure coffee or transparent coffee and a big resistance to…

Ashley: Right? And to be clear, this is a hot topic in the niche niche parts of coffee—people get very upset about this.

Lucia: It's true, and I'm really glad that it is such a niche part of the market and that most consumers don't care and are just interested in good-tasting coffee, because I really think that's, at the end of the day, that's what's important. Does your coffee taste good?

I don't know that we need to moralize or demonize some of these processes. It's just coffee guys. It doesn't need to be as intense.

Ashley: I do think you made a good point, though, when you talked about the words like “pineapple co-fermentation” or something like that as fermentation—again, I'm going to use air quotes—becomes more “vogue,” even though fermentation's been around forever and a lot of these processes like co-fermentation have been around forever. Even though I've seen on websites being like, “This is a new process.”

It's like, okay, well, it's maybe new to you, but it's been done for quite some time. There is still a lot of confusion about what's actually happening with my coffee, because these words don't really have any sort of scientific definition within our industry specifically that we all agree on. Again, going back to this idea that you were one of the first people I've really heard talk about the use of words and how words matter and how our inability to land on like one definition for a thing means that we're all probably talking about either the same thing with different words or talking about different things with the same word.

So for consumers, when they look at a bag of coffee and they're like, “What does anaerobic fermentation mean?” or, “What does carbonic maceration mean?” like how is a consumer supposed to interpret like, what's on a bag of coffee essentially implying some sort of fermentation process has happened but like—I don't know. How do you pick up a bag of coffee and even decipher what's going on here?

Lucia: You know, and it's funny, too, because I mostly work with coffee producers. But because of the podcasts and because some of the presentations and work that I do, I also get to talk to a lot of roasters. So like, I will look at my inbox and I'll have messages from coffee producers saying, “Oh a roaster asked me to do carbonic maceration or this anaerobic process—what does that mean?”

And then I have, in that same space, a roaster saying, “I received this carbonic maceration, this aerobic coffee from a producer—what does that mean?” and I'm just like, both sides are not talking to each other. I think that both we don't have enough words for coffee because it's a young industry, so we haven't developed that vocabulary, and then also we are being very loose and very sloppy with how we're naming things.

There needs to be a balance, and I think right now we had way too few words and now we have a lot of words and I think we just need to—we're just in this messy middle, and we need a little bit more time for things to calm down and then coalesce into a vocabulary. And I know that there are people that are attempting to have dictionaries and lexicons and people really want this. My concern is that most of these efforts have been from the consuming and roasting side, and I don't know that there's enough balance within the whole chain that everybody's voice is being heard.

I think there's also a cultural context where different cultures also have different meanings that's not necessarily something that we need to untangle and demystify. It’s just saying, “Oh, what does this mean for you, a producer in India? And what does this mean for you, a producer in Guatemala? How are you using these terms?”

Because they could be very different. One example I'll give you really quickly is double fermentation. So in Kenya, “double fermentation” usually refers to, in the first phase, the coffee cherries are pulped—so the skin is removed. There's a dry fermentation, meaning it's just in its own moisture. There's no additional water for maybe the first 24-ish hours, and then there's a second phase where the tank is completely submerged in water and then that's the second fermentation.

So that's a double fermentation, and that has a very specific flavor profile. In Colombia, a lot of producers are using the term “double fermentation” when they keep the coffee cherries whole, intact, for one to three days, maybe a week, and then they pulp the cherries and then they do a second separate fermentation in parchment, in just the mucilage, and that has a completely different flavor result—and yet a consumer on a bag will just see “double fermentation.”

I don't think that there needs to be one universal fermentation and Kenya needs to either adopt Colombia's or Colombia should adopt Kenya's. Each country can have their own definition and maybe it's just asking more questions, if you care.

If you just find a flavor that you like, go for it. But if you do care, I think there's a lot more questions that could be asked.

Ashley: I mean I guess I would put it on roasters to be clear about what they mean by those things too. But maybe that's implied in that.

Before we go, is there anything that you want people to know about the work that you do that maybe we haven't covered in this conversation?

Lucia: If this is your audience’s first introduction to my work of microbiology and coffee fermentation, and you find this interesting, I have a lot of episodes [of my podcast]—one that I'm really excited about that I did recently is about altitude—this connection of altitude and quality and flavor from a microbiology point of view.

I have three episodes on terroir and that connection to quality and coffee producers. I also do fermentation workshops. I'm hosting them in Guatemala. The next one is sold out—it's coming up in February—but I'm doing more in the future, and it's called Fermentation Training Camp, FTC, and it is open to anybody.

I have 50% set aside for coffee producers and then the rest of the tickets are [for] anybody else who's interested, so we always usually have exporters, importers, we have roasters, we have baristas, and we have just coffee enthusiasts, people who are just really into coffee and want to come spend a week processing coffee with us.

We do three different types of fermentations. And just like meeting other people in the coffee industry. So those are really fun events where for a week you come to Guatemala and we just nerd out about coffee processing.

Let's see if there's anything else podcast, camps…

I am processing coffee right now! I don't have a lot for sale. But I'm working with Tom at Sweet Maria’s to have some small quantities available in the U.S. so that people can try. You don't have to buy a whole bag or 10 bags of coffee to be able to try some of these fermentations that I'm working on. And I think that's it!

Ashley: Thank you so much for joining me.

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The author of "How to Taste Coffee" talks expectations, effervescence, and finding joy and delight in drinking coffee.

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“What’s disgusting? UNION BUSTING!” “What’s outrageous?” “POVERTY WAGES!”

Today I’m sharing an audio story I made about a union rally in Madison. It’s short—about four minutes—but the stories are so impactful and the audio is so rich and I’m really proud of this one. I hope you enjoy.

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The Charlotte-based coffee consultant threw herself into the industry at a young age—and now has a wealth of thoughts to share about loyalty, robot baristas, and the best coffee cities in the world.

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Workers at Madison Sourdough are striving to ratify their first contract—a process that's proven to be more hampered by management than they anticipated.

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The author of the new book, "How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life," talks building up your sensory skills and unlocking more enriching experiences.

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Today I’m chatting with Mike and Caryn Nelson, co-owners of Junior's Roasted Coffee and Guilder Cafe in Portland, Oregon. I met Mike and Caryn back when we all lived in New York nearly 10 years ago—Mike used to teach barista classes and I would help lead small breakout sessions. Now, the duo owns a roasting business and a few retail spaces, including a cafe inside the famous Portland bookstore, Powell’s Books.

All of that seems like it would be more than enough to keep them busy, but over the last few years, Mike and Caryn have also been working on an idea called The Cost of Production Covered, a multifaceted project that aims to quantify exactly how much money it costs a farmer to produce one pound of green coffee.

Sounds easy enough, right? Unfortunately, data on how much it costs to produce coffee is often lacking, and coffee is regularly sold without regard to the costs and labor required to produce it. Instead, other metrics are used to determine pricing. Like the C-market, which is determined by the stock market in New York, or by quality measures: a coffee that “tastes better” often garners more money. But experts looking at the coffee industry have known that coffee is in crisis, and that many farmers aren’t making enough money to cover their production costs—and yet, there have been very few initiatives to try to figure out exactly what those costs are and how coffee buyers can pay for coffee so that farmers are actually making sustainable wages.

Mike and Caryn have been working on this project for years—you might even remember a 2019 episode where we recorded a Cost of Production Covered event. Now, they’re joining the show to talk about a new template they’ve released that helps coffee buyers and producers work together to determine production costs. The template is open-source, meaning anyone can use it, and their goal is for more coffee actors to use this data. It’s one thing to say you’re paying “high prices” for coffee, but that claim falls flat without context, and a so-called “high price” doesn’t matter if it’s not covering the cost of production.

A quick note: I edited this episode within an inch of its life. It downloaded strangely, and some of Mike’s audio got weirdly clipped, so I apologize if he sounds funny, or if I sound funny. This is also a great episode to enjoy via the transcript below, since we link to the Cost of Production Covered template and have screenshots and visual assets to share. However you prefer to engage, here are Mike and Caryn Nelson:

Ashley: I'm thrilled to have the two people that I have on the show, and I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourselves.

Mike: My name is Mike Nelson. I am co-owner of Junior's Roasted Coffee and Guilder Cafe in Portland, Oregon.

Caryn: Hi Ashley, I'm Caryn Nelson and along with Mike, I'm the co-owner of Junior's Roasted Coffee and Guilder Cafe.

Ashley: I'm really thrilled to have you both on the show, both because you have been doing incredible work with your roastery and some of the projects that you've been working on. But also because I've known the two of you, I realized, for almost 10 years—which is wild.

But let's go even further back than, before when I knew you folks: Did either of you grow up with coffee in your life?

Mike: I grew up in Utah where you couldn't drink coffee. I grew up with coffee as this mystery, but my parents would give me coffee ice cream secretly. So that was my exposure to coffee. When my family moved to Oregon I just instantly started drinking coffee elsewhere and thought that barista culture was the coolest thing in the world.

Ashley: What about you, Caryn?

Caryn: For me, I think my earliest memory is watching my grandparents make and drink instant coffee. And it was always with a cigarette and always in formal china because they were drinking it after dinner.

Ashley: So you folks own a few cafes in the Portland area. You have a micro-roastery and you have recently launched—I don't even want to say that you launched this project, because you've been working on this project for so many years—but you launched a template called the Cost of Production Covered, which helps people across the supply stream figure out how much does it actually cost to produce coffee.

We have a lot of context I want to talk about: I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about how this project began for you, and we'll talk a little bit too about what “cost of production” means, and all these nuanced little pieces of the supply stream that might seem obvious but actually have a lot of depth and nuance that we need to uncover.

Mike: Yeah, the project for us started in Tallahassee, Florida. I was in a doctoral program at Florida State University and I was going to be looking at what climate change and coffee disease were doing to coffee production in Costa Rica. But I needed data.

I was introduced to Chad Trewick, who, at the time and currently, focuses on production costs for producers. I was put in touch with Chad, we had a chance to talk, and I realized that this could be the metric for my research—looking at what climate change and coffee leaf rust were doing to producers’ cost of production.

Long story short: I mastered out of that project so we could move back to Portland and grow Junior’s. I didn't wanna lose all of that research, so I thought that we could have it be our principles for green coffee buying, serve as our foundation—cost of production, that is.

So we look at what it costs a producer to produce a single pound of green coffee and have that be the quote unquote “minimum price,” contract price in our purchase.

Ashley: Yeah, I'm glad that you defined what cost of production means, because it's a phrase that I think we throw around in the coffee industry because we talk to each other and we have a same base understanding. But I wanna go back to that moment when you realized that this was a metric that maybe wasn't as easy to find, or maybe could be a metric for your research.

What did it mean for you to come up realize that, “Oh, this is maybe a metric that's very poorly understood”?

Mike: Yeah it is still misunderstood, and I think that when I started looking for data in grad school, I couldn't find any anywhere. I would occasionally run into countrywide reports, huge aggregations of large farm data. That was it. And it was pretty scarce.

So I knew that if I was going to keep doing research on this, that it was gonna be a long road ahead and it was gonna have to be all of our own research.

Ashley: So basically what you were saying is that you were trying to find more information about how much it actually cost farmers to produce coffee.

And basically that data was few and far between.

Mike: Oh, definitely. Yeah. Roasters and green buyers weren't really, weren't talking about it much. And that's not to discredit anyone that had—it's not like I know everyone in the industry. It’s just really tough to find.

I've been working in the coffee industry since 2004, and worked for companies that focused on quality-based metrics mostly—basing coffee prices on how good a coffee tastes, how high it scores, plus other Specialty Coffee Association specifications. But that's where I was coming from—and this seemed tangible and it seemed objective.

Ashley: Right, right. That's a good point.

So I wanna go backwards on what you just said about quality being pretty much one of the standard metrics specifically in specialty coffee—you see that talked about everywhere, about how specialty coffee almost differentiates itself based on quality, and then that idea of quality—this coffee is better than this one—being used as a way to quantify what that coffee is worth.

What I think is really cool about this Cost of Production project that you folks have been working on for so many years is that you say things really plainly: A coffee that scores an 84—coffee is scored between 0 and 100—a coffee that scores an 84 took just as much labor to produce as a coffee that scores an 86, an 87, an 88, an 89, and it seems like the labor that it actually takes to produce coffee wasn't being considered at all.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. I think too that, if we're using those quality-based metrics alone, we've worked with the farm for X number of years and we know them so well, we buy their coffee through the good years and the bad years. It always scores an 86 and above. So we pay this price, which is, in air quotes, “high.”

But what if that farm all along had been selling at a loss or just breaking even? What if their cost of production was high? What we're experiencing from time to time is that, like you said, that lower-scoring coffees—even 80, oh geez, 82, 83—sometimes in those cases, their production costs can be higher than an 86.

It's a very uncomfortable conversation to have because roasters who have been talking about these relationships and how much we value them have to, at least in this case, we're saying folks should take a good look at those relationships and think about how we have these values-based conversations with our customers.

Ashley: Yeah, I wanna talk a little bit about that idea of relationships, because I think along with quality, that's one of the central tenets of specialty coffee: You pick up any bag of coffee, and there’s something about the relationship that we have with the producer, the way that we work with X, Y, Z farms.

And these are good things—don't get me wrong, building relationships is really important—but what does that actually mean to build a relationship as opposed to using the word “relationship”?

Not to say that roasters are using this incorrectly or whatever. I don't wanna put anybody on blast by any means, but really digging into that word: What does it mean to build a relationship? What does it mean to actually work with a farmer long-term and say we're sourcing this coffee in a way that's sustainable and realistic and actually works for you, as opposed to it being a one-way relationship where I'm sourcing this coffee from you, and it's great and I get to tell your story, but I'm not actually ensuring that the other part of the relationship—where I am actually taking care of you—is happening.

Mike: Yeah, that's it. Exactly.

I think it started making the most sense to us when we opened the cafe, to be honest. In 2017, the first cafe, we were roasting coffee for a couple years before that, but with the cafe really got a sense of what it's like to run a business—and for us, I think that the connection was really made once we started thinking of farms as businesses too, right?

Thinking of farms as vendors—if we knew that our dear friend Sam, who provides us with his chai, if he was operating at a loss because of the price that he was receiving, wouldn't we want to have a conversation with Sam? Right? It’s the same way with our producer partners.

Ashley: Right. You folks own a business. You folks own a few cafes. You know the cost of your goods. You know that if a latte costs you $4.50 to sell, you know what the cost of goods are to make that thing: The coffee costs this much, the cup costs this much, the rent on our space costs this much.

So you can predict some of those overhead costs, but then when we go backwards on the thing that makes it all essential—coffee—we're saying to producers, “We're gonna pay you based on quality, but we're not actually gonna consider what it costs to produce this thing.” We would never do that in our own businesses.

I think that's a really interesting framework to be like, “These are all businesses, we're all operating businesses too.”

Mike: Yeah. To have it be so arbitrary—it's exploitative. It's really dangerous.

For us, I think that cost of production becomes an objective metric. It is about business.

Ashley: Right. The cost of your cups is an objective metric, the cost of your lids is an objective metric.

Mike: Yeah. In order for business to continue, it has to make a profit.

Ashley: I wanna talk a little bit about how you were able to implement some of these ideas into the cafe at first, because like we said, this has been an ongoing project and it's been something that you folks have done in multiple formats. I remember you folks released a comic book about this topic, you had signage at the cafe—I think the Wi-Fi password for a long time was “ask me about the cost of production.” I don't know if it still is.

You've hosted different talks or events where you bring in producers, you bring in importers, people who will all have a stake in this project. But for you, how did you start implementing it yourself in the cafe?

Caryn: I just wanna make the link back to how the project started from a research perspective. We wanted to have this research be shared with our community and also be created with input from the community. So it was important for us to have a two-prong [approach]: the research happening behind the scenes, and then the marketing or the education campaign with it.

So we wanted to involve people in this project through, like you said, the Wi-Fi password. We did a four-city tour, meeting with other roasteries and baristas talking about the project. We had the comic book and that was a way to engage with art, too, and a really accessible artform for our customers to pick up and read while they're standing in the line to order.

With everything that was going on behind the scenes, we wanted to match it with something that was happening externally with customers and then other people in the coffee community.

Ashley: Yeah, that makes sense. It seems like behind the scenes you were using this as a way to inform the way that you sourced coffee.

Mike: Yeah. Any chance we can get, I mean with the Wi-Fi password, we built in the cost of production into trainings with staff, which admittedly it's a really difficult thing to talk about. It's not as easy as saying, “Well, this is direct trade, which means we pay more or we pay more for coffee,” or, “We buy this coffee every year and we pay a lot,” or fair trade or shade-grown or organic.

It's not very easy to talk about. But it is part of our training curriculum in our cafes. And I think that's actually been something that's very exciting to me, to see how this has changed. I feel that it's an easier elevator pitch, even with the template now, but it's taken years to get there.

We actually put out a survey to our customers at one point too, to ask them what they knew about the project, essentially how familiar they were with it after being exposed to it for a couple of years. We tried all sorts of different things even outside of the comic book. Though I must say that the comic book has been one of the most effective tools at communicating this message.

We had an art show focused on cost of production. We had the C-market price posted on the window. We tried that for a little bit, which also prompted conversations too, but I think that at this point I can say that there are customers who are coming to the shop because they've heard how we source or because they know more about it and believe in it and are excited about it.

Even though they might not be able to explain to their friends, “Well, you see, this is why coffee's in trouble.” They understand that we are actually ensuring that cost to production is not only covered—we're looking at gross margin on those costs too. So they can start to understand the prices that we pay.

Ashley: That's a good point. And going back to something you said about all the jargon that goes around coffee that's a little bit hard to explain, but it's understandable why it's used so often. Things like shade-grown, direct trade, fair trade—those two-word things—it’s a way to try to find products that align with your values, but then to explain the cost of production covered means this, and then this is how this goes. It's hard, it's complicated, and it's not necessarily easy for consumers to digest.

And you folks being really honest about all the different ways that you've tried to approach educating consumers about it in a way that doesn't feel like it's in your face—it's a way to invite and evoke conversation that’s really cool and really powerful.

Mike: Oh, thanks for saying so. I think that, initially with the project, we were very focused on the consumer. Clinging onto this idea of, more air quotes, that this notion of “sustainable consumerism,” the oxymoron that it is, that the consumer has the power to make these choices and decisions.

That's shifted over time. That isn't to say that we aren't putting out the same materials that we were before, but definitely our focus on sharing this project, I think, has shifted to roasters and green buyers.

Ashley: Sure. So with that being said, let's talk a little bit about the actual template that you recently released.

Basically, you made an open-source document where any roaster can download this really simple—I have it actually up on my computer right now—it's a really simple Google document where you ask questions in partnership with the people that you source coffee from.

So in partnership with the farmers or cooperatives that you're sourcing coffee from, you're able to determine what their cost of production is. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the template and what was the idea for making this tool for other roasters to use?

Mike: Yeah, the template idea started at the end of 2019. We started putting together a template to pass off to other roasters.

We didn't want to own this material. We wanted to get this project into as many hands as possible. It's great when someone buys a bag of Cost of Production Covered coffee, but wow, what if we could get roasters to buy containers worth hundreds of bags of Cost of Production Covered coffee? That would have a bigger impact, so we wanted to get this project into the hands of other roasting companies and green coffee buyers.

I spoke at this Roast Magazine event, this Roast Summit, in early 2020 about this upcoming template that we were putting out. And the pandemic definitely slowed things down in terms of the project, and we had to shift all of our focus on the business, because this project—it’s something that we have to do in our spare time.

It's not making us money as a business. This is something that is a passion of ours and ultimately the entire mission of our company. But I started digging back into the template at the end of 2020, realizing that this thing was massive. It’s accompanied by a questionnaire, and then the responses are then plugged into a spreadsheet or a pro forma of sorts. But it was massive. It was hard for us to even use, to be honest.

While it was very granular, very detailed, it was very time-consuming for us and for producer partners and importer partners to use. So we took a few steps back—we wanted to make it very practical for folks. So we pared down the questions, the accompanying questionnaire, to six to eight questions as opposed to 30 to 50 questions.

In the past, there was so much back and forth with this questionnaire. Even though we had all this detail, we still had to clarify things. Emails back and forth, WhatsApp messages back and forth, Skype calls back and forth, and now we can get this information with just a few emails. It's pretty amazing to see how quickly it works now.

Ashley: I mean, the questions are as simple as, “How much coffee do you sell in a harvest year?” “How much coffee do you sell as green coffee in pounds?” Really trying to get to the nitty gritty of how much coffee do you sell and how much labor goes into producing that coffee—and can we get a price per pound that it costs to produce this coffee?

You have some coffees that you've implemented this model with on your website, and I was wondering if you could talk about what that looked like for you folks to implement this system and figure out for you, how much does this coffee cost to produce?

Mike: Yeah, well, before we first launched the project, I think the first coffee we worked with was released in 2018, and that was with Andres Fahsen who owns Pachuj, or at the time was Santo Tomás Pachuj. We're using the questionnaire with Andres and the spreadsheets—the 30-to-50-question questionnaire at first.

We then started the project with another farm in Guatemala called Peña Blanca. We then started another project with a farm in Brazil called Sítio Canaã. Another farm in Guatemala and then a farm in Colombia.

We did this with this massive questionnaire and unruly spreadsheet. We spent a lot of time in that back and forth, and now we're able to see that with this streamlined questionnaire, we can get some of the same data, [and see that] the numbers are actually very similar compared with that bigger spreadsheet, which has been so gratifying and gives me so much hope that this actually works.

The kind of information that we're looking at now, we're still looking at harvest costs. land management costs, and also in this new spreadsheet where we have cells for gross margin as well. So not only looking at that—it's not necessarily a break-even point, but we're not just looking at cost of production. We want to see that people can actually see gross margin on those costs, and we're able to get that with this new spreadsheet.

Ashley: I'm actually looking at one of the coffees that you have on your website right now. It's from Colombia, produced by Jorge Rojas.

You have these really compelling details about the coffee. Because we talk a lot about how much a producer or how much a roaster pays for a coffee, they could say, “Oh, I pay $3 per pound,” but that doesn't necessarily mean that the farmer got $3 per pound and it doesn't mean that it covers their cost of production.

So I'm on the website right now—and I'm actually gonna take a screenshot of this so that people can look at it when we release this episode. But here in this chart you show that the C-market price when you bought this coffee was $1.49 per pound.

The cost to actually produce the coffee is $1.38 per pound. So that alone should tell you how bad the C-market price is: The C-market is 11 cents more than what it actually costs to produce that coffee. And again, that's not to say that the farmer even gets all of that money.

But then you also have a price here where you say the farm gate price. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that farm gate price means, because as we were saying, a roaster can say we paid whatever amount of money for [a coffee]. But that doesn't necessarily mean that's the money that went to the farmer.

Mike: Yeah. Farm gate price—it can mean different things to different people.

Ashley: How would you guys use it here on your website?

Mike: We see it as the price that was actually received by the producer. To obtain that farm gate price, we need to ask the person who the producer sold their coffee to. So it's the price that they received directly, and this is different if the producer is not paying their exporting costs or dry milling costs.

If a producer had an exporting license, their farm gate would actually be FOB (Free On Board). So the price the importer paid the exporter in that case, that could be the producer, the farm. So we're looking at the price actually received by the producer for their coffee.

Ashley: So I'm looking at your website right now. This is a coffee that's available on your website right now: It's called El Jardin, and on there it says that the farm gate price was $3.42 per pound of green—so that is the actual amount of money that Jorge Rojas received for this coffee?

Mike: Yeah.

Ashley: Cool. And then at the bottom, right below that number, you also have the gross margin on the cost of production. So it's roughly about 60%.

Mike: Yeah. The beautiful thing in this case too, because with the producers that we've worked with in the past, we'll ask: What gross margin would they like to see? What gross margin would be healthy for their business? And most folks we talk with say 30% gross margin on those costs.

In this case, the importer that we work with, Shared Source, they more than covered 30% gross margin on those costs. So we didn't pay any additional premium on this. We just realized just how amazing Shared Source [is], and the prices they pay.

Ashley: Michelle Stoler was on the podcast before, so if you wanna learn a little bit more about how Shared Source works and the way that they think about coffee sourcing, you guys should go listen to that episode. Shoutout to Shared Source on the podcast.

Mike: Shoutout to Michelle Stoler. I think the prices that they pay are fantastic, and while we know that—and honestly, we knew that once we started working with them—but now we can verify, right? We can all see here that the prices they pay are incredible for their coffees.

Ashley: Do you find that people are able to look at this and say, “This makes sense”?

Mike: [Laughs] I hope so. I think that honestly, after getting the template out, something I've been thinking about is who this information is for on our website? On anyone's website? About transparency? Who are we putting this information out for? I think in the past it was for consumers, but now I'm thinking more and more it's for—it's been a hard thing to market. It's pretty, pretty impossible for us to market this. But we do want to show that people saw gross margin on this purchase and to simplify it in a way that people, these businesses that we work with, are actually profiting from the prices that we pay.

To actually dig into business profit there too, we would actually have to see how the rest of their business is working to see if their business is profitable, because of this transaction, which is why we just say gross margin. So we're looking at their direct business costs.

No matter how you cut it, it's a complicated thing to communicate quickly on the website, for folks to look at FOB, even farm gate—what are they supposed to make of this?

What we've seen over time is that roasters reference it and producers reference it too. They can look at it and say, “Oh wow, I can see that you actually care about being transparent and that yes, you actually pay prices that are reflective of our costs.”

Ashley: I wanna talk about that word, “transparency,” because that's I think coffee's favorite word—that and “intentionality.” But one of the things that is really paramount to this template for you folks, from what I understand, is that this document is made in partnership with producers.

This isn't something that you folks are making and then saying, “We're gonna pay this much to producers.” You're working in partnership with them so that those costs are transparent on both ends.

I think that there's something to be said about thinking about transparency from the perspective of all producers or all actors being opted in versus a roaster saying, “We're being transparent because we're telling you how much we paid.” But that doesn't talk about all of the people who are involved in the process.

I was wondering, for you folks, how did you think about collaboration and partnership and how did that relate to your definition of transparency?

Mike: Yeah. For us, we wanted the context. I think that what we're hearing in the specialty industry is that we (consumers) need to pay more for coffee because of 86+ scoring natural gesha, this and that. Or that we need to pay more for coffee because we (roasters) paid a lot for it.

I think that for us, cost of production is the missing link, and for consumers too, and other buyers—it's the missing link. It's getting people to understand just why we need to be paying more for coffee.

To work with producers, for us, it was important, especially in the beginning, because we were learning about all of the different costs involved. Andres Fahsen was crucial in building the questionnaire over the years and helping us build this template because he was being very detailed about his costs and what it takes and what's missing.

So we've added some things over the years, and taken some things off of the questionnaire over the years. The context is different farm-to-farm. I think in a very practical sense, that's why it's important to have this back and forth with producers, to get that kind of back and forth too.

If you're not talking with producers directly, it's very important to work with importers that you know and trust and who have direct contact with farms or washing stations so that we can learn more about their context. And also then at the end of the day, say, “Hey, does this look right? Does this cost of production reflect your costs truly?” And if so, we'll move forward, but only then.

Ashley: There's something to be said about—I don't know, it feels, maybe it's because I'm just having this like revelation as I'm talking to you, but there's something a little itchy to me about saying, “Look at what we're doing. We're being transparent. We're paying this much for coffee. But it in no way involves the rest of the actors,” you know what I mean?

There's something too about having this open-source document that, I don't know, like radically challenges that idea of what transparency actually is. Because transparency isn't about just saying all your s**t out loud.

It's about actually working in partnership and being like, “This is why we did this stuff. These are the folks that are involved and everybody is gonna tell you how they're affected by this thing.”

Mike: Yeah. A good friend said to me once, “Any transparency is good.” I think that can still be true, but context matters. Context still matters that if we say, “This farm gate was received by this producer and wow, it's $4 a pound.” That seems high when you look at other prices they've paid, or another roaster's farm gate prices that they paid, but it doesn't mean anything unless we actually know what it costs the producer to produce that quote unquote “high price”—it might actually not be a sustainable price for that farm, for their business.

I think that folks releasing this information out, I think that it's good, but we need to keep moving forward here. For us, we want this template to be used by everyone. In fact, we even say on the website to take this and edit it and grow it and shape it to the relationships you're working with and working on.

We see it as the minimum, this starting point for transparency. It's surprising to see just how on board, or, I don't know—it was surprising for me at least in the beginning, to see just how on board importers are with this idea and actually how easy it can be to obtain this information.

Ashley: Yeah, it's just about asking questions—and I think if this goes back to the theme of the Cost of Production Covered project, which is that it's not just one thing, it's a thing that you folks have been working on for years. This is just one nexus point, right?

It's not, “Oh, we achieved a thing,” it's, “We're continuously working on doing better, on finding new ways to improve a system.” Like you were saying, transparency isn't one fixed point. It's not like, “We said this thing, this is transparent.” It's an ongoing, continuous conversation. And again, that just speaks to the theme of the Cost of Production Covered project that you folks have been working on for so long.

Mike: I think it's really easy to see a bunch of information and a bunch of data and get freaked out or overwhelmed or think, “Well, I can't understand this. I guess I'll take your word for it.”

I think that really what we want to have folks, roasters, importers using this template [for], what we want them to do with it, is to talk about profit and talk about how they can ensure, or at least get very close, to a cost, to a price that means something.

Ashley: Before we started recording, we were talking about who's gonna talk about what, and then Caryn at one point said that she was here to be the talent manager, which I thought was really funny.

Caryn, I was wondering, for you as a person who's done a lot of the logistical stuff here, what do you hope for?

Caryn: In 2020 we had plans to hold an event where we would have a partner from each area of the supply stream—that was obviously postponed and that [finally] happened this year in Portland in April.

That event was so meaningful to me because we were hosting Andres Fahsen at our home for the week, and going to [SCA] Expo with him. We had our importer partner, TerraNegra—Christie was here, and Michelle from Shared Source was here. And Sal and Mary Lisa from Peña Blanca and Guatemala were also here. It was so meaningful for us to be together, and I saw that as the pinnacle of this project because it was taking something that was on paper and had been in digital communications for so long.

And it was in person, right? We could actually hug each other for the first time and speak to a sold-out event of 60 people in one of our cafes for the first time. Really, the impetus for opening our second cafe inside of Powell's Books was to have an event like this. So to see it come to life was so important to us.

And then to see the people who attended this event say, “This makes sense to me. I just started a roasting company. I'm going to start doing it with my first coffee that I buy.” That meant a lot to us.

I think we wanna keep that energy up, but it's gonna take a lot more people to be involved at this point, right? And that's why it's open-source. That's why we're talking with you right now: We need it to reach other people. Because we've seen the limits of what we can do with it.

Ashley: Is there anything that you folks want people listening to this episode to know that we didn't cover, or any topics that we glossed over that you wanna end on?

Mike: For me, I would like to emphasize just how I know no one's gonna understand what it was like to use the previous questionnaire and template. For me, it's been such a breath of fresh air how easy it is to actually implement.

I think what I would like to share with roasters big and small, because actually walking around Expo we got to talk with roasters of all different sizes, is that this is an easy place to start.

With this kind of tool there is, it's something that we should be basing our prices on. If we can get this kind of data from producer partners that we value, these relationships, that there would be no reason to not use it. That's what I would like to share.

Ashley: We'll have a link to this on the Boss Barista transcript for this episode. And when we release more details about this episode, those will be available. So if you can't find it on the Boss Barista website, you can find at JuniorsRoastedCoffee.com as well.

Like Caryn and Mike have said, this is open-source. You can make your own copy, you can make this your own, you can do whatever you want with it. But thank you so much, both of you, for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Mike: Ashley, this has been so much fun talking with you. Thanks. Thanks for having us on.

Caryn: Thank you for supporting this over the years and sharing it with your listeners.

This episode was lightly edited for length and clarity.

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Asking coffee trader Stephanie Alcala what does it mean to source responsible coffee and think holistically about sustainability. 

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Specialty coffee distinguishes itself by its higher price tag—and stops there. To make meaningful change, Brendan Adams of Semilla argues that cost alone cannot be the finish line.

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Hi friends. For the rest of the year, I’m sharing a selection of my favorite podcast episodes as part of the Boss Barista December Rewind. Partly, that’s because the community of Boss Barista listeners has grown so much in just a few years, and these conversations will likely be new to many. But I also wanted to highlight the episodes that have made a great impact on me—I still carry lessons and ideas from these conversations with me today.

If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, here’s a handy link to do so:

Since it’s the end of the year, I wanted to look back and figure out what were the most popular episodes of the show. Surprisingly, an episode I did in 2020 with James Hoffmann is still my most downloaded episode, but in a close second place was my episode with Morgan Eckroth, the 2022 United States Barista Champion. At the time we recorded, Morgan was getting ready to compete in the World Barista Championships; we now know they placed second in the world, but the ideas Morgan lays out in this episode are still surprisingly refreshing and a kind reminder that even barista champions like Morgan want you to be a little less serious with your coffee. Here’s Morgan:

You’ve probably seen a movie or a television show that depicts baristas in a … not so flattering light. Think familiar tropes, maybe a dude with a man bun and facial hair ready to make you feel bad or confused about your coffee order. I can even hear this character in my head: A customer might walk in, order a macchiato, and then receive a 10-minute lecture that begins with, “Well, actually, a traditional macchiato…”

Morgan Eckroth is the opposite of all that. On social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where their handle is @MorganDrinksCoffee, they both explain coffee concepts and make light of the silliness of coffee culture. In their short videos, they play the role of the customer and the barista, interacting in a coffee shop space.

Unlike that movie barista, what Morgan achieves in their videos is validating the experience of both actors: It can be frustrating to be a barista and work a service job, but it can also be confusing and weird to be a customer in a coffee shop with complex menus and hard-to-discern tasting notes. In a way, all of it is kind of ridiculous—and Morgan’s videos cut right through this inherent tension.

Morgan is also the 2022 United States Barista Champion, and brought their hundreds of thousands of followers along for the ride as they prepped and competed. When the organizing board who runs the competition announced they would not be livestreaming the event shortly before it was held—effectively making it impossible for those not at the competition to watch what was happening—Morgan decided to do so on their own.

As the winner, Morgan will go on to compete at the World Barista Championships later this year, and will continue to bring the positivity and lightness that pours through their videos in service of making coffee information more accessible to others. Here’s Morgan:

Ashley: So let me have you start by introducing yourself.

Morgan: My name is Morgan Eckroth. I am most often found online under the moniker of MorganDrinksCoffee. I do YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and I've also been working as a barista for the past five years.

Ashley: I always start these interviews in the same place: I was wondering if you could tell me if you grew up with coffee in your life? Do you have any childhood memories of coffee?

Morgan: I actually, funnily, I don't. I grew up in a family that doesn't drink or didn't drink any coffee. And to this day they don't drink any coffee. I frequently say that it was kind of my act of teenage rebellion to be a coffee drinker.

At the age of 16, when I got my driver's license, the first thing I did, I think, was drive to a coffee shop for the first time.

Ashley: Oh, God, I'm trying to think of the first thing I did when I got my license—I don't think it was driving to a coffee shop.

Morgan: My act of teenage rebellion was pretty mild when it comes down to it.

Ashley: It's funny when you set certain expectations within a household, or even just within your life. And then you break out of those expectations and then you're like, “Oh wow. My act of rebellion was pretty mild.”

Morgan: I was like, “That wasn't nearly as dramatic as I meant it to be, I don't think.”

Ashley: But you must've felt like it was at that moment!

Morgan: Yeah, it was definitely one of those things that I kind of wanted to be my own. Part of it was the convenience of like, I was a student and needed a place to study and wanted to be out of the house because I was a teenager.

Also, there was this kind of world of coffee where I was looking at these baristas and I'm like, “They're so cool. I want to be like them.” And so I just kind of stumbled my way into a specialty coffee cafe, and very awkwardly started ordering very, very sugary and delicious drinks. And it's kind of all history from there.

Ashley: Do you remember the moment where you decided, beyond this teenage rebellion moment, that like, “Oh, this is something that I want to do,” or, “This is something I want to learn about or be part of?”

Morgan: I can't remember a very, very specific moment. I do, however, remember the time period of, I think about two years from when I started drinking coffee to when I got my first barista job, that I knew that I wanted to be a barista. That was my, that was my end goal.

I was like, “I'm going to go to college. I want to work as a barista,” and do that sort of thing. I started applying to this coffee shop that I was—it was actually called Tried and True, and was my very first coffee job ever. I remember being 16 and having this inkling that I wanted to do what the people behind the bar were doing.

So I showed up with my resume and like a really awkward cover letter. And I was like, “Please hire me!” And of course, I'm a high school student, zero qualifications, zero availability, anything. And they were like, “Yeah, no, but keep trying because maybe eventually.” Throughout those two years, I think I applied multiple times.

And it wasn't even with the intention of getting a job, I really was just trying to be like, “I want to work here really, really badly. And I want you all to know that.”

Then finally they said yes. I think it was that very first shift when I got behind the bar, and they started teaching me things that I was like, “Oh yeah, this is as cool as I thought it was going to be.”

Ashley: I love that the moment met your expectations.

Morgan: 100%. I remember grabbing the portafilter for the first time, and them being like, “Okay, like put it here in the grinder, and then the coffee comes out,” and I felt like a superhero. I was like, “I'm in heaven right now doing what I want to do forever,” and somehow that has lasted for the past five years.

Ashley: It's funny that you tell the story this way too, because I feel like so many people, when they come on the show and we have the conversation about, “How did you get into coffee,” it's almost always, “I fell into it,” or “I had nothing else to do,” or “I was a student on campus and like, the coffee shop was kind of cool so I just sort of did it for a while.”

And it's so cool to see—I'm going to sound ancient as I say this—but it's so cool to see a generation of people who see baristas and they're like, “Yes, that's what I want to do.”

Morgan: I definitely annoyed my way into my first coffee job and still to this day, I don't know exactly why it clicked as early as it did or what kind of drove me to it, but it was just kind of like that gut instinct of being like, “I think I want to do this.”

Once I got there, “I was like, okay, yeah, I definitely want to do this.” I think I really lucked out with those two things syncing up as early in my life as they did.

Ashley: So, as you mentioned earlier, you make content on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram—let's give people a little bit of a backstory about how you got to that point.

So at what point did you start filming yourself—I guess that’s like the proto-version of all of this.

Morgan: Totally. So I started my content journey at the very, very baseline before I even knew it was something I wanted to do as a career—I started making TikTok videos in June of 2019. So TikTok, as an app, was still very, very fresh. It had nowhere near the mainstream adoption it has now. It was an app that I'd like, just kind of spend time on. I enjoyed it as a consumer.

It was about to be summer. And I went, “I am bored and I want a project or like a hobby to do.”

I was like, “You know what? I'll try making some videos.” At the time I was finishing up my marketing degree and it was my goal at that time to go into some aspect of either digital marketing or social media marketing in the coffee, food, and beverage space.

That was my end goal. So I was kinda like, “Well, if I can start to get a handle on some new emerging platforms, if I can get a little bit of the hard skills of video under my belt, that would probably be pretty helpful in the future.” I kind of stumbled upon making videos about coffee just naturally.

I worked quite a bit when I was in college and so I was at my job most of the time. I really loved my job and I was like, “Oh, I'll just make videos about coffee.” And then they started to do well, and that was a true shock. It was very surprising to me. So I just kind of leaned into it.

I was having a lot of fun making videos about latte art, and then I kind of stumbled upon it like, “Oh, I can make kind of funny videos about barista experiences.” And it just kind of escalated from there. They started to take off and I started to take it more seriously.

Ashley: Do you remember the first video where it felt like a sea change—like something clicked or something really changed for you?

Morgan: Yeah. So my first couple of—for lack of a better word—viral videos were very silly. I have this party trick where I can do a pretty impressive backbend and that went viral. That was non-coffee, and then I remember the first coffee video I posted that did really well.

It was literally just me. It was just no sound—or pardon me, no music, just me standing at the bar, pouring a latte, stuff you see on Instagram all the time. I just had the videos and I was like, “I'll just post it.”

I remember posting it as I got off my shift and then I went and ate dinner. Didn't think about it. And I came back a couple hours later to just scroll through TikTok like usual. I remember opening it up and being like, “This video has 400,000 views.” Out of nowhere, I was like, “This is completely out of the realm of possibility of what I expected.” And that was a truly shocking moment because it really was over the course of like two hours that this video grew like that.

And people were excited by it! I mean, in my world latte art is like something you kind of do every day, so it wasn't that special to me, but it was really, really cool to see that it was special to other people. And I was like, “What else can I show them that I do every day that they might be interested in?”

Ashley: It's funny to reflect on those moments where you're like, “I do something like this every day, and this is so fascinating to people.”

I was on a podcast recently, and I think we talked about the stuff that I write about and labor organizations and unions, and at the very end of the conversation, I gave a tip about how to pour a heart into a latte. Just a heart, because I was like, “Everyone likes a heart. Like, don't even mess with it.”

Morgan: It’s classic.

Ashley: It’s classic. And I could tell that was one of the most interesting parts of the conversation. And I'm like, “I've poured at least a hundred thousand hearts in my life. It's something that I could like live and breathe.”

So it's really fascinating to reflect on those moments and figure out like, “Wow, things that I find so normal and regular are really fascinating to people,” especially because, as baristas, there is some alchemy in a way to what we do.

We have these raw ingredients and then suddenly you have a delicious drink. How does this happen?

Morgan: It’s like you're making, like, a potion behind the bar.

Ashley: Right. At what point did you feel like you were refining your message in your videos? Because what I find so fascinating about your videos, and we have emailed about this, is that—so Morgan has these videos and she plays both parts. There's the customer and there's the barista.

Sometimes there is more than one character, which I love. I love when you're two different customers, that makes me really happy. But I think what you do really well is that you validate both experiences. You're never really mad at the customer, but you're also not mad at the barista.

I think there's a really easy tendency in coffee to juxtapose customers and baristas as opposing forces. But you seem to validate the frustrations that both characters have while making both totally valid. When did that start becoming clear to you?

Morgan: Yeah, it was something that was pretty important to me from day one. I mean, honestly, it kind of just leads into how I approach my job as a barista. You know this from your experiences: Being a barista can be really hard. You can deal with some of the weirdest, most awful things happening to you just over the course of your job.

With that context, I've come into my job and through all the stuff that I've experienced looking at everything through the lens of humor. At least for me personally, whenever you have a customer that's being particularly difficult or perhaps angry at you, I think it's really easy to take that personally, as in like, “They are angry at me as a person,” when very rarely I think that is true. I think it's often they're already having a bad day and you just happened to be the person in front of them.

But I also find sometimes I think we get very serious with the sort of interactions we have, when I think, more often than not, they're just kind of funny. We're just a little part of people's everyday lives and it is at the kind of cafe level—like, it's a cup of coffee. I think often there are so many, like, theatrical and dramatics involved in it that is very, very funny for the level of seriousness that it actually is.

When I was making my videos, I really wanted to touch on the ridiculousness of like, you know, how dramatic these cafes scenarios happen.

But at the same time, I did very much want to respect both the customer and the barista experience, because I think more often than not, any sort of friction and stuff that happens between barista and customer is mostly born out of just a lack of knowledge and/or context as to what the barista is doing, and that's not necessarily at the fault of the customer.

You can't expect them to know every single core value that we have in specialty coffee. But that being said, it can still be very funny. So I was like, “I'd like to kind of poke fun at these things that happen.” But at the same time I wanted to have this angle of like, “While it is silly, we don't want to be driving people away.”

The goal is to bring them to specialty coffee and to value coffee at the same level that I do. So how do we get from point A to point B? And I think a lot of that is just acknowledging that there is a knowledge gap and then kind of working through it with something that is relatable, and I think frequently that's humor.

So that's kind of where I came from.

Ashley: I love that so much because I think that you identified so many, perhaps hurdles we face in the coffee industry. And as I was looking at your profile and reading some of the interviews that you've done recently, I was struck by the fact that you said that you make coffee content for everybody, you don't make coffee content for coffee people.

Not to say that they're excluded by any means, but that they're part of the conversation. And I think for a long time, I mean, I struggle with this. I make a podcast that I don't think anybody outside of the coffee industry listens to—

Morgan: They should though!

Ashley: You know, one day, fingers crossed, but I think that we've done a lot of that in the past where we're speaking to the choir, we're kind of speaking to the same people over and over.

And I think coffee has kind of struggled with this hurdle of getting to consumers in a way that feels safe and accessible and doesn't feel like this barista is going to be mad at me. I'm sure you've seen the hipster barista meme—which I'm obsessed with right now. I have an article coming out in Standart about the hipster barista meme because it's so fascinating to me

Morgan: It’s a classic.

Ashley: It's classic, but it's like, that is the perception that a lot of people have of what being a barista is.

And I would posit if we had like a scale of hipster barista—like if we had a scale of how we feel about baristas—hipster barista would be on one end. And I would say that you're on the other.

Morgan: Cool. Thank you. That's a huge compliment. I always kind of hope that is the case, but I could never be sure. You never know how other people are perceiving what you're making.

Ashley: But it seems like you get a lot of positive feedback from people. I mean, you can't equate likes necessarily with positivity all the time, but I imagine when you're engaging with people through your videos, or you see comments, or you're engaging with people on other platforms, there is a moment where you're like, “Oh, this is landing with people. This is sharing an experience.”

Morgan: I’ve been really grateful to kind of cultivate the following that I currently have. I think what you said is exactly true. I have somehow ended up with a pretty healthy community as far as online communities go. I think it's very easy to cultivate a community that is comfortable with dog-piling on people or, or punching down on people.

We have these discussions a lot about whether it is a creator's responsibility to maintain control over their audience, or whether it is—you know, you can't control an audience, they'll do what they want regardless of the creator.

I have always been very much of the opinion that a creative is, to some extent, responsible for their audience's actions, because I do very much believe that what you put out there as a creator, the tone you use, the kind of, for lack of a better word, kind of energy you put out there will be reflected in how your audience both reacts and what they do with the information you're presenting them.

I came into making content with that opinion. I've always tried to do my best, to varying levels of success, but I've always tried to do my best to kind of cultivate an audience who is accepting of all things coffee.

I come to my platform with a lot of love and just passion for coffee, and I want that to be replicated in my audience. I don't want to have an audience that is going to go out to other creators and blast my opinions at them as something that is fact, because very frequently it is not. I just wanted it to be a very fun place full of people who want to have fun with coffee.

I've finally reached that point with my audience. We have a good time together online, which is a really, really cool thing to say.

Ashley: You said that you finally reached that point. So I imagine that there was some learning and figuring it out as you went along.

Morgan: Absolutely. I can pinpoint one kind of direct experience when I started on YouTube. I had started on TikTok, because, as I mentioned before, I was very, very comfortable with short-form content, and with short-form content there tends to be a slightly younger audience.

You tend to be hitting more of the 18-to-24-year-olds. But when you move to YouTube, especially when talking about coffee, you start to get a little bit of a different demographic. At least to my knowledge, a majority of the YouTube audience who watches a lot of specialty coffee long-form content tends to skew a little bit more towards the male demographic, and it also tends to skew a little bit older in age, which makes sense because the cost of being invested into doing coffee things and buying coffee equipment is a lot higher than what most young people can have.

So when I came onto YouTube, I was suddenly faced with this very, very different audience who I think was just expecting something different from me. They were looking for a certain level of information and dissection of topics that I just didn't want to give because I think that kind of initial higher-level [content] can make it a little bit hard for people to jump into specialty coffee. I very much viewed myself as kind of a stepping stone to those sorts of higher-level creators.

It was very much a back-and-forth with my new audience of, “Hey guys, I know what you want for me. That is not what I'm going to be giving you, at least not all the time,” and so there was a little bit of friction there, of dealing with frustration from audience members.

But ultimately I just held strong to my guns. Eventually, there was this mutual understanding of people who didn't want to consume my content just finally being like, “Okay, I can leave.” And I was like, “No worries. There are other people who make the kind of content you want.”

The people who enjoyed my content found their way to me. And now we're in a very happy place together.

Ashley: I like that you were able to create some boundaries around what you wanted to create. I did an interview with James Hoffmann and he mentioned, “There are things I'm going to create and there are things I'm not going to create,” and being pretty comfortable with that. I think that took him some time too, and it's really encouraging to hear you say that same thing of like, “I don't have to give people everything. It's okay for me to say, ‘This is what I want to do. And if you want to be part of this ride, that's awesome.’ If you don't, you're always welcome back, but you don't have to consume this.”

Morgan: Exactly. It sometimes can be a little bit painful because you want to give people what they're asking for. But at the same time, I also knew, from my own level of knowledge, that I wasn't qualified to talk about a lot of topics that people were asking for. It was a lot of people being like, “Do this, do this!”

And I'm like, “Look, if I try to cover this topic, I'm going to do a disservice to it.” I would always try to do my best to point them in the right direction and frequently that is like James, or other established content creators. I'm like, “Hey, I don't want to talk about this, but the good news is there are a ton of amazing resources about it already. So go over there and enjoy those. And then come back for the things I am going to talk about.”

Ashley: Did you find it ever difficult to separate the personal from, like, Morgan Drinks Coffee the character—and not to say that this is a character you're playing. I mean, you kind of are in some aspects—

Morgan: But it is curated.

Ashley: Yeah, do you ever have to draw a line for yourself like, “I need to put down my phone,” or, “I need to not respond to this message,” or, “I need to cultivate a safe place for myself that maybe doesn't exist to consume for others?”

Morgan: No, completely. That is the ongoing struggle. I think I'm a lot better about creating that separation nowadays than I used to be. But it is tricky when you're a content creator, but also someone who enjoys spending time online.

I remember like two years ago, I think when I was like starting to really get into it, going online to just consume content for my own enjoyment became very, very difficult because I would open up TikTok and I wouldn't think, “I'm going to just have a nice 30 minutes where I can enjoy videos.” It was immediately like I am being faced with my job. It got really hard to kind of plug out of my job and just be like, I'm just me on my time off.

I think when you're a content creator and especially any sort of person who's self-employed or freelance, you become your own boss, and that's kind of dangerous because you're not always that good at setting boundaries for yourself. So nowadays, I have a lot of good systems and supports in place to know when to get myself offline.

I've also cultivated for myself a lot of hobbies that are not monetized and un-online. Sometimes I think in the creator space, it's really easy to be like, “Oh, I have this hobby. But I could monetize it!” and then it becomes a job, it's no longer a hobby. I've found things for me, reading and writing are my true hobbies.

Those do not exist really on the internet in any way. That's something that I've kept special to me. And that's been super helpful as well. And creating that sort of division.

Ashley: So let’s talk about this very big thing that happened to you.

Morgan: [Laughs] No biggie.

Ashley: What could we be talking about? No big deal, whatever.

So you won the 2022 United States Barista Competition. Woohoo! Let's take a moment to celebrate that. I have my jazz hands up, which doesn't make any sense because we can't see each other.

I kind of want to work backward from that moment. What was it like when—

Morgan: Oh my gosh. It was shocking, truly. I've been thinking back to that moment a lot. I have a lot of footage and videos and photos from those 30 seconds between the announcement and walking up on stage.

I think it was an overwhelming feeling of just joy and relief. For the past year—I've competed now for a couple of years with varying levels of success—but in 2020, when I competed in qualifiers, I did not do as well as I wanted to. I didn't do as well as I thought I was going to do. And so I left competition that year feeling really bad about myself, honestly.

Competition has always been something that’s kind of pushed me, I think, in my career path. And I've always really valued that. So to leave feeling like I had failed myself was something that took a long time to come to terms with. Coming into this year, it was very much about proving myself wrong, that I wasn't stuck at this level that I thought I was at.

To be in the finals, even just finding out that I was in the finals, was shocking and amazing. I remember they were counting down all the names, and it came to the last two of us and we were standing back there just hugging—I think both of us were probably on the verge of like a panic attack just waiting for the announcement, and then it came and I think I just kind of … let go of all that self-resentment and frustration from my past failures. It all just kind of like came out in that final.

Ashley: I would have never guessed that you were carrying those moments of self-resentment. That was a really interesting way to put it, because I think that like—I don't know!

I've competed a couple of times and I've thought about those moments too, of like what I could have done better. I still feel resentful towards myself of making mistakes that I feel like I shouldn't have, but at the same time—

Morgan: You probably had no control over it.

Ashley: Did you realize that you were holding onto this feeling of self-resentment?

Morgan: I don't think I did really until afterward. I had a little inkling of it when I found out that I was competing. I kind of had this minute where I sat back and I was like, “I need to get into a healthy headspace.” Not that I wasn't at the time, but I was like, it is going to be really, really important that I am really steadfast in what I'm doing this year.

Especially with the inherent audience I was bringing with me, no matter whether I chose to publicize that I was competing or not, my audience would have kind of figured it out at some point. It was tricky to come to terms with the fact that I needed to kind of prove something to myself, but additionally, I was bringing a really strong audience with me, that if I felt like I did poorly, or if I legitimately did poorly, I would not hear the end of it for a very long time. Not necessarily a bad way, but it would stick with me. Much more so than in previous years.

So it was, it was a lot of personal pressure that I applied to myself this year, and I'm very glad it all worked out. I do not want to think about the process I would have had to do to decompress hadn't it worked out.

Ashley: Yeah, that must've been a huge decision that you had to make. It wasn't just competing for yourself or the company that you worked for. You were competing almost on behalf of your audience.

Morgan: No matter what, I do everything I do, in coffee and online, nowadays with the context that I have a lot of people watching, which is really fun and definitely an honor, but at the same time, very scary. I had to make the decision very early on with my routine of, “Am I going to involve my audience, or am I just going to kind of let them vicariously view when I want them to?” I think the best possible outcome for everyone was to have them involved along the way.

So they could at least kind of understand the magnitude of preparation that goes into it. And for them to like, have a fun time with barista competitions because they're very strange. They're very weird, as you said before yourself, and I fully agree. And so I was like, “Well, if I can like explain this weird thing, maybe we can all come away with some knowledge more so than just the results of the competition.”

Ashley: There are so many layers to your competition win. There's the fact that you had this decision before you even applied, to think, “Are these folks going to come with me? Am I going to put this on my channel? Am I going to just do it in stealth mode and then be like, ‘Surprise! Here's all the stuff I did!’”

But then there's that second level of, “Okay, if they're coming with me, how do I cultivate content for them so they can understand what's happening for people who probably have no idea what this weird thing is?”

Morgan: For sure.

Ashley: And then on a third level, you made your routine about your audience, about sharing with people. You made your drink specifically in a way that people could make it at home. You made a video that was like, “Here's my drink, and here is how you make it.” I have to imagine that that took so much planning.

Morgan: It was an interesting challenge, logistically it was good and bad. I wouldn't have changed a thing about it, but I will say it added a little bit extra stress to the prep, because we were releasing these videos, and going into deep dives about the different components of my presentation while we were actively preparing.

We released a full video about how to freeze-distill milk and why we nowadays do that a lot in competition and what it tastes like and what drinks I was doing. The minute that video is uploaded, you check the box and you're like, “Well, we're using freeze-distilled milk. Like we can't change it now.”

It posed a very interesting challenge for us, especially at the end. We actually changed my signature beverage, the ingredients pretty significantly. We had a different version of it. We'd been working with it for a couple of weeks, and then two or three days before we left for Boston, we were like, “We need to change it. This—we need to improve this.”

I filmed my video about my signature drink, I think it was less than 24 hours before we got on the plane for Boston. I was frantically sending it off to my editor, and then we were frantically trying to upload it on really bad Wi-Fi. It was a really interesting challenge in that sense.

But at the same time, there was a little bit of relief in checking those boxes and being like, “We're using freeze-distilled milk. We literally can't change it now.” So at least we could like move past that step of prep.

Ashley: Yeah, there is some relief in being able to make a decision and just stick with it.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Very much so.

Ashley: Have you reflected much—I know that I've asked you about this—but have you reflected much about what your win means? Like, I don't know that anybody else winning with an audience like yours would, and I don't want to say [past wins] don’t mean anything, that's not true, but it just means something different because you brought a whole audience with you.

Morgan: I talked very briefly with one of the head judges, after all the announcements, as we were leaving the venue the final night, and they said something that meant a lot to me and was—yeah, I was crying a lot that night—but hearing what they said kind of tipped me over the edge a little bit more.

Because it was really, it was the goal of the entire thing: They said that they don't think they'll know kind of the impact of like my routine for another couple of years. Hopefully, we start to see the competitor landscape shift and change. I started off this year when I found out I was competing, not with the intention of winning—like I'm competitive, obviously I wanted to do well, like all of that stuff—but more so I wanted to create something that could kind of act as a resource for potential new competitors.

It's my process. Everyone's process is different, but I at least wanted to lay a little bit of a foundation for people who might want to compete but have nowhere to start.

To hear that someone else had thought that I had maybe created something similar to that was really emotional to me because that, more so than doing well or even winning or anything, was the overarching goal of the season. I'm really excited frankly, to see future seasons and to hopefully see a shakeup in the type of competitors we see. I'm really excited that in the past couple of years, there's been a really, really great push to open it up to more people. And I'm just grateful to kind of be a part of that.

Ashley: Is the way that you talked about barista competitions being inaccessible, and wanting to create information and give people a resource to turn to—was that informed by your past experiences?

Morgan: It was a little bit. When I competed for the very first time, I was lucky enough that my bosses had both competed in barista competitions in previous years. I had a little bit of help from them as kind of like, guidelines.

But a lot of it, because they're busy, they have lives, and I'm the competitor, a lot of it falls on my shoulders to figure out. It was a lot of me, as like a very fresh, 19-year-old barista, throwing stuff at the walls and just hoping I was doing the right thing.

I studied tons and tons of other competitors’ routines, but beyond that, and looking over the rulebook, there wasn't really any information about what I should be doing or shouldn't be doing. So my hope was to create a little capsule of videos that could at least act as a starting point for someone like me, back when I was competing for the first time.

Ashley: And the idea behind barista competitions, ideally, is that we're pushing coffee to a new place. So we should be borrowing from people who did something that worked. We should be borrowing from people who did something really interesting, and we should be able to access that, be like, “Oh, they did this thing. This is how they did it. Let me try it. Hopefully that will serve the coffee.” That's the whole point.

Morgan: Yep.

Ashley: What are you looking forward to as you prepare for the world competition—which luckily you have a little bit of a breather here. It doesn't happen until September, and we're recording this in April.

What are you looking forward to maybe thinking about or retooling as you prepare for that?

Morgan: Honestly, I'm really excited to sit down with my routine and really dissect it. I think the bones of my routine are probably gonna stay roughly the same, things like the overarching theme, probably where we're getting our coffees from—stuff like that. But this past season prepping for USBC went by so quickly.

We had barely two months, which is kind of nothing in the scale of competition, especially for like, a full, national-level of routine. And so everything that we did, while very intentional, had to happen rapidly. And we had to kind of stick to our guns on all of them.

I'm really excited to take the next four months and really go back on all the decisions we made and also look at my scoresheets and kind of decide, “Were we happy with that? Can we make it better?” Or [look at] the things that didn't do as well. I kind of had some shortcomings and it's like, okay, how do we take these shortcomings and bring them up to the level they need to be at? And then take them that much further.

So I think it's going to be honestly, a lot of really, really structured, thoughtful time. Beyond that, there's just a lot of practice I need to do. I would like to be better at tasting, myself personally, there were some technical things I need to be better at. So I'm excited to dive into those topics separately as well, because they're going to also elevate my routine for the world stage.

Ashley: I think I've asked you a version of this question before, and I kind of want to end on it again because … I don't know, there's something so precisely of this moment of where we're at in coffee and what the future of coffee can represent about you winning this competition. And that's a lot—I know that I just told you a lot of things and that's probably—

Morgan: It’s scary and exciting at the same time.

Ashley: It's all of the feelings at the same time, but there's something about us wanting to be a more accessible industry that I think you represent.

I think there's something about the fact that we're not great at talking about coffee as an industry, but some people are starting to claw out of that, are starting to find ways to communicate that—you being one of them.

When we think about who wins the USBC—obviously there's a scoresheet, there's points that you get and it's a point system, but at the same time, one of the things I think the judges are asked to do, especially when you get to that top level, is to really evaluate, “Is this person going to represent us? Because that's ultimately what the U.S. Barista Champion is. They are a representative of the United States that will be going to the world competition and representing our country.”

They have to think about that. Who's going to encompass that role. And in a way, there must be something so like, mind-boggling and almost—I don't want to say self-reflective because that's not the right word, but like, how do you process all that?

Or like, what do you think of it? When someone looks at you and they're like, “That's the U.S. Barista Champion,” what do you want them to kind of take away from that?

Morgan: When we flew home from Boston, that was kind of like, a very grounding moment, because you get back at home, I did all my COVID tests, and then I went back to work—and it was this weird moment of coming back to what used to be very normal and routine and feeling like there is now this extra layer on top of it, of this title that I hold in great respect. And I know a lot of other people do.

I'm still trying to figure out what that means. I had to have a pretty, pretty lengthy talk with my coach because I was sitting here, four or five days after competition, being like, the idea of making a normal, kind of like funny video seems so like, it just seemed silly.

I hit a weird creative wall where I was like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do now. And he kind of talked me through some really helpful stuff and what it came down to, he was like, “Don't look at what other champions have done. Don't try to put an expectation upon yourself of what you're supposed to do now because you are your own unique person and you do Morgan Drinks Coffee. Whatever your future looks like with this title is also through the lens of doing Morgan Drinks Coffee.”

That was something that was really helpful for me, because it kind of drew me out of my own head and I was like, “Okay, there is this added level and title and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, I want to continue pushing forward with talking about coffee and having a lot of fun with it.”

I am really excited that there are potentially some new people who are coming to it and coming to me from this win, and that's really, really exciting. So that kind of got me over my creative hump and I'm really excited to continue pursuing forward with what I've been doing in the past. And I'm sure it will continue to evolve as we continue forward into worlds and then after that.

But that being said, the core of what I want to do online still exists and I'm just gonna push forward with it. Title be darned.

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Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we're bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting.

Some of you might know that before I worked in the service industry, I was a teacher, and I was on a very narrowly-drawn path for myself. I thought I’d teach for a few years, go to law school, and felt like I had things all figured out. But then I started working as a barista, and it felt like a completely different version of my life began.

Nigel Price has a similar story: the owner Drip Coffee Roasters in New York started in finance before discovering coffee, and it led him down a completely different, unscripted plan for his life. Yes, this episode is about coffee (we talk a lot about pourovers) but it’s also about how we end up where expect—and don’t expect—in life.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at bossbarista.substack.com

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What do words like "ethical" and "sustainable" really mean in coffee? In this audio extra, Jim Ngokwey discusses the ambiguity of common buzzwords.

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A managing partner at Mighty Peace Coffee, Jim Ngokwey is creating pathways for Congolese coffee growers and posing difficult questions about the future of the industry.

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The coffee pro-turned-coach talks about the gentleness of service work.

A full transcript of this episode can be found at bossbarista.substack.com. Listen to past episodes of Camila on the Boss Barista Podcast in 2019 and 2020. 

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In my last newsletter piece, I talked about how customers and community aren’t the same thing. My inspiration for that article was a tweet from the team at Cxffeeblack, regarding their IRL café space, The Anti-Gentrification Cxffee Club. With that fresh in my mind, I decided to pull this episode from July 2020 so you could learn more about Cxffeeblack and its founders, Renata Henderson and Bartholomew Jones.

This re-air is quite a bit longer than most recent Boss Barista episodes, so I want to jump right in—but I also want to promote two projects from Cxffeeblack first. One is a limited-edition sneaker they’ve released to fund a cross-global coffee exchange, and the other is a documentary the team made, released in March 2022. Check out the trailer here, watch the documentary by joining Patreon, and keep an eye on their Instagram account for tour dates to watch.

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Wine and coffee are a lot alike—up to a point.

In coffee, we frequently refer to wine to explain concepts like terroir (or the idea that crops like coffee taste different depending on where they’re grown). But for years, I’ve wondered if this comparison—what I’ve lovingly called “the wine analogy”—has hindered our understanding of coffee. Maybe it’s just that we’ve focused on the wrong similarities.

Marie Cheslik is the founder of Slik Wines, and we first connected through Slik Wines’ Instagram account. Marie focuses on making wine accessible and fun through short videos that break down common wine questions, and in this conversation, we dig into how to make things that feel esoteric and hard—like wine and coffee—more joyful and approachable. And there’s a lot of joy in this episode—Marie is really, really fun to chat with. We cover everything from Chicago-specific references to attempts to figure out who is the better group of tasters: wine folks or coffee people.

Here’s Marie:

Ashley: Marie, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Marie: Sure. My name is Marie Cheslik. I am the founder and sommelier for my business, Slik Wines.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Marie: Well yes. I went to nursing school in the city of Chicago, at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Right when I turned 18, I moved to the city from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

They don’t tell you how much you need to study when you're in nursing school. So I ended up going to the cafe a lot—for any of you Chicago stans out there, it's Wormhole Coffee in the Wicker Park neighborhood. And I just remember going there all the time, just feeling like the vibes were very cool and I felt comfortable and I started getting to know the baristas more and they were turning into my friends.

I would go there and study and they were open super early and super late. So I would be there, like, 10 hours a day hanging out with these people, getting the most outta my $5 coffee. I'm sorry, but I was that person sitting in the coffee shop for way too long, but I talked to these people and know these people, I feel like that's okay.

They kind of showed me this really fun and great world of coffee. That was, yeah, a little bespoke, but definitely very accessible and professional. We got a lot of different kinds of people going in there and I just an overall great coffee experience while studying for nursing school in Chicago.

Ashley: I love a career changer just because I am also a career changer. And that's something that I've talked a lot about on the show. There's this interview with Nigel Price—if you folks are listening and haven't listened to that episode, please go back and listen to it.

He also talks about having this completely different career path for himself, and then having this moment where it's like, “Oh, this is actually not what I want at all. I want this completely other different thing.” And it seems like that's an experience that you had as well. So I was wondering if you could talk about the moment that things kind of switched for you?

Marie: When I went to nursing school, I felt like it was a very pragmatic thing to do. It's not like my parents shoved it down my throat or anything. I really just wanted a career where I get to talk to people, I had flexibility, and that I could make a decent amount of money and live comfortably.

When I was studying for my nursing boards exam, I worked in restaurants and that was just a way to sort of get by. I worked as a host in a restaurant called Hub 51. And again, for all the Chicago fans out there, it's pretty much a bro bar in the River North neighborhood. So it wasn't necessarily the clientele I would normally interact with, but I really loved the job.

I love just talking to people. I love, even for that brief moment, having an experience with a person and especially being a host at a restaurant, being the first person that you meet and that first person being really nice and just like there to help you. I felt like it was a powerful thing, and something I see in a lot of parallels in nursing.

When I started working as a nurse, it wasn't as pretty and shiny as I thought it was gonna be—it ended up being very okay. I was at Northwestern Memorial in Streeterville in Chicago, and it was a great job. I really liked it, but I felt myself thinking about working in restaurants again.

I remember working the night shift—usually where you start when you're a new grad in the hospital—and I remember just Googling Eater articles and seeing what the hot new restaurant was and Googling about places and Anthony Bourdain and different wines and things like that. And I just kept sort of daydreaming at night about these sort of things.

Eventually I worked at Northwestern for two years and I said, “You know, this is something I haven’t stopped thinking about, and I owe it to myself just to see what this is like. So let's pursue restaurants in whatever capacity that may be and let's just go for it.” So I started working in a Michelin-starred restaurant called Elske in the West Loop, and that's sort of where my restaurant and wine career began.

Ashley: When you said Elske—I also lived in Chicago; a lot of people who listened to the show might know that—you say Elske I'm like, “Oh, that's some real-deal s**t there.”

How did you end up at Elske? Or did you work at other restaurants in between? How'd you end up there and how did you start developing your wine career?

Marie: Yeah, I had worked at some restaurants in between. In full transparency, you have to pass this nursing boards exam and I notoriously suck at taking exams. So it took me four times in a year and a half to pass. So I kind of was twiddling my thumbs after I finished nursing school but before I finished my boards exam, so I ended up working a few different restaurant jobs.

When I got to Elske, it's like, yes, I had restaurant experience, but then I also had this nursing experience. Then the man I interviewed with, Kyle Davidson, who is a gem and really someone who I consider a mentor and someone who really let me be in that space and be myself and try things, he was just very open about what he needed and I was very open about what I needed.

I could be honest with him of being like, “Hey, I don't mind starting as a server here, but I really wanna learn about wine.”

I had sort of decided on wine because I guess it's this pragmatic part of my brain again, the same thing that kind of led me to being a nurse was like—I really liked being a server. I really didn't see anything wrong with being a server. I really enjoyed it, but I felt like that I needed something else. I needed another edge to give myself more value and make myself more hirable.

And I didn't grow up with wine. I grew up in Milwaukee, definitely blue-collar beer town, but wine seemed like the easiest way to sort of beef up my resume. When I started learning more about it, I ended up just really enjoying it.

It's almost like being a bartender where you're kind of mixing with the back-of-house and the chef’s side and the front-of-house, which is the people side, right? So this was sort of my way of doing that. And I was just lucky that I had Kyle who let me taste things all the time and let me attend tastings. But I also was very vocal about, again, what I wanted, which I also feel like made his job easier to be like, “Okay, here's Marie, this is who she is, awesome. This is where she wants to go. Let me take her there.” So I think it was just a very good symbiotic relationship.

Ashley: Yeah, it seems very serendipitous. It seems like a lot of things lined up together, which is awesome because that obviously led you kind of down the pathway that you're on now, but at the same time, I love that you were able to say, “I know what I want—or at least I have an idea of what I want—and I'm gonna say these things out loud to you.”

Luckily you said them to a person who is safe and you could say those things too. I can see that kind of like going in a different direction for some other people. But I do wanna really highlight the idea that, like you said, of saying the things out loud. I'm a big believer in saying the need out loud, because you kind of never know who can respond to it.

Marie: 100%. There have been times in my life where I've said what I needed and yes, I get a negative response from it. It’s even sort of shocking when you tell people what you wanna do, and they say like, “How dare you,” or, “How stupid,” which is absurd.

But at the end of the day, I need to just follow my heart and trust my gut. I know that's cheesy, but it's just true. And it’s part luck too, right? It's like, yes, I knew what I wanted. It’s not that I always knew what I wanted, but I had an idea and I just needed to roll with it and just see where that took me as opposed to being unsure about something.

So I agree. It's a couple of factors there where I did get lucky, but I also knew.

Ashley: Did you have any transformative wine moments early in your career? That kind of affirmed, “This is what I wanna do,” or, “This is the path that I'm at meant to be on for right now”?

Marie: I can't say there's a singular moment. People call that the “aha moment” for wine. I don't know if there's like a similar thing with coffee.

Ashley: There's an aha moment. There's—I don't love this as as a term, but there's the God-shot moment where you have a shot of espresso that's so good that you're like, “How did it get so good?” Then you kind of like fall down whatever rabbit holes you need to fall down. But God-shot is a pretty common term.

Marie: Hilarious. Okay. So it's not called a God-shot, but it's called an aha moment, which it gives me a similar feeling of—I almost cringe where you're like, okay, is something like that really gonna change my life?

But it was the joy of the combination of what I was doing—where I was really proud to work where I was working, I felt like I had a goal and it was an achievable goal, but a challenging goal. And I loved that. I loved that I got to educate people and meet people and then shift my career from talking about diabetes and heart failure to talking about food and wine and culture, which just felt so right when I was working there.

And it was a really special time for me.

People need to experience joy as much as they need someone to be there during a hard time. I feel like they're an equal amount of power even though people don't always see it that way. After working both, I get enjoyment out of doing both. But I get more enjoyment out of working and wine and sharing that experience with people.

Ashley: I had a very similar experience when I was a teacher. I think I got into teaching with this altruistic idea in my mind that I was making a difference. And perhaps I was a little more myopic about that when I was in it, because I don't think that I had like the emotional wherewithal to actually say, “What do my students need from me?”

It was very much like, “I'm 22 years old and I'm gonna change these kids' lives.” I wasn’t like, “Oh, I need to respond to the situation and actually do some assessment about what's happening around me,” and that's one of the reasons that I left teaching, because I just didn't think I had the emotional wherewithal to do that kind of work at that time, at that age, because I was 22.

But I think you're echoing a lot of those similarities that I started to see as my career in coffee evolved and shifted—is that the way that we impart meaning into people's lives happens all the time. There's no more important job than another, and it happens in different ways.

So I love that you mentioned that—I just wanted to highlight it.

Marie: Oh yeah. I mean, real recognizes real. I feel like nurses and teachers are like, we are in this together. That's some real in-the-trenches kind of work. So I feel that.

Ashley: I often reflect on the lessons I learned as a teacher. I probably think about the things I learned as a teacher every single day, which is surprising for the fact that I only did it for a year and that was 12 years ago.

I was wondering: Are there lessons in nursing that you take with you to the restaurant or to a virtual class, or just even like your everyday work, the content creation that you're making on Instagram and TikTok and all the other apps—every app!

Marie: All of them!

You know, it really tells me that life isn't fair, for better or for worse, however you want to view that.

It's just like, what are we supposed to do? How do you possibly navigate that when you know that life is dramatically unfair? And I view that from now a business perspective in the most interesting way where it's like—I do post a lot of content. I do create a lot of things. I do think I work hard, but sometimes people work hard and they don't get the results they want.

Is that fair? No. There are people on TikTok for half the time that I am and they see more success than I do. Is that fair? No, but it just is, right? So it shouldn't stop you, you shouldn't look at other people's cup—it's sort of one of those idioms where you just need to set these goals for yourself and then not look at other people all the time. It's okay to do it sometimes, but it really just teaches me that none of this is really fair, but you should just do exactly what you wanna do and if it helps people, awesome. If it doesn't, that's also okay.

It's a little bit nihilist, I suppose, but I find it very freeing in a way.

Ashley: I do too. I think you're not wrong. And I agree—I think that you're right, in a way, like the nihilism is a little bit freeing.

The idea that like, you can really only focus on you. I certainly feel that too, as somebody who makes stuff and puts it out there and hopes, fingers crossed, that it'll land with somebody. And if it lands with one or two people, that's fine. It did its job.

Marie: Right. Or even just being like, “I'm gonna put this out because I think it's good. I put out this great video. I thought it was awesome. Only seven people liked it. Okay. Who cares?” I'm just gonna do the exact same thing tomorrow. It doesn't matter.

Ashley: What inspired you to start Slik Wines?

Marie: I was working this great restaurant job and then of course, COVID totally ruined it. I found myself jobless—only briefly because I have this nursing plan as a backup, which is a pretty supreme backup plan.

I worked as a COVID nurse for a little bit, and during that time I was like, “I can't be a nurse again forever. I don't want this future for myself, so I need to do wine in a way that feels right, and it feels like that I can interact with people, but it needs to be not associated with restaurants. It needs to be in a different capacity.”

So I started Slik as fun and approachable wine education and mostly virtual events, because that was the thing that made the most sense in August of 2020. Then it sort of drifted from virtual to in-person. Once things started clearing up a little bit. Now, most recently it's been turning into content creation and marketing, which I totally did not expect to happen, but has sort of just worked out that way.

Ashley: Let's talk about the education part of it, because I think that that's probably the most lvisible—you go to your TikTok or your Instagram, or you look at Reels, and it's a lot of you talking about like how to taste a wine, how to pick a wine, how to pair it with this, how to do that…

What were some of the goals that you set for yourself when you were thinking about the educational aspect of this?

Because, like coffee, wine is hard. It's hard to understand. [Laughs]

Marie: 100%, totally.

I think it was maybe much like coffee, fighting against this pretension that's always been there. I think of the hipster barista memes, there's just like stereotypes that exist both in coffee and in wine, and very much like the sommelier stereotype—it's even a hard word to say for people.

It's like all these French words and it's very easy for it to feel not relatable, because it feels like there are so many barriers up. I have been lucky with my career that I have been accepted with open arms and even Kyle Davidson over at Elske, he was a bartender. He worked at The Violet Hour, which is a great cocktail bar in the city, and so he approached this with this cocktail sort of mindset.

I always had this alternative path, which I think is fabulous and I think was what made wine so approachable for me and so easy to get into for me. If I can do that for other people, I feel like that'd be a very powerful thing. And wine is a place where people need to be educated to explore new avenues with it.

Like you don’t need to be educated to drink it. You can, of course, just buy a bottle of wine and drink it. And of course, people do that all the time and I'm totally there for that, but there's a whole other world and there's a whole other level of enjoyment and, I think similar in coffee, a level of like hobbyism to it as well, where people either want to just explore something new or they wanna be proficient or they wanna impress their date or their boss or whatever.

If I can make that as easy as possible for people, I love doing that within Slik. I think about situations that I always thought about when I was first learning and I try not to lose that perspective—things that I think to my colleagues seem really basic and really 101 are the things that people need to hear and need to hear over and over again. It's worth saying more than once.

Ashley: What do you think some of those things are?

Marie: Just even how to pick a bottle of wine off the shelf.

I really like to push labels for people because it's usually the first thing people see and usually what people make their buying decisions off of, right? Whether it's a cute label or it gives you information—and of course, a cute label is cute, but doesn't really tell you anything about the wine, unless when you look on the back label and you see the importer and you go, “okay.” But you have to know what an importer is.

So then there's another video, right? And it's like, what kind of importers? If I like natural wine, what kind of importers would I like? If I'm going to my in-laws’ house, what am I picking? I think a lot about situations for people where I felt like it was very intimidating. So whether it's a restaurant, whether it's in a wine shop, or gift giving—I find that's very popular too, where people are like, “I need to give something to my boss” or whatever—I try to just re-remember what it felt like to know nothing and help my past self with that.

Ashley: I love that. I love that you mentioned that we need to remember those moments of being a learner ourselves or that we're all still learners. We're all constantly learning, but going back to those moments where it's like, “Oh, I didn't know anything about this. What questions would I have had at that moment? What questions did I find frustrating that I didn't know the answers to? What questions did I find it really hard to find information on?”

I even had one of those questions come up recently. I was looking up information about what to do with really old coffee. Let's say you find—we've all been there—you find a bag of coffee that you're like, “Oh, I forgot I had this. This is eight months old. How do I brew this?”

And I found so many conflicting narratives online and I was like, “How do we not know this?” And I think that there's this idea of knowledge that's assumed that you just kind of pick up or it's passed through experience or passed through, I dunno, sommelier to sommelier, barista to barista, but we don't really codify it.

Not to say that there's an end-all-be-all way to do things, but we often don't think about how the information that we're seeking out is going to be information that others are seeking out too. So that's what I love about accounts like yours.

It's almost like record-keeping in a way, like putting things down and having a record so that people can say, “I have a question about this. Oh, there's an answer somewhere.” And maybe this isn't, again, the end-all-be-all. Maybe this opens up more questions, but at least somebody is addressing this question that I have in my head.

Marie: I think you made a good point about it being a catalog, because yeah, I even go back to look at the content I've made because I am human and I forget these things all the time. What did I post a month ago—because I try to post every day. So it's just a lot of stuff that's coming out.

People don't always know what they wanna learn, either. You can tell me if this is something that happens in coffee too, but like, I will ask my audience, “What do you want to learn?” And that's kind of the worst question to ask people sometimes, because people freeze. People are like, “Oh, well, uh, I don't know, whatever you want.”

So it's like, I'm creating a lesson plan and teaching it at the same time.

Ashley: You're really hitting all the notes for me.

Marie: Yeah, it's hard. I mean, it took some getting used to, and usually these things just come to mind. I still do events and I find that those are the most helpful for—like the Q&A at the end, the common questions that people ask.

Like, “I don't have a wine fridge. How do I store my wine?” Things like that, doing these classes again and meeting these people again and having this time at the end of each class to just hang out with them after I teach about whatever they wanted to learn about. Then that's when all the real questions come out, when people have been drinking a little bit, people are a little more comfortable with you and they go, “Oh yeah, by the way, what's your favorite glassware?”

I kind of get the same 20 questions, so I'll definitely make content based on that.

Ashley: There's something to be said about being in front of people and having at least a little bit of time to get familiar with your surroundings, get comfortable with the person leading the conversation. I imagine conversations look very different at minute one to minute 60, if you're doing an hour-long presentation.

I used to lead, we call them cuppings. So we'll do tastings of just different cups of coffee. And I used to lead one every single Friday and I think the most powerful thing for me to witness other people do is just taste different coffees side by side, which we don't do a lot of.

It’s kind of the same thing in wine too—it's not like you're ordering three glasses of wine to have next to each other. The only time you're really tasting comparatively is in this kind of setting. I wonder if that's been powerful for you as well?

Marie: 100%, and I love that's the connection that you've made with that too, because I see that all the time and consumers also recognize that.

I've taught classes where we've tasted three Sauvignon Blancs, three of the same grapes right next to each other, being like, “What is this one? What is this one? What is this one?”

People are interesting in that they think they know what they want, but they probably don't. And I'm exactly the same way, right? This is a very human attribute, where you think you like a Chardonnay, or you think you don't like a Chardonnay—more likely—and then you try one, you don't know what this is, but we just pour it in a glass and we assess it together.

It's a really powerful thing. I think people find that, like you said, to be a very powerful thing. I think it's a lot of fun.

Ashley: I worked in a wine store for like, 20 minutes, if that. I only worked there like on shifts where they called me in and they were like, “We need someone to help us put bottles on shelves,” and I was like, “Cool, great. I'm very grateful for this opportunity.”

Marie: You were like, “I can do that.”

Ashley: One of the games that we would play at the wine store when it was kind of slow is that I would pick a bottle of wine for one of the owners, and I wouldn't tell him what the bottle was. He had to ask questions to try to figure out what the bottle is, and he got it right every single time, but it took hours—hours!

And it was great though. We'd be at kind of like our regular work day, we'd pour it. He'd look at the color and kind of make an assessment. He's like, “I think it's from this region of the world,” and then he'd stop. Then he'd come back to it and he'd be like, “Okay, I think it's from this region of the world. And I also think it's from this country specifically,” and then stop and then keep tasting the wine as the day went on.

It was really interesting for me to witness him ask questions and be like, “This is how you are making assessments.” I think just like the process of—it sounds intimidating to say—testing ourselves, but it is! It’s like doing an experiment, changing a variable…

I will die on this hill: Coffee is like the coolest science experiment I think you can do because you can change a variable and with that, have a totally new set of things to try. But wine seems to invite that too. Maybe not in the same way where you can brew a cup of coffee and then brew another one a little bit differently right next to you, but the idea that it’s one big experiment that you can just play with and see where different variables kind of lead you…

Marie: Have you ever thought about getting into wine? Like as a barista?

Ashley: I think that I'm just—okay, so this is my PSA right now. I'm gonna say it for everybody.

I think baristas are the best tasters that exist.

Marie: Ooh, those are fighting words!

Ashley: I know, I know I'm inciting something. But I think—okay, so if you go to a new city, for example, I would not ask a restaurant person where to go eat. I would ask a barista. Just because baristas—yeah, I'm going there.

Number one: We spend so much time tasting and manipulating variables to taste. So if I get to the cafe in the morning, I'm tasting espresso. I'm making changes. I'm constantly tasting over and over and over. And I have absolute control over what's actually happening in front of me—not absolute control. I don't control the beans or whatever. I'm getting a roasted product delivered to me.

But two: I think baristas are also seeking out those experiences at other places. I lived in Oakland, California for a while and I worked at a coffee shop in my neighborhood. And there's this wine store that's like very well-known, it's called Ordinaire, and you've probably heard of it. The only people I would see there are baristas. I would see all my barista friends there.

I wouldn't see them at other coffee shops. I would see them at Ordinaire. I would see them at breweries that had really great and interesting beers—not IPAs, mostly Lagers, just also putting that out there, more fighting words.

But I think that baristas often get underestimated by how powerful their palates are.

Marie: I wanna test this. How do we test this?

Ashley: I don't know. I don't know. What's neutral ground between a sommelier and—our equivalent would be maybe a Q grader, but even that's much more specific to green coffee quality, but those are pretty powerful tasters, too.

Marie: I mean, could we even do a whole different medium, like, can we do like cocktails or something?

Ashley: Maybe?

Marie: Or like—or like a liquor or something, but sometimes the alcohol can be like too much…

Ashley: Yeah, that might be. That could be, huh? Anyway, if someone's listening to this and they have a challenge that they could set up for coffee people versus wine folks, please.

Marie: I would love that.

Ashley: Send it my way.

Marie: Maybe I could do a coffee and you could do a wine?

Ashley: That might be the challenge, but I do think that baristas are actually, secretly some of the best tasters that get underutilized.

That's kind of a hurdle that a lot of baristas face, I think. A lot of baristas have this romanticized idea of being bartenders—or at least that was a very hot thing in like 2014, and maybe I'm thinking of a very particular time in my barista life, but I would see a lot of my friends not even get considered for these jobs because people didn't really understand how taxing it is to be a barista.

Marie: I think about some restaurants have dedicated baristas, especially the upper echelon of the Michelin world, because I think they understand that. But I think much like, especially right now, in many restaurants, everything is just being consolidated. The DM is now the wine director, it's just like people are wearing so many hats just for the sake of survival.

I don't think an in-house barista for restaurants will probably be relegated—I mean, I was making coffee drinks, being the server and the wine director, and I'm also pulling espresso shots and making hearts and cups of coffee and people love that. People never get sick of that.

Ashley: People never get sick of hearts. Everyone just make hearts.

Marie: Don't make anything else.

Ashley: That's another hill I'll die on. But no, you're right. There's this idea of like servers having to do everything, or like your server is the one that's supposed to have this extensive wine knowledge too, which can be really taxing and overwhelming, I have to imagine.

Marie: I mean, yes. You bring up a really great point where you're like, yes, you’re more equivalent to a bartender or a chef than you are a server because you can dial in all these things. [But as a server] I have to be a treasure trove of knowledge and sometimes you get people coming in who will just know more than you, especially for some regions like Burgundy.

I can't afford to drink Burgundy all the time. I'm a wine director for a Michelin-starred restaurant, and I don't even drink Burgundy all the time. Some people are just gonna know more cause they have the resources and the particular time to spend on that. So I'm not always gonna know everything: much like healthcare, much like [anything], there's there's specialties, right?

There's fabulous Italian restaurants in Chicago. And if I signed up in an Italian restaurant to be a sommelier there, I would need a big learning curve. It's not necessarily my strong point. So I think it totally just depends on where you work too. You're not always gonna know everything and that's okay too.

And this is not a time where you fake it ‘til you make it, because people can smell that a mile away and you just end up losing trust in people.

Ashley: Something that you mentioned in some of the Reels and the videos that you make is climate change, and how that's affecting different wine regions. And that's something that we talk a lot about in coffee too. Climate change is absolutely changing where you can grow coffee and how that coffee's being grown in particular regions.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about like what climate change is doing to wine-growing regions.

Marie: Oh, can I.

Ashley: Did I open a can of worms? Perhaps I did, but maybe we can give people just a little bit of a taste because something that does happen—just to give you another kind of wine/coffee comparison that a lot of coffee people make—is that we do talk about elevation and temperature changes in coffee growing.

So we talk a lot about—so, coffee grows between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. It wants to grow in hot, humid places, but it wants to grow at high elevation so that it can experience that shift in temperature. It almost stresses the beans out. I think that that's something we borrowed pretty much directly from wine as a way to talk about this.

Marie: Just saying that there's certainly parallels.

Yes, we can briefly touch on this. I won't dive in too deep, but I'm just gonna take a point for my most recent experience. I did a couple weeks of wine harvest in Napa, California. And I've never been—I kind of felt like a poser talking about Napa, but never actually being there.

So I felt like this was a good time to not only see Napa, but to try making wine in the cellar, which, spoiler alert: is really hard. You're pretty much a farmer. You work consecutive 12-13-hour shifts. I was just like shocked. I underestimated how much work it was gonna be. And of course me I'm like, “Well, I was a nurse, well, I worked in restaurants. I can handle this,” but I just … these people work weeks at a time, months at a time, without a day off. Because the grapes don't take a day off.

But in California, [climate change] is a big problem. And there's two major factors happening with wine growing around there, which is water conservation and wildfires.

I was asking people, “What are you gonna do?” California is on fire every other year. 2020 was a horrendous fire year and it affects the wine.

And people do clever things where if they're growing red grapes, you can make rose to reduce the amount of smoke taint in the wine. But you're kind of just putting a Bandaid on a gash, right? It's not actually helping. So I’d ask people and every single person I talk to, they’d go, “Yeah, it's fucked up.”

And I was like, okay—there's no real solution. There's things like water conservation where people recycle water within wineries. I was also shocked to find out how much water it takes to make a bottle of wine. I'm sure coffee is a very similar thing, but, at the end of the day, it seems like you're just not gonna be able to make wine in California anymore.

It's just too inclement. There's too many droughts. There's too many fires. There's not enough water. So we're just gonna have to move or make crops that are more resistant to heat, which some people are doing. But in places like California, where it's getting exponentially worse every year, it seems like there's not really gonna be enough time for it.

Ashley: Is there anything that you want people to know about you listening to this, or to think about when they're purchasing their next bottle of wine?

Marie: I'm just gonna take this opportunity to bump my stuff. My name is Marie Cheslik. I am the founder of Slik Wines. So if you are interested in fun, approachable wine education in tiny digestible video format, give us a follow on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and even on Twitter, I'm on all of it, just seeing what's up, so I'd love to meet you, interact with you.

When you are out buying a bottle of wine, I would say the most important thing would be buying from small wineries, buying from people who don't make a ton of wine, spending a little bit more on a bottle of wine—probably much like coffee—really goes a long way.

I mean, on average as a wine professional who doesn't drink fancy Burgundy every day, I probably spend on average $25-35 on a bottle of wine. So just that little bit can really go a long way for farmers, but I know people don't have the resources for it, and there's a lot of good reasons for that.

But if you have the resources and you like buying organic produce or things from farmer’s markets, or nice coffees, then buying nice wine is another way to expand that way of being sort of environmentally conscious and labor conscious, which I feel is very important. And I think you do too, Ashley.

Ashley: I went to an event, it was a coffee event, and we brought in Martha Stoumen to talk about wine and she's this amazing wine producer. And one of the things that she was telling us was that for her to be profitable, the cheapest she can sell her wine is $27-28, which I thought was super interesting.

As you were saying, that $25-35 range feels like, even when you said it, I was like, “Ugh!”

Marie: I know!

Ashley: But then I was like, “Wait a minute. I feel the same way for coffee,” and I can make a whole argument for coffee that you get more cups of coffee, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

But regardless, the thinking is still the same: that the prices don't come from us trying to market this as a luxury item. The prices come from, this is the bare minimum. We can sell this for—this is a steal, actually. And it's hard to convey that.

Marie: It is. Because food is underpriced right now

.

Ashley: Just in general, just always.

Marie: 100%. The people you hear from the most are restaurant owners saying food costs are growing up, but we go to the grocery store and we think now that $6 is too much for a dozen eggs, but it's like—maybe it should have been $6 10 years ago, right?

For it to be livable for farmers or livable for somebody. That's a whole different conversation about like subsidies and who deserves good food and why. Governments will either do the thing that will benefit the economy the most, like subsidizing corn, or benefits the culture the most, which they do in the EU.

There you'll see more bespoke cheese dairy products, or whatever their country is proud of. But here in, the U S of A, we love corn, we love soy.

And people need to have cheap options! That needs to be a possibility for people. But if you have the resources to spend a little more money, I encourage it. I would like you to consider it, at least.

Ashley: Thank you for taking time to chat with me. I appreciate it.

Marie: Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

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In this episode from November of 2019, we ask, "What if the minimum wage actually reflected the minimum you need to live?"

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A few weeks ago, I asked my friends on Twitter to suggest folks I could interview about coffee and milk. I wanted to learn more about why we put milk in our coffee instead of, let’s say, orange juice, or whipped cream, or any other ingredient used to temper its bitterness.

I’m still looking for that particular answer—but along the way, I was introduced to Dr. Lori Flores, an associate professor of history at Stony Brook University. Lori studies the migration and labor history of Latinx communities in the United States. She also wrote a book called “Grounds For Dreaming: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the California Farmworker Movement,” which explores the labor history of Mexican Americans and immigrants in the Salinas Valley in California.

In this episode, we talk about how “unskilled” labor is categorized, whose labor is purposefully obscured from public view, and how those in power often use collective action for their own benefit while attempting to quash it among those with less power and access to resources.

We talk a lot about the Bracero Program, a government-supported initiative to bring Mexican workers over to the United States throughout the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s to fill jobs in the agricultural sector, as well as other industries. Many of the workers brought to the United States through this program were vilified—you can probably envision critiques along the lines of “they’re taking our jobs,” or other ugly forms of discrimination. At the same time, workers who were part of the Bracero Program were barred from joining unions or having much power over their working lives due to powerful coalitions and the consolidation of power by agribusiness.

We’re talking about this now because so many of the historical lessons Lori details apply now, as more and more people are engaging in collective action. But there are still a few lessons that haven’t fully landed. Like the misconception that if folks unionize, if their wages go up, consumers will have to foot the bill. Or the belief among some that if a “low-wage” jobs pays $15 an hour, it devalues their own work.

In this episode, we discuss the existence of these false dichotomies, and how taking a moment to recognize that everything you consume—everything you eat, drink, and enjoy—was made by someone else could help us place more importance on fair wages for all. Just a quick note: My recording device died right towards the end of this episode, but I had a backup audio recording—I don’t think it’s too obvious, but you might notice it towards the very end of the episode. Here’s Lori.

Ashley: Professor Flores, I was wondering if we could start by having you introduce yourself.

Lori: Sure. I'm Lori Flores. I'm associate professor of history at Stony Brook University, part of the SUNY system here in New York. And I specialize in 20th-century U.S. history with a focus on Latinx labor, food, and immigration history.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Lori: I definitely remember the Folgers can always present in our home. I grew up in a little town in South Texas in a Mexican-American family. Both my mom and my dad were Folgers drinkers. And so that was a daily presence in our household in the mornings, for sure.

And then I remember them having coffee with their friends was always something that my parents enjoyed as a way to decompress from their days. So I remember my dad going and having coffee with his buddies at a Whataburger in Texas and my mom having coffee with her sisters at one of their houses.

Whenever I was lucky enough to get to tag along, I just associate coffee and all the mugs and all my tias at one of their houses, just laughing and gossiping. And even though I wasn't drinking it myself, it just always seemed like something that someone needed in their day. Not only to get it started, but also to end it.

Ashley: That's interesting that you mentioned it was part of ending the day too, because for me, I grew up in a Cuban-American household. I grew up associating coffee with nighttime because my grandmother would make it after every meal.

Lori: Hmm. Yeah. To me, it always seemed funny because I thought, “Well, if it's something that wires you during the day, why are you doing it at night?”

But I think it fueled the conversations because they could go on for hours. So, to my parents, it was no big deal to re-caffeinate at the end of the day. It was very ritualistic for them.

Ashley: Exactly. Same with my family. How did you get—I know this is a big question, but how did you get into academia? What fueled your interest in studying the migration and labor organization [history] of Latinx people?

Lori: I love talking about my path to academia because I could have had a very different life than being a professor.

Like I said, I grew up in a small town in South Texas. It was pretty common for children to stay near their parents and to stay nearby, especially if you were a Mexican-American kid.

I went to a high school in which the counselors basically encouraged us to shoot for a school in state. Or, in my case, when I went to go speak to my high school counselor about my desire to apply to schools out of state, she sort of told me, “I think you should either enlist in the military or apply to the community college down the street.”

“You're a girl. Your parents probably want you to stay close by. You're from a working-class family. It just doesn't seem in the cards for you to shoot further than that.”

But I had a history teacher who taught me from eighth grade to senior year and he really encouraged me to apply to places that were just in my imagination or schools that I had just seen on TV or something.

So I ended up applying to Yale, and got in. And once I saw that big letter in the mail, I knew that I had to take the opportunity. It just wasn't going to come around again. And my parents were not happy about this decision. They, especially my father, he just did not envision his first daughter going away from home, and it took a long time for him to come around.

But in the meantime, I had made the decision to go. And at Yale, it was during my sophomore year that I took a Mexican-American history course, and I just fell in love with the topic. It was the first time that I had ever realized that my background, the background of my parents, the background of my community in Texas, it could be something that you could study that you could read about, that you could write about, that you could teach about. And I was just hooked.

I knew that I wanted to keep on studying in that field and asked that professor of that course to be my advisor, and he encouraged me to go to graduate school. So if I hadn't made that decision that was something that would separate me from my family, both physically and emotionally in some ways, I think I would've gone into maybe teaching, but at a different level or a different group of students.

But I think my decision to pursue an education somewhere far away actually led me back to who I was. Anytime that I can do that for students who don't know much about their own background, but then that lightbulb goes off for them in the classroom, those are the moments where I just love my job because somebody did that for me back then, and I love being able to do that for people.

Ashley: I love that you were able to identify that pivotal moment, and it still seems really clear and salient to you because I feel like on the podcast, I've discussed those moments of when something feels … almost like your life is starting, in a way, if you know what I mean? Like this is the beginning of the first day of everything.

Lori: Right.

Ashley: And we get a lot of those in life, I think—hell, not a lot of those, but we get more than one. I don't wanna say that there's just one moment that that happens, but it's also critical to think about how pivotal just really great advice can be or somebody encouraging you and saying, “You can do this,” in the face of everybody telling you maybe that's not a good decision or maybe that's something you can't do.

Lori: Yeah, it just takes those little micro moments of somebody validating something about you. “You're a good writer,” or, “I like how you said that,” or, “You should really think about the East Coast, think about somewhere different,” or, “Think about envisioning yourself living a life that maybe other people are not prescribing for you. Maybe you can craft something else.”

I think those little moments are so important whether we recognize them or not right then and there. Looking back it's easy to see where you could have taken a very different turn. Not making your life better or worse, but just making it different. So, yeah, it still sticks out to me as one of the moments of bravery I had in my life.

And one of the best decisions I made, both for the people I ended up meeting and then for what I ended up doing with my career.

Ashley: Yeah, it's been really great researching all of the work that you've done and the things that you've been studying.

So let's go back a little bit to talk about your field of research. So you mentioned that you research migration, you research Latinx communities and how this all relates in terms of labor and movement.

So, the way that we got connected is that I am working on this podcast project about different coffee mysteries and trying to answer kind of big questions in coffee.

And one of the questions I was trying to answer is, why do we put milk in coffee? I got connected to you because you study the migration movements and labor of migrant workers working on dairy farms in Wisconsin.

I was wondering if you could set the scene a little bit for like some of the research that you're doing, and then we can maybe dive a little bit deeper into that.

Lori: Sure. What I'm really fascinated by in my research is, when it comes to Latinx history, I think there's still a lot of confusion out there about what “Latinx” means. Which people does that term include and who are we talking about?

Because I think there's still this problem here in the United States, a lot of people equate “Hispanic” or “Latino” or “Latinx” with immigrants, and we lose that profoundly deep and historical mixture of this is a contingent of people of Latin American descent or origin, but who are this mix of citizens, permanent residents, immigrants, guest workers, temporary migrants…

It encompasses a lot of different people with a lot of different citizenship and mobility statuses in this country. So when we say “Latinx,” we can mean people who have been in this country for generations and centuries. And we can mean people who just arrived a few weeks or months ago to live and to work in the United States.

But I think what holds the people together that I study and that I'm fascinated by is work that goes either undetected or is invisible in various ways. And we can see that both within the food industry and the drink industry, including coffee and milk.

So my current research is on the contributions and deep historical roots of Latinx food and drink labor, specifically in the U.S. Northeast, but kind of zooming out to the entire U.S. to sort of make people aware of—there are very intentional ways that these industries try to shield our eyes and our attention from labor conditions that are happening in barns, warehouses, farms, restaurants, these spaces in which labor can be tucked away and that working conditions and the realities of them can be tucked away from our view and from our minds to the point where we take a lot of things for granted in food and drink—milk, wine, these other things we enjoy and ingest on a regular basis.

And really diving deep into what did it take for that product to get on your table, in your cup, in your glass, for your enjoyment, for your leisure, for your routine, for your sociality? What did it cost other people to produce that enjoyment and ritual for us, for others?

I'm really fascinated by what is, intentionally or maybe unintentionally, invisible to us, and making visible those people and those voices and those histories that contain movement, whether they’re from another country in Latin America, in the Caribbean, or whether it's internal here in the U.S.—people move all the time for work and for their lives.

When it comes to Latinx people, it's been a deep history of contributing to economies that often do not thank the very people who helped build and maintain them, but actually villainize them as illegal threats to the nation. It's an incredibly unfair and unthinking sort of narrative to conceptualize Latinx as something perpetually foreign.

Actually, it's been a part of our food and drink industry for as long as we can remember.

Ashley: It seems like there's a duality that comes up a lot when we think about Latinx people and their contributions to labor.

Because as you mentioned, Latinx people often get villainized as immigrants or “they're taking our jobs,” but in “Grounds For Dreaming,” you talked about the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican folks to the United States specifically to do agricultural labor. Like they were specifically brought in by the U.S. government to do labor.

You also talk about the duality that kind of exists with food systems, where people are physically doing this labor. There are people who are picking your lettuce. There are people who are picking your vegetables, and yet on the other end of it, as consumers, we have been taught to expect that certain things must be cheap.

And through that, that's where I think it seems like labor gets erased. This idea that we are owed certain things like milk, which for so long in the United States has been taught to us to be a fundamental food group. Even though I think most people who are not of European descent are actually lactose intolerant in some way.

But we've been taught to believe that this is a fundamental food group or a thing that like, you wake up in the morning and have a glass of milk, or milk is part of the healthy breakfast. And yet, through that, we erase all of the people who contributed to that labor.

And that happens a lot in coffee too. We have been taught to believe that coffee is supposed to be cheap. That is supposed to be something that we can have every morning. And that ignores the countless hands—I think somebody said it's anywhere between 50 and 100 hands touch your coffee before you even get it.

Lori: Mmm. Yeah, totally. Just like you said, it's this kind of contradictory thinking that we hold in our minds that food or milk or other drinks need to be cheap. They need to be fast. They need to be available always—at the times that we want them for the occasions that we want them.

And like you mentioned, the Bracero Program that we had with Mexico from 1942 to 1964 was one of the longest-running guest worker programs in world history.

We participated in it initially because of World War II labor shortages. But the fact that it continued for almost a quarter of a century means that the U.S. got really used to conducting itself in such a way that it could import cheaper, non-unionized foreign labor and use it perpetually in farms and other sectors of the food industry, and get used to this pattern of paying workers a certain wage that employers could collude to and agree upon, a pretty low wage for these workers.

In turn, American consumers, on the other end, in grocery stores, in restaurants, and different venues where we are eating and drinking, we came to get used to a certain price point for these products, but that price point is only possible because the people at the beginning of the process are getting paid very inadequate salaries.

I think another duality, if we wanna add one more to the mix, is what I constantly get frustrated by is this rhetoric about this kind of work being “unskilled.”

That is something that's just infuriating to me because every single job requires thought and learning and training and some sort of skill and craft. Anything from picking apples in an orchard to making a good cup of coffee to producing the milk in the dairy products that get into our markets and restaurants every day, all of that requires skill.

For people to use this discourse of it being unskilled and thus deserving of low wages just keeps people suppressed into this position that they are never able to ask for more or that they're not entitled to ask for more.

I think the ways in which, in the U.S., food and drink has become so hurried in some ways that if you wanna be slow about your eating and drinking, that's actually running counter to a lot of the culture that we have around food and drink—the faster that we expect these to be in our hands and in front of us, on our plates, the less we are thinking about and the less thoughtful we are being about how much time and how much backbreaking labor it took to get that product to you.

Thus, we're not thinking about the types of wages. If anything, we are devaluing workers all the time because the price point has been kept so low for us for decades.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a really good point. The idea that we expect things to be in our hands so quickly—so we often just gloss over the work that it takes to get there. When we slow things down is when we can see, “Oh, these are the steps that it took for a thing to get here.”

But on the other end of that, for a thing to get to us faster requires more skill. I keep going back to coffee obviously, but I think like, “Oh, if I can make 20 drinks in 20 minutes, I am a good barista. That means that I am better at my job.” Versus like somebody who's maybe a little bit slower or still learning—but regardless, both jobs deserve dignity, both jobs deserve fair wages.

But the idea that the faster we go could actually really signifies a bigger skill, but that somehow still devalues the skill because we don't really have to look at it, we don't really have to focus on what's happening in front of us.

Another thing that I wrote down, as I was reading some of your work, is that we seem to vilify or devalue the labor that's required to do a lot of the the farmwork and fieldwork, or really any low-wage skill. But then oftentimes it seems a theme that comes up in your writing is that people seem to think that Mexican laborers are “better suited” for this type of work.

So it seems there's this contradiction in a way. We seem to acknowledge that Americans are not suited for this work or whatever—this is another kind of social conditioning, but we're willing to recognize that it's labor that a certain sect of people can do, but like we won't honor that that should be [paid] a higher wage.

If that makes sense.

Lori: Yeah. I've been nodding really hard at what you've been saying.

I mean, it's exactly it. Because the more that we participate in this kind of talk about, “Oh, these immigrants are just naturally more hardworking. They're faster. They'll do the work better. They're not complaining, right?” The reason that this work is being done harder and faster and with less complaint is because of people's different vulnerabilities.

So that could be, in this precarious economy, somebody banking on the fact that their employer might fire them or give them less hours, fewer hours or worse working conditions if they do complain. If you're an immigrant, and if you have undocumented status in this country, you're going to be more scared of not performing well in the job, being replaced by somebody else, being fired, being reported, deported.

All of these fears are playing into this “hard work” and “fast work” that's going on. It's because people are afraid. And they are well aware of their precarity in different sectors of our economy, but that hard work discourse erases people's attention to this fear that's going on behind this fast pace that doesn't get bathroom breaks, doesn't get shade breaks, water breaks, all these other things in the fields and barns and warehouses in which our food and drinks are getting produced—and the vineyards too, you know, talking about wine as well.

The more that we sort of buy into this binary of that they're doing jobs that Americans won't do, it's like—yes, in one way, that is true. They're in these positions, but they're not working in these positions because they are happily working fast and hard.

They're actually doing it from a very different emotional place.

Ashley: Yeah. One thing that your work has really touched upon, I think, as a theme in general is just how power works.

So at one point as I was reading “Grounds For Dreaming,” you mentioned the growers associations coming together to sort of make almost a buddy agreement between themselves of like, “We're all gonna kind of operate in the same way. We're not gonna try to undercut each other by paying people this or that,” which I thought was interesting.

It's a collective action worked together to quash collective action from the laborers’ perspective. The idea that those in power were able to collectively use their power and say, “This is how we're gonna do this thing. Because these other people do not have that power. They will never be able to stand up against us because they lack the power and the resources to do so.”

I think it's easy to kind of accept the status quo as is, and say like, “Well, this is working,” or like, “Okay, my milk comes to me at like, a dollar whatever a gallon. And that's fine.” But we don't really question how people without agency or voice often can't do much about that.

They can't just quit their job. That's another common trope, I think, that comes up a lot when people complain about their jobs, they're like, “Well just quit your job and go somewhere else.” It's like … how? Or where? With fear of deportation, oftentimes people are held against their will essentially in certain jobs because of lack of agency and power.

Lori: Yeah, exactly. And the reality is when it comes to fruits, vegetable, solid crops, milk, wine, all of these products in our food and drink systems, what's happening is that we are continuing to use different reincarnations of the Bracero Program. We have the H2 visa program.

We have a lot of temporary visa programs in which one of the conditions—or two of the conditions are actually one, that you don't unionize; and two, that you are bound to one employer for the duration of your contract. So when people say you can just quit and go somewhere else, they actually can't in terms of what their contract says that they can do.

So I think it's so smart to think about, like you said, the flip-side of collective action, which is what the associations of employers are doing with each other, and I think it's precisely them recognizing that that works between them. That's what provokes a lot of fear of that happening between workers too, because they know the power of collectivity. They know the power of people gathering in groups, talking about what they have in common and reaching a plan or agenda and a way forward.

And so I think that that is what is motivating a lot of resistance because they do know the power of people coming together. And when it comes to trying to separate or pit workers against each other, I mean, these kinds of tactics are still going on along lines of race, along lines of citizen versus immigrant, along lines of gender, along lines of generation and age.

There are just so many axes along which employers can make employees feel like they're very different from one another or that they should be working in opposition to one another, or regarding others as threats to their own employment. And I think it's precisely because they know what could happen if people didn't buy into those separations and actually came together.

Ashley: Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Something that I wrote down is that oftentimes when we think about solving a problem like this; let's say we're talking about the price of milk and saying that laborers aren't paid enough. We kind of get this false binary of what the solution is—like, “Oh, we're gonna have to raise the price of milk and that's gonna put a strain on families,” or something like that.

I think at one point you even identified in in your book, if we raised wages 40% for farm workers, that would result in a $200 increase—I think that's in a different article, maybe that's not in the book—but it would result in something like a $200 increase per family throughout the whole year, which isn't a lot, but I wonder if that also masks who the real villain is in this situation, because in every industry, there’s money somewhere.

We talk about this a lot in coffee—that there's money in coffee, even though it seems like there never is because coffee shop workers don't make money, but farmers don't make money as well.

It's the people in the middle who are making money. And I was wondering, how can we start to think about these false binaries that we’re often taught? Like, we're often taught that to have a consumer good that's more equitable, we as consumers have to pay more, but I feel like that masks the actual “winners” in this situation, which is corporations and people at the top.

Lori: Yes. And employers in agribusiness make consumers scared of those rising prices in order to deflect from what they could be doing on their end to make working conditions healthier in various ways. And actually the statistic is not even $200. It's $21 that each household would have to pay more per year in order for wages to rise across the board.

So it's an even lower amount, but still this kind of talk of, “Well, you don't want your food prices to rise, do you? If you don't want that to happen, if you don't want to see elevated price points on your menus in your restaurants, then you have to accept that workers only are allowed conditions within these particular parameters. And that's why we're not going to be recognizing unions and everything that they want and all these demands.”

On the other end, when it comes to milk, producers are sort of squeezed by the government sort of setting the price points for milk, and this setting of price points by the government is actually creating a squeeze on milk producers from one end that then justifies the conditions and the salaries that they're giving workers on the other side.

And so the milk industry keeps on saying they are price takers. They're not price makers. And so that is one reason why dairy workers are not able to have particular benefits or have particular rights to unionize or something else because of the way that they're being dictated by the government that they have to keep prices at a certain level, and so their profit margins are very low.

But this again, even if that is a particularity of the dairy industry, it still allows different sectors of agribusiness to claim the same thing: that they are not able to control much. And so then it's the workers who have to get the short end of the stick, at the end of the equation.

That is simply—it's not sustainable. And we saw that during COVID, because COVID just broke open a lot of our assumptions and what we were taking for granted with our food and our drink, that it actually requires workers to sacrifice a lot of different elements of their health: physical, emotional, mental in order for our prices to stay the way that they are.

There's a lot that the government can be doing. We are saving money with these labor programs, agribusiness has enjoyed the greatest subsidy in the world because our government has participated in global labor programs that have brought us tons of people who are working every day and toiling away in these different spaces of food and drink—that's the reason why agribusiness has been able to make the profits that it does, but those just make workers’ own lives pale and comparison.

They are not able to enjoy the very food and drink that they help to make, these workers in dairy are not even able to walk into a cafe and order a cup of coffee with the very milk that they have helped produce, and that reality to me is so disturbing that a worker cannot even enjoy the very thing that they have worked so hard to make.

Ashley: That's a really common theme in coffee too, particularly when you look at farmers. Oftentimes because the best coffees will fetch the highest prices—those coffees are exported out. And a lot of farmers don't ever get the opportunity to enjoy their own coffees, especially because they live in remote areas.

They might not have a roasting facility anywhere near them. So how would they ever get to enjoy it? So that's a really interesting tie that I think both coffee and the dairy industry share. And I think you also identified that dairy is in a particularly unique situation because it is subsidized or regulated by the U.S. government.

How has that shaped the way we view milk in society? I know that we've talked, we've kind of taken for granted that in the United States milk is kind of seen as a fundamental food, but that's not inherent to milk itself.

That's something that we've shaped and created.

Lori: Yes. We have definitely shaped and created that in the United States, because there are so many places around the world that do not enjoy the availability of milk that we enjoy all the time, that they do not enjoy the different alternatives to milk that we have in the United States to drink and to market to others.

The prevalence of not just dairy, cow milk, but also these plant-based milk alternatives. Think about almond milk, for instance, where is that coming from? The almond groves in California—who is working those almond groves? The same farm workers who are working in different kinds of crops all around the country.

And so even if we go to non-cow milk, if we go to plant-based and alternative milks too, we are uncovering the same kinds of labor systems that are keeping workers from having the types of lives that they can only dream about. And I was actually thinking about the title of my book and how it can apply to coffee as well.

These workers have grounds for dreaming of something better.

Just like in any relationship when you are made to feel like you can't assert your needs, your wants, what you hope for, what you would like in your life—when your employer, when society makes you feel like you are unskilled, you do something that's so simple, you do something that's so quick. “Why do you need these particular types of benefits and conditions and wages?”

It's precisely because our interaction with those products is so easy for those of us at the end of the line who are going into a cafe and ordering a cup of coffee and getting milk with that or whether we're purchasing a carton of almond milk at the grocery store.

That is a very quick moment for us. And our sense of time really doesn't allow us to be able to see that there are lives behind those products and people are being constantly made to feel like they can't get included in conversations about what they want and need and dream about and desire.

Ashley: That wasn't lost on me either. When I looked at the cover of your book, I'm like, “There's a lot of coffee connections that could be made here.” But I think what's really interesting too is that I would say maybe barring like bakeries, who probably interact with a lot of dairy too, baristas interact with a lot of dairy.

I would say that I probably, if I had to, by volume, look at how much dairy I interact with versus coffee, I probably interact with more dairy because of lattes, of cappuccinos, of any steamed beverages or ice drinks that are milk-based.

As a barista, I can hand your drink to you, and I know stuff about coffee because that's what we're trained in. That's what we're trained to talk about. And I could maybe convince 10 people that you should consider where your coffee comes from.

Lori: Mmhmm.

Ashley: But I don't get that training for milk. Like, I get some training for milk to make sure that it looks pretty when I pour it, but I often don't know a lot about where my milk comes from.

So I can't do that same kind of advocacy work, or even just start a conversation with a customer on that. Like even as a barista, we're alienated from that value. You mentioning how quickly we can get these products and just not even think about where they come from—that’s really interesting because as baristas, I think that that's a problem we think about a lot when it comes to coffee, and we don't necessarily have the rhetoric or the knowledge to do that sort of work for milk, which is kind of sad.

Lori: Yeah, that's fascinating to me. Because I think when people think about milk, they either are thinking about it as this thing that's very much taken for granted and easily available. Or they might think of milk as coming from a bucolic setting, right? A pastoral setting.

While that is true, that milk is getting produced in these very beautiful spaces, it's actually very ironic to me. And I don't know—I mean, this is something that would be so interesting to talk about with baristas—is how do you balance capturing a customer's attention enough to communicate the beauty of milk and how it gets to us, but also this sense of workers being held and living their daily lives in these very bucolic landscapes and yet feeling so trapped in certain conditions of their living and their working.

So for instance, in these interviews that I've been looking at with Vermont dairy workers who are largely Mexican or from Central America, that they use the same Spanish word over and over again in their interviews, not planning to do so, but it just comes up as the same word, which is en ado—feeling trapped, being hemmed in and not feeling like they can move very much in the very landscapes that they work in, often because the houses that their employers provide them to live in are literally right across the road from the barns that they are going to nine-hour shifts twice a day.

The fact that they can't really move very much between home and work, that you are literally just crossing the road or the street back and forth and just eating and sleeping and going back to work and interacting with the bodies of cows, that is an interesting relationship in itself, right?

It’s this human/animal connection that a lot of these workers are extremely skilled at. That they're able to calm the cows down enough to be able to milk them, that they gain the animals' trust, that they develop this intimacy with these other living, breathing beings. How can we communicate the beauty of that in the small interactions we have with the customers who come in front of you and other baristas, who like the latte art and who appreciate the taste and the sensation and the ritual of coffee drinking with milk.

How can we get that message across that there is this darkness or this reality of feeling trapped within a very sort of beautiful landscape and story that we have around milk?

Ashley: I feel like the only insight I can provide is based on my own experiences, but I find that so much of the work that I've done as a barista often involves building trust with consumers, which we get a lot of opportunity to do, admittedly, because there's not a thing that you buy every day like coffee.

So if there's a consumer coming in and they're a regular coffee drinker, I'm probably seeing them anywhere between three to seven times a week. It may be even more if they come in more than once a day. So there is a really beautiful opportunity for baristas to engage with somebody and build that trust.

“Oh, you like lattes, maybe try this coffee,” or something like that, and build trust kind of in that way, and get people to start asking more questions. I think that's a lot of what we do, but I can't say from my own experience that I have ever done that with milk, just because it's not something that I was ever really trained to think about.

Lori: Yeah, I guess it's about curiosity at both ends, right? The curiosity of the craft, the craft person and then the curiosity of the customer.

So that gets me to think about, oh, maybe it'll take multiple interactions for that relationship to build so that you could, for instance, mention an article you read about what's going on in Vermont with dairy workers organizing or what's going on in the almond industry in California, that that's when you could approach or broach that topic and get people to actually think about milk in a different way.

Maybe that's the key is that the trust isn't something that can happen in one exchange that it needs to happen over the course enjoying the product and coming back for it again and again.

Ashley: So we have talked a little bit about this in passing, but you are currently working on a book about the dairy industry. When can folks get that book?

Lori: Well, the perpetual frustration of academia is it takes a long time to publish anything. Although I do want to make more of an effort to get things out in public, like shorter-form writing. So hopefully that will be happening over time. But my book is tentatively titled “Starved For Respect: The Many Hungers of Latinx Food Workers,” coming out with the University of North Carolina press.

We are shooting for 2024 for the entire book. But like I said, I think I want to be putting out more writing on dairy workers, wine workers, food workers, over time. So I would love if people just kept up with those pieces of writing until the big thing comes out.

Ashley: Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it. And just getting to spend this week reading your work and being immersed in the topics that you cover has been such a delight.

Lori: Thanks Ashley. I'm so glad I got to meet you and that we got to have this conversation.

Ashley: Me too.

This interview has been edited for clarity. You can find out more about Lori and her work at her website.

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Hey folks—I’m back in your feed this week with a bonus podcast episode. Recently, I got to spend time with Ravani Grace, one of the baristas behind the Intelligentsia Coffee Workers Union in Chicago. Ravani and the baristas at five Chicago-based Intelligentsia stores announced their intent to unionize on May 27, 2022.

The baristas will be voting now—this week—so please show your support. Share this episode, and if you’re in Chicago, go to Intelligentsia and tell the baristas that you support them. This has the potential to be one of the most pivotal unions in the specialty coffee industry, so please keep your attention on this group. Here’s Ravani.

Photo by Kevin Loesch

Ashley: I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself for listeners.

Ravani: Yeah. Hi, my name is Ravani Grace. I use she/her pronouns. I have been a barista with Intelligentsia for a while now, and am a career barista. I have been doing this since I was 20 years old—and don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

Ashley: I love that you started with “you’re a career barista” because something that comes up a lot in union rhetoric is that these are transient jobs, or these are jobs with lots of turnover.

I think it's important to highlight that folks like you—and a lot of the folks that are organizing unions within coffee shops—are people who love coffee and wanna stay with it for a time.

Ravani: Obviously I think about like switching careers because of all of that rhetoric around, like, “This is a temporary gig, this isn't something that is sustainable.” But honestly, I think about doing something else and I cringe. I like making coffee. I like talking to customers all day.

Ashley: How did you start working at Intelligentsia?

Ravani: I was bouncing around shops a lot in the summer of 2018. I went through three different coffee shops in three months, just because I kept running into really horrible working conditions. You know, the kinds of working conditions that really are like the norm in service, and I was like, “I need a new job, Intelli is hiring. This is as good as it gets in terms as coffee jobs go, I'm gonna apply,” and I managed to get it.

Then I’ve been with the company on and off since then. I've left Chicago a couple of times. Whenever I left Chicago, obviously I stopped working at Intelli, and whenever I came back to the city, I was like, “Let me get this job again.”

Ashley: So let's walk through the timeline of union organizing. Obviously, we're here because Intelligentsia announced about a month and a half ago that its five Chicago-based locations are intending to unionize. They had a press release [stating] they're organizing with the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, which we're gonna refer to as the IBEW throughout this conversation.

So, if you announced about, let's say a month and a half ago, how long had you folks been talking and planning or even thinking about unionizing?

Ravani: We've been thinking about unionizing since 2018. I think things got really serious in 2021, like the back end of 2021, the start of 2022. People really started doing the work of getting organized. There were always whisperings of a union for as long as I've been at Intelli, but we took the step from like talking about it, getting drinks together and saying, “Man, we should organize,” to actually being organized and getting organized—I would say like a year-ish ago.

It's definitely been a long process. I think like the thing that really changed the game for us was getting in touch with the IBEW and having people who really know how to organize workers, who know how to do all of the legal work, who can teach you how to have the kinds of conversations that are necessary to create real worker solidarity, which is like the foundation of any union, right?

Ashley: I think what's really crucial in the answer that you just gave is that talking to the IBEW was almost like a switch for you folks. And it wasn't necessarily that you folks needed to do anything special, or that getting in touch with the IBEW was jumping through any hoops or anything like that.

It seems like it was simply reaching out to an organization that's a really well-established union and saying, “Hey, we're interested in this. Can you help us?”

And them saying yes.

Ravani: It really was that simple. It was Jordan who sent a couple of emails. They started organizing meetings. And then we did the work of having the conversations on the shop floor, of visiting the shops, being like, “Hey, do you wanna come to this Monday meeting the IBEW is hosting?”

They organized a couple of really big in-person meetings for us at various union halls, and those were really successful events that helped get my fellow workers on board with the idea of a union and really demystified the process for [them].

Ashley: Right. Yeah—“demystifies” is a really good word there, because I have to imagine for a lot of people who see you folks organizing, or see other coffee shops organizing, some of the hesitation to maybe take that step for themselves is that they don't know what the next step is. But I love that you were able to draw like a direct line between “we reached out to the IBEW” and “they started helping us.”

Ravani: Yeah. It really is that simple. I think doing a fair amount of research on like, what are the local unions that are really active in your area, right? The unions that like, align with your values, because not every union is made equal. We're really lucky to have had the IBEW here in Chicago.

They are really in line with, I think, Intelligentsia—like the Intelli workers’ values. And they're a really proactive union that are willing to give us a lot of support.

Ashley: What was it about the IBEW—just to extrapolate a little bit on that answer—that made you folks decide, “Yes, these are the people that we wanna work with.” What were some of those shared values?

Ravani: One of the really big ones was a history of anti-capitalism, right? As workers at Intelligentsia, we're organizing for ourselves, we're organizing to get a better paycheck, we're organizing to get more vacation days, to get better healthcare for all of the basic things for ourselves, but also we're organizing because food service needs to be organized in a broader sense.

And I think the IBEW really connected our struggle to a broader struggle. What really drew us to them was their work in the Colectivo unionization campaign. We really liked what we saw them do with Colectivo and reached out to them largely because of that.

Ashley: Was it ever a decision in your mind to not organize as all five stores together? Or was it always like, “We're all organizing together. We're all in this together.”

Ravani: I think certain models of unionization really are shop by shop.

Ashley: Right, right.

Ravani: That's what we've seen from Starbucks. And I think there was a point at which we were like, “Well, this is how it's done. This is what we should do.”

But we realized that it wasn't gonna work for us in our particular situation. We needed everyone or it was gonna fall apart, because our shops are really small. It's like, four or five workers per shop, and you don't really have that solidarity, that strength in numbers when you're organizing four or five workers at a time. Because we're a smaller outfit, it was easier to get everyone from every store involved.

Ashley: Those meetings that the IBEW held—what were those like? What did you folks learn in those meetings?

Ravani: They were just like little Zoom meetings. Frequently they'd be really small because a lot of us were working during them, or like half of the staff would be working during them, or we'd just be getting off work and we'd be tired.

They were really intimate meetings in which we just sort of talked strategy for the most part, or people would come and they would have questions about the union. Like, “What is the bargaining process gonna look like? What is the next step? What is our timeline?”

And the IBEW was able to give that information and say, “This is what we're looking at. This is what to look out for from management. This is what the bargaining process might turn out to be.”

Ashley: So it seems like they did a lot of work to make sure that you folks felt very informed?

Ravani: Yeah, absolutely. It was a situation where really, if you wanted to learn about the union, it was really easy and accessible. You hop on the email list and you're getting an email once every couple of weeks keeping you updated on where exactly we are in the process. Yeah, that was one of their main roles.

Ashley: It seems like information is so powerful in these situations because, from what I've gathered interviewing people who have unionized or thinking about unionizing, it seems like a lack of information and a lack of clarity on what laws protect you, what laws don't protect you, is a big hindrance to moving forward.

But it seems, from what I've gleaned from the outside looking in, you folks are highly informed and highly organized. I remember when you folks dropped the press release that you were unionizing, I was like, “Whoa, this came out of nowhere, but this is highly organized. This is something that these folks are ready for.”

Ravani: Yeah, absolutely. I have been a part of various attempts at worker organization at, frankly, every coffee shop that I've ever worked at, because of the type of person I am, you know: If there wasn't union chatter before I showed up, there definitely was after.

But coming back to Intelli at this time, and I remember within the first hour of my first shift back, Jordan was like, “So we're starting a union.”

My first reaction was like, “Okay, that's cute. But, let's be real here. Are you actually gonna start a union?” And it very quickly was apparent to me that, no, actually this was real and this was gonna happen.

And it still feels kind of dreamlike to some extent. It feels like a really big moment, both in the lives of everyone who's working for Intelligentsia right now, but also in the coffee industry more broadly. It's a little surreal to be in the moment.

Ashley: Speaking of this moment, it seems like a lot of things are currently just coming together. So there's the current labor movement that we're just in, in general—with so many Starbucks branches unionizing, with other coffee shops unionizing, the Colectivo union was a huge win for this movement, but it also seems like the pandemic really accelerated the need for a union.

I think we've talked a lot about how you started a union, but I think we wanna talk a little bit about why—and it seems like the pandemic had a big role in that for you folks.

Ravani: There are a lot of reasons why we want to unionize, right? And those reasons vary from person to person. But as someone who was there before the pandemic—there was no clarity over why people got fired. It was really a situation in which we were just completely at the mercy of Intelligentsia as a company and had no power and no way to fight back.

Ashley: Something I wrote down as you were talking was that there was no clarity on how or why people were being fired. I think that that speaks to a bigger theme when we talk about unionization—and it's something you mentioned before we started recording—was the idea of accountability. Being able to answer questions, being able to say, “Why is this happening in this way? And why aren't you giving me more information?”

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the idea of accountability in terms of this union and what you're hoping to achieve.

Ravani: Yeah. So the truth is we have a pretty sweet deal at Intelli, right? And the fact that we have a pretty sweet deal is like kind of the core of the anti-unionization campaign. For me, accountability is about making sure that when something like the pandemic happens again, like some sort of big financial crash, something that is really disruptive…

When something like that happens, I think it's really important to be organized and to have power, and to be able to say, “You can't treat us this way, this is not how you said you want to treat us.”

A union isn't gonna solve that issue singlehandedly, but it will provide a way for—if an employee is say, having an issue with management, right? Management is for whatever reason treating them a certain way, the union will be there to back that person up. If management makes the decision to fire someone over offenses that another person wouldn't get fired over, the union is there to say, “Okay, this is not actually a fireable offense. This does not violate the terms of our contract. You can't do this.”

That idea of having something that is kind of set in stone to say, “This is how we are going to be treated as employees. This is how we want to be seen as a collective union, unit, union—whatever—that deserves respect.” I think organization is how we get from point A to point B in terms of questions of respect and accountability.

Ashley: Something you said during that answer was that one of the lines of thought that is being used as like an anti-union rhetoric is that this is a pretty sweet job, which is a false, I think, claim—not necessarily that this is not a sweet job, but the idea that because it's a sweet job, you shouldn't need these protections.

But I think as you're rightly pointed out, workers in non-unionized places often don't know when the rug's gonna be pulled out from under their feet. You could be promised X, Y, and Z one day, and then suddenly those things don't happen to you anymore. And you're real people—you make life decisions based on these promises of what you're going to receive.

Like, “I'm gonna stay in Chicago for an extra couple of years because I've been told by my manager that I'm gonna get a three- and six-month raise,” and then that's just not there anymore. And I think that it's interesting that the idea that your job is good is a line of rhetoric that people use to fight against the union.

The idea that your job would be bad if the union wasn't there or that the company doesn't deserve this type of accountability claim because they already do an okay job, which I think is just like a false dichotomy.

Ravani: Absolutely. I 100% agree. At the end of the day, we are still workers and we are still, no matter how sweet the deal is, there's still that sort of baseline level of control that the company has over our lives.

Ashley: But they get to dictate the terms of how good your job is versus letting you—

Ravani: Exactly.

Ashley: Have any ownership over it.

Ravani: Exactly. I 100% agree. It is the fact that at the end of the day, Intelligentsia has all of the power and we have none of it. And a union is a really effective tool for balancing that situation.

Ashley: Power is a big thing I love talking about, because I think a lot of people think that anti-union efforts are fueled by money. They are not—they are fueled by power. They are fueled by the idea that somebody has power and they do not want to relinquish it.

But I think Intelligentsia is a really interesting situation because you were talking about accountability to workers and because Intelligentsia is owned by JAB.

They have this accountability to these stakeholders that are just like … not you. They're not you, they're not the people who are actually working every day.

I think it's just an interesting thing to think about because it's like, who are you accountable to? And it seems like in so many workplace situations, we're never accountable down. We're never accountable to the people who actually make the business go every day. And that's literally true in coffee shops.

Coffee does not happen if you do not show up and unlock the door and dial in espresso and welcome customers. But oftentimes companies where there is a stakeholder, where there is a board of directors, when there's somebody to answer to, because there's an influx of money happening from the top, a lot of who we answer to are those people.

It's interesting that we don't question that that often. And when it comes to things like this union effort, it's portrayed as this struggle, but it's like, we're just trying to get a seat at the table. We're just trying to assert the fact that we're here and we make this company happen.

Ravani: There are two things in what you said that I really wanna respond to.

One of the things I think is really exciting about both all the food service unions, but also all of the hotel unions and the hospitality union waves that have been happening—like room-keeping service being unionized—is how immediately, like, imagine a coffee strike, right? [If] it gets to the point where Intelligentsia is being super intractable, it takes like two days of us not opening for the shops to like, fall apart, right? It's not like a factory where they're able to have a bunch of back-stock cars that they're selling.

Ashley: But even then, like the union shut or the factory shutdowns of like Detroit-based car companies…

Ravani: Yeah! As I was saying that, I was thinking about a conversation I had with a friend that just-in-time production has really changed the game in terms of unions.

The ways in which we have these incredibly complicated supply chains has really given us a lot of power as workers. It has given us the ability to really affect change in our workplaces and also beyond our workplaces.

I think one of the things that really excites me about us unionizing is—I remember in various versions of the union chatter we've had, a lot of what we wanted to organize around wasn't necessarily improving our lot as workers, because we all were like, “Yeah, there's not that much more we want to ask for.” I mean, we always want more money. We always want more vacation days.

But also we wanna be organized, not just for really immediate concerns in our workplace, but so that way we can respond as a collective to these broader things that are happening. And your mention of the Detroit strikes just really brought that to mind because of the ways in which the Detroit strikes were so intimately woven into the Civil Rights Movement in a broader sense.

Ashley: Right, and then tying that back to another thing you said where maybe one person got fired for something, another person commits that same offense and they don't get fired—like, where is the accountability in that situation?

It seems like unions can really help almost litigate biases, make sure that there's accountability for like, “Hey, like if you're reacting this way to this person, not to this person, what is that saying?” We have a system in place to counteract this.

That's why we have this.

Ravani: Yeah, 100%.

Ashley: Something else that you mentioned too—which I think gets often ignored—is that you said that the union is good for both you folks as workers and for Intelli as a whole. And I think that is absolutely true, but like nobody else would say it. You know what I mean?

Like obviously Intelligentsia is not gonna say it, but as you were mentioning, unionized workers are probably more likely to stay at their jobs, they're probably more likely to feel like they have a seat at the table, so they're able to contribute positively to the work environment.

In a way, the union is almost saying, “We love this place and we wanna make it better.” It’s kind of in a convoluted way, an ultimate love letter to this place that you wanna make better. And you wanna invest your time in making it better.

Ravani: Yeah, 100%. I really love Intelligentsia. I think there are a lot of things that we do as a company that are really exciting and really exceptional, and I don't want that necessarily to be lost in this conversation. Like I keep coming back to this place whenever I'm living in the city of Chicago, because it's a great workplace in a lot of ways.

I think the ways in which we work with coffee farmers are really important and the ways in which we like set that model, that like pretty much all of specialty coffee at this point is following, of working directly with farmers, of paying more than fair trade prices, of helping them improve their farms—and I'm not necessarily trying to buy into the hype. There are a lot of problems with that. Fundamentally, the coffee industry has like a serious problem in that it is based on the exploitation of the Global South. That is the core dynamic that makes coffee, coffee, but in a lot of ways, Intelligentsia improved that situation over say a Starbucks, right?

I think the union is like an avenue in which, like you said, we can improve this company from the ground up. Workers can have more of a say in their situation. We can be more invested in our work. We can feel like we have the support that we need in order to be really good at our jobs.

Ashley: When I think about Intelligentsia five or 10 years ago, I think of people who are there forever.

Ravani: Yeah.

Ashley: And the fact that I'm talking to you now, I don't know that I know anybody who works there anymore. And I feel like I used to—that's maybe more of a personal thing, but there is something to be said about, what do we want for the future of coffee?

What do we want on a broad scale? And we do often talk about the future of coffee, as it pertains to coffee itself. We talk about sustainability. We talk about climate change and things like that. And not to say that those things are solved by any means. They're not, there are huge problems in the way that we source coffee.

And as you mentioned, it's built on the colonization of the Global South, but it seems like we have failed to recognize how important the sustainability of the people who work in coffee shops is—and why can't we have baristas who stay in their jobs for 10, 15, 20 years? Why can't that be a sustainable job?

Why can't it?

Ravani: Yeah!

Ashley: Like why? Why?

Ravani: Right. There's no good reason. [Making] good coffee is a really well-honed skill—I was not nearly as good at my job when I was doing this a year ago, even. I've been at this for five, six years now and I'm constantly growing and I'm constantly learning new things.

We should be able to look at a barista and say, “This is a career, right? This is something you can do for as long as you want to do it, and not something you're gonna get forced out of when you turn 35.” And as it stands now, it's something that you kind of get forced out of at a certain age, right?

Ashley: Right, because you can’t afford it.

Ravani: Or at least that's how it feels, yeah.

Ashley: And just to kind of extrapolate outward a little bit, all jobs deserve dignity. All jobs deserve the dignity of being able to go to work and say, “I can live my life based on the things that are happening in this situation. I can live my life based on the amount I'm getting paid here,” because every job … exists.

There's no less dignified, more dignified jobs. I hate stuff like that, but it's just saying that like, if we want people to work in these jobs, if we want our futures, just in general, to be better, we have to recognize the dignity of every single job and make space for people to say, “I demand more because I'm a human being and I want to be safe and secure at work.”

Ravani: Absolutely. I couldn't have said it better myself. You know, I think the question is then, how do we get from point A to point B? And I really think unions are like a big, big part of the answer, and is why I'm so excited to be in this stage in our unionization process, where it really feels like it's about to happen.

Ashley: Can you give me a timeline about what's next for you folks?

Ravani: Yeah. So our union ballots are currently in the mail. We all start voting right about now. Our last ballots have to be turned in by August 4th. And we find out three or four days later. I wanna say it's the 7th or the 8th—I can't remember which.

Ashley: So what happens? So you have the ballots, they're out to all of the employees. Is that correct?

Ravani: Yeah. So it's 27 workers. Anyone whose job title is barista or shift lead.

Ashley: And then you need a plurality, right? So you need more than 50%?

Ravani: Of people who vote. So if only 10 people vote and six of them vote “yes,” then we still have the union.

Ashley: Then once the union is recognized, that's a big step, obviously an important step, but that's not the end.

Ravani: No. Then we have to negotiate a contract. And this is what we have seen at Colectivo—is that the company tends to drag their feet. They negotiate in bad faith. They don't wanna give us a contract that is fair and on our terms, or they don't wanna give us a contract in a speedy manner because they don't want us to have a union.

So that is sort of gonna be the next big fight is if the vote goes our way, which based on the conversations I've been having, I feel really, really confident about—I would be genuinely shocked at this point to find out that this vote is not successful for us.

Ashley: Is there anything you want people to know about this stage of your union fight that maybe isn't obvious or maybe that people just wouldn't know—like, what are the best ways that folks can support you right now?

Ravani: I think one of the most effective ways that you can support is, if you come into the coffee shops, talk to us about the union. Let us know when you order your coffee. Like, “Hey, I heard about this. I'm super excited for you. That sounds awesome.” If you say that in front of management, it probably wouldn't hurt, but what, at this stage, really the big question is like, did Intelli successfully scare us out of a union vote?

We know that the majority of Intels want a union and the question—or at least they did before Intelli started their anti-union campaign. If the vote doesn't go our way, it means that Intelli ran a really successful anti-union campaign. I think one way to counteract that is to have folks from the outside say like, “Yeah, I think it's dope that you have a union or that you're trying to unionize. I think this is exciting.”

Yeah, I guess that's sort of the answer for me.

Ashley: Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Ravani: Of course. This was really fun. Thank you for giving us some coverage.

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If you want an episode that comes full circle, you’re gonna love this conversation.

My guest today is Niki Tolch, a coffee professional and creator of the Not Caffeinated Enough Instagram (as well as a YouTube channel and video podcast).

Niki built her platform to talk about coffee, and to connect with other people of color in the industry. Her content is deeply inquisitive, yet open and welcoming—you don’t need to be an expert to talk shop with Niki, and curiosity is encouraged. In this episode, we talk about building community online, how to rally against the sameness of coffee, and why coffee reminds Niki of “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.”

There’s a lot of really compelling twists and turns in this episode, but it eventually comes around to finish, unexpectedly, in the same place it starts. You know that the conversations that get reflective and crunchy are my favorites, and I feel like this chat is pure nourishment. If you’ve ever felt like you’ve looked out into the world and didn’t see the people or the spaces that you needed, please listen—and then get out a pen and paper and take notes. Here’s Niki:

Ashley: So I was wondering, Niki, if you could start by introducing yourself.

Niki: Yes, my name is Niki Tolch. I have an online platform, primarily on Instagram, called Not Caffeinated Enough where I really like to play around with coffee, experiment with brew techniques, and other coffee-related things, as well as connect with and talk to other people of color in coffee.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Niki: Not really, no. My main connection with coffee growing up was when I would visit my grandmother. Nana, I always like to say, would make the mornings itself smell like coffee.

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And so I would always look forward to that whenever I stayed over, waking up to the smell of coffee.

Ashley: I love that. I love that sense memory.

Niki: Yeah.

Ashley: How did you start working in coffee? What was your first coffee job?

Niki: My first coffee job was at a Starbucks in the suburbs of Houston. I had actually just come back home because of a family emergency. And so I was looking for a really quick and close-by job to start making money again.

It was not meant to be a long-term thing. I was just drawn to the idea of working in coffee, because again of the smell reminding me of my grandmother.

But the first thing I really noticed, or the first thing that drew me to the industry, was this was the first job in which I was working with people who seemed to be more themselves.

Coming more from the corporate side of work, I had never really experienced that, or worked with people who just seemed free to be themselves. So that was really interesting to me.

Ashley: What were you doing before coffee?

Niki: Before coffee, I was in the nonprofit world, mostly marketing and communications. I was helping kind of a lot of different nonprofits, but mostly, I was with this philanthropic foundation that was creating videos for hundreds—which became thousands—of nonprofits as a way for donors to get to know those nonprofits better before giving.

Ashley: I think that's such a salient thing to notice about working in a coffee shop, that people seem more like themselves. That's something that's come up on the podcast before. And I think for myself, a really transformative moment in the industry for me—I would say that I wasn't pulled into coffee because of coffee itself.

Not to say that I don't care about coffee, but I think I was pulled into the industry because working behind the bar felt like the most true and authentic expression of my personality in a way that I had never experienced before.

Niki: Yeah. Yeah. And it's funny, it didn't happen right away where I felt like I could be myself behind the bar. I just saw these other people around me just having fun, acting like themselves. And they were all just so different, but worked well together, and it really excited me about my potential for bringing more of myself out.

Even though it took a while, because I tend to be more guarded in public.

Ashley: Right, that makes sense. Do you think that working in coffee started to change that aspect of yourself? When did you start feeling like you could be more yourself or more outwardly yourself?

Niki: I think it really wasn't until I started my podcast or the online platform. I just started talking more about what I was feeling while working in coffee. I feel like just that act of talking about it, recording it, and putting it out there is what made me feel more comfortable, like, “Oh, I can talk about this in real life, like outside of my home in front of the camera.”

Ashley: When did you pick up the camera and start recording—or the phone? I don't know.

Niki: It was near the start of the pandemic. That's when I first got the idea. It took me, I wanna say, a handful of months of picking up my phone, putting it back down, changing my mind … because I have this real stage fright, or at least I did. I would start getting this sick feeling every time I started to record and my brain would tell me, like, “Why are you doing this? Like, this is pointless. It's dumb. No one wants to hear this.” And I would just like shut myself down.

So it took a long time for me to actually, from the idea to press record and get rid of those fears that were stopping me.

Ashley: What was the first video about? What was the first thing that you were like, “All right. I’m hitting record. I'm getting over the stage fright, or at least I'm coping with the stage fright and I'm gonna press record. I'm gonna put it out there.”

Niki: The topic was essentially, “Is specialty coffee white?” And I was kind of going over some points that I had thought about that indicated that it was kind of a white man's game.

Ashley: What were some of those things that you wanted to highlight or you wanted to at least put out there so that other people could discuss, and at least have some breathing room for this idea to exist and have people discuss it out loud?

Niki: My thoughts on it were one: I, in my quick little online research, had told me that other people don't really see Black folks behind the bar much. And in a lot of areas, at least all of the Chicago area that I visited coffee shops in, I didn't really see Black people within the shops as well, at least not many, not as many as I saw just like walking outside.

So that indicated to me that one was potentially a cause of the other, because coffee shops either didn't or were struggling to hire people of color, so it didn't really make customers of color feel very comfortable to be there.

The other kind of subtopic under that was in advertisements. I didn't really see people of color being advertised to in coffee, which is very strategic. I don't know, I can’t blame the coffee industry exactly for that. It’s just kind of marketing in general has specific target audiences that they gear toward. And it's not always for the benefit of that community that's being targeted.

So I kind of talked about that a little bit and I also just, for my own personal experience, felt like as a woman of color I sometimes was talked down to, or it was assumed that I didn't know much about coffee even. When I was at like the, I don't know, seventh coffee shop that I worked at, and I'd gotten to kind of learn the best pieces from all these other coffee shops. I was still met with a lot of surprise when people saw that I could like, work an espresso machine.

Ashley: Going on that same theme of not seeing people of color in coffee shops or behind the bar, even though that didn't reflect what you were seeing just out in the world, out on the street, it also seems like you carried that idea to the video content that you were making.

I can point to a handful of content creators about coffee online, and the people with the biggest platforms are white people, white men. And I wonder for you if that was part of the reason that you wanted to start making this kind of content?

Niki: It was. When working behind the bar, I was starting to get really lonely, feeling like I had to code-switch while at work, because I just didn't, there were no other people of color there.

And then on the other side of that, as I started getting more and more interested in just learning about coffee and looking up coffee videos, all I would see were white folks, primarily white men making these coffee videos. And to me, they just all kind of had the same feel.

I wanna say like—what is that word where something's really clean? It was just all these videos had like a very clean look to it and very professional.

So I was really, really looking for something that felt more like me. Not to say I'm not clean and professional, but I wanted something that was more relatable. Something with a little color to it, a little spice, something that showed that I didn't have to know exactly all the verbiage or all of the language, know all of the things in order to learn from this person.

So that kind of just added to this loneliness I was already feeling in real life and just made me think I maybe should create this thing that I wanna see.

Ashley: I love that spurred you to create something for yourself and create the thing that you were not seeing because that's really hard. It's hard to create something totally new or to even synthesize all the ideas that you have and say, “These are the things that I'm not seeing. How do I take what I'm not seeing and what I'm craving—the content that I need to keep going and keep moving—and make it?”

That sounds like an intuitive step, just because I'm saying them together, but it's not.

Niki: Right. Yeah.

Ashley: Something that I wrote down as you were talking was that you wanted to see video content that felt more like you, or felt more like the things that you were looking for and made room for you to maybe not necessarily know every single word in coffee, or know every single brewing process.

What I'm struck by in your videos is you essentially take an aspect of brewing, maybe it's bypass brewing, which is just to add water towards the end of brewing, that's a big topic and you have almost hour-long video on it, so I'd encourage people to go look at that if they wanna learn more about it.

But you take this one aspect of brewing and you leave all this room for experimentation. You talk about different ways that one can try this brewing method. You talk about different ways that people can play with it.

And I think zooming outward on the coffee industry: this is a really important way to approach coffee, because coffee is so often seen as inaccessible and pretentious and hard to do and if you don't nail your brew that first time, then you failed.

It seems like you're just kind of like, upturning that—you're saying, “No, you can experiment and have fun.” That to me seems so much more of the way that we should be speaking to customers.

Niki: Yes. Yeah. One thing I was struck by, in all the coffee shops that I worked at, and then just when I meet new coffee folks, often I get the sense of, “There is only one right way to do things,” or “I'm a huge believer in doing it this way. And I think the other ways are evil.” And that's what I was seeing in all the videos I was looking up. “This is the best way to do this thing.”

And then in the new coffee folks that I meet, if they have some sense that I have experience in coffee, it seems like there's always this assumption that I myself have really strong opinions on like, what exactly a cappuccino is for instance, or the right way to make it. And my thought is, “No, there's clearly a lot of ways to do things.”

There's almost as many ways, appropriate ways to make coffee as there are people who drink coffee. That's an exaggeration probably, but I don't really have these strong ideas that there's one way to do something when it comes to coffee. I might have preferences, but I really encourage people to feel comfortable, at least in exploring how they like their coffee.

Ashley: Right. And it seems like that space for exploration really gives people ownership over the cup of coffee they're brewing.

Niki: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashley: I think something that we do in coffee, and I don't know why we do it this way, is that we really limit the scope of experimentation, even though coffee is so easy to experiment with.

You can brew a cup of coffee and four minutes later you can brew another cup of coffee. Like, like how easy is that? If it's espresso, it's even shorter. So it's like, why do we shoot ourselves in the foot by saying these things have to be done this one way? I think that that translates to how customers feel about coffee.

Niki: Yeah. It seems like a huge roadblock when customers come in, actually wanting to learn something about coffee, or even just talk about what they know about coffee to the person on the other side of the counter. And often that person on the other side of the counter is telling them they’re wrong about something, for instance, or using all this language that a customer doesn't know.

And it just kind of shuts a lot of people down from either learning, thinking that they have to be bougie maybe, or it keeps them from making that conversation with baristas, which for a lot of people in coffee, I, at least from what I hear, they really like making connections with people.

So learning to open yourself up to more that you may not know about coffee, because I highly doubt there's anyone who knows everything about it, I think could be really beneficial.

Ashley: In one of the podcast episodes that you did, you talk about the flavor wheel, which is something I've been thinking a lot about. I just released an episode with a scholar named David Tortolini and we talked a lot about different flavors in coffee that we taste that are very Americanized, very Western flavors, and how maybe they don't translate globally.

But even going further than that, it's like the flavor wheel—which is, just for people who maybe don't know it, it's this wheel literally of all of these different flavors that one might taste in coffee, like berries or melon, moldy or whatever. Some of them are good, some of them are maybe not as desirable.

A lot of people base what they taste in coffee on that flavor wheel. I know that a lot of people, when they do coffee tastings, they'll even have the flavor wheel somewhere and refer to that as like a reference point. But the scope of the flavor wheel feels very narrow and that's something that you've discussed before.

Niki: Yeah. I know that, on the one hand for a lot of people, especially people who are familiar with most, if not all of the flavors on the flavor wheel, it can be a helpful reference point, and I assume that's what it's meant for. So, you know, that's cool for them.

I know for a lot of other people, it's very intimidating, to look at all those slices, or all those spokes on the wheel. And you're tasting coffee, especially if you are either new to coffee or you do not know those flavors. And you're like, “Oh my god, which one of these is the right one? That matches with this coffee…”

I think it's limiting both for people who are not familiar with all of those flavors and how to identify them and alienating for people who are just starting out in coffee and really want to be able to connect coffee with their own experiences.

Ashley: Even in that description of your podcast episode, you even mentioned that it doesn't necessarily need to be a specific tasting note as a way to describe coffee. It can be a sonnet or a sentence or a feeling. And I think that that's super powerful too, because as a new taster, if you're someone who's maybe just getting into coffee—I don't know that [even] now I can always articulate a specific note. Sometimes I'm like, “This is sweeter than the last cup I had,” or, “This reminds me of the color purple.”

It's just interesting that we don't make space for that, even though, like you said, being able to connect a customer where they're at with the coffee that they're tasting is a really powerful way to bring more consumers in.

Niki: Yeah. That's something that trips me up a lot too. Still I taste a cup of coffee and it, sometimes it just reminds me of a song. I've even gotten reminded of like TV shows, drinking coffee.

Sometimes I'm with people who are very technical about coffee, which I have nothing against—until you try to make that be everyone's way to appreciate coffee. But it might be they'll taste a coffee and list six different flavors on the flavor wheel. I'm like, “It tastes kind of sour.”

So I think that getting rid of the expectation that everyone must follow the color wheel or the flavor wheel would do wonders for people wanting to get into coffee.

Ashley: What coffee did you taste that reminded you of a TV show, and which TV show was it?

Niki: Good question. I believe it was my BlackNerd Coffee, and it reminded me of the show “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” because, it was—now I gotta be honest: The name, I think, probably influenced the show that it reminded me of a little bit, but when I tasted it, I was just instantly reminding me of kind of like … jolly.

It reminded me of kind of like, of a sense of community. It reminded me of a lighthearted Blackness that is just present, but not like, announced, if that makes sense?

Ashley: Yeah, that makes sense.

Niki: Okay. So yeah, the show was, you know, obviously it was a family of Black folks, but it's not like, “This is a show about Black people.” And that's kind of what the coffee reminded me of. I just thought of scenes in the show when I drank it.

Ashley: That's a really, I think salient point to make though, because, like, we make memories based on past experiences.

We connect taste and smell to memories, and we also are influenced by the world around us. So like picking up, like you mentioned, picking up that bag of coffee and you're like, '“Maybe I was influenced by the name of the coffee.” Like the name of the coffee is going to influence people too.

It's just like, I don't know. It just feels like a really fun way to approach coffee. And it's like, why would we ever wanna limit ourselves when we can have this fun spectrum of experience?

Niki: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I do—like don't get me wrong. I love numbers and data and technical stuff. I completely understand its place when you're trying to work in a professional setting and calibrate with other coffee people. But otherwise, I mean, it could open a little bit more up in the professional setting around the cupping table, but especially, it could be more open when you're talking to someone who makes coffee at home or whose career doesn't depend on calibrating with everyone else.

Ashley: Right. I was wondering if we could also talk about the second part of what your podcast does. So you do these experiments with people, but you also use that space as almost like a connector.

You mentioned earlier that one of the reasons that you started your platform, that you started Not Caffeinated Enough, was because you were feeling lonely and it seems like you were looking for community that you weren't seeing in other places. And you were like, “Well, let me go out there and like find other people that I wanna talk to and connect with.”

I was wondering—how did you start building this community for yourself?

Niki: Oh, good question. It started before I even picked up the phone to hit record.

I was looking for that online. So I didn't find it behind the bar in coffee shops. I didn't find it in the YouTube videos I was looking through. And so I started Googling “Black people and coffee,” because I didn't know what else to look for. Essentially for a while all I could find were just Google images of Black people drinking.

I think I was able to find one person. It was Michelle Johnson, the, I think in a lot of people's minds, the OG Black barista, and she had this blog about being Black in coffee and it was the only thing I could find.

And I was so excited to find it. And then I read to the last post and it was a while ago. I was like, “Well, what now?”

So I started the platform. And Instagram really like, as ornery as Instagram can be, it really became my primary [outlet] for a while. My only source of finding people of color in coffee, I just started putting these videos out on Instagram and kind of one by one, a few people started messaging me—and it wouldn’t even be like about being Black in coffee, but they were Black and they're like, “Hey, I like coffee too,” or, “Have you tried this thing with the AeroPress?” And just like started randomly giving me tips about coffee and it was really exciting.

I was chatting with a few people that way for a while, and, from what I'm told, there were people that shared my account with other people of color in coffee. And so it was surprisingly for me anyway, cause I didn't expect it, organic that I just started quote unquote “meeting” other Black people in coffee, really just through Instagram and through people sharing.

I started inviting a lot of these people onto my podcast and it just kinda grew from there. Other Black coffee people would introduce me to some other Black coffee people. And before you know it, I suddenly feel like I'm in a community.

Ashley: I think that that's really powerful that the community that you were seeking kind of came about from you putting yourself out there, in a way—but that's scary. Like that's hard.

Niki: Yeah. Yeah, it was. It was really hard because that fear I talked about—of recording myself—it didn't go away.

After the first time I recorded myself, it was … oh man, maybe the first, like, the whole first year I kept almost like giving up. I would have the same fear every time I picked up the phone.

Probably the platform wouldn't exist if not for my boyfriend who kept saying, “Yes, you do have a voice. Yes, you do have something to say that other people want to hear.” And so it's really thanks to him that I kept picking it up—after putting it down—but yeah, it was scary, and still sometimes is.

Because now I've almost gone in the opposite direction. Sometimes like, I now go kind of back and forth in a more extreme way from, “Okay. You now see,”—like I'm telling myself—“you now see a lot of Black people in coffee doing videos.”

And I don't know if I just missed it before starting up, but I had this sense of, “Okay, your work is done. You're seeing more of what you wanted to see. You don't need to do these videos anymore. So stop.”

And then on the other hand, I sometimes—I don't know, something triggers me and I wanna make a video about it. And so I start rambling on a video and then I'm like, “Is this too much? Are you putting too much of yourself out here now when it's not necessary?”

Ashley: This speaks a lot to me because I think about this a lot with Boss Barista. Sometimes I think, “When is this over? When does this end?” It's like both a personal question and a community question, I think. And I think that what your answer kind of spoke to was that like, how do you have a platform that is about crafting community or looking for something that you didn't see before?

And then once you start to see it, you're like, well, what do I do now? Or like, do I keep doing this thing? I found that the more personal I got with Boss Barista, like the more that I made it about the things that I cared about, the more universal it became and the more it felt like it evolved because I feel like I evolved. So [the podcast] is going to be a reflection of the way that I change.

Everybody's opinions will evolve too, or everybody's ideas will evolve. So I don't know. I think you should keep doing it. Even if you start to see the things that, like you said, you were seeing what you wanted to see, this is still a personal project, this is still about you.

And people will always wanna hear what you have to say.

Niki: Well, that's really nice. Thank you for saying that.

Ashley: How do you think about this as a personal project?

Niki: Well, you know what? I don't think I have thought about it as a personal project.

And maybe I should. That's a very good question. I'm glad you put that outta my mind. I think that's why I've been struggling for kind of a while now as to like, should I keep doing this? Because I just saw it as a way to bring more people of color out in the coffee industry.

So I saw it as like, I guess more of a community thing, not for myself. But as a personal project, yeah. You know what, I think I have to think about that. I'm not sure.

Ashley: Maybe we come back to this on another recording or something like that.

I feel like, I don't know. When you reflect back on some of the conversations that you've had in the past, do you find the more personal ones are the ones that really stick with you, or maybe the ones that are more personal or feel like they went in a direction that maybe you didn't expect?

Niki: Yeah. that holds true. And then along that same vein, I guess kind of brings me back to the personal projectness of my platform. I did actually use it as a way to, at least in my mind, to be selfish so that I could just talk to these people that I wanted to meet. But through the guise of just, “Will you be on my podcast where I have one viewer?” just because I wanted to talk to them. And yeah, when the—it was the conversations where, really where I could be myself and not filter myself or what I was saying. Those always result in, I think, better conversations when at least both parties feel that way and feel comfortable.

I think that those emerged more with people that I was communicating with in some way already, mostly through Instagram. Like one of us would like a video that the other put out or whatever and, you know, start talking about it.

Marvin Duncan, for instance, in that video you referenced where we talk for almost an hour—well, in reality, more than an hour—about the bypass method. That started because I was just going through his posts, which is what I was doing with every single Black person who had an account that I could find who posted about coffee. I saw that one of his posts was some notes [about] the bypass method.

That was kind of the first time I had heard about it and it really interested me. And so we just started—I asked him a question about it on Instagram, and a lot of my good connections started that way, where either I or the other person would ask a question about a coffee post.

I guess it was different for me than like from other coffee conversations, because what I was used to before was someone telling me what was best. Or telling me a tip or like, something I should try instead of asking, and then asking a question, and/or me asking and them being really transparent about not knowing everything, just what they know.

It did wonders in helping me to feel more comfortable about being myself because neither of us, it seemed, were putting on airs. That was, I think, probably the start of all of my deeper, more interesting conversations with folks.

Ashley: It's almost like full-circle, in a way.

Niki: Yeah.

Ashley: Coming back to that first experience at the Starbucks where you observed that people were being more authentically themselves.

Niki: #Deep

Ashley: This is my favorite thing in the whole world is to do this kind of connect it all, make it a circle.

As we're starting to wrap up our conversation, I was wondering—what are some things that you're thinking about right now?

Niki: You mean like where I wanna take my platform kind of thing?

Ashley: Yeah, let's start there, and then maybe extrapolate outward.

Niki: Mmm, okay. So there is this thing I've been thinking about for a while, and I haven't really told anyone about it because it's like, one: really scary for me to think about actually doing, and two: it feels really out there, feels like a stretch for someone like me to be able to do, but it also feels like a really good idea.

I wanna keep it close to the vest, but I really wanna get more into consulting for cafes. So I had this idea where I use my show to do that. Like maybe I find a team of some really good trustworthy coffee folks. And we just reach out to cafes or allow cafes to submit their shop and we go out and we consult with them on their community needs.

We find out more about their community and how they can best serve their community, train their staff, and just really customize the consultation or training for them, but we video it and we use it to help other shops and people learn more as well, sort of like “Kitchen Nightmares” kind of thing, but maybe not as yelly.

Ashley: Yeah. Like, not mean.

Niki: Yeah. A not-mean version.

I guess the main idea or the main point, besides taking off the bells and whistles, is really helping coffee shops to meet the needs of their community and not just the community that they see in their shops already, because chances are, it's just a certain—at least for a lot of shops that I've been in—it's just a certain kind of person that goes into or frequents that shop.

Opening your shop up even more to the other people that live in your area, I think, is really what is drawing me.

Ashley: Yeah. That's something that I wanted to talk a little bit about too: this idea of coffee shops as community spaces, which I don't think you can avoid if you're a coffee shop. It seems like a lot of spaces insert themselves in communities and kind of assume that's all. That's needed to be part of a community, but there's a lot more that's involved.

There's a lot more about knowing who you're serving, who actually lives in your neighborhood, are you employing people in your neighborhood versus, like you said, kind of selecting a sample cut of some people and the people behind the bar don't reflect the community.

It seems like a lot of that conversation starts at a very top level of just like, we need to be more community-invested, but there's not a lot of conversations about how to do that. So it would be really cool to see you and other baristas go in and kind of tackle that problem head-on.

Niki: Yeah, it's a really exciting idea to me, especially if I get to work with more people I respect.

Ashley: I would love to see that—I'd watch that.

Niki: Well, cool, good. One viewer down. We got one.

Ashley: That's the starting place. So we talked a little bit about what you'd like to do with the platform in the future. What would you like to see in the coffee industry as a whole in the future?

Niki: I'd really like to see, honestly: more events that were run by people of color. I just think that there's so much potential in how we can open up education in coffee if we just hear from different people.

I know not all white people in coffee are the same or give the same information, but we are kind of, at least from what I'm seeing, ignoring large groups of people that could have totally different perspectives and things to bring to the table.

I haven't been to a lot of coffee events, but the ones that I have been to, I feel like I hear a lot of the same information, or I'll go to a breakout panel or something where the topic really interests me. But when I actually attend, I'm hearing things that I've heard before. I know from personal conversations, from other people of color that there are totally different perspectives out there.

And so bringing people who maybe haven't been quote unquote “sullied” by attending a lot of the existing coffee events, I feel like they could just bring something totally new. And I'm really looking forward to seeing more of that.

Ashley: What would you want people listening to this to know about you?

Niki: Mm—as little as possible.

Ashley: That’s fair. I get that. I totally understand that. Do you feel like you ever have to balance that, as a person who's online? Because I feel like I do.

Niki: Yeah, I do. I'm never really sure how much of myself to give. I generally err on the side of not really giving much of myself, but honestly it's not because I'm so opposed to it. It just—it doesn't come naturally to talk much about myself or what's going on in my life or anything like that.

If I thought that all of my followers were really interested in—I don't know, that kind of thing, then maybe I would work on it, on presenting more of me, but really, I feel like it's enough to be authentic as long as I'm not trying to be someone else. I am being the real me on videos.

I’m just not talking about myself much.

Ashley: I see what you're saying. Well, Niki, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. This has been so lovely, and I'm thrilled and honored that I got to spend time with you.

Niki: Yeah. Thank you, Ashley, for asking such thoughtful questions.

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We learn so much about the world from the internet that it’s easy to forget that this sort of communication is still new—and take for granted everything we have at our fingertips. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted to learn more about a new coffee shop, you couldn’t just go on its Instagram page and see what sort of content it was posting. But now, a scroll through someone’s feed can tell you about everything from their menu offerings and hours of operation to their events, workers, and political stances.

David Tortolini is an incoming graduate student at Purdue University who studies food and digital spaces. Last year, he gave a talk about how coffee brands used their Instagram pages following the murder of George Floyd to galvanize their communities, whether by participating in fundraisers or attending protests. David’s work exposes the importance of digital platforms: They are both the fuel that connects communities and the levers that enforce existing power dynamics and create disparities in access to resources.

In other words, social media and other shared digital spaces can be powerful tools. Used well, they have the potential to harness collective action, uplift voices, and help folks find people who care about the same things as they do. Used poorly, they can cause enormous harm. If you use social media to make decisions about the world around you—which, at this point, we all do to some extent—then this is a must-listen episode. Here’s David:

Ashley: David, I was hoping you could start by introducing yourself to everybody.

David: Sure. My name is David Tortolini. I'm an incoming graduate student at Purdue University in the American Studies department.

Ashley: David, did you grow up with coffee in your life?

David: Kinda sort of? My parents drink coffee. They drink maybe two or three cups a day. But for me, I always grew up drinking yerba mate. My mom is Argentinian and my dad is BIPOC from the United States. But growing up for me, it was always mate, mate, mate with the bombilla—I grew up on all that.

Hey! This is a digital space! So wild! Please support and help sustain this digital space by making a financial contribution:

But I didn't start drinking coffee until I was about 25 when I needed a pick-me-up one day—and I don't drink energy drinks—and my friends gave me a blonde roast from Starbucks and it was like an aha moment.

Ashley: Tell me about that aha moment.

David: I always knew coffee to be like, something off-putting for me. But when I had it that time, I just tasted a complexity of flavors and I was like, “Okay, this is why people love coffee. I can see why people love coffee black.”

And I just jumped head first into finding out about specialty coffees, finding flavor profiles, trying to understand where coffee regions are, like the different regions, the varietals, the seasons, how even the amount of rain can change the way a coffee's gonna be roasted the following year.

And then the big, almost music-in-the-background kind of moment was when I had Tandem Coffee’s—they had this coffee with a blueberry note and I tasted blueberries and I was like, “Wow, this is so complex, more than I could ever even have imagined.”

Ashley: It's funny you mentioned the tasting note of blueberries, because I feel like if you took a poll of different coffee folks and their aha moment or their, “Wow, this is something totally different that I didn't expect” [moment], I bet you at least half of them would say that blueberries are part of that journey.

I know for me it is. I had a coffee from, I think it was from Irving Farm.

It was a natural Ethiopia called—oh, I'm gonna get this wrong, but it was a natural Ethiopia. And I remember tasting blueberries in that, and I was like, “This is so different from anything I've ever had.”

But blueberries kind of come up a lot in these tasting notes. I think Veronica Grimm of Glitter Cat actually just did an episode of Soleil Ho's podcast. Soleil is a food writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and she has a podcast called Extra Spicy, and I think Veronica mentioned saying the word blueberry like, 23 times [in a barista competition].

David: Yeah, I wonder what it is that why we have such a connection with blueberries and coffee. This isn't part of my research, but I think it could just be maybe the acidity. It could be a similar acidity profile or the tannins of the coffee. Just something about coffee and blueberries—they just mesh so well together.

Ashley: I know you said that this is probably not part of your studies. And I wonder if this is a question that maybe you might know somebody who would know the answer to this, but do you think that blueberries specifically have a distinct flavor that's not replicable by other things?

David: I think so, because when you think of artificial blueberry flavoring, right? It's a manmade attempt trying to make what a blueberry can be synthesized as. And it's totally different than when you're trying to eat or even drinking something with wild blueberries in it, or even farmers’ blueberries.

And I think blueberries are one of those things—at least in the West—because when you look at how flavor is inherently part of a colonial process, blueberries are just like, I don't wanna say a ubiquitous term, but it's just like a flavor term. When you think of a blueberry automatically, you think of the flavors on your tongue.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a good point. And also thinking about this reference point as being specific to maybe Western countries, I wonder what would be the analogous flavor call for maybe somebody living in a different part of the world? What's the thing that like this region of the world all associates as this powerful moment together?

Or is there another flavor that so many people have tasted in coffee in a different region of the world that has really opened up their eyes? I wonder if that experience translates.

David: Exactly. This is when I'm thinking instantly of—I hope I'm saying this right—Ārāmse Coffee out of India where they're doing some of the craziest, like most powerful decolonial process work in food in general. That’s something I think is right up their alley because I'm thinking of the James Hoffmann video where they were talking about the de-colonial practices of strawberries.

Ashley: Tell me a little bit about that because I think that I watched that a while ago, but just for people who haven't seen that, can you describe it a little?

David: Yeah! If anybody gets a chance to watch the video, it's riveting, but when we think of flavors and coffee—and it doesn't necessarily have to be coffee, it can be wine, because wine is a big thing that people and academics talk about when it comes to flavors—we look at this using almost a Western lens.

We look at it, thinking like everybody around the world knows what a strawberry is, but not really. Not a lot of people have access to fruits like strawberries. Or they'll say something [tastes] like stone fruit. But not a lot of people know what a stone fruit necessarily is. Like I still get mixed up when I see the word “stone fruit” on a coffee bag.

But when we have collectives and groups like Jen Apodaca with Mother Tongue who says things like gummy bears or peach rings, we all know what peach rings are because peach rings is just—it’s candy. We know, “Hey, it tastes sour like a piece of candy,” or it's gonna taste kind of gummy bear-like. We know that experience globally more so than saying it's gonna taste like Northwestern summer sage.

Ashley: That's a really good point. Like there are certain things that—I'm thinking about this in two ways. Number one: There are certain things that are global, that are international.

Number two, describing things with like really—to be specific so that people can recall them. Like, stone fruit is not specific. Like, is that a nectarine? Is that a plum? Is that a this, is that a that?

But why can't we get more specific? Or, can we identify the thing in that flavor? So, saying sour candies, maybe someone hasn't had a sour candy, but they know what sour is. Like, there are ways to be more specific and intentional with the language that you use to bring more people to the table so they can at least have a reference point to understand what you're talking about.

David: Exactly. It's 100% that, and I think this is one of the reasons why I love the coffee industry so well, is that so many people have been so receptive to trying to change the way that they described flavor and contextualized flavor.

People don't realize that it makes me—I like to say I'm a budding scholar, and it makes people like me who do research on how we discuss flavor and food and food cultures and digital spaces specifically, how are we talking about flavor in these spaces, and when I'm looking at the coffee industry, I'm seeing people talking about experience as a flavor, and then it makes me look at the world a little differently.

It's like, “Hey, how do I experience wine as a flavor? How do I experience something?” When somebody says this tastes very bitter, very bitter could be a good flavor or a bad flavor.

Ashley: Speaking of that, you’re a scholar, you study food and digital spaces. What brought you specifically into the specialty coffee fold, like what drew you to this industry beyond just being an avid fan of coffee?

David: I have so many friends in the specialty coffee industry in Virginia. I have friends who are baristas—and still are baristas‚ friends who are coffee managers, roasting managers, even coffee shop owners.

Seeing and being immersed in their world because—I consider myself an at-home barista. I have the whole setup, I now just got a W60 from Hario. I have the kettle. I have the good grinders. I have access to [all] that. And it was just an interest in the industry. When I had my aha moment, I didn't jump in feet-first. I like, reverse-one-and-a-half-competitive-diving-maneuvered into the coffee cup essentially.

And I’m still swimming in it. I'm still loving it.

Ashley: Yeah, but like, you're not just a person who makes a lot of coffee at home and is really interested in specialty coffee. Like you're part of the discourse.

Recently—not recently, maybe this was like a year and a half ago—but both you and I gave talks at a thing called The Barista League.

And I remember seeing your name. I was like, I don't know who this person is, but you gave this really cool talk about how digital spaces can convey values and how you show true solidarity and commitment to community through Instagram and other social media platforms. And I was like, this is a person who's in it, like this isn't a casual observer.

Do you know what I mean?

David: Yeah, definitely. I think what brought about my interest in that discussion I gave was I'm a minority. I'm a proud minority. There's no way that I hide it. Every day where I walk, I'm a proud minority. And when the murder of George Floyd happened, it hit me just like it hit everybody else.

It hit me hard, and I was fortunate enough to have amazing friends around the world who were posting these powerful messages. And like I said, my friends are coffee shop managers, and they actually own shops and roasteries now. And I saw how they were engaging with it and then I saw how the coffee industry was engaging with the discourse happening.

As a scholar—because I was still doing my master's research then—it just piqued my interest. Like, “Hey, how are my friends creating discourse and change in our com—” I don't wanna say “little community” because the Tidewater region and Richmond are massive communities, but how are their posts changing our communities?

I actually got to see it happen. Like my friends organized fundraisers, they organized protests. My friends even organized essentially like a rallying point at their coffee shop where people were given free cups of coffee as donations for helping out.

Ashley: Right, that makes sense. Let’s backtrack a little bit because I wanna talk about your research and what you're studying to give people a framework for how you've been able to use that lens to kind of look at the coffee industry. So can you talk a little bit about what you're studying and what your background is?

David: I was at Old Dominion University. I graduated from the Institute for the Humanities, and my focus of research is looking at how we discuss food items and flavor in digital spaces and how it affects minority populations. How can we say something like—my mom is Argentinian and culturally raised Argentinian—how can somebody say somebody like, “All Argentinians eat rice and beans” online, and it becomes almost canonical in some of these online spaces?

But … we don't really eat rice and beans in Argentina like that. Or you could say something like, “All chorizos taste the same” when all chorizos don't taste the same.

I'm a chorizo aficionado, I love chorizo, give me a choripán [and I’m the] happiest person in the world. And I can tell you all chorizos don't taste the same, but when you go on these online spaces, they're like, “Yeah, they all taste the same.” Or stuff like, “Dulce de leche tastes the same” when it doesn't, there are variances. There are different ingredients. There are different complexities.

And another example is empanadas, not all empanadas are cooked the same. Every country has its own different version or variation of the empanada. So don't say, “Hey, my mom fries empanadas,” when we don’t fry empanadas in my house, we bake 'em.

Ashley: So it seems like you—let me see if I can try to summarize it: So it seems like you look at how essentially we create ideas of like, what is true and what is not about food via digital spaces. Like, are you specifically looking at how that happens online?

David: For my main research, yes. I also think it's part of the continuation of the historical discourse we've seen in cookbooks, we've seen in food television shows, we've seen in reality television.

I'm thinking of reality shows popping into my mind where a cook from overseas cooks a dish from where they're from, and they're being told, “Oh, well, people aren't gonna like it because it's too weird. It's too different.” One show that I'm thinking of in particular is from the U.K. They were like, “You have to kind of like, Anglicize it a little bit, kind of like gussy it up for the British audience.”

And in a way it's like, it can also be seen almost as a form of violence as a way to say, “Hey, your food's not good enough to be eaten in this country unless you do X, Y, and Z. And then we'll say it's good, but we're gonna wait for hipsters to start eating it, for them to start liking it before the general population will want to.”

Ashley: That's so interesting. It seems so wild how much we look for validation of a thing to be good or not based on very specific populations, and we just write off the taste and the interest of other countries, like other huge populations of people where this is a very standard food, or this is a very accepted way for someone to eat.

And it's also like, not even testing the thing to see if it's like—I don't know. Like that just seems, that seems so complex and layered, and I imagine this must be frustrating, but rewarding research in a way.

David: It is, it really is. I feel like there are moments where you just want to scream in frustration when you see some of the television shows or apps, or even Instagram or TikTok, the way they describe minority food cultures and or minority cooking.

But then you see moments where in the coffee industry where we see Ārāmse and other—I don't wanna call 'em “barista activists,” I just wanna call them the straight-up, general activists who are trying to fight this discourse and trying to make things more equitable and fair. So at the same time, it's like, I see both sides and it’s just—I love it. I'm always excited by it. And I'm just so passionate about this.

Ashley: Let's shift back to the conversation that you had, or the talk that you gave for The Barista League. So you gave this talk about digital spaces and you looked at Instagram to kind of parse out different ways that coffee companies—from the small level, like maybe a shop manager or a small coffee shop, to the bigger level, to businesses and media companies.

And you talked about how they essentially share community and share their values via social media. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the premise of that talk and what some of maybe the findings were of that?

David: Yeah, definitely. So like I said, the premise of that talk was I was spurred by my friends in the specialty coffee industry and their reaction to the murder of George Floyd. I was spurred on by looking at how—because I've taken digital media classes, I was spurred on by looking at how scholars like Dr. Christian Fuchs and Dr. Safiya Noble talk about how places like Instagram TikTok, and even Google are always gonna be inherently zones of power struggles.

How can community be built, destroyed, and rebuilt essentially in these digital places where power isn't equally shared? We always want power to be equally shared online, but power isn't.

There are so many different theories and ideas and schools of thought about it. But I was looking at how power is created and shared in terms of helping out social activism movements, or giving reverence and credence to minority bodies during a turbulent—and it still is a turbulent—time in the United States.

And I looked at, for example, with the local roaster: How did somebody who's a coffee shop manager, how did he create discourse mainly with his customers and friends and family groups? How did he create discourse to help shed light on the plight of minority baristas or how minorities are mistreated? How did he create space?

And when I looked at the local coffee shop, they did a fundraiser. So I looked at how they created a discourse by creating a fundraiser at a shop level. Then I did a roaster that's nationally known, but essentially regionalized.

And then I looked at the media because the media is always gonna be a key point, of course in just life in general. So I looked at—how did the coffee media react? How did the coffee media give space and credence and change their ways to help marginalize and minority bodies create and build community?

Ashley: Why was this important for you to look at? Or what did you want people to take away from this conversation?

David: I think it was important to look at because it showed how community is created.

Ashley: Mmhmm.

David: I also want people to know that these digital spaces online are always gonna be unequal. That people who have 1.5 million followers are gonna have way more voice, credence, and power than somebody who has 879.

Ashley: That's a good point.

Can you talk a little bit about that idea of digital spaces and power? Because I don't know that those two things—I think when you say it like that, that makes sense. Like, of course, somebody with 1.2 million followers is gonna have more power than somebody with like 837. But I don't know that that tie is necessarily intuitive.

David: No, definitely. I use this analogy of the high school cafeteria. I like to think of some of these apps, it reminds me of high school and I think of fashion. When the really cool, really popular kid in the school wears this avant-garde shirt from a band that they discovered from a friend of a friend, but the band is something like, I wanna say LCD Soundsystem, my favorite band.

But then you have this skater punk or this indie kid who’s been wearing that same LCD Soundsystem shirt for the last two years every other day. But everybody's like, “Oh yeah. Now you're copying the cool kid.” And this kid's like, “No, this is the shirt I've been wearing for the last two years.”

But everybody's like, “No, no, no, the cool person's wearing it. So you're following them.” And that's the kind of power struggle I think of is like—you have these big brands, these influencers, these people with a ton of power, or it doesn't have to be people. We even noticed that even nations have power in these digital spaces that they're using their voices and the whole entire world is listening.

But then you have people who are activists, scholars, even community members who have been like, “We've been saying that for the last 15, 20, 50, 100+ years, and now y'all want to listen to this.”

Ashley: That's really interesting. I think that analogy, number one, was incredibly powerful, but two, how do you rectify something like that? I don't know that there's an answer to it. But is it that cool—like going back to the analogy—is it that cool kid saying, “Oh, I wasn't wearing this shirt first. Like that guy over there was wearing it first.”

But what if that kid didn't even like—I'm just trying to think of, how do we distribute power in digital spaces in a way that does feel more equitable? Again, I don't know if there's an answer to that, but...

David: I don't think there's a real answer just yet, because I've seen, we will see some things where somebody will tag somebody, will tag the person they got the outfit from.

I'm thinking of somebody like Kim Kardashian who might tag or mention saying, “Hey, this is a person's brand I got this from,” it could be a small shop owner, and then next thing you know, they're gaining power and their shop is blowing up, but we're not seeing it enough with everything else just yet. I think it could slowly start happening, but this is not getting enough traction.

Ashley: Right. I think earlier you also said something about community-building. And I think that that's an important term because I think it's really easy for people in the coffee industry to talk about the word “community” as a given, as opposed to a thing that you build and your digital space is part of that too.

David: Yeah. Oh yeah. I think having a digital space that represents the shop, the idea, the values is very important in the coffee industry and in the food industry. Pretty much almost every business in general.

For example, I'm thinking of, when I look up a shop, I look up new shops to go to when I'm traveling to a different city for conferences or for fun, I immediately look at their Instagram page to say, “Hey, is this the vibe that I'm looking for? Is this the kind of drink that I like?”

Because somebody can say, try this shop. Somebody could say, try Shop Oli—I'm just using Oli because my dog is right next to me. They say, “Try Shop Oil,” but they may have a ton of drinks that I may not necessarily find appealing, but somebody else could say, “Go to Chester's Place,” and Chester's Place could have the wildest drinks imaginable that are mind-blowing, pushing the coffee industry, but they only have like 15 followers cuz they're brand-new.

Ashley: How would you make a decision in that situation? And I guess that goes back to the essential question: How do you know a coffee shop is quote-unquote “good”?

David: Yeah. Of course, it's a little bit about trying, but it's also like, is this a community that I wanna be a part of?

Ashley: Do you think that people are conscious of how much decision-making they make based on a person or a brand or a place's digital presence?

David: I think we are now.

I think this pandemic has definitely shown how much credence we've given to digital spaces and digital trends and digital footprints, because I'm thinking of—look at all the dance trends we saw in the early days of the pandemic, like how people were like, “Hey, I'm basing what I'm doing, I'm basing how am I having fun based on what I'm seeing on digital spaces.”

I'm actually working on a really cool project with another scholar. We're looking at like feta-baked pasta on TikTok. How is this influencing the way we look at Mediterranean [cooking], especially Italian dishes?

Ashley: Something that I think I lament about a lot in coffee—I was just reading a book about the history of brunch from one of the colleagues that you actually recommended I talk to, and we'll probably have a conversation with her in the upcoming weeks.

But I was reading this book about brunch and I realized that coffee is not as good at talking about its own history, but with this digital footprint that we're leaving we will have a history that's recorded in just a very different way.

David: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're seeing better, especially in terms of minority voices, we're seeing more, I'm seeing more and more minority voices in marginalized communities speaking in the coffee industry than before.

I'm thinking of people like getchusomegear who have created a community for marginalized and minority coffee and baristas and that's a community being built. That’s people who have connections and are building friendships based on that.

Ashley: Right. And it's completely outside of any physical space or any need for, let's say, capital to buy a building or rent a space for a coffee shop or something like that. Like it's allowing more people into the conversation because the barrier to entry is so much lower.

David: Exactly. I think of cosplay when it comes to these community-building spaces that—I don't wanna say niche, but are a little bit smaller than what we typically would consider. Because look at how cosplay—this is so dating myself…

Ashley: I’m ready.

David: When we're looking at like Xanga, Livejournal, and even early MySpace, where we would see cosplay communities build these fan pages for either their community or just for individuals and how people were able to build friendships and relationships.

People have been married based on them meeting through cosplay groups online!

Ashley: Right. I think I just saw a chart recently that was tracking how people met their spouses over like the last hundred years. And like, I was so surprised—this is maybe silly for me to be surprised by this, but I was so surprised by how many people in like the 50s, 60s, 70s were married to their neighbors.

I can't even imagine that now because we grew up in a digital era, but I think about being online, growing up in the digital era, getting on Facebook for the first time in like the early 2000s and so much of the connections that I've made since then, as an adult, have been through digital spaces.

That chart showed that now, like almost, I think half of people meet their spouses online.

David: Yeah. These digital spaces are integral in our life.

Companies, all companies, have realized it now, but I remember when these digital spaces were being created, like early Instagram and stuff, and people were like, “Oh, it's just a trend. It's not gonna really happen. It's not gonna go down like that.”

And it's totally has. Think about how much of our everyday lives we can do online. Now we can do groceries. We can do our doctor's appointments online now.

Ashley: Right.

David: For me, that's mind-blowing. Cause I, I would never have done a virtual doctor's appointment 15+ years ago, but now I'm like, “Oh, okay.”

Ashley: I was watching an old episode of “30 Rock,” like maybe season one or season two. And that's a show that I would consider pretty modern, but they had flip phones in the first two seasons and I was like, “Oh, like this was not that long ago that we wouldn't have had access to Instagram on our phones.”

We wouldn't have had our emails on our phones. Maybe some people had Blackberries, but now I'm like, you know, after this phone call, I'll probably check my email on my phone, even though my computer's in front of me. But it's just interesting to see how much of—not just how our connection to digital spaces has changed over time, but how influential it's been to our everyday lives.

I'm wondering, as we're kind of thinking of last thoughts in this conversation, what are ways that coffee shops can—or any coffee brand really—think about their digital footprint? Like, do you think that people are taking them seriously enough? Or do you think that there needs to be more investment and…I don't know, that's kind of like a loose question there.

So take it in whatever direction you want.

David: I think it's 50-50, to be honest, I see some shops that are very proactive with their digital footprints. They're honest and talking to their targeted audience. They’re honest when it comes to saying, “Hey, this is what we're doing.” They're essentially showing their everyday lives, their everyday shop-to-shop running—online.

And then other shops are just using [social media] to post a picture, just to hope that somebody's gonna cruise through the shop.

I think it's a little bit of 50-50, where we see some shops still have this mentality that [social media] is kinda like putting a picture in the newspaper, like back in the day we just did newspaper advertisements—they’re using it as that, but other shops are like, “Hey, we can actually build a community and engage with our favorite customers and engage with people who want to ask us questions.”

Ashley: Yeah, it seems like—maybe I'm wrong in this, but it seems like people seem to know that they need to have, like, let's say an Instagram account, or they need to have some sort of digital platform, but it doesn't necessarily seem like everybody has taken that next step mentally to say like, “Oh, but this means something. What I put on here means something beyond just like, ‘Here's a latte, please come in,’ or ‘Our hours are seven to six.’”

David: Yeah, definitely. It's I think—it's just changing the way shops are being run. Now look, shops have changed so much within the last five years that it's almost mind-blowing.

While the way we see stuff, like how point-of-sale is happening, how small, independent shops are doing essentially drive-through services or pickup counters. We're seeing that happening, but I think it is a lot of change happening in these shops. Some people are kind of putting the digital spaces as an afterthought when they need to put them into the forefront.

Ashley: Yeah, I would agree with that because so much can be conveyed through what you see online, but also like it helps identify your—not necessarily your mission. I don't wanna get too preachy, but like what you're about, like what you want people to know about you.

I don't even think we talked about it in this conversation, but something I think about a lot is how we differentiate ourselves in the market. Sometimes I think people are like, “Specialty coffee is oversaturated,” and I would disagree with that. I would say that it's not that we're oversaturated, it's that we're all the same. And there are ways to differentiate who you are versus like who your neighbor is—as long as you think about it, as long as you really say, “This is who I am,” or, “This is what the shop is about. And I need to find ways to communicate that.” And I think having a really strong digital footprint is part of that.

David: Yeah, that’s exactly it. You just have to be you. People are trying to keep up with the Joneses, but I come from the punk DIY scene where people love to express themselves. Self-expression is tantamount in the scenes.

And I think I'm seeing more and more coffee shops having that kind of ethos. So like, yeah, this is us. This is our community. We're a part of this neighborhood. These are some of the community members that are walking through. So let's be part of the community. Let's talk more about a community versus let's trying to act and look like everybody else.

Ashley: David. Is there anything you want people to know about you or listening to you that you'd like people to take away from this conversation?

David: That digital spaces—of course, we all know they're here. That power is always gonna be a little different in them, but like Dr. Safiya Noble talks about in Algorithms of Oppression—the book—is that they're always gonna be almost unequal. But what we're noticing now, especially in the specialty coffee industry, is that people are by being themselves, by having a voice, to give them voices to the marginalized, to minority communities…

And we're starting to see that it's not even a trend. I essentially call it almost like a mini-revolution of change that I'm super excited for. And I can't wait to see what happens in 10 to 15 years when I reflect on today's conversation.

Ashley: David. Thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

David: Of course.

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My guest today is Gefen Skolnick, founder of Couplet Coffee. Gefen has been an avid coffee fan for years, and she worked in the tech world before starting her brand. In her previous role, she was tasked with assessing users’ experiences and insights, calling people to learn what they liked and didn’t like about the products they interacted with.

Gefen used this consumer-focused lens to start Couplet. Couplet is a fun, colorful, and, most importantly, approachable brand. On its website, it reminds folks that coffee is “for f*g everyone.”

It’s no secret that coffee can feel inscrutable or exclusionary. Many assume that, to make it well, you need a certain amount of knowledge, or access to tools and gear that might be expensive or out of reach. Gefen turns those assumptions around, presenting consumers with fun ways to enjoy coffee, and removing the pressure of making a perfect brew.

For me, what pops out of this conversation is how diverse the coffee market really is. Though the industry can feel oversaturated, Gefen reminds us that worrying about a crowded market might not be the result of actual competition, but rather a sign that we’re all pursuing the same target. Couplet is a fresh reminder that we can create fun, interesting, and novel approaches to coffee, and in turn, invite a whole new group of drinkers in who might have otherwise felt too intimidated or unwelcome to participate. Here’s Gefen.

Ashley: Gefen, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Gefen: Yeah, of course. My name is Gefen. My pronouns are she/her. I'm the founder of Couplet Coffee. And for the past few years, I've been thinking and dreaming up what it would be like to start a coffee company. So I'm super excited to chat.

Ashley: What were your first interactions with coffee? Did you grow up with coffee as a child?

Gefen: We could talk about this for like 20 minutes, so I'll try to condense it. But, yes, there was a lot of coffee culture just in my family. And so a lot of our culture is surrounded by having a nighttime coffee, like a Turkish or Armenian coffee.

And it always felt super communal—like by a fire, with a bunch of friends, and I kind of felt that was missing in a lot of the other different cultures that I'd have [coffee]. It's kinda like a grab-and-go situation typically. And so once I graduated from high school, went into college, and I was in this 300-square-foot apartment, and I just wanted to get out at any time that I could.

So I would just go to these different coffee shops. And in high school, I thought Starbucks was the peak of coffee. Like on my birthday, people would just have a bunch of these coffee cups on all the little—you know how everyone brings like the little gifts for your birthday? I just had coffee cups everywhere, all over desks in homeroom, because I thought that that was the best coffee.

Once I was in college and kind of exploring a little bit more of my surroundings—I was at Santa Monica College, I went to community college for a few years—I realized there were other shops, other places to go.

I first found Groundwork Coffee, which I am forever indebted to them because I was so in shock that coffee could taste that way and that people were making cashew milk from scratch. I thought that was insane in the best way, and I was just obsessed and taking everybody there and working from there and studying from there.

Then I discovered on my little walks near the beach that there are other coffee shops around. And then I very much realized that there is a whole ecosystem here that I had no idea about.

Ashley: Are you the type of person who like, gets really into things?

Gefen: (Laughs)

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Ashley: Because that to me seems like—I love trying to pick apart like these facets of people's personalities. Like I wonder, are you someone who really passionately pursues interests?

Gefen: Yes. (Laughs) That's exactly what happens. In high school, my first love was basketball and I was extremely obsessed with it. It was probably excessive. That was kind of like the first thing that I fell in love with. And so I was watching YouTube videos during class, after class, of new moves that I wanted to try, new ways to train. I was constantly in the loop on the NBA, WNBA, NCAA—just like obsessed. Before school at like 5:30 a.m., I would try to get to school really early so that the basketball courts were empty and I would just play in the freezing cold and just keep trying to get better. And I was just super obsessed with it.

And after school, obviously, that was what I was doing, too. On the weekends—that's what I was doing. And eventually, I got really good and it became kind of like a really big part of my life, but I was virtually obsessed. My fingers were really messed up constantly from playing outside in the cold and having these little, like little injuries on my fingers constantly—either I had a splint on or some sort of cast, because I just messed up my body from doing it excessively as a kid.

That was the first way that I got obsessed with something. And then coffee! That's why there were seven to 10 coffee cups every birthday, because everybody and their mother knew that I was obsessed with Starbucks at the time.

Side note, we can talk about this later, but I applied to Starbucks to be a barista over a hundred times. That is my villain origin story for sure in coffee.

Ashley: Over a hundred times?

Gefen: I actually wanna go back to my old email from middle school and high school to see how many times—it was 100% more than a hundred times. Because every time I submitted it, it was to like 45+ locations, because I was in the Valley in LA so there was a ton of options for me. Never once heard back. (Laughs)

Ashley: Ugh, that’s a bummer!

Gefen: Yeah, but maybe that's why I became obsessed with one day doing something in coffee. This is probably a very positive thing that happened.

Ashley: It's like the mountain that you could never overcome. So you're like, okay, F this, I’m going to do my own thing.

Gefen: I'm gonna do it myself.

Ashley: I'm trying to even do the math on that. Like, how many times a year you would have to apply to…

Gefen: You have no idea. I'm gonna get you that number because I am now very curious as to what it was.

Ashley: I love math. I love numbers. So you're speaking my language here.

Gefen: Fantastic!

Ashley: At what point, when you were exploring these coffee shops in the Santa Monica area, what kind of switched it for you? When you were like, “Oh, I'm a casual fan,” or someone who is really into coffee, to, “This is something I maybe wanna work in or explore as a business, or maybe even just enmesh myself in more than just a person who goes to the coffee shop every day”?

Gefen: Yeah, that's a great question, because there was absolutely a transition from a person who's just drinking an absurd amount of coffee every day to, “Oh, I wanna know what's happening behind the scenes here.”

I will say it took a very long time for me to get to the point where I was comfortable in even asking certain questions, because I just kind of felt like I—I never really felt that I was supposed to be in those places. And that's historically how I felt, both in tech and other places as well, where I just kind of went into places where I don't necessarily look or act or seem like I belong there.

But, I went to these different shops, and like I said, because I lived in such a small apartment that was not insulated—so it was just either hot or cold all the time, and [there were] not really a lot of places to kind of work from—I just became friends with so many baristas. It was funny, they just like knew that I was just gonna be there all day, most days.

You talk to someone enough that you just start to get curious about their job and what they're doing. It’s not even me going to look into, “This is a business that I wanna start one day.” I never thought that this was something that I'd be doing, especially not right now.

I really did think that tech was my biggest passion in life and that I would be doing it forever and I would start multiple tech businesses and we'll get into that after, but really, I just started looking at the beans.

I was getting bored, you know, taking breaks in between studying. I studied linguistics and computer science in college. I’m not sure how much you know about either of those, but it's just super technical and tough. And you don't wanna think about that for four hours straight. So just like, I'm gonna let my mind wander. And so I picked up some bags and was reading things about elevations and origins.

I was just like, so curious. There's a lot of information on this bag. What does any of this mean? I slowly kind of built up the confidence to ask the baristas, “Like, okay, what does this mean? Why is this bag of beans for espresso specifically?”

And most of my friends and consumers are still like, “Oh my god, I accidentally used my espresso beans in my French press! Oh my god, is it gonna break down?”

I'm like, “Oh my god, no, it's totally fine.” I didn't realize how many people also had those same thoughts. And so I just asked a lot of questions like that. Like, “Okay, why is this bag of Brazilian beans different from this bag of Peruvian beans?” Every kind of time that I'd be there during my breaks, I would be doing that.

They [the baristas] became super friendly with me. It wasn't an annoying thing. I just ended up actually hanging out with some of these people outside of the coffee shop too, which was funny, but yeah, it was just out of complete, sheer curiosity.

I will say it took me a very long time to upgrade my own setup at home because all of the things being sold at the different coffee shops were so much more expensive than I could afford. I was working at AMC Theatres, cleaning bathrooms for 40 hours a week during college. For the first few years in college, until I started teaching computer science to kids to kinda switch it up a little bit.

Even though I might have been able to afford some sort of new grinder, which like, who even knows? It was just so hard to even know, “What do I need to make a cup at home?”

It was just so [a] very big question mark. I just always had assumed that I would never be able to make that same cup at home until one of my best friends, Zach—he's the founder of Gnarwhal Coffee, he is the co-founder of it. We met in 2017 and I used to go to his house and he had a Breville espresso machine and a Breville grinder.

And somehow he just made the best coffee. Sometimes I would just be like, “I don't need to go to a coffee shop today. I'd rather drink your coffee.”

Ashley: I'm just going to your house!

Gefen: I've loitered at his house a lot cause he had a nice apartment and he's a little bit older than me, so I was just so excited to go to his house and hang out and loiter and just like be drinking his coffee all day.

That's when I first discovered, “Oh my god, like, wait—people can make this same taste at home, if not better? And make it tailored to their taste? That's wild.” I had absolutely no idea.

He's the one who pushed me to get that same setup at home. I had that setup for years up until very recently. That's what led me to kind of also push a lot, like dozens of my friends also started getting the same setup at home, because I was just so passionate about the fact that you can do so much with that same setup at home.

Ashley: I feel like you identified so much in that answer. Going back to the very beginning, you mentioned being curious about just looking around and seeing—

Gefen: Just looking around.

Ashley: That there's these Brazilian beans here and there are these Colombian beans here. What's the difference?

And I think what you said that was really fascinating was about how you still have customers to this day who are like, “Oh my gosh, I put my espresso beans into my French press. Like, will it break?” That sounds silly as we say it out loud, but that's a binary that we draw pretty hard in coffee shops. Espresso looks so different than filter coffee, but we don't explain very well why that difference is drawn.

So when people go home and we don't explain it on the bag, or we don't make that information accessible, people might have that freakout moment of like, “Oh no, did I break my equipment by putting my light-roasted Colombian coffee into my grinder and making espresso?”

Because we don't explain that stuff well. The fact that you picked up a bag of beans and you're like, the elevation is on here, but I don't know what that means. Then what's the point of putting it on there?

Gefen: That's why our bags are the way that they are. We don't put a ton of information. We kind of make it obvious that you can reach out and ask us about things. And then we're gonna also continue building out the coffee program, of course. We'll highlight a lot of producers that we work with and farms and things like that, and a lot of that's gonna be super accessible.

But it's like, [consumers] don't need to know the elevation and sometimes even tasting notes. I mean, when I was picking up these bags and seeing tasting notes, like molasses and stone fruit, and just words that I'd never seen before, honestly, that's why it took me probably an extra six months to a year to ask the next questions, because it's just like—if I don't know this basic terminology of just tasting notes, I'm gonna sound super stupid asking any other question, in my opinion.

That's basically the biggest thing for me was the tasting notes, to be honest with you.

Ashley: Right. And then even if you do know what those words mean, if you go home and you taste the coffee and you don't taste those notes, then you're like, “I'm a failure. Like I messed this up.”

Gefen: God. I know.

Ashley: I had this experience and you know, I've been making coffee for a long time, and I was a trainer for a coffee shop in San Francisco when this happened.

And my job was to go to different coffee shops and taste coffee. And I remember going to this one coffee shop and one of the tasting notes was orange wine. And I remember thinking like, “I know what this is only because this is my job, but that is the only reason why I know what this is and what the f**k? This is a tasting note that nobody else is gonna know!”

So it's really interesting that you thought really specifically about what tasting notes convey, because it's another way that we set up folks essentially to fail. And it seems like a lot of what Couplet is founded on were these very personal experiences that you were having, but seemed to mimic a lot of what almost every consumer of coffee is feeling.

Gefen: That's the best way—I couldn't have put it better, honestly. That's exactly what I'm doing. So first it started with my own personal inklings, but then my friends were making fun of me for being obsessed with coffee. They were just calling me bougie and they're like, “Oh my god, like you take so long to make us coffee and blah, blah, blah…”

They just were just making fun of me for having this whole setup at home and having—what's it called? Like a certain grinder that costs a little bit more all of a sudden. And I went from having my Mr. Espresso one-group little guy—it was like $30 at Bed Bath and Beyond—to having this Breville at home and people were just making fun of it.

But then they would try the coffee. And it was the same thing, like when I went to my friend Zach’s house: It was comparable to that $5, $6, $7 latte. And that's when they changed too.

My only argument really with Couplet is that we just need to stop judging people for how they consume coffee and just educate a little bit more in a non-pretentious way. That's literally all I'm about.

Ashley: Right. The reactions that I get from people when I talk to them about coffee, especially non-coffee people, it tells me a lot about the perceptions that we have as a society about coffee.

So people will be like, “Don't judge me, but I'm doing this.”

And I'm like, “Why would you think that I would judge you?”

And then I have to remember that it's not about me. It's about what society has imbued in us about how coffee is consumed. That we have these very difficult-to-access coffee shops, where we treat coffee like it’s this precious thing in certain spaces. But then in other spaces, you can go to a bodega or you can go to a diner and get coffee without any pretension or fuss.

That has to be really confusing for people. I realized that as people were reflecting this onto me like, “Oh, don't judge my coffee.”

And I'm like, “I'm drinking coffee that I brewed—not even I brewed—brewed five hours ago because my boyfriend was up much earlier than I am. And if he's not home, I will make instant coffee because I'm the laziest person alive.”

And I have to tell this story to people to get them into a safe place where they feel not judged by their coffee consumption. It's just funny to see you talk about your evolution, but still getting like this reaction from your friends, because that just reflects on a lot of the things that you were talking about earlier—about not necessarily feeling comfortable asking questions about coffee, not feeling comfortable being like, “Okay, I'm gonna pick up this bag, but what does this all mean?”

Gefen: Yeah. I think, especially when we talk about literally just coffee grinders—let’s just isolate coffee grinders in this argument.

We are gonna introduce a $30 price point for a coffee grinder and yes, it's gonna be a hand grinder. And it's because my friends, when they go to these coffee shops with me, the only thing that they're selling in terms of a way to grind your beans at home is like a $140 grinder.

Some of my friends come—as of more recently—come from more privilege and money, but most of my friends don't, especially my friends from college and community college and growing up. I'm a first-gen immigrant, a lot of my friends were first-gen immigrants. They would think this is hilarious.

There are a couple of little things that people notice when they go into shops and sometimes it's the tasting notes. Other times it's like, “I can't believe y'all are paying $140 for a coffee grinder. Like, are you joking? That’s not even like making the coffee yet.”

Those things, I think, have led to so many people—I wish we could do a study on this—to just not even go into it, not even ask the questions, because they're like, “I can't even afford this. I would never buy that. Why would anyone buy this?”

That's gonna be the attitude of so many people. I've seen it in the dozens—probably, if I think about it, at least a hundred people I've come in contact with, in my life, in the past 10 years, have gone into coffee shops with me and been like, “Oh, that's hilarious. This is a joke right?”

It was my choice to go on my journey, to put a lot of money and effort into it, because I find a lot of joy in the process of making coffee, but I think that a lot of people don't recognize that not everyone needs to be like you, but they should also have access to good coffee, or they should at least try it, or we should make it a little bit more accessible for other people, and we just don't all need to act the same.

And not everyone wants to make little swirlies in a pour-over. I love it. I think it's so fun. And so meditative. A lot of my other friends, when I make them pour-overs, they're laughing out loud. They think it's hilarious.

I just think we need to recognize that there are so many different types of coffee drinkers, but again, just my only argument is that they should all enjoy coffee, not depending on how much money they can spend on the setup.

Ashley: For me as a person who's worked in coffee for years who has spent so much time almost idolizing this hoity-toity pretentiousness that coffee was like in 2010, 2011, 2012, where I remember going to a coffee shop once in New York and there was like four things on the menu.

It was like espresso, espresso with milk, and maybe espresso with chocolate, and I thought that that was like the f*g coolest thing in the world.

And as I reflect on that, now I'm like, “What?!?! How could anybody read that menu and be like, ‘I just want a latte. I don't know what any of this is.’”

It's really interesting to hear you reflect that idea back too, of like, people can think whatever they want about your setup, but that doesn't mean that they can't have good coffee.

“Tell me what your budget is, and I can get you a delicious setup no matter where you're at.” We should be doing more of this work—and I do think coffee is getting to that point. I think more and more people, as I go to different coffee shops, as I talk to more people thinking about what hospitality and customer service look like, I'm starting to see that sea change.

But I wonder with your background in tech, how did that inform the way that you approached coffee, and maybe we can get a little bit into your background before you started Couplet?

Gefen: I—and this was kind of my next obsession in life—when I quit basketball, I discovered computer science. I got really into computer science because it was like the one thing that really humbled me to my core in high school.

I was kind of like a little jock, not in the worst way, but just kind of a little jock, like chillin’ it in class, making jokes, always got the little “talks too much in class” and still getting good grades, even though I was not really studying much so really needed to be humbled.

I took AP computer science in my senior year of high school, which was when I quit basketball. And then I just completely reinvented myself and found my new obsession and my new passion. I started off doing software engineering. That was kind of what initially piqued my interest. And I went to community college because I couldn't afford to go directly into college.

So I knew, junior year, I was gonna go to community college for sure. Spend about three years in community college. And that was really crucial. Those three years—I took an extra year to finish up classes—but those three years were really crucial because I got a lot of time to explore what I really wanted to do, a lot of extra time to do some research on like, “What are things that I can do with computer science? Does it have to be software engineering? Probably not.“

You only discover that typically later, but I was just barging into doors that community college students were not welcome in. I would go to these professional women developer conferences and all of these different things, and get scholarships to go on trips, and do these little hackathons where you create products in 48 hours and compete for prizes from big tech companies.

I learned a significant amount, just doing a whole lot of that and very quickly realized, “Okay, I actually don't really care to do non-consumer-facing stuff,” which is super relevant because it was kind of another thing where this was just replicating high school: I had a passion, I was pursuing the passion, and the classes didn't matter. I worked at a bunch of different consumer companies like Hulu and Tesla, and like super small five-person apps for consumers.

That's when I started studying a lot of human behavior and understanding consumers or people, and that I’m a person and not everything is about marketing—it's about connecting. And there's community, and literally, all of that was because of those roles in tech. I otherwise would probably kind of build for me and my needs and what I think.

At Tesla and at Hulu specifically, we would work with user research—if there is a user research team, we usually kind of tell them who we need and get the information. But at Tesla, even though it was a huge company, I had to get on calls with people who own Teslas and ask them about certain issues and have just conversations, human to human, to like understand what we could build on the tech side.

I apply that same philosophy now as a product manager when I had to do a bunch of user research so that I could tell developers and engineers what to build next. It's kind of the same thing, right?

I'm like: One, remembering that every consumer is a person with needs and problems, and my goal is to build alongside them and take their advice and their needs very seriously. And that's just my philosophy with Couplet is, “Cool. I had a lot of these personal experiences. I saw a lot of my friends have these experiences,” and the reason why people have been really receptive to Couplet, in my opinion, is that I have been building it alongside people.

Being like, “Hey, I am very new to coffee. I am gonna ask a lot of questions.” And I don't even think that a lot of people in coffee have answers to these questions. How about we talk to the consumers and how about I have conversations multiple times a week with people who I've never met before, who found Couplet somehow on the internet and asked them why they like it, what they hated about it, what could be better? What is it about the packaging that really spoke to you? Is there something you wish you saw in there? Is there information we're missing?

I mean, I just asked a bunch of questions. I'm still really new to coffee and I still ask a bunch of stupid questions, but it's just like, that's my building philosophy, right? I took a lot of those learnings from the tech world.

Ashley: I was listening to an interview that you did with Modern Retail with Cale Weissman, who I used to work with. In the interview, you mentioned that you interviewed a couple hundred people. I kind of wrote it down as a hundred, but you said a couple hundred, and I'm gonna even extrapolate outward that you've probably interviewed, at this point…

Gefen: Yeah, hundreds, yeah.

Ashley: Hundreds, maybe in the thousands at this point, because based on all of what you've talked about, working in a way to figure out what people want or what people are looking for. And I think that that's something that's often missing in coffee. I think we often do things without considering—who is this for?

Gefen: That's literally exactly what I've been telling everybody.

I will say I am a big fan of a lot of the brands that have been like, “Okay, so what's next?” Like, are they gonna do something more interesting? Like, are we gonna go funky? Are we gonna learn from other DTC brands or streetwear brands—how are we gonna expand on what it means to a coffee brand?

I just kind of waited for someone to do something like that. And a lot of them do coffee, so, so well, and I was waiting for that. But I also kind of felt like a lot of these different coffee brand owners were building for them and their friends and their fellow roasters.

I just felt like a lot of me and my friends and coffee consumers, that was my original thought was I just don't think that they care. I just think they're building for each other. I agree with you. That's just kind of been what I've seen, but again, I still have a lot of respect for what has been done—significant amount of respect.

Ashley: Right, right. It's not to say that anybody's doing anything bad, but it seems like—and maybe you can speak a little bit to this, because I have to imagine that this maybe is informed a little bit by your background, maybe this is just something you've observed—but it seems like we're pursuing this single exit in coffee where quality is the only target. And how we measure quality is also very narrow.

So not only are we pursuing a very narrow target, but we've even narrowed that even further by being, “Quality looks like a Gesha quality, looks like a 90+ coffee from the Cup of Excellence” versus, oh, maybe quality can look like we bought a past-crop coffee and we were able to roast it excellently.

Maybe we were able to buy all of the coffee from this one producer and sell it all for premium. There are other things that are valuable in coffee that we sometimes, I think forget, but could really benefit us.

Like people care about their coffee being fun and approachable. People care that they can pick up a bag of beans and feel successful. Going back to that idea of tasting notes can kind of set us up to fail—people wanna go home and have that feeling of like, “I made this coffee and look how cool my stuff looks and I made this and I'm gonna drink it and it's gonna taste f*g awesome because I made it and I feel great.”

Gefen: Yeah, there's that, but another part to that, which I think is really funny, is when people—so when I looked up videos, when I was first starting out and I still look at the same videos today of what's kind of the best way to brew like this or that, I think that one thing that we also forget as coffee people is that not everyone wants to weigh things.

I think none of my friends will ever weigh things. It'll make them feel way too bougie and they think it's unnecessary. I drink Couplet every day, and multiple times I have just completely messed up the recipe or it was just extracted so poorly, but it still tasted good.

And I think that's the thing that really deters a lot of other people as well that I've noticed. They're gonna get another expensive thing, like a scale, and not only do they not want that as an extra step, but I will argue—and we've had this in our copy. Michelle [Johnson] actually wrote this copy for us when we made our how-to guides for the Moka pots and French presses, Michelle from Ghost Town Oats—basically I was like, “Hey, let's add something in there that’s like, ‘By the way, if you mess any part of this up it's okay. And also it still might taste great.’” Like that's just it, you know?

Ashley: Right. Setting people up to not fail. How can we make people feel like they won every time they brew?

Gefen: Yeah, that's the thing is like I've made many a sour coffee, many a coffee that was just, nah, just extracted poorly, but it was still actually really good. And so when I mess up things to the gram on a scale, I think that that's okay. And I think a lot of the times it might not be super relevant for everybody in the way that they wanna make coffee at home.

Ashley: Something else that you mentioned in that interview was that you've used social media to test different thesis—thesis? The—I'm not sure how the plural of that is, but that you've used social media to test different ideas that you've had about coffee and to see if they're viable at all, or if people are interested in them, which I think really speaks a lot to like the scientific method of just trying new things and seeing if things work.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. What are some of the things that you tested on social media and what have you learned from putting stuff out on TikTok or on Instagram or just out for the world, for people to consume?

Gefen: Every single thing that I've done has been a test so far. Like every single thing, it just seems like weird, and for a reason. I think we are trying to be the weird brand, weird, but in a fun and approachable way.

I would say one of the tests that I had—so like, I was looking for ways to source coffee equipment that was just more affordable and also just fun.

I just didn't wanna put out some sort of—I didn't even know if I was gonna do equipment, that wasn't even the plan. I did this test and ran with it and it did really well. And I was super surprised, but also not super surprised, because I just had this intuition that people would be down for funkier-looking coffee equipment.

So I went and searched for a couple months for what that was. I got our cow-print Moka pot, and I was just like, “Listen, we have a queer audience and people who like our bags, I think that they would like something that looks different, even if they're not queer.” Also Urban Outfitters has noticed that people like cow print. I just went there the other day and saw a bunch of cow print stuff, so it's definitely reaching a wider target audience than that.

But that was my first thing was like, “Okay, I think people would be down to have like a non-stainless-steel Moka pot.” That was just my only intuition. I made a video with both the cow-print Moka pot and our lover's French press, which is just this red French press with a heart in it. And I literally just took the samples that I got and made a video. Like, “Would you guys like this?” Made a video about it and then the video went pretty viral.

I had, I think it was 800 comments that were super aggressive, like really funny aggressive, like “Drop the link now or I'll kill your mother.” Crazy s**t like that. Super funny. Then they were like, “Oh, we'll rob you if you don't do this.” Or like, just, if you go through that video, I'll link you after if you want.

But it was just really funny, like really funny how passionate people were about having these things. I just like, don't get why nobody else has done this before. This feels like low-hanging fruit to have something that looks just like more fun. I'm not innovating here.

I'm just offering something a little bit different and it's like, I didn't do any real innovation. I just saw something that I thought would be cool and oh, people are obsessed with it. And then every time someone buys or we gift it to somebody and they make videos with it on TikTok—even the other day, there's a pretty big creator who made a video with our cow-print Moka pot. And then we like made a couple thousand dollars that day just because that video.

People haven't seen it before. That's kinda like one of the ways that I tested and then I immediately bought a ton of them, and I was in a big rush and there were supply chain issues, but anyways. Now it's part of our offerings and we're in a bunch of different retail locations with it. And we're selling out of them because people just haven't seen something like that before.

They're used to the same run-of-the-mill, either matte black or stainless steel equipment, and it's usually priced pretty high. But I thought that a Moka pot and a French press would be a really good entry point for people. So, yeah, that was the one major test that I ran that was super successful, and I was excited about.

Ashley: What I'm taking from this conversation is two main things:

One of them is that you're not afraid to observe people. You're not afraid to notice what they're looking at, or even just notice what's popular around you. The fact that you went to an Urban Outfitters and it's like, “Oh, there's cow print here,” or, “Oh, I saw this somewhere else. Let me just try this out and see if this works in this arena.”

Two: It seems like you're able to put a lot of things together and notice where there's gaps and you've talked a little bit about that—that there are definitely gaps in the coffee industry.

I think this whole conversation is kind of an ode to all the gaps in the coffee industry. But I was wondering like, as you were collecting interviews, as you were talking to people, what stood out to you and what do you think Couplet is responding to?

Gefen: I mean, even if we just hone in on the bag: We are now doing pretty, pretty damn well in retail. Like I'm focusing on like, a couple loca—well, that's not a couple, we're like at 20 now, but, we're in a couple retail locations. And it's funny when I went to New York, I think we had like seven accounts there that I went to and went and took some pictures.

Every time you see Couplet on a shelf, it stands out because of the holographic nature of the bag, but it's also super maximalist and a lot of super fun elements on it. But it's funny, when you walk past it—this was by design—but when you walk into a store, you walk into any store or if you're in a different aisle, the light reflects off the bag. You're gonna, it's gonna catch your eye whether you like it or not. That is the first thing that people, they look at it, they pick it up, they're like, “Oh, that's cool.”

I think the funny thing about Couplet is that there's an element of surprise. If something looks really, really pretty, you don't think it's gonna taste good. So it's funny because then people end up really liking it. We get a lot of people posting about Couplet all the time. They're like, for some reason, super passionate about it.

And this is the gap. Why are people so passionate about Couplet as a brand? Like why are people posting about it constantly? And we're small—we launched two months ago—posting about it constantly like DMing me.

And we're gonna post this on Instagram today, but DMing me hilarious paragraphs about how much Couplet has brightened their day just by having really good-tasting beans, but also something to like really show off on their counter. It's always something that they like to put on their counters, almost decor.

For some reason, they’re just obsessed with the cow-print Moka pot, the French press. For some reason, a lot of the people that are into cow-print end up interacting with each other and share tips and stuff and recipes, and it's because that audience is not the typical specialty coffee audience.

And I will say a lot of specialty coffee people are also still impressed with the quality of Couplet. Because of the nature of who is a part of Couplet, whether it's a lot of the people in the queer community who they've just never seen a really very queer brand for coffee—and like so many people drink coffee. So it's been super easy to connect with that, but it's the offerings that are queer. It's the offerings that are fun and it just feels a little bit more inclusive.

We're tweeting funny stuff about making fun of people who make fun of others for how they drink coffee at home. And they haven't seen a coffee brand do that, especially when they're positioned as a specialty brand.

So I think there's multiple elements where I just felt a lot of people were maybe fans of brands, but were they posting about it all the time, were they really excited about it? Are they telling their friends about it? Are they buying every new thing that we're putting out? Are they reaching out to us to say how excited they are? I just didn't see that happening with other brands. And I'm sure that it absolutely exists and it will continue to exist. But I just wanted to create a brand that felt more like you're a part of something. That was the gap.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a really good point. It's something that I've heard only talked about when people are talking about former employees. Maybe this is a jump, but go with me here. We're gonna take a journey.

Gefen: Let's do it.

Ashley: I feel like when people leave a job in a really amicable way, those are the people that are gonna talk about that place well.

Those are the people who are gonna be, they're like your alumni, almost. “You should apply for this job here. I had a great time working there,” or, “You should buy coffee from this place because I used to work there like, and it's so much fun,” versus when you leave a job and it's not amicable or not even memorable, then you never really mention it.

It seems like a lot of that rhetoric is kind of being applied to the way that you think about Couplet with like—you want people talking about this, your best marketing is other people sharing their passion for your brand. And we don't think about that in coffee. You're absolutely right.

There are very few coffee bags that I would pick up and be like, “I'm gonna tell everybody about this,” or “I'm gonna take a photo and put it on my social media,” or "I'm gonna message you directly and be like, ‘I loved this,’” like that, that doesn't happen. We don't think about that.

Gefen: Yeah, I just haven't seen it. And like I said, I'm sure there's things that have existed that I have just not seen, but I wanted to create sheer excitement and joy from my brand that embodies my values and principles.

And obviously these things—I have a lot more to learn and do in this world, but just core stuff, I feel like people honestly just connect with others on a human level or with brands on that level if they just feel heard.

I always like to DM everybody who's posted and like, “Hey, how do you feel about this? If you didn't like this bag, or if it wasn't as fresh as you expected, I will personally send it myself, from my apartment, not from our fulfillment center. I will go to a roastery and grab a bag for you.”

That's another element that I had also not seen is Instagram and all that—all of the ads just felt like the same thing over and over again, like this is just a bag. Someone is showing me the same visual of someone like pouring, just making a pour over. I could not decipher the multiple ads that I see from coffee brands. Could not decipher which brand was. I wanted us to be like, “Oh, that's Couplet. Oh, that's so Couplet.”

And even before we launched and we were just doing the limited-edition drops and things like that, and people were like, “Oh, that's so Couplet.” And we didn't even have our brand identity done. But we had a voice though. And I think the voice is what stuck with people.

It's just something recognizable, but just different in that people connect with it. That's it really.

Ashley: Is there anything that you'd want people to know about either you or Couplet that maybe wouldn't be obvious from reading about you or even listening to this? What would you want people to take away from this?

Gefen: That's a good question. I would say one takeaway is that I am not self-made and I know absolutely nothing. And the only reason I accomplished anything that I've ever accomplished in my life is because I just ask a ton of questions. I don't think Couplet is perfect and I think we could do better and be better.

And I think that's the same for me, but I always welcome opinions, rebuttals, feedback, negative feedback, criticism … all of those things. I'm very open to hearing different people's opinions. Whether it's something that I said on this podcast or tweeted or whatever, I'm just happy to collaborate and chat in positive ways with other people.

So I hope that's clear, uh, and also, yeah, nobody, nobody is self-made. So I think that we should just acknowledge that, that like me going to UCLA to study computer science and then going and working at Tesla and raising money to like start a coffee brand. You know, there's a lot of privilege that went into that.

And I just like want to be clear about the fact that there's privilege in everything that I've done, and I'm trying to give back in the best ways that I can. If anyone who ever wants to reach out and ask how to start a business, or has coffee questions and things like that, I'm very open to chatting.

Ashley: Gefen, thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it.

Gefen: Thank you so much. This was fun.

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This week, I wanted to release some bonus content just for Boss Barista paid subscribers—thank you so much for your support!

Following last week’s podcast interview with Julien Langevin, the 2022 United States Cup Tasters Champion, we recorded a few extra, off-the-cuff questions. In this short audio extra, Julien breaks down how he tastes and assesses coffee, how his diet has changed to prepare for the World Cup Tasters Competition in June, and how anyone at home can get better at tasting coffee.

Read on for his tips, and get tasting!

Ashley: So Julien, for people listening, how can they taste coffee better?

Julien: Oh my gosh. Taste a lot of different coffee: Taste dark roasts, taste light roasts, taste under-developed roasted coffee, taste over-developed—I don't even know if that's the thing for us to…

Ashley: That could be, that could be!

Julien: Taste other people’s coffee, taste coffee spiked with different acids, taste coffee with milk in it. Taste coffee with no milk, but sugar—just taste all different kinds of coffee.

Ashley: For people at home who maybe don’t work in coffee shops every day, or maybe just brew one pour-over at home, is there a way for them to unlock maybe another level of being able to taste their coffee? I agree with you. I think tasting side-by-side is the single most important thing you can do to build your palate.

Especially when you’re starting out. The thing I always tell people: I used to host a weekly cupping for a general crowd. Like anybody off the street could come in and I would tell people, “I don’t want you to say a flavor. I just want you to tell me that this tastes different than this, because this is X or this is Y,” and, “This is sweeter. This is heavier. This is that.” Just being able to contrast the flavors is what I want you to start [with].

Julien: Oh yeah. I don’t even think, especially when I’m doing triangulations, I do not think about flavor. Flavor is like, the last thing that comes to my mind.

Actually, it’s funny, because when I first started tasting, I was really good at calling out flavor descriptors, but now as I’ve tasted more, it’s actually like one of the more challenging things for me to do, because I immediately A) assess roast quality and B) I will go to mouthfeel, acidity, bitterness, sweetness—like any of those qualities before I’ll even be like, “Oh, that tastes like strawberries.” You know?

Ashley: Yeah, that makes sense. I think when people look at coffee bags, there’s so much pressure to like, “Okay, this tastes like molasses and gingerbread and chocolate. Okay. I need to get those flavors.” But I think what you’re saying is that you can taste a coffee and just look for balance. Like, does this taste sweet?

Julien: Oh, yeah.

You can also just feel like, “Oh, I like that,” or, “Oh, I don’t like that.” It doesn’t have to be this super intellectual process. You can literally just be like, “Oh, that feels good on my mouth or it doesn’t.”

Ashley: When you’re looking at those three cups of coffee in front of you, do you have a protocol for yourself internally where you’re like, “Okay, this is how I’m going to taste these three, and this is how I’m going to make a decision about which one is the odd one out?”

Julien: Yeah. I always taste the middle cup last, so I’ll go like left, right, and middle. It’s kind of funny, cause triangulations are like a logic problem. So obviously two are the same; one is different. So if you can determine the two that are the same, then you automatically have the different one.

I haven’t taken my Q [grader exam] but they’ll apparently teach you in the Q to solve it like that—or I call it in my head fact-checking, like I’ll fact-check what I think I’m tasting against the other ones. And yeah.

Ashley: Is there anything you’re looking for in each cup? Are you trying to be like, “This tastes heavy in my mouth, or this tastes … I’m getting a lot on the back of my tongue,” and then you get to the next one, and you’re like, “I’m not getting that in this one.” How are you trying to do that fact-check?

Julien: It’s interesting. A lot of people I’ve talked to, they’re like, “Oh, I only look for this,” or, “Oh, I only look for that.”

I mentioned it before, it’s kind of like a synesthesia thing where I do a color association, or a lot of times it’s almost like a—I don’t want to say a sonnet, like in my mouth where like the journey—the flavor, or the coffee—takes in my mouth.

It lasts like a few seconds, but it’s like a tingling. It’s really hard to describe, but it’s like the rhythm of the mouthfeel is like the only way I can describe it, where it’s how, in what order, in what way does the coffee affect, physically, your sensors in your mouth.

And that’s what I look for when I do a triangulation. It’s weird because as simple as you can make it, the better off you’ll be. But also you want to assess everything about the coffee—you don’t want to, in my opinion, only be looking for one quality, because that might not be present in any of the coffees you’re tasting.

Ashley: It seems like you’ve really tailored your way that you taste to the way that you just experience flavor in general, because everything that you said about the sonnet that performs, essentially, on your tongue, I was like, “Yeah, I get that.” Because if you watch any cooking competitions, they talk about that too.

About how they discover new flavors with every bite, or they talk about building flavor. And I feel like we don’t really talk about that a lot in coffee, the idea of building flavor or what complex flavors look like on top of each other—it seems like we actually have a very one-dimensional way we experienced flavor, which is like, we look for balance and we look for these tasting notes.

Everything you said reminded me of watching a cooking competition and being like, “That’s how they talk about flavor.” And it seems like you’ve identified that as a strategy that works for you.

Julien: Yeah, which is funny because I don’t really—people ask me a lot, they’re like, “Oh, are you really into food and tasting food?” Actually, I have a very—and especially now that I’m prepping for worlds—I have a very limited diet. So it’s like funny, but I guess makes sense.

And it’s funny that you mentioned that we have such a one-dimensional view because coffee is so multi-dimensional in its flavor, just like chemically. So yeah, that’s really funny.

Ashley: Tell me about your competition diet. I can guess because I’m like, oh yeah, you’re eliminating things that are over-powering to like, make sure that your palate stays really sharp so that things pop out to you more. But can you talk a little bit about that?

Julien: Yeah. Going into the U.S. [competition], I cut out anything that was super acidic or—I haven’t eaten spicy food in a long time, anything super acidic I feel like I cut out, but going into worlds, I’m also cutting out salt and pepper, basically any seasoning, and then I’m doing some water calibration, so yeah.

I dunno, maybe it might be overkill, but I’m pulling out all the stuff.

Ashley: I’ve heard of roasters who cut out sugar ahead of the Q to see if they can perceive sweetness more acutely. So like, that’s something I’ve heard.

Julien: Yeah, I have a sweet tooth, so I don’t know if I’ll do that, but I’ve heard a lot of stuff about the Q. One person told me that people eat only oatmeal going into the Q. So when I went to qualifiers two years ago, I only ate oatmeal, but I was so miserable. I was so hungry and just sad.

So something I learned from that was it’s more important to feel normal, I think, than it is to have that kind of sensitivity, I guess. It’s more important when you, for Cup Tasters specifically, to feel as normal as possible in such an abnormal situation like tasting coffee on a stage.

I talked to some people at nationals and they were like, “Yeah, I didn’t even eat this morning,” but they were like competing at 1 p.m. and I was like, what? Like, what is—no! Like, just eat food and then get coffee back on your palate. All that matters is you have coffee on your palate before you taste and, in my opinion, you’ll be fine, but whatever, it’s whatever.

Ashley: You talked a little bit about how those triangulations can kind of be structured. It can be coffees from a different country, or it can be coffees from the same country, but different regions. Do you know anything about some of the cups that you tasted?

Julien: I honestly don’t know. It was funny—I was talking to one person and they were like, “Oh those were like super dark,” but it’s so weird. I’ve heard this before I even went to qualifiers: You always want to practice with a range of roast levels because you never know what’s going to be up there.

I was talking to one guy who went to nationals before and he was like, “Yeah, the coffees were super light and fruity and it was so easy to tell the differences in flavor,” but I mean, the coffee [that] is up there, they give an Agtron rating, it’s like 55 to 70 on an Agtron is the range.

So you’re not going to have too much variance. I don’t think they were dark, in my opinion, they were probably solid medium roast. But the company I work at, we do a lot of medium roasts, so the coffee I was practicing with was probably similar roast levels.

My advice is to always just practice with a range of coffee because you never know who the sponsored roaster is going to be. You never know how they’re going to—in my opinion, I couldn’t tell you where the coffee was from; I’m not that well-calibrated to that specific thing, but I will say they were all roasted very well. Like there was no underdeveloped or spotty coffees. They were just well-roasted, medium-roasted coffees, from my perspective.

Ashley: Well, I hope people listening to this will feel more confident tasting coffee.

Julien: Cool, me too.

Photo by Matthew Temple

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Hi, hello! If you’re here for the first time, welcome! Your contributions make the show possible, so if you can, please consider supporting the show financially by subscribing below and picking one of the paid subscription options:

Today, I’m sharing an interview with Julien Langevin, a production worker for Coffee by Design and the 2022 United States Cup Tasters Champion. If you’re a longtime listener of the show, you’ve probably heard us talk about barista competitions, but maybe you didn’t know that there are contests designed to test and celebrate pretty much every aspect of how coffee gets to your cup. From brewing and roasting to latte art, coffee cocktails, and tasting, these competitions occur annually in conjunction with the World Barista Championship.

The World Cup Tasters Competition asks competitors to taste a set of three cups of coffee: Two are the same, and one is different. Though that may sound simple enough, this is an extremely challenging task. Competitors are also timed and perform in front of a screaming crowd, so Julien’s accomplishment is no mean feat.

When you win a competition like this, there’s an idea that you have to capitalize on it—that you have to take the opportunity to move your career to the next level. But as we explore in this episode, linear career trajectories often fail workers, particularly those of marginalized identities. To compete in the U.S. Cup Tasters Competition, Julien had to qualify at a regional event, which took place before COVID; for a long time, it was unclear whether they would even get to compete on a national stage. During that period, while waiting to hear about the fate of the competition, Julien actually left coffee because they were forced to step behind the bar again and work as a barista, a job they didn’t want to do and which didn’t line up with their interests or personal needs.

Julien’s interview will make you question why we often fall into very typical, very linear modes of upward mobility, and how we view the dignity of work. For example, most people in coffee start off as baristas, but there’s truly no reason for that. Now that Julien is a national champion, there are expectations that he’ll do something “big” next—but he’s quite content to learn and grow in his current position. As Julien says in the interview, “There is a place for everyone in coffee who wants to be here,” and this requires thinking critically about how we view work, what career progression actually means, and how we can find space for everyone to express their skills and be happy at work—whatever industry they’re in.

Ashley: Julien, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Julien: Hi, thank you so much for having me on the show, Ashley. My name is Julien Langevin. I am a production worker and roaster and I live in Portland, Maine.

Ashley: I like that you giggled to yourself a little bit there. It's just funny, because we've been talking for like the last 20 minutes before we even started recording. And then the minute recording starts, it's like a totally different game, but I feel like I don't help it because I put on, like, my podcasting voice, and it just feels different.

So I apologize for setting that scene in a funny way, but here we are.

Julien: I also always feel weird, like, introducing myself. I'm like, how much information should I give right now? Because they're going to know a lot by the end of this. So how much do I really need to say right now? But I guess just name, job description, location. Probably? Yeah.

Ashley: I do a fair amount of freelance writing. And at this point, I feel like the longer I've been writing, the shorter my bio has gotten—to a point, I'm sure at one point it's gonna be like, “Ashley is a person who wrote this article,” and that's it. That's all I'm going to have on there.

Julien: That would be such a power move. You're just like, “Yep. This is just me. And I just wrote this.”

Ashley: Yeah. You don't need to know anything else about me.

Julien: Yep.

Ashley: Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Julien: I did. My dad actually just quit drinking coffee, but I grew up drinking coffee—I didn't grow up drinking coffee, but I grew up watching him drink coffee, and he was in the Navy and he always would tell me, it was like a quintessential phrase: “The best cup of coffee tastes like the bottom of a dirty ashtray.”

And I was like, okay. Obviously, following that, I was a dark roast drinker for most of my life up until 2018. In high school, I would go to Tim Hortons all the time in the morning and get like, a hazelnut hot coffee with like cream in it. That was just like my comfort drink before school sometimes.

Ashley: When did you start working in coffee?

Julien: I was 18 and I was in college and I got my first apartment and I needed a job. So I applied at the Starbucks down the street and I started at nine bucks an hour, 40 hours a week, and I worked at Starbucks for three-and-a-half months.

It was great. I mean, the job was wild and so overstimulating and me, just like a little 18-year-old who had really only worked at a movie theater before that, it was like, “Whoa, okay, this is a real job.”

I think I went to work at a soup shop after that, but—

Ashley: I think it's interesting that you mentioned it's overstimulating, because I imagine—I think about myself as like an 18-year-old—I also worked at a movie theater when I was 18. And I was an usher, so I didn't have to talk to anybody. I didn't sell tickets. I didn't sell concessions, but even that I would look at the menu and I'd be like, “Okay, there are like nine things on this menu. That's a lot of things.”

And then going to Starbucks where there are 8,000 things on the menu and you can make any custom ridiculous drink you want. I have to imagine at 18 that must've been such a cognitive overload.

Julien: It was, but I feel like it was good for me in a way, because I feel like I learned bar flow real quick, kind of out of necessity. There was no real training. They just kinda throw you on the floor and were like, “Sink or swim bud.” And I was like, okay.

After that, after Starbucks, everything else, every other coffee job kind of seemed manageable, you know?

Ashley: Fair. My first coffee shop job was in Times Square in New York.

Julien: Oh my.

Ashley: And nothing holds a candle to it in terms of difficulty. I'm like, if I could work at this place, I can work anywhere. Like try me, give me 20 drinks to do, and I'll do it.

Julien: Line them up all the way down the counter. I don't care.

Ashley: I got this. This is fine. This is like, an easy Thursday.

At what point did you realize like, “Oh, this is a thing that I kind of like. Maybe I can do this in a different job, or maybe I could do this as like, a career for a little.”

Julien: It was probably after I graduated school, college. I had worked at a couple shops, like on and off through school. And then I started working full-time as a barista after I graduated in 2018.

The shop I worked at, they were sending us to SCA [Specialty Coffee Association] events, so I started witnessing the national coffee community and I was like, “Oh, okay. This is actually something people do for their whole lives.” And I was like, “This is kinda cool.” I started like tasting more, I started cupping for the first time, and I was like, “Whoa, wait, okay. This is actually a really cool thing that I can nerd out on.” I think then I was hooked.

Ashley: So you mentioned cupping, you mentioned tasting, which I love.

It's fun that you were thinking about, like, how do I introduce myself? Because I'm going to do an intro where I introduce you, and I'll introduce you before we start this episode as the current United States Cup Tasters Champion.

So I was wondering, for listeners who maybe don't know what that competition is—it's kinda like the Wild West, I think—but can you describe what it's like, what this competition is?

Julien: It's the only U.S. comp—and I guess, global competition, without judges. So it's pretty sudden-death of the results [coming in] immediately, which is kind of terrifying, but also pretty exhilarating.

So basically—at qualifiers and nationals this year, there were six sets, but at worlds there will be eight sets—but six sets of what they call triangulations, which is pulled from a test, it's part of the Q grader certification. It's one of the many tests that you have to take to become a Q grader.

So basically a triangulation is three bowls of coffee. One is different and two are the same. And you have to pick out the different coffee in the shortest amount of time. And there are two factors that can help you succeed or fail you: You have to be fast and you have to be accurate.

Ashley: I feel like you say that, and I feel like people will listen to it and be like, “Oh, okay. So three coffees in front of me, one of these things is not like the other,” is essentially the game you're playing. And I feel like people will listen to this and be like, “Oh, that's easy.” It is not f*g easy.

Especially cause you can really vary it, like maybe you can speak to this from your experiences, but maybe you can tell the difference between a Sumatran coffee and an Ethiopian coffee. Those have very different flavor profiles. But as you get deeper and deeper into the competition, they're giving you like, “This was roasted two days ago, this was roasted six days ago.” The differences can be that subtle, right?

Julien: Yeah. I've been talking to a few people who have competed at the world level and it only gets more wild there, but they do the difficulty, it does increase per round.

The sets we were tasting in round one were significantly less—not, I wouldn't say they're still challenging, but less challenging than the ones we faced at finals.

I mean, they'll pull coffees from the same country of origin sometime. I don't know what they throw at you at nationals, but I've heard things about worlds. Well, it'd be, it may be the same region, with the same processing method—they'll throw like natural coffees against each other, which, I've been working on it, but those are what kind of stumped me. At least in one round in nationals was a natural coffee against another natural coffee, because the fermentation flavor kind of clouds a lot of what you would taste from the terroir. And so it's really interesting.

It's also interesting contextually—a set of naturals on a table of all washed will be considerably more difficult than a full table of naturals, because you kind of calibrate to the similarities in the coffee. There's a lot of factors that make it a really—not to mention you have to do it on a stage.

Ashley: Oh yeah, you're doing it in front of people.

Julien: In front of a bunch of people. Yeah!

Ashley: If you go to these coffee competitions—so we've talked a lot about coffee competitions on the podcast, so people listening are likely familiar with them. We've mostly talked about barista competitions, where they have a person on a stage with a routine and they're talking and they're making coffee and there are these judges and it's all very quiet.

You're essentially doing a one-person show for 15 minutes. When you go to the Cup Tasters Competition, it is loud. People are cheering. It is a raucous affair. And then when you're, like you said, you find out the results kind of in real-time.

So you finish your set, you finish all your sets of cups and then there's an emcee who's pulling up the cups and yelling really loud. Like, “You got it!” or “Oh no!” Like I said, it's like the Wild West of coffee competitions, just because it's like—it's fun and it's raucous.

But I have to imagine when you're on the other side of it doing the actual competition, it's like, “Oh s**t. There are a lot of people just yelling at me and it's wild.” What made you want to compete?

Julien: I started tasting coffees and cupping and I was like, “Okay. Maybe I do have a good palate,” and the company I was working for at the time had sent me to judge— sensory judge—barista [competitions] before. And they were like, “Do you want to compete in Cup Tasters?” And I had a friend who had competed in Brewers Cup and Barista before. I was like, “Sure, why not?”

It was wild because we didn't even know if we would get a spot at a qualifier, like let alone qualify to go to nationals. That qualifier was in 2020, and I was like, terrified. I competed, and then I got four out of six [sets right] in two minutes and 30 seconds. And I had no idea if I was going to move on.

I was so terrified. I just stayed in the Airbnb the whole time, but I ended up placing 11th and like the top 16 or 17 moved on and I was like, psyched. I was so happy that I had just moved on and accomplished my goal of just getting to nationals.

[Nationals] was scheduled for Portland, Oregon, and then obviously that didn't happen [because of COVID-19]. They kept rescheduling it and I was like, I had left coffee and then obviously came back and got the email that it was happening. And then I was—I just knew instantly, as soon as I got the email, I was standing in my kitchen and I just like … you know, when you say yes and you clench your fist and you like, pull it into yourself.

I just reacted. I knew that I had to finish it to compete.

Ashley: It sounds like if this was a movie, that moment, the Rocky theme would have started right then.

Julien: Yeah, totally.

Ashley: Something that you said before we started recording was that you had to compete to close this chapter of your life. And I wrote that down ’cause I was like, “I'm going to ask Julien about that, what that means.” I was wondering if you could elaborate on that.

Julien: I played sports in high school. I did a little bit of ski racing, so I did some individual sports, but it's strange when you’re a competitor and you have a team of people around, cheering you on, that you really don't want to disappoint, but you also know that you can't put too much pressure on yourself or throw yourself off.

There was a lot of pressure for me, I feel like, be it internal or external, to qualify and to compete. I put a lot of weight on that training, on going in off the clock, doing sets at night—like we were setting up sets at night and it was just a lot of mental weight in this tasting competition. I would tell people, “Oh yeah, I'm competing in a tasting competition.” They're like, whoa, that's wild.

It was a lot of just buildup, and then to have that taken away by COVID … like I found my passion through tasting. I'm passionate about tasting coffee.

And I felt like that chance to prove myself on a national stage was taken away forever because no one knew what was going to happen. I went on unemployment for two months, and then I was being set up to work in the QC [quality control] lab and that kind of got taken away too.

I was just put back to being a barista and it was just really troubling. So to get that email in the fall that Coffee Champs is happening at [SCA] Expo, I was like, this is my chance. This is my chance to finish it and no matter what happens, just get up there and see that stage that I never thought I would.

I was talking to a lot of the other competitors that showed up and they all had the same—it was the same vibe. It was like, “We didn't think this was going to happen, so why not do it?” And you know, not all of us showed up. If everyone would have showed up, there would have been at least 35 people, but there were like 21, 22 people in round one.

Ashley: Just to go with the movie theme—I feel like every movie has a beginning and it's really exciting. And then there's a dip, like a low point, that's where the tension comes. And I'm imagining that COVID delaying the original competition date is like that dip.

And then of course there's the moment it all changes. And that's when you get the email and that's when the movie picks back up again, and then the ending—I guess, I don't know? I guess this movie is still happening, because you're going to go to the World Competition and compete pretty soon.

Julien: Yeah, very soon.

I feel like even with worlds, I feel like this is a beginning, still. It was like a chapter closed and now I just got a new chapter.

Ashley: So it's like we're watching “Star Wars.”

Julien: Yeah. It's like a sequel, I guess.

Ashley: We'll see if there's a trilogy. Maybe you come back in 20 years and then we are, I don't know—we go back in time and then you add movies at the beginning. I don't know.

Julien: Yeah, definitely.

Ashley: So you talked about how you left coffee and then you came back to coffee. Why did you leave?

Julien: I'd been a barista for like four years. I started as a barista as a cisgender girl when I was 18, I came out as nonbinary and started using they/them pronouns after I left Starbucks.

This was like, 2015, so this was kind of before people really knew what gender nonconforming people were like, popular? I don't even know how to—

Ashley: By and large?

Julien: Yeah, by and large. It was kind of the culture at the shop I worked at where—there were a few trans people working there, and the culture was like, if someone misgendered your co-worker and they didn't correct themselves, if you were at the end of the bar, you would correct the customer.

So I had people telling me, “‘They’ isn’t a pronoun. Like you're not—what is that?” Basically saying that how I identified wasn't a thing, and that was constant. That was just like all the time. I hadn't had top surgery yet, so I was binding my chest. I bound my chest for four years. There was a period of time when I was like only wearing button-up black polos because it was the only thing that I felt okay in. And, um, it was just like really hard being nonbinary as a barista.

I came out as male in the spring of 2019, started hormone replacement therapy and still hadn't had top surgery at that point. You know, the conversation around transness in the U.S. was definitely changing, and people started to know what it was, but that didn't really change much for me. I still had people gendering me as she, even though I was wearing men's clothing, banding my chest, shaving my head. It was really hard.

And you know, every time you correct someone and they look at you weird or they apologize too much, or they make you feel, sometimes unintentionally, just weird about it, you're like, “Wow, I hate this.” And it was just like every day, like it was every single day I would go to work and it was because I was front-facing, public, and my body was changing. I'd also been working there for like a year and a half. So people knew me as this, and then I was that, so it was just like a whole thing.

And also like watching my friends. One of my friends, close friends, was a trans girl, and just watching her get misgendered even more than me … It's like going to cry. It was really hard.

That coupled with COVID, I was just like, “Yeah, I'm done. Like I can't,” and that's what I thought—I was like, “Oh, okay. So I am like damned to being a barista or I leave,” and I just left. It's not worth it. I was done.

Ashley: It seems like we don't really build in the idea of respect and dignity, especially in front-facing positions like this. And it feels like you've touched on it in a multitude of ways: That you are front-facing and people would constantly misgender you or misgender people around you.

And it's an everyday thing. Like you said, it never stopped. But then there's also the dignity of like, just being able to go to work and do your job.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: And it seems like a lot of that was taken away from you.

Julien: Yeah, that's why I think I latched on to roasting and production. I can just show up and do my job and go home. I see the same 10 people every day and I know that those people aren't going to disrespect me.

But you know, when you have hundreds of people—and a lot of the times it was with regulars who would just continually disrespect me and the people around me, but then still be allowed to come into the space. But a lot of the time it's tourists or people from out of town and they don't even know you, so they're just banking on what their first impression is. So it's like, you can't—unless, say, they act aggressively when you correct them—you can't really blame them, I guess.

I'm a big believer in that there is a place for everyone in coffee who wants to be here.

I think that being a barista was one of the most challenging jobs I've had for many, many reasons, but I think any kind of front-facing job where you have to not only defend yourself but also coffee, I think it carries a lot of weight that many people don't give a second thought to. They're like, “Oh like, you’re a barista.”

It's like, well actually, being a barista is sometimes very hard. And I feel like that's something that a lot of people don't really realize.

Ashley: Especially when you have to be a person in a place where people feel entitled to consume you, essentially.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: Somuch of barista work and so much of why we love coffee shops in general as a culture is when we go into a space and we feel a certain way. And I think that kind of muddles the idea of being a consumer and going to a place and consuming the physical items there versus going to a place and consuming the identity of the people who've made that place.

And that's a very scary line because there are moments where I'm sure you've probably had, like, an awesome customer service interaction and you're like, “Yeah, I did that. Like I made that f*g st happen.”

I don't know why I'm cursing so much—

Julien: I don’t mind.

Ashley: But you know what I mean? There's like this real beautiful sense of pride and ownership in certain ways.

But then in other ways, it's like, “I just want to do my job. All I want is to do my job. And you are not letting me do that. You are making me have to do so much more because you feel entitled to myself and my person.”

Julien: Oh, yeah. Like people—the thing about customer service is that you can’t have an off day. You can't shut it off. You can't like, tell your boss that you want to go do something else for the day. Like you have to be on bar. You have to be on register. You have to be like, expediting.

I have a lot of mental health issues. I have borderline personality disorder and bipolar disorder, and I get triggered—like very real, seriously triggered a lot of the time at things.

I feel like this is also a conversation—like the toll that emotional labor takes on people's mental health is, I mean, obviously known—I feel like I've joked with my friends about putting on the customer service persona—but it's like, the difference between doing like a 3,000-pound production day or doing a $3,000 retail day is pretty massive, but in one where I'd be physically exhausted and maybe another where I'd be emotionally and physically [exhausted]…

But it is something to talk about where every single person in this supply chain, every single person in this industry, faces challenges in the position that they're in and that no position should be looked down upon or discounted because—I mean, I'll bring up what I just accomplished, but I'm a production worker. I don't taste coffee every day. I go to work, I put beans in bags.

Sometimes I get to roast coffee, but ultimately I am doing manual labor every day, 40 hours a week. And I just won a national tasting competition. So I feel like we have to open our eyes to that: Everyone in this industry is capable, I think, of more than they give themselves credit for. And a lot of that comes from the discourse we have around each other's positionality within this industry.

Ashley: Absolutely.

Julien: If that makes sense.

Ashley: No, that totally makes sense. I think there's this idea that … I don't know, even thinking about your career, just what you said right now, you mentioned being a barista then moving into production. And that was, it seems like that was the right move for you. And I would think most people would read that as like a promotion, or you're working on your career, but like, it shouldn't have to be that way.

Like there's dignity in every position within the coffee industry, there's dignity in being a barista and being a service worker. There's dignity in bagging coffee, like you mentioned—there are people whose sole jobs is to do that, is just bag coffee. And they've never worked as a barista, but like, we still seem to put almost like a stink upon certain positions in the industry, and expect there to be a certain level of upward mobility in this very linear, very boxed-in way.

I was wondering, since you're thinking about it, what has that felt like, thinking about, “Where I belong in the industry,” or like, “What am I supposed to do next? Are there these expectations of me to do a thing because now I've won a thing?”

Julien: Yeah, definitely. I've had a lot of people talk to me about what to do next. Or like, what do I want—now that I have this, what do I want? It's interesting because I had a career before I won. I was learning how to roast coffee and I was doing my job.

I think now I just get to have a lot more options in terms of geographically where I could see myself, or who I get to have access to now. I was happy before I won, which was not something I've ever felt in my life. I very recently started to feel like I was content.

We were talking a bit before we started recording about the timeline or the celebrity of winning a coffee competition. I definitely felt that pressure. I think in the weeks after I won where I was like, “My whole life has to change and it has to change now and I have to make moves now.”

But then I took a deep breath. Then I realized I was like, “Julien, you're turning 26 at the end of June. You have been in coffee for under five years. You have time. And just because you achieved this title and are working very hard to like, do well at worlds, I still have time.” Even if I wasn’t young, and even if like, I had been in coffee for 20 years and I won, I'd still have time.

I found a national community and a global community through these competitions and I feel very grateful. I think we need to think about, what does it mean to be an ambassador for the industry? What does it mean to be a champion? How does achieving that title actually affect a person? Because I was just a person, I am just a person. I'm just a guy living in Portland, Maine who loves coffee, and I just happened to win a national tasting competition.

There's this one person who's been competing in Cup Tasters every single year it's existed. It's like, how am I to say that I am better than that person that's literally been working every year to try to achieve this title? Like, I’m not.

Everyone who got up on that stage is a champion in my eyes, because the amount of mental stamina it takes to even walk up there is something a lot of people can't do.

Ashley: Yeah. And there's something, too, to the idea that if you didn't win, you would still be just a guy.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings, just in general, about the idea of competition. Maybe this is like putting me in an unsolvable problem, because I love competition. I live for competition. I love game shows. I'm that type of person, so I love seeing people win things and seeing people win a lot of money and them talking about that changing their life always makes me very emotional.

But at the same time, when I look at coffee competitions, I'm like, nobody worked more than anybody else, nobody is better than anybody else up here.

Julien: Yeah.

Ashley: And with all these competitions too, like, it could have been anybody. If the competition had happened tomorrow, would the same thing happen again? If the competition happened an hour later, would there have been a different winner?

So it's interesting to think, going back to this idea of the dignity of work and who deserves what, it's like, we all deserve everything! This seems a little Pollyanna in a way, but we do, because we just deserve to like, go to work and be happy and feel safe.

Julien: Yeah. I always think it's interesting, because I feel like the people that really like Cup Tasters really like Cup Tasters, and the people that really like Roasting [Competition] really like Roasters, and people that really like Barista [Competition] really like Barista, and I think it's funny.

One time, someone told me that they were like, “Oh yeah, someone told me that Barista Competition is the only one that matters.” I just think that's so funny, because every single one of the competitions like CIGS [Coffee in Good Spirits] Latte Art, Cup Tasters, Roasters, Barista, Brewers—every single one of those competitions is so challenging in its own way.

I could never get up on that Barista stage. I would never. And maybe some Barista competitors would never get up on the Cup Tasters stage. I just think that they're all so interesting and what every person, every champion, and every person that even qualifies, like gets to a qualifier or competes in a prelim—

Like, I always love to learn, I'm a big nerd about anything that I can learn [about] constantly. That's why I love coffee so much, is because I could spend my whole life in this industry and not know everything.

I think that competing is a great learning experience. I love watching people compete for years and years, and then finally get the title, or watching people compete for years and years that don't get the title. As long as you're getting something out of it, I think it's a valuable experience.

I know a lot of people just want to win and that's great, and I'm like, “I hope you do if that's really what you want.” But everyone who puts time into these competitions, the volunteers, the committees, the judges, we all make this community what it is. And it's a very special and a very, very weird little community.

Ashley: For folks listening to this, as we wrap up our conversation, what would you want them to take away from listening to you? What would you want people to know about you?

Julien: I don’t know!I'd like to just let people know that I'm just a person and probably, and definitely, every coffee champion is just a person. We all have different career timelines and we all have different life timelines. If there's a champion or a person in this industry that you really identify with, or you idolized, or you really want to meet or talk to, even be someday, I think that's really cool.

One of my mentors, when I was preparing for this and I was freaking out because a certain someone was in my first seat and he was a past champion and [my mentor] was like, “They're just people.” And I think that sentiment has really stuck with me, is that we're all just coffee people. So yeah.

Ashley: I was going to close it out—I was about to do like the whole, “Thank you for being here,” but something I thought was worth mentioning before we close out was that you reached out to me to be on the show, and thinking about what you were just saying, that people are people and if you admire somebody that's really cool.

I also wonder, how can we make things feel more like everything is accessible too, because I was thrilled when you reached out to me. Number one, because I wanted to talk to you. But two, I was like, “Somebody feels comfortable saying, ‘I want to talk to you. I want to be on your show.’”

We even talked a little bit, as we were going back and forth about the things that you thought were open and accessible to you. And I hope that people listening to this feel like more is open and accessible to them. I hope that they listened to your story and feel empowered to say, “I want to do this thing. And I'm going to ask the people that I want to ask about it.”

Julien: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. That's helped me even with prepping for worlds. I reached out to a past world champion. I've reached out to past U.S. champions. That's the thing with competing—and I feel like just life and building a career in coffee in general, it's like, you are not alone and it's almost impossible to do it alone.

If there's someone you want to talk to, just shoot them a DM or an email. If they don't respond it may not be because they don't want to talk to you. A lot of people have a lot going on. Yeah, we're just people, and it's about community.

We are a community of coffee people and it's easier to say that we should all feel like we have access to each other—and especially if you want to compete, if you want to be part of this community, do it, just try it out.

And if you don't do it all your first year and you want to go again, do it. Just try and put yourself out there, I guess. Yeah.

Ashley: Julien, thank you so much for taking time to talk with me. I really appreciate it.

Julien: Thank you so much, Ashley. This was really great. Thank you so much.

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In April 2020, I had Adam JacksonBey on the show. He came on to talk about tipping, and about his new organization called GoFundBean—a play on the crowdfunding website GoFundMe. At the time, early in the pandemic, GoFundBean served as a central hub that pooled virtual tip jars that coffee shop and restaurant workers started to offset some of their losses. It was a simple and straightforward idea.

Fast-forward two years—which barely feels like a fast-forward at all—and GoFundBean is doing so much more. As an official 501c3 nonprofit, it advocates for hourly coffee workers through grant programs, mentorship matching, and professional development courses.

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Today, I’m speaking with Valorie Clark, a historian, member of GoFundBean’s leadership team, and a catalyst for many of the programs GoFundBean now offers. Over the last two years, Valorie has personally witnessed how necessary it is to advocate for hourly workers: Back when COVID-19 was supposed to be controlled by a “two-week quarantine,” many employers still laid off their workers without notice. Today, many still don’t pay a living wage. And all too many see their employees as disposable.

Going back to the tip jars, one of the key observations that Valorie and the team at GoFundBean noticed is that people didn’t make their own, individual tip funds, but worked together with their colleagues and co-workers to pool resources. I think that follows the themes we’ve witnessed over the last two years: folks recognizing the power of collective action yet again, and working together to secure better outcomes for all. It’s in this spirit that GoFundBean continues its advocacy work. Here’s Valorie:

Ashley: Valorie, I was hoping you could start by introducing yourself.

Valorie: Hey guys, I’m Valorie Clark. I'm the director of marketing for GoFundBean.

Ashley: Valorie, did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Valorie: A little bit. My parents drink coffee. I was given my first cup of coffee when I was like five, but of course, it was more like a cup of milk with like a splash of coffee in it.

Ashley: Were you ever intrigued by it? Like, did you see adults in your life drinking coffee and think, “I want that.”

Valorie: No, I loved the smell of it though.

Ashley: So then when did you start getting into coffee?

Valorie: I think when I was in college and was having to stay up really late to write essays because I'm a terrible procrastinator. I wouldn't start writing a paper until like 11 p.m. or something. And that was when I started drinking coffee.

Ashley: At what point for you did it become something more than just a thing you were drinking?

Valorie: I think probably when I was a junior in college. Somehow most of my friends had become the baristas at the coffee shop where I was a regular at. And I think that was when the first inkling that coffee is more than a drink, coffee is a community. That's kind of when those first inklings started for me.

Ashley: And then when did you start working in coffee?

Valorie: About six months after I graduated from college. I had been working in politics in DC and hated it and was like, “I have to—I just quit.” Like one day I was like, I just have to get out of this. A coffee shop in DC, for some reason, hired me to be their morning barista.

Ashley: I like that, for some reason—

Valorie: Truly, like looking back, I'm like, “Who made this choice? Who decided this was a good idea?”

Ashley: Why do you think that?

Valorie: I think because I just had absolutely zero experience and it was a busy shop in Chinatown. There were tons of politicians that came into that shop and I was like, “Whose idea was it to put this like, completely green person here at 6 a.m. giving politicians coffee? Like whose idea was that?”

Ashley: I hope that you can trace back some really important political decisions to specifically your service of these politicians in that coffee shop.

Valorie: I can't off the top of my head. But Dennis Kucinich came in a lot and he always got a dark chocolate sorbet to go with his coffee. And I will never forget that as long as I live.

Ashley: I love that.So at what point did it go from, “Okay, this is a job I have. I'm serving people—important politicians—coffee at six in the morning,” to, “Oh, this is a job I like. What does it look like to maybe take this more seriously?”

Valorie: Pretty quickly actually, because—so I started working there in like, early summer of 2012, and by winter I was training to become a trainer at that location.

It was by fall that I was already like, “Oh, this could be a future for me.” And I think a lot of that—like a large part of that realization—was that that shop was a Counter Culture Coffee account, and so we had access to all the Counter Culture classes.

The owners were huge perfectionists. They really wanted us to be serving the best possible coffee. And so we got paid to go to every single Counter Culture class if we wanted to go.

Just as I learned more and more about coffee from the guys at Counter Culture, I was like, “Oh, this—this isn't just a thing that I'm doing for now. Like this could be a career.”

Ashley: I love that. I love the investment in your education and being like, “Oh, we're going to pay you to go to these classes,” almost turns that light switch on for you—that this can be something more, and it seems to be as simple as the people above you saying, “Hey, we take this seriously. This is the avenue in which you can take this seriously as well.”

Valorie: Adam and I, who founded GoFundBean—Adam and I met at that coffee shop. And we always talk about how it wasn't the healthiest work environment. It was super toxic in a lot of ways, but they were really, really invested in us knowing everything we could, which was cool, looking back.

Ashley: Yeah, I love looking back on those moments and I think you can rectify—not necessarily rectify, but both can exist. It can be toxic, but at the same time, you could recognize where this contributed to the future of your career.

Valorie: Absolutely.

Ashley: So you've mentioned GoFundBean a couple of times, but for people who maybe don't know what that is, can you explain a little bit about that organization?

Valorie: We are a nonprofit that supports, uplifts, and defends hourly coffee workers in the U.S.

So what that means is that—we were founded during the pandemic to give grants to hourly coffee workers who had been laid off from their jobs because of COVID and ever since then have grown into doing other things.

Like we gave grants after Hurricane Ida to kind of help people in New Orleans who had been put out of work by having to evacuate. But the core of our mission has always been making sure that hourly coffee workers are taken care of and have a way to like, move forward in their careers if that's what they want to do.

Ashley: Tell me about how GoFundBean was founded, because you mentioned that it was born out of the pandemic, which I don’t think is a big stretch for people to realize that when the pandemic hit, coffee shops were severely affected. So what was that first conversation like between—I imagine between you and Adam JacksonBey, who's the co-founder of this organization.

Valorie: Everything started shutting down in mid-March 2020, right. And I think by about May, it was something like 80% of coffee employees in the U.S. had been laid off—like it was some crazy, huge percentage.

In mid-March, whenever places started to shut down and then eventually quickly lay off their employees, Adam and I were talking—and also Jenn Chen was a part of the conversation, and she's now on the board, and then Bailey Arnold was also helping us out back then—but we started talking, being like, “We should have a central location for all of these tip jars that are going up.”

Because what was really fascinating that was happening was that the entire cafe staff was making tip jars together. Sometimes it was the boss making it and putting it up on the website and sometimes it was [the employees] coming together and using their social media to say, “Hey, we're raising money for all of us,” which was cool because I think it could have so easily gone a different way of people being very individualistic about it, but it was a very collective moment of, “We're all in trouble. We're all hurting, we're all raising money.”

So Adam had this idea to have a centralized location for all of those tip jars, instead of everyone trying to fight the algorithm and get their tip jars out there, we wanted to kind of centralize it. So we created an Instagram and Twitter first, and we were just posting and reposting people's tip jars so that they could get a little bit more attention, and kind of have become a centralized place.

We [then] started the website GoFundBean.org, and same thing. We were posting the tip jars there with links and information and it just grew from there.

Ashley: I never thought of the tip jars that way!

So taking a step backward: The pandemic happens, an uncountable amount of baristas lost their jobs because places shut down, and people had nowhere to go. And as you mentioned, instead of approaching things in an individualistic way, like one person saying, “Hey, I lost my job. Here's my Venmo, or my GoFund—GoFundMe.”

I'm realizing now that GoFundMe and GoFundBean are very similar, which I know, but in my brain, I'm like, “I have to choose one.”

But individuals [could have] started GoFundMes for themselves—but instead what you folks were observing, and it seems like you were very conscious of, is that people were coming together as collectives, as like, “We are the staff of X, Y, Z coffee shop. Let's all pull our resources together.”

And it seems like that idea of collectivity inspired you to even go a step further and say, “Hey, maybe somebody who lives in, let's say New Orleans—” I'll pick a city. “Maybe someone in New Orleans wants to support their local coffee community, but they don't know where the tip jars are.”

GoFundBean’s Instagram account almost served as a platform for them to just go to one place and say, “What's in my community?” Or, “What's the tip jar I'd like to support? Oh, here it is.”

Valorie: Absolutely. And you know, when we had all the tip jars on the website, you could sort by city, actually. So we actually had a lot of people go onto our website and use the sort button to say, “I want to give money to baristas in Philadelphia or New Orleans and donate money that way,” and like, just click through to every tip jar in Philly.

Ashley: Were you surprised by how people responded to GoFundBean when you first started? Did you see a lot of people going to the website and, like you said, using those sorting resources, or saying, “Oh, this is a resource that I can use to support my community. I didn't know about this. This is great.”

What was the response initially when you started the website and the Instagram account?

Valorie: Yeah. I mean, it was so funny because—I think you probably have dealt with this—is that a lot of people don't give feedback.

Ashley: Yep, yep.

Valorie: So it was like, we only knew that people were doing it because we could see spikes in website traffic. No one was messaging us being like, “This is so cool. I just donated to every barista in New Orleans.” Like no one was saying that.

We did get specific coffee people coming to us and being like, “Oh, this is really cool. Thank you for doing this. It's really amazing that you're doing this.” But we only knew because people would post on their own individual Instagram and be like, “Oh my god, someone donated like a hundred dollars to our tip jar today. Thank you guys so much.” And then we would be able to look on our website and be like, “Oh, I think that traffic came from us because of this spike in our website traffic the same day.”

Ashley: That's funny. I 100% know what you mean by not getting feedback on things, but then seeing somebody talk about someone you're like, oh, okay. I guess, I guess that was impactful for you.

Valorie: I guess this worked.

Ashley: I guess this worked?

So then how would you measure things? You said that you looked at spikes in website traffic, but like, how did you know that your impact was, I guess, making an impact?

Valorie: We would get messages from the people whose tip jars we posted. And they would sometimes thank us and be like, “Thank you, thank you for posting this. We saw a lot more tips come in this week,” or something. But also it was a lot of like—I was locked inside my house, as was everybody else—and I was just going through baristas’ Instagram [accounts] and watching their stories and seeing them either reposting our tip jar. Or people who I knew worked in coffee, but weren't baristas, who were posting about GoFundBean and telling their followers to check us out.

That was kind of how we were measuring impact back then.

Ashley: At what point did you folks decide that you wanted to do more? Because initially, it seems like this was a temporary measure, right? Like, okay: The pandemic is happening. We had no idea at that time how long it was going to last. I think there was still talk at that time of, oh we’ll shut down for two weeks and we'll be back up and running, which obviously hasn't happened.

We're two years in. We're still here. At what point did you realize that this could be something more permanent, or that you wanted to do more?

Valorie: It was when actually Melitta came to us and was like, “Hey, we want to partner with you guys to sell—” because like, Melitta, Chemex, all these companies that sell home coffee brewing equipment at retail, they were making money hand over fist early in the pandemic because people were learning to make coffee at home.

They were like, “We want to use some of these extra profits that we're making, that we're making directly because baristas are not making money because coffee shops are closed.” They came to us and they were like, “We want to partner with you guys to sell like a certain brewer,” or something, “and the profits from that will go toward tip jars. We'll give you guys the money and you guys can decide which tip jars to put them in,” or something. And that was the beginning of the grant program.

What ended up happening was, for three months, we were promoting this with Melitta and working with them and then kind of in the middle of the process, they were like, “Oh, we really need you guys to be a 501c3 nonprofit for us to give you a bunch of money,” which was like, “Yeah, that totally makes sense.”

I think that was probably in May of that year. So we got a board together—Adam mostly got a board together. I started applying for 501c3 status, which we got later on in 2020, and just kind of like through that process, we're realizing that there was so much more we could do with the brain trust that Adam had assembled.

The people on our board are all people who care very deeply about hourly coffee workers. They've all been baristas and worked in the industry for like, I think we together combined, we have like 80 years of experience in coffee or something. It's a lot of time that we've all been in this industry.

We all love it so much. As we were talking and assembling this and like becoming a 501c3, and realizing we could do this whole grant program with this money that Melitta was giving us—and then JNP got on board too. And then just donations started kind of pouring in, as we started saying like, “Hey, this is kind of our next step.”

I think that’s when we realized, “Oh, we have something cool on our hands here that we could do a lot with.”

Ashley: So you've talked about hourly coffee workers a fair amount, and you've talked—like, you say it as a phrase: “hourly coffee workers.” I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the struggles that hourly coffee workers face, which we saw very clearly illustrated in the pandemic, right?

They were the first people laid off. They're the people who can't do their jobs at home. What other issues were you seeing hourly coffee workers facing that you thought, “Oh, okay. We at GoFundBean can tackle this,” or, “We at GoFundBean can at least offer support in a way that's meaningful and impactful.”

Valorie: When I say hourly coffee workers, we're referring mostly to baristas, but there are plenty of people who work in coffee who are paid by the hour who are not baristas, or who were baristas but aren't anymore. That's kind of the inception of that phrase.

And it's been really cool to start seeing people start using it, because I remember when we came up with it—and not to say that no one had ever put those three words together—but when we consciously decided that we weren't going to say that we were an organization for baristas, we were an organization for hourly coffee workers, since then, I've seen a spike of people using that phrase, which has been really fun.

I think it's also important because it's much more inclusive and I think addresses more of the industry as a whole.

Ashley: What I love about the phrase “hourly coffee workers” is, like you said, it includes people who aren't just baristas—who are delivery drivers, a lot of roasters are hourly coffee workers, anybody who works in production, so the people who maybe aren't roasting your coffee, but are putting it in bags and making sure that it gets to you—almost all of those people are hourly coffee workers.

It seems like as GoFundBean evolved, you were able to start identifying specific struggles that hourly coffee workers face. So I was wondering if you could talk about some of those struggles. Because I also imagine that maybe people in the restaurant industry are listening to this, or people in the service industry at large, they probably face a lot of the same issues as well.

How did GoFundBean bring light to some of the issues that hourly coffee workers face?

Valorie: Hourly coffee workers are some of the most vulnerable employees, and that's true of hourly wage earners sort of across the United States. They are some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S. economy or in U.S. society writ large.

A lot of states have at-will employment. It can be very precarious to try to speak up, especially when you are working a minimum-wage job or just above minimum wage and you don't have the ability to save money. You don't have a safety net. And our government doesn't have a safety net for U.S.-based workers really.

I think we saw a lot of that in the pandemic. There was the extra $600, but there was no safety net for the people who lost their health insurance because they lost their jobs. Just the vulnerability of workers has been kind of made more and more clear to us every day.

I think, just in conversation with hourly coffee workers, just the things that they—and I say they, but really, I mean we, because I was a barista up until like last March—the issues that they face, it's like they compound on one another. It's one thing after the next.

Like, they don't have money, they don't earn enough money to save, so then when things like they get a flat tire or something like that has to go on a credit card, which then incurs a bunch of fees and interest. That's stressful, and they don't have a safety net for dealing with that stress because probably they don't get good healthcare insurance or good health insurance through their job, and so they don't get mental health care probably.

It's just like every problem that coffee workers face, it seems like compounds on one another. That has been something that, as we address one issue, we find ourselves being like, “Okay, but there are five other issues tying into this and how do we address that?”

Ashley: I think what really caught me during the pandemic, during the early days of the pandemic, was how quickly so many employers let go of baristas. I was wondering if you were at all struck by this? Because I know that some baristas, they were considered essential workers. So some people had to go to work regardless of how safe they felt or not.

But I also know baristas who—I think I was in Chicago when the pandemic started. I think Chicago went into lockdown on March 13th. I know people lost their jobs March 14th.

Valorie: Yup. The speed at which people were happy to lay off their employees, it was like—I mean, you have that shirt that says, “We're not a family.” I was like, “Oh, that has never been more clear to me than in this moment when you were so quick to abandon your staff.”

And like, I understand. I tried to open a coffee shop, I understand that margins are really tight, you probably don't have a month’s worth of pay in the bank that you can just give to your workers. That is a very big reality and coffee. And that's something that we, as an industry, need to start dealing with and addressing, because if nothing else, if coffee shop owners get nothing else out of this whole pandemic, or at least the early part of the pandemic, the idea that businesses should also have three months of savings in the bank should have been occurring to people at some point during this, and I don't think it was.

I definitely knew people who got laid off, truly, the next day, which was crazy to me because it was like, we don't even know how long this is gonna last. Like, can't you just furlough people? Can’t you just keep people on staff for like a week or two, just to see what happens next?

I was very fortunate at the beginning of the pandemic because I was actually working in a museum. And so that museum kept us on staff until almost May. Um, and then when it finally became clear that this was not going away and that they weren't reopening the museum anytime soon, that's when they laid us off.

I was personally offended, I think, to see how quickly some hourly coffee workers were laid off.

Ashley: I mean, so was I. I'd see people posting left and right about being let go from their jobs. And there's a certain cadence to the way that people talked about these layoffs,where I'm like, “Your employer did not have a nice conversation with you. Your employer did not say to you, ‘I am so sorry. This is just where we're at.’”

Because you're right: A lot of coffee shops just don't make money. That's like also a fact of life too. Don't open a coffee shop if you think you're going to make money because it's not going to work.

Valorie: It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. We're here, the hot, hot take here.

Ashley: It's not a get-rich-quick scheme. Hot take here.

But hearing people talk about how they were let go from their jobs so quickly into the pandemic, without any sort of promise of, “We're going to do everything we can to keep you, we're going to do our best to give you what you need to bring you back. Please don't go anywhere, what can we do to support you? Can we start a tip jar for you?”

I was surprised. I don't know if you've noticed this too, a lot of the tip jars were started by baristas. Not necessarily by employers—some were, with respect to the people who did start them for their employees—but it seems like the pandemic gave people a lot of excuses to just say, we don't have to care about you anymore.

Valorie: Yeah, which was really astounding and infuriating, because it was like, “Oh, you guys are the same people who've been saying we're a family and that's why we don't pay as well, but we take care of each other.” Where's that attitude now?

Ashley: Right. We're seeing that now play out in the Starbucks union as well. Starbucks wants to retain control and not have people unionize because they want this freedom to say, “Look at us, we can solve our problems all together.”

But on the flip side, we've seen people say, “Oh cool, we don't have any money to pay you, see you later. Never mind, goodbye.” I think this speaks to the bigger issue of what GoFundBean represents, is that nobody is speaking for low-wage workers, not our government, not the people that are supposed to be taking care of these low-wage baristas or low-wage coffee workers—excuse me, we've learned this term, we're going to use it—but nobody is speaking up or advocating for them. And it seems like GoFundBean has really found its voice as it has recognized that nobody is speaking up for low-wage workers. Nobody is speaking up for hourly coffee workers who don't have a lot of recourse when their boss does something crappy or they get laid off from a job.

When do you think that that moment really crystallized for you that this is so necessary? I have to imagine that, as you've been doing this work—like maybe some of this has always been intuitive for you—but I have to imagine the last two years have also like fundamentally changed you.

Valorie: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I always was sort of aware of kind of the inherent crappiness in the way that a lot of service workers, in general, are treated, and like the way that we're treated as disposable specifically—a lot of people walk into a coffee shop and treat the baristas as just as disposable as the cups in there.

It's really upsetting, but it was seeing that come from bosses as well. Like, I knew it because I'd had bad bosses who treated me that way. But seeing that it was industry-wide, and not that I had just had bad luck with bosses, I was like, “Oh, no one cares about us actually.”

Ashley: I think what you're saying, and what I really want people to understand, is that I think before the pandemic—and I think you're speaking to this a little bit—it would have been easy to say, “That's a bad employer,” or, “That's a shitty boss,” or. “That person is so-and-so,” and just kind of leave it at that, and just say, “This is a bad employer. We're not going to work for them,” or, “We're going to let other people know that this person's a shady boss.”

It's the one-bad-apple argument. But I think what GoFundBean is doing on the positive end is acknowledging that there are systems in place that actively hurt hourly coffee workers, and we are here to say that these things are not okay. We are going to give [hourly coffee workers] as many resources as we can.

Valorie: Yeah, absolutely. A big part of our whole thing has been uncovering just how almost systemic it is in the industry to assume—I think that a large part of it comes from assuming that it's a low-skill job. A lot of it is coffee shops are often owned by people who were never baristas.

Not always, there are some shining examples. And those were also the shops that were doing kind of the most for their workers during the early days of the pandemic. I'm thinking of places like Mammoth Espresso in New Orleans, where Jonathan Riethmaier, he was a barista for a long time, and then opened his own shop.

He treated his employees really well during the pandemic. I was seeing that being, “This is like an example of what this industry could be if people just tried and cared.” There was definitely this moment, though, of realizing that, “Oh, but that's not the standard.”

That's the exception. What he's doing is not the rule, and there needs to be someone—someone needs to be in place to advocate for baristas and for other hourly coffee workers in a way that has not existed before.

Ashley: I want to pivot a little bit and talk about GoFundBean as an organization itself. This—I love getting meta in these conversations, so this is the part where we get really meta.

But thinking about how much you folks have accomplished in the last two years, you went from essentially starting an Instagram account and being like, let's collect all of these tip jars, to a 501c3 that has multiple programming options, gives out grants to coffee workers, has mentor pairing programs, works with multiple coffee organizations to distribute funds…

I mean, the big question I want to ask is like, how'd you get it all done in two years, but can you even answer that question? Because I think it's a really hopeful story for baristas or for hourly coffee workers in general, who are like, “How do I start something?” And it's like, look to GoFundBean, even if you don't want to start a nonprofit exactly—look how much they've built in two years.

Valorie: Yeah. We have done so much in two years and it's actually crazy because a lot of us had never met in real life before this. Adam knew everybody personally, but to think that we've done so much in two years, coming together as strangers, is so insane to me.

I kind of want to point out that that was also part of this: We were all getting to know each other and just trusting each person on the board wanted the best for each other, for GoFundBean, for hourly coffee workers. It's kind of amazing to consider that.

In terms of how we got so much done in two years, I think it was a lot of trusting each other, trusting the process, but also like, we are a working board. Adam and I work the most, but Morgan, who was our accountant, and they did a ton of work to make sure that people were getting their grants on time … every single person on the board has stepped up and given a lot of time and a lot of hours to GoFundBean over the years.

I mean, in a literal sense, that's how we got so much done. But I also think when Adam picked the people he picked for the board, I think the best thing he did was pick people that both inspired him, but also that he trusted. A) It's really hard to do stuff alone, and B) When you do something with other people, you’ve got to do it with people who you both are inspired by and also trust, because otherwise, it is so hard to start something new, which sounds like the biggest “no s**t” kind of statement in the world, but it's hard to start a new thing and doing it with people that you trust and respect and are inspired by is going to be a huge help for you along the way.

Ashley: I think that people listening to this—I hope people listening to this—feel like it's possible for them. Do you know what I mean? That people feel like, “I don't know if I want to start that coffee shop,” or “I don't know if I want to start that roasting business. I don't know if it's possible,” but I hope that they look to GoFundBean and think, “Oh, it is possible. I can do this and maybe it doesn't look exactly the way that I thought it would.”

I imagine that you guys didn't think that GoFundBean would ever look the way it does now.

Valorie: Nope.

Ashley: But it can happen. What would you say to people who maybe are struggling with that first step of making something real and actualized?

Valorie: I would say don't be afraid to pivot. The phrase GoFundBean occurred to Adam in like 2018 or 2019. And when he first started the idea—if I remember correctly, and maybe Adam is somewhere tearing his hair out hearing this—I believe the idea was actually originally to do fundraising specifically for competitors to compete individually, like independently, so that they didn't have to rely on sponsorship because that can be a very stressful kind of added pressure to what is already difficult about USBC, right?

Ashley: Right. So we're talking about barista competitions, right? Just for people who don’t know.

Valorie: Sorry, yeah, for barista competition. So I believe the phrase came from that, but then Adam didn't do anything with it. And then a year later this pandemic hit and he was like, “Oh, what if—like I already owned the Instagram [handle], what if I pivot that idea into doing this?”

So he was like texting me and Jenn Chen about it. And we were both like, “Yeah, that's a great idea. That's a great use of that phrase. We should all do this. We'll help you.” Then when we were at Expo, we were talking to the people at Oatly and they asked a similar question.

They were like, just at every turn, you have found ways to meet needs that you didn't even know were there. I kind of jokingly told them, “Yeah, we're just pivoting our way to the top.” And I said it as a joke and I was like, oh, but that's really true.

You can't be afraid to pivot to what is working and pivot away from what is not working.

A big pivot we made was we really wanted to offer free mental healthcare. We did it through Talkspace. At first, it didn't work, it just didn't work. And so we took six months off of that program so that we could figure out a better way to retool it.

And then we pivoted and now, it's much more stressful for us, but it works so much better for the hourly coffee workers that are benefiting from it that it's completely worth it. So I would say pivoting is key probably in any business, but don't be afraid—it probably won't look the way that you think it will today five years from now, whatever it is that you want to do won't look the same, but I think you'll find what works for you and your business or you and your idea by following your intuition and pivoting to where you’re needed.

Ashley: I had Adam on the show maybe a couple of months after the pandemic. We talked a little bit about tipping culture and a little bit about GoFundBean. And one of the things that was kind of a somber topic was creating an organization whose ultimate end goal, in a perfect world where all problems are solved, is that the organization no longer exists or is no longer needed.

As a person who is now kind of shifting to GoFundBean being your main job, how do you kind of think about your role in pushing an organization forward with that ultimate goal in mind?

Valorie: We look a lot at other organizations, other nonprofits that have been around for decades, and actively hope that that isn't us. I really hope GoFundBean doesn't exist five years from now. And I say that knowing that I love this organization. I love the work that we do, but I hope that five years from now, or 10 years from now, or whatever it is, I hope that there's a living wage in place in America where people don't need to rely on emergency relief grants so that they can get through something like a car problem, or I don't know, being robbed or something—we actively don't want to exist anymore, which is crazy to say.

I think the way we keep working forward is knowing that, until the moment that everything is perfect, we still have a role. And we still have almost a responsibility to take care of people in any way that we can. So, yeah, I dunno. It's hard to want to push it forward and create new programs and also at the same time, be like, it's insane that we—and it's something that we talk about—it's insane that we have to do this.

It's insane that certain things don't already exist, that we feel like we're inventing the wheel sometimes. It can be frustrating, but it can be really rewarding to watch people around us see what GoFundBean is doing and be like, “Oh yeah, that should have already existed,” or like, “Oh yeah, you're right. That is a thing that we need to change.”

That's very rewarding, but yeah, it is weird trying to push an organization forward when you also kind of hope that you work it out. Like, we hope that we work toward a world where we're not needed.

Ashley: For folks who are listening, who think, “Oh, I want to support my hourly coffee workers,” what steps can they take right now, listening to this, they closed their podcast app or whatever, or they're reading the transcript of this episode and they put down their phone or their computer, what can they do?

Valorie: If you have disposable income, you can donate to GoFundBean on our website. All of our donations go toward our programs like disaster relief or emergency relief grants or our mentorship program. Early in, we established an 80/20 rule. So 80% of your donation automatically is applied to programming and 20% goes to overhead. That's one thing you can do if you have disposable income.

If you are employing coffee workers, you could maybe look into getting better health insurance for them. If you employ hourly coffee workers, you could look at what a living wage is in your city and determine what it would take for you to actually pay your employees a living wage.

Every person that makes a living wage is one less person that has to rely on outside help. And if you are neither of those people, if you're not a shop owner, and if you don't have a disposable income, you can just follow us on Instagram and share our message. That helps too.

Ashley: Valorie, thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

Valorie: Oh my gosh. Yeah, this was so fun. Thank you.

Hey, you like Valorie, right? Tell her so by sharing this episode with a friend!

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Hi! Welcome to Boss Barista, a newsletter and podcast about coffee, service work, and empowerment. If you’re new here, consider subscribing!

You’ve probably seen a movie or a television show that depicts baristas in a … not so flattering light. Think familiar tropes, maybe a dude with a man bun and facial hair ready to make you feel bad or confused about your coffee order. I can even hear this character in my head: A customer might walk in, order a macchiato, and then receive a 10-minute lecture that begins with, “Well, actually, a traditional macchiato…”

Morgan Eckroth is the opposite of all that. On social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, where their handle is @MorganDrinksCoffee, they both explain coffee concepts and make light of the silliness of coffee culture. In their short videos, they play the role of the customer and the barista, interacting in a coffee shop space.

Unlike that movie barista, what Morgan achieves in their videos is validating the experience of both actors: It can be frustrating to be a barista and work a service job, but it can also be confusing and weird to be a customer in a coffee shop with complex menus and hard-to-discern tasting notes. In a way, all of it is kind of ridiculous—and Morgan’s videos cut right through this inherent tension.

Morgan is also the 2022 United States Barista Champion, and brought their hundreds of thousands of followers along for the ride as they prepped and competed. When the organizing board who runs the competition announced they would not be livestreaming the event shortly before it was held—effectively making it impossible for those not at the competition to watch what was happening—Morgan decided to do so on their own.

As the winner, Morgan will go on to compete at the World Barista Championships later this year, and will continue to bring the positivity and lightness that pours through their videos in service of making coffee information more accessible to others. Here’s Morgan:

Ashley: So let me have you start by introducing yourself.

Morgan: My name is Morgan Eckroth. I am most often found online under the moniker of MorganDrinksCoffee. I do YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, and I've also been working as a barista for the past five years.

Ashley: I always start these interviews in the same place: I was wondering if you could tell me if you grew up with coffee in your life? Do you have any childhood memories of coffee?

Morgan: I actually, funnily, I don't. I grew up in a family that doesn't drink or didn't drink any coffee. And to this day they don't drink any coffee. I frequently say that it was kind of my act of teenage rebellion to be a coffee drinker.

At the age of 16, when I got my driver's license, the first thing I did, I think, was drive to a coffee shop for the first time.

Ashley: Oh, God, I'm trying to think of the first thing I did when I got my license—I don't think it was driving to a coffee shop.

Morgan: My act of teenage rebellion was pretty mild when it comes down to it.

Ashley: It's funny when you set certain expectations within a household, or even just within your life. And then you break out of those expectations and then you're like, “Oh wow. My act of rebellion was pretty mild.”

Morgan: I was like, “That wasn't nearly as dramatic as I meant it to be, I don't think.”

Ashley: But you must've felt like it was at that moment!

Morgan: Yeah, it was definitely one of those things that I kind of wanted to be my own. Part of it was the convenience of like, I was a student and needed a place to study and wanted to be out of the house because I was a teenager.

Also, there was this kind of world of coffee where I was looking at these baristas and I'm like, “They're so cool. I want to be like them.” And so I just kind of stumbled my way into a specialty coffee cafe, and very awkwardly started ordering very, very sugary and delicious drinks. And it's kind of all history from there.

Ashley: Do you remember the moment where you decided, beyond this teenage rebellion moment, that like, “Oh, this is something that I want to do,” or, “This is something I want to learn about or be part of?”

Morgan: I can't remember a very, very specific moment. I do, however, remember the time period of, I think about two years from when I started drinking coffee to when I got my first barista job, that I knew that I wanted to be a barista. That was my, that was my end goal.

I was like, “I'm going to go to college. I want to work as a barista,” and do that sort of thing. I started applying to this coffee shop that I was—it was actually called Tried and True, and was my very first coffee job ever. I remember being 16 and having this inkling that I wanted to do what the people behind the bar were doing.

So I showed up with my resume and like a really awkward cover letter. And I was like, “Please hire me!” And of course, I'm a high school student, zero qualifications, zero availability, anything. And they were like, “Yeah, no, but keep trying because maybe eventually.” Throughout those two years, I think I applied multiple times.

And it wasn't even with the intention of getting a job, I really was just trying to be like, “I want to work here really, really badly. And I want you all to know that.”

Then finally they said yes. I think it was that very first shift when I got behind the bar, and they started teaching me things that I was like, “Oh yeah, this is as cool as I thought it was going to be.”

Ashley: I love that the moment met your expectations.

Morgan: 100%. I remember grabbing the portafilter for the first time, and them being like, “Okay, like put it here in the grinder, and then the coffee comes out,” and I felt like a superhero. I was like, “I'm in heaven right now doing what I want to do forever,” and somehow that has lasted for the past five years.

Ashley: It's funny that you tell the story this way too, because I feel like so many people, when they come on the show and we have the conversation about, “How did you get into coffee,” it's almost always, “I fell into it,” or “I had nothing else to do,” or “I was a student on campus and like, the coffee shop was kind of cool so I just sort of did it for a while.”

And it's so cool to see—I'm going to sound ancient as I say this—but it's so cool to see a generation of people who see baristas and they're like, “Yes, that's what I want to do.”

Morgan: I definitely annoyed my way into my first coffee job and still to this day, I don't know exactly why it clicked as early as it did or what kind of drove me to it, but it was just kind of like that gut instinct of being like, “I think I want to do this.”

Once I got there, “I was like, okay, yeah, I definitely want to do this.” I think I really lucked out with those two things syncing up as early in my life as they did.

Ashley: So, as you mentioned earlier, you make content on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram—let's give people a little bit of a backstory about how you got to that point.

So at what point did you start filming yourself—I guess that’s like the proto-version of all of this.

Morgan: Totally. So I started my content journey at the very, very baseline before I even knew it was something I wanted to do as a career—I started making TikTok videos in June of 2019. So TikTok, as an app, was still very, very fresh. It had nowhere near the mainstream adoption it has now. It was an app that I'd like, just kind of spend time on. I enjoyed it as a consumer.

It was about to be summer. And I went, “I am bored and I want a project or like a hobby to do.”

I was like, “You know what? I'll try making some videos.” At the time I was finishing up my marketing degree and it was my goal at that time to go into some aspect of either digital marketing or social media marketing in the coffee, food, and beverage space.

That was my end goal. So I was kinda like, “Well, if I can start to get a handle on some new emerging platforms, if I can get a little bit of the hard skills of video under my belt, that would probably be pretty helpful in the future.” I kind of stumbled upon making videos about coffee just naturally.

I worked quite a bit when I was in college and so I was at my job most of the time. I really loved my job and I was like, “Oh, I'll just make videos about coffee.” And then they started to do well, and that was a true shock. It was very surprising to me. So I just kind of leaned into it.

I was having a lot of fun making videos about latte art, and then I kind of stumbled upon it like, “Oh, I can make kind of funny videos about barista experiences.” And it just kind of escalated from there. They started to take off and I started to take it more seriously.

Ashley: Do you remember the first video where it felt like a sea change—like something clicked or something really changed for you?

Morgan: Yeah. So my first couple of—for lack of a better word—viral videos were very silly. I have this party trick where I can do a pretty impressive backbend and that went viral. That was non-coffee, and then I remember the first coffee video I posted that did really well.

It was literally just me. It was just no sound—or pardon me, no music, just me standing at the bar, pouring a latte, stuff you see on Instagram all the time. I just had the videos and I was like, “I'll just post it.”

I remember posting it as I got off my shift and then I went and ate dinner. Didn't think about it. And I came back a couple hours later to just scroll through TikTok like usual. I remember opening it up and being like, “This video has 400,000 views.” Out of nowhere, I was like, “This is completely out of the realm of possibility of what I expected.” And that was a truly shocking moment because it really was over the course of like two hours that this video grew like that.

And people were excited by it! I mean, in my world latte art is like something you kind of do every day, so it wasn't that special to me, but it was really, really cool to see that it was special to other people. And I was like, “What else can I show them that I do every day that they might be interested in?”

Ashley: It's funny to reflect on those moments where you're like, “I do something like this every day, and this is so fascinating to people.”

I was on a podcast recently, and I think we talked about the stuff that I write about and labor organizations and unions, and at the very end of the conversation, I gave a tip about how to pour a heart into a latte. Just a heart, because I was like, “Everyone likes a heart. Like, don't even mess with it.”

Morgan: It’s classic.

Ashley: It’s classic. And I could tell that was one of the most interesting parts of the conversation. And I'm like, “I've poured at least a hundred thousand hearts in my life. It's something that I could like live and breathe.”

So it's really fascinating to reflect on those moments and figure out like, “Wow, things that I find so normal and regular are really fascinating to people,” especially because, as baristas, there is some alchemy in a way to what we do.

We have these raw ingredients and then suddenly you have a delicious drink. How does this happen?

Morgan: It’s like you're making, like, a potion behind the bar.

Ashley: Right. At what point did you feel like you were refining your message in your videos? Because what I find so fascinating about your videos, and we have emailed about this, is that—so Morgan has these videos and she plays both parts. There's the customer and there's the barista.

Sometimes there is more than one character, which I love. I love when you're two different customers, that makes me really happy. But I think what you do really well is that you validate both experiences. You're never really mad at the customer, but you're also not mad at the barista.

I think there's a really easy tendency in coffee to juxtapose customers and baristas as opposing forces. But you seem to validate the frustrations that both characters have while making both totally valid. When did that start becoming clear to you?

Morgan: Yeah, it was something that was pretty important to me from day one. I mean, honestly, it kind of just leads into how I approach my job as a barista. You know this from your experiences: Being a barista can be really hard. You can deal with some of the weirdest, most awful things happening to you just over the course of your job.

With that context, I've come into my job and through all the stuff that I've experienced looking at everything through the lens of humor. At least for me personally, whenever you have a customer that's being particularly difficult or perhaps angry at you, I think it's really easy to take that personally, as in like, “They are angry at me as a person,” when very rarely I think that is true. I think it's often they're already having a bad day and you just happened to be the person in front of them.

But I also find sometimes I think we get very serious with the sort of interactions we have, when I think, more often than not, they're just kind of funny. We're just a little part of people's everyday lives and it is at the kind of cafe level—like, it's a cup of coffee. I think often there are so many, like, theatrical and dramatics involved in it that is very, very funny for the level of seriousness that it actually is.

When I was making my videos, I really wanted to touch on the ridiculousness of like, you know, how dramatic these cafes scenarios happen.

But at the same time, I did very much want to respect both the customer and the barista experience, because I think more often than not, any sort of friction and stuff that happens between barista and customer is mostly born out of just a lack of knowledge and/or context as to what the barista is doing, and that's not necessarily at the fault of the customer.

You can't expect them to know every single core value that we have in specialty coffee. But that being said, it can still be very funny. So I was like, “I'd like to kind of poke fun at these things that happen.” But at the same time I wanted to have this angle of like, “While it is silly, we don't want to be driving people away.”

The goal is to bring them to specialty coffee and to value coffee at the same level that I do. So how do we get from point A to point B? And I think a lot of that is just acknowledging that there is a knowledge gap and then kind of working through it with something that is relatable, and I think frequently that's humor.

So that's kind of where I came from.

Ashley: I love that so much because I think that you identified so many, perhaps hurdles we face in the coffee industry. And as I was looking at your profile and reading some of the interviews that you've done recently, I was struck by the fact that you said that you make coffee content for everybody, you don't make coffee content for coffee people.

Not to say that they're excluded by any means, but that they're part of the conversation. And I think for a long time, I mean, I struggle with this. I make a podcast that I don't think anybody outside of the coffee industry listens to—

Morgan: They should though!

Ashley: You know, one day, fingers crossed, but I think that we've done a lot of that in the past where we're speaking to the choir, we're kind of speaking to the same people over and over.

And I think coffee has kind of struggled with this hurdle of getting to consumers in a way that feels safe and accessible and doesn't feel like this barista is going to be mad at me. I'm sure you've seen the hipster barista meme—which I'm obsessed with right now. I have an article coming out in Standart about the hipster barista meme because it's so fascinating to me

Morgan: It’s a classic.

Ashley: It's classic, but it's like, that is the perception that a lot of people have of what being a barista is.

And I would posit if we had like a scale of hipster barista—like if we had a scale of how we feel about baristas—hipster barista would be on one end. And I would say that you're on the other.

Morgan: Cool. Thank you. That's a huge compliment. I always kind of hope that is the case, but I could never be sure. You never know how other people are perceiving what you're making.

Ashley: But it seems like you get a lot of positive feedback from people. I mean, you can't equate likes necessarily with positivity all the time, but I imagine when you're engaging with people through your videos, or you see comments, or you're engaging with people on other platforms, there is a moment where you're like, “Oh, this is landing with people. This is sharing an experience.”

Morgan: I’ve been really grateful to kind of cultivate the following that I currently have. I think what you said is exactly true. I have somehow ended up with a pretty healthy community as far as online communities go. I think it's very easy to cultivate a community that is comfortable with dog-piling on people or, or punching down on people.

We have these discussions a lot about whether it is a creator's responsibility to maintain control over their audience, or whether it is—you know, you can't control an audience, they'll do what they want regardless of the creator.

I have always been very much of the opinion that a creative is, to some extent, responsible for their audience's actions, because I do very much believe that what you put out there as a creator, the tone you use, the kind of, for lack of a better word, kind of energy you put out there will be reflected in how your audience both reacts and what they do with the information you're presenting them.

I came into making content with that opinion. I've always tried to do my best, to varying levels of success, but I've always tried to do my best to kind of cultivate an audience who is accepting of all things coffee.

I come to my platform with a lot of love and just passion for coffee, and I want that to be replicated in my audience. I don't want to have an audience that is going to go out to other creators and blast my opinions at them as something that is fact, because very frequently it is not. I just wanted it to be a very fun place full of people who want to have fun with coffee.

I've finally reached that point with my audience. We have a good time together online, which is a really, really cool thing to say.

Ashley: You said that you finally reached that point. So I imagine that there was some learning and figuring it out as you went along.

Morgan: Absolutely. I can pinpoint one kind of direct experience when I started on YouTube. I had started on TikTok, because, as I mentioned before, I was very, very comfortable with short-form content, and with short-form content there tends to be a slightly younger audience.

You tend to be hitting more of the 18-to-24-year-olds. But when you move to YouTube, especially when talking about coffee, you start to get a little bit of a different demographic. At least to my knowledge, a majority of the YouTube audience who watches a lot of specialty coffee long-form content tends to skew a little bit more towards the male demographic, and it also tends to skew a little bit older in age, which makes sense because the cost of being invested into doing coffee things and buying coffee equipment is a lot higher than what most young people can have.

So when I came onto YouTube, I was suddenly faced with this very, very different audience who I think was just expecting something different from me. They were looking for a certain level of information and dissection of topics that I just didn't want to give because I think that kind of initial higher-level [content] can make it a little bit hard for people to jump into specialty coffee. I very much viewed myself as kind of a stepping stone to those sorts of higher-level creators.

It was very much a back-and-forth with my new audience of, “Hey guys, I know what you want for me. That is not what I'm going to be giving you, at least not all the time,” and so there was a little bit of friction there, of dealing with frustration from audience members.

But ultimately I just held strong to my guns. Eventually, there was this mutual understanding of people who didn't want to consume my content just finally being like, “Okay, I can leave.” And I was like, “No worries. There are other people who make the kind of content you want.”

The people who enjoyed my content found their way to me. And now we're in a very happy place together.

Ashley: I like that you were able to create some boundaries around what you wanted to create. I did an interview with James Hoffmann and he mentioned, “There are things I'm going to create and there are things I'm not going to create,” and being pretty comfortable with that. I think that took him some time too, and it's really encouraging to hear you say that same thing of like, “I don't have to give people everything. It's okay for me to say, ‘This is what I want to do. And if you want to be part of this ride, that's awesome.’ If you don't, you're always welcome back, but you don't have to consume this.”

Morgan: Exactly. It sometimes can be a little bit painful because you want to give people what they're asking for. But at the same time, I also knew, from my own level of knowledge, that I wasn't qualified to talk about a lot of topics that people were asking for. It was a lot of people being like, “Do this, do this!”

And I'm like, “Look, if I try to cover this topic, I'm going to do a disservice to it.” I would always try to do my best to point them in the right direction and frequently that is like James, or other established content creators. I'm like, “Hey, I don't want to talk about this, but the good news is there are a ton of amazing resources about it already. So go over there and enjoy those. And then come back for the things I am going to talk about.”

Ashley: Did you find it ever difficult to separate the personal from, like, Morgan Drinks Coffee the character—and not to say that this is a character you're playing. I mean, you kind of are in some aspects—

Morgan: But it is curated.

Ashley: Yeah, do you ever have to draw a line for yourself like, “I need to put down my phone,” or, “I need to not respond to this message,” or, “I need to cultivate a safe place for myself that maybe doesn't exist to consume for others?”

Morgan: No, completely. That is the ongoing struggle. I think I'm a lot better about creating that separation nowadays than I used to be. But it is tricky when you're a content creator, but also someone who enjoys spending time online.

I remember like two years ago, I think when I was like starting to really get into it, going online to just consume content for my own enjoyment became very, very difficult because I would open up TikTok and I wouldn't think, “I'm going to just have a nice 30 minutes where I can enjoy videos.” It was immediately like I am being faced with my job. It got really hard to kind of plug out of my job and just be like, I'm just me on my time off.

I think when you're a content creator and especially any sort of person who's self-employed or freelance, you become your own boss, and that's kind of dangerous because you're not always that good at setting boundaries for yourself. So nowadays, I have a lot of good systems and supports in place to know when to get myself offline.

I've also cultivated for myself a lot of hobbies that are not monetized and un-online. Sometimes I think in the creator space, it's really easy to be like, “Oh, I have this hobby. But I could monetize it!” and then it becomes a job, it's no longer a hobby. I've found things for me, reading and writing are my true hobbies.

Those do not exist really on the internet in any way. That's something that I've kept special to me. And that's been super helpful as well. And creating that sort of division.

Ashley: So let’s talk about this very big thing that happened to you.

Morgan: [Laughs] No biggie.

Ashley: What could we be talking about? No big deal, whatever.

So you won the 2022 United States Barista Competition. Woohoo! Let's take a moment to celebrate that. I have my jazz hands up, which doesn't make any sense because we can't see each other.

I kind of want to work backward from that moment. What was it like when—

Morgan: Oh my gosh. It was shocking, truly. I've been thinking back to that moment a lot. I have a lot of footage and videos and photos from those 30 seconds between the announcement and walking up on stage.

I think it was an overwhelming feeling of just joy and relief. For the past year—I've competed now for a couple of years with varying levels of success—but in 2020, when I competed in qualifiers, I did not do as well as I wanted to. I didn't do as well as I thought I was going to do. And so I left competition that year feeling really bad about myself, honestly.

Competition has always been something that’s kind of pushed me, I think, in my career path. And I've always really valued that. So to leave feeling like I had failed myself was something that took a long time to come to terms with. Coming into this year, it was very much about proving myself wrong, that I wasn't stuck at this level that I thought I was at.

To be in the finals, even just finding out that I was in the finals, was shocking and amazing. I remember they were counting down all the names, and it came to the last two of us and we were standing back there just hugging—I think both of us were probably on the verge of like a panic attack just waiting for the announcement, and then it came and I think I just kind of … let go of all that self-resentment and frustration from my past failures. It all just kind of like came out in that final.

Ashley: I would have never guessed that you were carrying those moments of self-resentment. That was a really interesting way to put it, because I think that like—I don't know!

I've competed a couple of times and I've thought about those moments too, of like what I could have done better. I still feel resentful towards myself of making mistakes that I feel like I shouldn't have, but at the same time—

Morgan: You probably had no control over it.

Ashley: Did you realize that you were holding onto this feeling of self-resentment?

Morgan: I don't think I did really until afterward. I had a little inkling of it when I found out that I was competing. I kind of had this minute where I sat back and I was like, “I need to get into a healthy headspace.” Not that I wasn't at the time, but I was like, it is going to be really, really important that I am really steadfast in what I'm doing this year.

Especially with the inherent audience I was bringing with me, no matter whether I chose to publicize that I was competing or not, my audience would have kind of figured it out at some point. It was tricky to come to terms with the fact that I needed to kind of prove something to myself, but additionally, I was bringing a really strong audience with me, that if I felt like I did poorly, or if I legitimately did poorly, I would not hear the end of it for a very long time. Not necessarily a bad way, but it would stick with me. Much more so than in previous years.

So it was, it was a lot of personal pressure that I applied to myself this year, and I'm very glad it all worked out. I do not want to think about the process I would have had to do to decompress hadn't it worked out.

Ashley: Yeah, that must've been a huge decision that you had to make. It wasn't just competing for yourself or the company that you worked for. You were competing almost on behalf of your audience.

Morgan: No matter what, I do everything I do, in coffee and online, nowadays with the context that I have a lot of people watching, which is really fun and definitely an honor, but at the same time, very scary. I had to make the decision very early on with my routine of, “Am I going to involve my audience, or am I just going to kind of let them vicariously view when I want them to?” I think the best possible outcome for everyone was to have them involved along the way.

So they could at least kind of understand the magnitude of preparation that goes into it. And for them to like, have a fun time with barista competitions because they're very strange. They're very weird, as you said before yourself, and I fully agree. And so I was like, “Well, if I can like explain this weird thing, maybe we can all come away with some knowledge more so than just the results of the competition.”

Ashley: There are so many layers to your competition win. There's the fact that you had this decision before you even applied, to think, “Are these folks going to come with me? Am I going to put this on my channel? Am I going to just do it in stealth mode and then be like, ‘Surprise! Here's all the stuff I did!’”

But then there's that second level of, “Okay, if they're coming with me, how do I cultivate content for them so they can understand what's happening for people who probably have no idea what this weird thing is?”

Morgan: For sure.

Ashley: And then on a third level, you made your routine about your audience, about sharing with people. You made your drink specifically in a way that people could make it at home. You made a video that was like, “Here's my drink, and here is how you make it.” I have to imagine that that took so much planning.

Morgan: It was an interesting challenge, logistically it was good and bad. I wouldn't have changed a thing about it, but I will say it added a little bit extra stress to the prep, because we were releasing these videos, and going into deep dives about the different components of my presentation while we were actively preparing.

We released a full video about how to freeze-distill milk and why we nowadays do that a lot in competition and what it tastes like and what drinks I was doing. The minute that video is uploaded, you check the box and you're like, “Well, we're using freeze-distilled milk. Like we can't change it now.”

It posed a very interesting challenge for us, especially at the end. We actually changed my signature beverage, the ingredients pretty significantly. We had a different version of it. We'd been working with it for a couple of weeks, and then two or three days before we left for Boston, we were like, “We need to change it. This—we need to improve this.”

I filmed my video about my signature drink, I think it was less than 24 hours before we got on the plane for Boston. I was frantically sending it off to my editor, and then we were frantically trying to upload it on really bad Wi-Fi. It was a really interesting challenge in that sense.

But at the same time, there was a little bit of relief in checking those boxes and being like, “We're using freeze-distilled milk. We literally can't change it now.” So at least we could like move past that step of prep.

Ashley: Yeah, there is some relief in being able to make a decision and just stick with it.

Morgan: Yeah. Yeah. Very much so.

Ashley: Have you reflected much—I know that I've asked you about this—but have you reflected much about what your win means? Like, I don't know that anybody else winning with an audience like yours would, and I don't want to say [past wins] don’t mean anything, that's not true, but it just means something different because you brought a whole audience with you.

Morgan: I talked very briefly with one of the head judges, after all the announcements, as we were leaving the venue the final night, and they said something that meant a lot to me and was—yeah, I was crying a lot that night—but hearing what they said kind of tipped me over the edge a little bit more.

Because it was really, it was the goal of the entire thing: They said that they don't think they'll know kind of the impact of like my routine for another couple of years. Hopefully, we start to see the competitor landscape shift and change. I started off this year when I found out I was competing, not with the intention of winning—like I'm competitive, obviously I wanted to do well, like all of that stuff—but more so I wanted to create something that could kind of act as a resource for potential new competitors.

It's my process. Everyone's process is different, but I at least wanted to lay a little bit of a foundation for people who might want to compete but have nowhere to start.

To hear that someone else had thought that I had maybe created something similar to that was really emotional to me because that, more so than doing well or even winning or anything, was the overarching goal of the season. I'm really excited frankly, to see future seasons and to hopefully see a shakeup in the type of competitors we see. I'm really excited that in the past couple of years, there's been a really, really great push to open it up to more people. And I'm just grateful to kind of be a part of that.

Ashley: Is the way that you talked about barista competitions being inaccessible, and wanting to create information and give people a resource to turn to—was that informed by your past experiences?

Morgan: It was a little bit. When I competed for the very first time, I was lucky enough that my bosses had both competed in barista competitions in previous years. I had a little bit of help from them as kind of like, guidelines.

But a lot of it, because they're busy, they have lives, and I'm the competitor, a lot of it falls on my shoulders to figure out. It was a lot of me, as like a very fresh, 19-year-old barista, throwing stuff at the walls and just hoping I was doing the right thing.

I studied tons and tons of other competitors’ routines, but beyond that, and looking over the rulebook, there wasn't really any information about what I should be doing or shouldn't be doing. So my hope was to create a little capsule of videos that could at least act as a starting point for someone like me, back when I was competing for the first time.

Ashley: And the idea behind barista competitions, ideally, is that we're pushing coffee to a new place. So we should be borrowing from people who did something that worked. We should be borrowing from people who did something really interesting, and we should be able to access that, be like, “Oh, they did this thing. This is how they did it. Let me try it. Hopefully that will serve the coffee.” That's the whole point.

Morgan: Yep.

Ashley: What are you looking forward to as you prepare for the world competition—which luckily you have a little bit of a breather here. It doesn't happen until September, and we're recording this in April.

What are you looking forward to maybe thinking about or retooling as you prepare for that?

Morgan: Honestly, I'm really excited to sit down with my routine and really dissect it. I think the bones of my routine are probably gonna stay roughly the same, things like the overarching theme, probably where we're getting our coffees from—stuff like that. But this past season prepping for USBC went by so quickly.

We had barely two months, which is kind of nothing in the scale of competition, especially for like, a full, national-level of routine. And so everything that we did, while very intentional, had to happen rapidly. And we had to kind of stick to our guns on all of them.

I'm really excited to take the next four months and really go back on all the decisions we made and also look at my scoresheets and kind of decide, “Were we happy with that? Can we make it better?” Or [look at] the things that didn't do as well. I kind of had some shortcomings and it's like, okay, how do we take these shortcomings and bring them up to the level they need to be at? And then take them that much further.

So I think it's going to be honestly, a lot of really, really structured, thoughtful time. Beyond that, there's just a lot of practice I need to do. I would like to be better at tasting, myself personally, there were some technical things I need to be better at. So I'm excited to dive into those topics separately as well, because they're going to also elevate my routine for the world stage.

Ashley: I think I've asked you a version of this question before, and I kind of want to end on it again because … I don't know, there's something so precisely of this moment of where we're at in coffee and what the future of coffee can represent about you winning this competition. And that's a lot—I know that I just told you a lot of things and that's probably—

Morgan: It’s scary and exciting at the same time.

Ashley: It's all of the feelings at the same time, but there's something about us wanting to be a more accessible industry that I think you represent.

I think there's something about the fact that we're not great at talking about coffee as an industry, but some people are starting to claw out of that, are starting to find ways to communicate that—you being one of them.

When we think about who wins the USBC—obviously there's a scoresheet, there's points that you get and it's a point system, but at the same time, one of the things I think the judges are asked to do, especially when you get to that top level, is to really evaluate, “Is this person going to represent us? Because that's ultimately what the U.S. Barista Champion is. They are a representative of the United States that will be going to the world competition and representing our country.”

They have to think about that. Who's going to encompass that role. And in a way, there must be something so like, mind-boggling and almost—I don't want to say self-reflective because that's not the right word, but like, how do you process all that?

Or like, what do you think of it? When someone looks at you and they're like, “That's the U.S. Barista Champion,” what do you want them to kind of take away from that?

Morgan: When we flew home from Boston, that was kind of like, a very grounding moment, because you get back at home, I did all my COVID tests, and then I went back to work—and it was this weird moment of coming back to what used to be very normal and routine and feeling like there is now this extra layer on top of it, of this title that I hold in great respect. And I know a lot of other people do.

I'm still trying to figure out what that means. I had to have a pretty, pretty lengthy talk with my coach because I was sitting here, four or five days after competition, being like, the idea of making a normal, kind of like funny video seems so like, it just seemed silly.

I hit a weird creative wall where I was like, I have no idea what I'm supposed to do now. And he kind of talked me through some really helpful stuff and what it came down to, he was like, “Don't look at what other champions have done. Don't try to put an expectation upon yourself of what you're supposed to do now because you are your own unique person and you do Morgan Drinks Coffee. Whatever your future looks like with this title is also through the lens of doing Morgan Drinks Coffee.”

That was something that was really helpful for me, because it kind of drew me out of my own head and I was like, “Okay, there is this added level and title and all this stuff, but at the end of the day, I want to continue pushing forward with talking about coffee and having a lot of fun with it.”

I am really excited that there are potentially some new people who are coming to it and coming to me from this win, and that's really, really exciting. So that kind of got me over my creative hump and I'm really excited to continue pursuing forward with what I've been doing in the past. And I'm sure it will continue to evolve as we continue forward into worlds and then after that.

But that being said, the core of what I want to do online still exists and I'm just gonna push forward with it. Title be darned.

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I’ve long been interested in partnerships. The way two people interact is a pleasure to observe, and I think we learn the most about ourselves when there’s a person close by to reflect on and share our experiences with.

Bianka Alloyn and Sabreen Naimah are the co-founders of Cute Coffee, a small and decidedly joyful roasting company based in Northern California. The story of how Bianka and Sabreen met is nothing short of kismet—they lived parallel lives for years, finally crossing paths at a coffee shop in Venice Beach, California.

Since then, they’ve found delightful ways to express their love of coffee and art together, pulling the best out of one another as their partnership deepens. They’re always looking for the fun and excitement that sharing coffee brings—that value is expressed so effusively it literally jumps out of this conversation. An audio editor I sometimes work with, Jordan, said he was smiling ear-to-ear as he listened to Bianka and Sabreen speak.

Right at the top, this episode starts with some silliness and laughs. Bianka and Sabreen just moved to a farm in the country, so you might hear a few feathered friends in the background. We also talk a lot about snacks, secret singers, and how Boss Barista can incorporate Nickelodeon-style slime into our interviews. Here are Bianka and Sabreen.

Ashley: So Bianka and Sabreen, I was wondering if you could paint a picture for our listeners—paint a mental picture for them about where you are right now.

Bianka: Imagine thousands of really big trees, some sunlight peeping through those trees. And there's also some dirt roads. Lots of just vegetation everywhere.

And everybody seems to have animals. And I mean, farm animals. People have roosters, chickens, cats, dogs, cows, lambs, turkeys … you name it. They got all the things, horses…

Sabreen: And just lots of species of birds are here.

Bianka: Oh my god. There's so many birds.

Sabreen: So many birds.

Ashley: How long have you folks lived in the country?

Bianka: It's only been about … last summer?

Sabreen: July of last year.

Ashley: So if our listeners hear a friend or two in the background, who might they hear?

Bianka: They're going to hear some roosters, chickens.

Sabreen: Sam, the rooster.

Bianka: Sam's in the back.

Ashley: I'm glad that we have a name for the rooster that we're going to hear. That makes me feel more connected to him.

Sabreen: Good.

Ashley: I always like to start these conversations by asking people about their first memories of coffee. So I'm going to start with Sabreen. If you don't mind, could you tell me about any early experiences you had with coffee?

Sabreen: Yeah, I grew up with coffee. I would say my love for coffee started around 13, 14. It was mainly my best friend and I going to Coffee Bean at night. Oh—that's interesting. I drink coffee just at night.

But we would go to Coffee Bean and then take our drinks to—I usually got like, let's see, like a vanilla latte or a Frappuccino-type drink—and we would head over to Barnes & Noble and just spend hours in there looking at magazines, books, just until they closed. We were just in there. So I always associated coffee with just communing and good conversation and books and magazines and sharing and just getting creative juices flowing.

Ashley: There's something very teenager-y about drinking coffee at night. I don't know why that spoke to me as a 16-year-old.

Sabreen: Yeah. I felt like I was doing something like, adult, and just like yeah, drinking coffee and just, “I'm so grown-up. I'm so mature.”

Ashley: What about you?

Bianka: Let's see.

In the kitchen with my mom. My mom would be baking or cooking, and she's drinking coffee. And every now and then I walk up to the mug on the counter and sneak in a sip and she would always say, “Don't drink that coffee, it’ll stunt your growth!”

And I didn't drink it for a long time, but then I was allowed to have it every now and then in ice cream as a kid—because I have a big love for ice cream.

Every now and then I’d get that bite or two of coffee ice cream, and I was like, “This stuff is interesting. Hmm. Hmm.” And then it really started off me really drinking it in high school.

Like maybe towards the end of high school though? I think my, I think my sister worked at Barnes & Noble—no, no. Borders. My sister worked there first, and at first, it was hot chocolates. And then next thing you know, my brother worked there and his partner at the time, she worked there too.

The next thing you know, I'm there every day at Borders and I'm just drinking coffee, doing my homework, eating all the snacks, whatever I could get because they all worked there. So I was like, “Oh, what you got?” And then I would venture into the aisles, just listening to the music and looking at all the magazines and just having a good time.

Ashley: I'm sort of imagining you two almost living parallel lives.

Like, there's a movie and there's like a divider in the middle and you both are teenagers traveling through bookstores with your Frappuccinos or vanilla lattes, almost living the same life, but not together, like, in different places.

Sabreen: That's very accurate because I also have envisioned our lives like that. After we met and shared stories, I realized there are so many parallels between us. In college, we both played sports: Bianka was a Division I basketball player, I was on a Division I volleyball team.

You know, it was a good experience, but ultimately not for us, and just our frustrations and challenges with that and then eventually quitting. We didn't stay on the teams that we played for the whole time.

And then just having creative interests and endeavors and projects and auditioning and acting. And then, even when we lived in New York, we discovered that we lived there at the same time and knew—I dunno if we knew some of the same people, but some of the same circles. You [Bianka] worked at a cafe that I had wanted to go to, but I think I tried going twice and it was closed. And then later I learned that you worked there.

Then learning that we auditioned for some of the same roles and neither of us getting the job and just kind of—just laughing at life in New York.

Bianka: [Laughs] Life in New York.

Ashley: It's funny to me that you both have these almost parallel lives happening in tandem, because you didn’t meet in New York. Did you meet in New York?

Bianka: No, we did not.

Ashley: Tell me about how you met.

Bianka: We met in LA.

Sabreen: How many years after we lived in New York?

Bianka: Oh my gosh. It was probably 10, 12 years?

Sabreen: Maybe like six or seven years.

Bianka: I didn't meet you ’til 2015!

Sabreen: 2014.

Bianka: Correction.

Sabreen: And then I left.

(Pause)

You're right. It is more like 10 years.

Bianka: And we met at a cafe!

Sabreen: At a cafe.

Bianka: In Venice Beach, like on the beach.

Yeah, Sabreen, you came by because you were dropping off headbands and your friend was part of making the cafe actually come alive.

Sabreen: Yeah, so I was working in the production of headbands and jewelry and I was selling them at a boutique next door to the coffee shop that Bianka worked at.

And that's how we got acquainted. I was just getting into specialty coffee and I also had a friend that did help open the coffee shop and I ran into her and she said, “Hey, you should come by and check us out.”

Bianka: Novena!

Sabreen: Yeah. That's how it began.

Bianka: Yeah. And that shop, in particular, was like, the shop that everybody wanted to come to because Nicely [Abel], the three-time world champion latte artist, he was the main feature there.

He was the main feature there. He was the manager, running the shop and people from all over the world would come and have drinks made by us. I learned a lot with him. That was, that was a blessing.

Sabreen: Yeah. And it was the only shop in that area [that served] specialty coffee. I mean, there was Intelligentsia as well.

Bianka: Yeah, but the vibe was different.

Sabreen: Yeah.

Bianka: We got to do what we wanted to do, and create a more creative atmosphere. Like everyone involved was a musician, you know—Novena, Derek, myself, other people that work there, everybody was creative, even Nicely’s a singer. People don't know that. That man can sing! Oh my gosh.

Sabreen: Yeah. It's pretty—it was awesome. It was, it was like the golden era of this space.

Bianka: It was the golden era. Yes, it was. We played records the whole time. I used to host the cuppings and also do all these flower arrangements for the space because I had a little flower company that I started because I started buying all these flowers from a friend of mine who had a farm of pork and flowers.

I didn't buy the pork, but I bought the flowers and just started making arrangements for businesses in the Venice Beach area. And yeah, the cafe I worked at was one of them.

Sabreen: The coffee shop had this very strong, magnetic pull.

I would find myself just like, “Oh, what should I do today? I'm trying to get my day organized.” And I just knew that I had to go to Menotti's at some point. It was just like great energy to be around.

Bianka: You said “before I get organized” you’d have to go get a coffee?

Sabreen: I did! It was just like great energy to be around. I would invite a friend or see who's around to meet up—and if I could go by myself, with friends, it just was come one, come all. It was very low-key and inviting.

Bianka: Mmhmm.

Ashley: What solidified your connection with one another? Because I can see, like, you go to coffee shops all the time and you meet people, but what moment were you folks like, “We have something and we're going to do something together?”

Bianka: I feel like it was the day you came by the shop and you had a suitcase of your flower crowns. And I was like, “Oh, you—you need photographs of these?”

And I happened to have a degree in photography and that's another thing I'm blessed to be able to know how to capture and make people's things look beautiful or whatever it may be.

And Sabreen was like, “Yeah, I need some photographs.”

I was like, “All right, I'm going to get a new camera soon and a new computer. And I'll photograph your work.”

Then I didn't see you for weeks! I'm like, “Where is this girl? I'm trying to help her out, get her work done.”

I saw her walking past the cafe one day and I was in the middle of making a drink. I stopped making that drink. I said, “Hey, customer, I'll be right back.” I ran outside, ran down almost to the boardwalk in Venice was like, “Sabreen! Sabreen! I got my new computer!”

Sabreen: And that was something that struck me as like very unusual, because I had been an entrepreneur at this point for a few years and there's a lot of challenges and people say something and mean another, and you're not sure like, who really wants to help you.

It was like, “I'm not sure how I can pay you. So I don't know what you really mean by taking photographs.” And it just felt really genuine and she really wants to help me. I don't really know what I can do in exchange, but that doesn't really matter at this moment. For the first time in a while, [this interaction] just felt very sincere.

I was like, “Okay, let's do this, let’s make this happen. You told me your computer was getting fixed, and you're now following up with me.” A lot of people in LA don't really do that. So when it happens, it's special and I knew, I was like, “Okay, we were going to be friends.”

Bianka: And then we had an eight-hour photoshoot.

Sabreen: I learned immediately that day that we work very well together.

Bianka: It was a really smooth photoshoot, scene by scene. Just bam, everything about it lined up: the computer, the camera gear … I had a friend from Philly who was living in LA—I didn't even know, and they had all this gear, all this lighting gear in particular that I needed to be able to photograph Sabreen’s work.

So it was just like, “All right Sabreen, I have the new computer, I got my new camera. I got the lighting. If we're doing this, we need to do this and I'm ready to do it.”

I actually have a background in photographing a lot of work for artists when I lived on the East Coast. I really enjoy, you know, being able to provide that for people because sometimes that's really all it comes down to, is being able to showcase your work through a photograph in a way that really allows people to come into your work and enjoy it.

Because if you have photographs and they're like too dark or they're grainy or whatever it is, it will really dictate how someone feels about what you're presenting. So if you can make it really beautiful and make it pop, like bam, you're golden. Yeah.

Ashley: I feel like that's kind of the ethos of Cute Coffee in a way, not the ethos necessarily, but maybe the aesthetic?

Sabreen: Yep.

Ashley: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how—I guess let's go backward before we get into the branding. Let's talk a little bit about how you folks decided to start a coffee business in general, because that's a big step.

Bianka and Sabreen: Yes, it is.

Sabreen: Especially for someone that didn't have experience in coffee. I was just learning from a customer's point of view. Like, “Hey, I'm really drawn to specialty coffee—” that was another reason why I connected with Bianka. I felt comfortable asking her questions that I wouldn't have asked any other barista or coffee shop worker. I just felt comfortable.

My education just started very organically. Just started with an interest.

Bianka: And I feel like, yeah, coffee is the vessel, essentially, to bring all the things together and bring people together. So I was just like, “Yeah, let's do some coffee. And you're an artist, I'm an artist. Let's do all our things and drink this cup of coffee. And instead of just having these separate businesses of all these creative things, let's just have the coffee because it's the backbone.”

I think it's the thing that, for me, in particular, I had been traveling all around the country, working in different spaces—in particular coffee spaces—where I was like, “All right, how do I meet all the artists, musicians, producers, directors, photographers, anybody, all these artists, how do I meet all them? I become their barista.”

Ashley: I love that idea, of a coffee-roasting business almost being like a nexus for all these other creative endeavors, because you folks—I think probably more so than a lot of people, or I don't want to qualify that, like who knows—but it does seem like you really approach Cute Coffee as this really dynamic art project in a way.

There's so many different, like, aspects to the things that you create, and visually what they look like. And I've never really heard anybody articulate that coffee kind of brings all of those parts of them together.

Bianka: Yeah, that's totally what Cute Coffee is. It is just an art project and it's an art project that is the umbrella for all the creative things we do—and other people do too.

We love bringing in different friends and family who make amazing things and then [we] say, “All right, where can we put your art piece?” It's almost like it's a gallery.

Sabreen: A platform.

Ashley: When you first were thinking of starting this coffee business, how did you start thinking about like, what you wanted it to look like? Because I think, for me, when I see Cute Coffee, it's like immediately a smile comes to my face. Did you start with that as the idea—we want to make people happy—or how did you find inspiration for what you wanted the brand to look like?

Bianka: Well, first it was Sunny Side Up.

Sabreen: Yeah. First, it was Sunny Side Up and we had this warehouse space in Long Beach and that's the space where we were attempting to have a co-roasting facility along with people renting out space for their art projects or whatever they wanted to work on.

We—I don't want to say a rule or how would you phrase it?

Bianka: We pretty much let people know, “Hey, anybody can use this space, but whatever you create, please let it be something that brings joy to people.”

Sabreen: Yes, positive.

Bianka: Yeah, just make it so it's positive, so people can feel uplifted. There's enough negativity in the world. We don't want to contribute to that.

Sabreen: So that was kind of like the early-on inspiration of like, “Keep it cute or put it on mute,” and…

Bianka: Then that space, we had to close it. So we decided when we closed it, that was Sunny Side Up. That was that place. It didn't work out. The landlord, we discovered, was illegally leasing this building to us. So we were like, “Ooh, close the doors. This is not, it's not going to work.”

Sabreen: Time to move on and let's just focus on the coffee component.

Bianka: Because that's the one thing we do have now, that we don't have a space. And just to give you an idea, this space had an outdoor patio. We had a storefront. We had another loft in there where we had actually created an artist residency where people could stay in the loft there.

There was a whole other space for doing music. There was a huge space where people could dance, or a whole other space you could do woodworking or any kind of crafting. It was just kind of an everything space.

So since we didn't have that everything space, like Sabreen said, the only thing we still had was coffee. You know, we could still do something with coffee

Ashley: So that's kind of Round Two: The Evolution of Cute Coffee, in a way.

Bianka and Sabreen: Yes.

Bianka: Because after we left that space, we moved into an apartment that was 600 square feet. We definitely didn't have space to geek out in the same way. And we just would sit around and do a lot of drawing and just be like, “All right, what do we want this to look like? What are we thinking about?”

One of the concepts, actually, when I first met Sabreen that I had in my mind was doing something with a cup, with a mug. When you look at a mug and you look at it from the top, it looks like two C's put together or when you look at the handle, it looks like a C. All right. Let's play off of the idea of maybe some branding with some C’s.

I was actually going to do a coffee and conversations [idea] because I had this space that I set up, kind of like a “Tonight Show” where I was like, “All right, I'm going to sit over here in my living room and people are going to come in and I'm gonna sit over there and I'm gonna play a record and we're just gonna chat it up and drink coffee.”

That didn't happen either, but we came back to it and was like, “That was a good idea. Let's play with it.” And next thing you know, it turned into: “You know, what? We love cute things. Who doesn't like cute things? Cute things make everybody feel good. It’s gotta be Cute Coffee. Okay. Let's do that.”

Ashley: I love that it's alliterative.

Sabreen: Yeah! Very easy to remember.

Ashley: I, as a person who named their podcast mostly based on alliteration, really appreciate it.

Sabreen: Yeah, that's right.

Bianka: That's right.

Ashley: Boss Barista, Cute Coffee. They have the same kind of cadence, in a way.

Sabreen: Yes, exactly.

Bianka: We knew what we were doing.

Ashley: We thought about this.

Bianka: That's right.

(Everyone laughs)

Ashley: Something that strikes me as I'm talking to you is that it seems like something that you folks really embrace is having ideas and just going with it, or seeing where it takes you and being okay with it not working.

Bianka: I mean, that's the only way to learn.

Sabreen: Yeah.

Bianka: You just gotta test it out, test out the waters. You don't know if you don't try.

Ashley: Do you think that's because of your artistic background?

Bianka: Definitely. That's definitely an artist's mindset, you pick something up, you start making something and you might not finish that project, and then you move on to another one or you started a project and it's like, “Oh, I thought this was for this, but actually it's for this.”

Sabreen: Yeah, that happens a lot. Something else happens and you're like, “Oh yeah, I'm going to get back to you now. There's a place for you.”

Bianka: Totally. I mean, that's what happened with all the designing for Cute Coffee. We didn't know what we were going to use all these different illustrations for.

And next thing you know, it's like, “Oh, that's the whole background.” And it's like three years later!

Sabreen: Right. If you're feeling inspired by it, there's a reason for it. And it might not present itself at that moment, but it's coming soon.

Ashley: How would you describe the way that you folks approach coffee?

Bianka: We feel it's kinda like, “Yo, is this my friend? Are you my family?” first—

Sabreen: Before we even get to the coffee, who's the person behind it.

Bianka: Yeah. Who's the person behind it? I want to get to know you. I want to have this relationship with you, but if I'm having this relationship, do I want to be in it?

It's kind of like, we’ve got to go on some dates and see if we like each other.

Sabreen: Right.

Bianka: It's like you're dating someone…

Sabreen: …and you're going to want to be ordering regularly….

Bianka: …and I want to build, I want to have a lasting relationship.

Ashley: How do you facilitate that?

Bianka: We actually initially started it just by looking at maps and being like, “All right, let's look at this map and see what farms are in this area. Let's just start cold-calling some people.”

There's even different resources that we found, just doing some research online. And from being in coffee so long, just conversing with different people, new people. So it was like, “Oh, I'll talk to that person because you know that person, that knows that person and they seem like a cool person.”

I just want to work with cool, sweet people and people who want to really truly exchange with us and not just have a transaction, because I dunno, it just feels empty when it's just about a transaction.

Sabreen: Yeah. So learning about their background, hearing their stories—helps us go from there.

Bianka: Lots of phone conversations. Lots of emails with people and yes, lots of storytelling. I think that that's really, what did it is just storytelling with people…

Sabreen: Emails, on the phone….

Bianka: It's been great.

Sabreen: Instagram…

Ashley: Are you in pretty regular communication with all the people that you source coffee from?

Bianka: I would say there's like, a select few who are like, “Yo, these are the homies. This is the bread and butter.”

Sabreen: We're on the same page [of] understanding.

Bianka: Yeah. There's definitely an understanding of like, “Oh, you love God just as much as I do. That's my girl. Like, that's my other mom. Like I can talk to you and your son.” And it just feels like that is just straight-up family.

Sabreen: And then hearing how they appreciate how we’re sharing their coffee. Like they really see us and appreciate like, “Oh, you girls are really trying to sell some coffee.” Yes we are.

Bianka: Yeah. But we're also trying to give you shine. Like we try to tell your story the way that you want your story to be told, because at the end of the day, we wouldn't have this story to tell or this coffee to share with anyone if it wasn't for you. We got to put you on blast.

Sabreen: Absolutely. And they appreciate that the most.

Ashley: I feel like that's so special because for so many coffees that we consume, or so many of the coffees that we see in coffee shops, there is storytelling used, but it can be really confusing about whose story is actually being told. Is it the person who produced that coffee’s story, or is that story told through the lens of somebody else?

Like, you're part of that story, but I think it could be really easy to tell a story that serves a purpose that maybe is transactional. So it's really, really special to hear you talk about why storytelling is important to you.

Sabreen: We always like to run the story by them first, before we share it on our website or any of the social media platforms. We just like to say, “Hey, is this accurate? Is this all the details? All the facts?”

Bianka: “Is this what you want to say?” Yeah because you wrote this—a lot of times, some of the farmers’ stories that we have on our site, that's not written by us.

We just copied and pasted what they wanted us to say.

Ashley: I told you this before we started recording, but one of the big reasons that I really wanted to talk to you is that I know that I've gone on record saying this a lot recently, but Boss Barista can sometimes be a little bit of a bummer and—which is okay. A lot of people have really important things to say and there are a lot of big issues we should be thinking about in the coffee industry.

But there's something about the way that both of you approach coffee that seems so unapologetically joyful. And I wonder if that's something that you guys have to like, remind yourselves of daily—like this is a joyous occasion. This is a joyous moment for us. How do you incorporate joy daily, and in your coffee experience?

Bianka: Man, how do we incorporate joy…

Bianka and Sabreen: Daily?!?

Bianka: Well, the first thing I do before I even get out of my bed is I just thank God for another day. I feel like opening my eyes every day is a joy, and the fact that I can move my body and actually put my feet on the floor and then go downstairs and make myself a cup of coffee.

I'm like, “Yo, life is good.”

Sabreen: It's a gift.

Bianka: It's a gift! So it just, it just seems like we really appreciate—or no, doesn't seem like—but we do really appreciate the little things. And so when it comes to Cute Coffee, it just, it's just easy. I don't even feel like we have to think about it.

And, you know, we definitely just wanted to make people feel good. We don't want to raise anybody's ire and make them feel agitated. And, you know, we don't want to get political and take sides with anyone because we want this to really truly be for everybody. I don't care what you choose to call yourself or what your political background is. I don't care where you come from. Let's just enjoy this cup of coffee together.

Sabreen: We’re probably not going to agree on those things. So like let's not even go there. Let's just enjoy this cup of coffee.

Bianka: Isn't it delicious?

Ashley: Does that ever get difficult?

Bianka: I don't feel like it's difficult?

I mean, for me, it's just easy. That's just easy for me to do. I feel like my purpose in life is just to spread love. Like literally that's it. And when that doesn't happen in my life, and I feel like someone's rubbing me the wrong way, or they're feeling some type of way about me being sweet.

I'm like, you know, that don't have nothing to do with me. That's your stuff. I'm just gonna keep on keeping it cute and keep on giving you love, so…

Sabreen: I will say it is very easy for Bianka to be love and joy. It's just who she is. I will say for myself, it's now easy for me, but maybe it wasn't super easy a year or two ago. I had to grow into it, but it's definitely, I see the benefits of it.

Ashley: What I get from you, in this conversation, in everything that I consume that's about Cute Coffee, is that everything feels very genuinely reflective of you.

Bianka and Sabreen: Totally.

Ashley: And that doesn't require effort. I mean—maybe it requires effort sometimes.

Sabreen: No, it doesn't require effort when you've built—you've committed yourself to just living in full transparency and…

Bianka: Just living.

Sabreen: …and just living.

Bianka: I just want to live. So in order to just be living and not be like I just said, cleaning up all the time, let's just keep it real. Let's just be incredibly transparent.

Let's always tell the truth. Let's always move forward. Even when it's hard to hear the truth, at least you know the truth. And you can move forward from there.

You know, you can't ever hide the truth. We had a woman say to us recently: You know, you can go through the truth and like shove it down, but think of it like grass.

You can go cut all that grass and cut all these flowers and whatnot. And next thing you know, the truth is going to pop up like a bunch of weeds and you can't stop it. So it's just easier to keep it real.

Ashley: I feel like that's a secondary, like, “Keep it cute or put it on mute.” Like, “Keep it true …. true ….” I dunno, I need a rhyming dictionary for this. I used to have one as a kid.

Bianka: That's totally what it is. That's funny you say that because we were kind of explaining that to someone recently about Cute [Coffee], because they thought that “Keep it cute” was like, “Oh, you gotta be cute and pretty all the time.”

And it's like, no, it's not about anything like that.

Sabreen: It’s about your energy, your spirit. It's just put out goodness, just that.

Bianka: Exactly. Or like my mom would say to me as a kid, and I'm sure a lot of people's parents have said this to them. You know, if you ain't got nothing nice to say, don't say nothing at all.

Sabreen: It’s exactly that.

Bianka: And I really believe in the power of words. So the words that you put out, that's what it's going to be.

So if I'm going to speak something into existence, I better get ready for what's coming back to me for what I just said.

Sabreen: You’re narrating. So narrate a good story.

Ashley: A lot of the work that it seems like Cute Coffee is doing is very self-reflective. It is very much this almost pouring out of your—of your souls, in a way. That feels a little cheesy to say, but I'm going to go with that.

Sabreen: That's accurate.

Bianka: Pretty accurate.

Sabreen: I mean, we both have put our everything into this.

Bianka: Yeah. I mean, even every dollar. I'm like, “I ain't got no more money, but guess what? Look at Cute Coffee. Look at Cute Coffee! You’re so cute!”

Sabreen: We both just believe in it so much. So we're just in it to win it.

Bianka: Yup. And even when we're ordering coffee sometimes, I'm like, “We have to order coffee and we don't have the money, but we're going to figure it out.”

Sabreen: It's going to come.

Bianka: It's going to come.

Sabreen: It has to keep going.

Bianka: Yes. And we've actually had so much going on in this past year with having to move a lot and it's just been wild trying to balance Cute Coffee! Oh, look, I gotta move again! I gotta pack up all this stuff! Now I got to figure this out! Oh, snap. Oh my god. This landlord—you're out of line!

Sabreen: It’s constant.

Bianka: I’m going to have to actually get official. I need official help.

Sabreen: Yeah. And during all these jumps and crossovers and ducking and bobbing and weaving like, Cute Coffee has sustained, and it keeps going and people are still loving it.

And I'm like, “Oh, this is amazing.” Like just more ammo to keep pushing, keep doing no matter what life is throwing at you, like keep doing this love project. It's really incredible to see how far it's come.

Bianka: And it doesn't feel like work. My mom just said something to us the other day, about how you—

Sabreen: When you enjoy doing what you do…

Bianka: You've never worked a day in your life.

Sabreen: Yeah. We may have messed that up, but it's like that.

Ashley: Tell me about your television show.

Bianka: Ooh. Cute TV!

Sabreen: Cute TV was very inspired by a lot of things from the ’90s.

Bianka: ’80s, too!

Sabreen: ’80s too.

Bianka: And then our everyday life. We have a whole skit coming up soon that we cannot wait to tell the story about. I can't wait.

Sabreen: Stay tuned.

Bianka: Stay tuned. Okay. It has to do with a thousand-pound roaster that I'm looking for. I'm really looking for it because supposedly it's in my house.

Sabreen: Supposedly we’re hiding it in our house.

Bianka: We were hiding it in our house. According to these accusations…

Sabreen: Somebody saw us sneaking it in through the back. I'm like, what? Like, please tell me where it is. What about carrying a thousand-pound roaster?

Bianka: [crosstalk] I would love to know.

Ashley: Now I wish that I had the video on so I can inspect and be like, “Where is it?”

(Everyone laughs)

Bianka: Coming soon on Cute TV.

Ashley: Where can folks check out Cute TV?

Bianka: I think we're going to post it on our website, ilovecutecoffee.com. So coming soon.

Sabreen: And what about Instagram?

Bianka: Oh, Instagram! Yeah, we'll put some skits on Instagram and then maybe it'll be like short skits on Instagram and then maybe some kind of full episodes or something—I don't know yet, but something's coming.

Cute TV actually just dropped yesterday, unexpectedly. We said, “Yo, for this Suenos Coffee subscription, let's do a little episode of Cute TV.”

Sabreen: And so it was the debut.

Bianka: The debut of Cute TV.

Ashley: As a person whose nails are like, slime-green-colored right now, I really appreciate anything related to the ’90s. I’ve actually been thinking a lot about Boss Barista [as a brand], and I think I just want it to be like, Nickelodeon orange.

Bianka and Sabreen: Yes! Yes.

Bianka: You know, you've got to have slime. Slime everywhere.

Ashley: What if I started doing live shows and I just slimed the guests? Like, would that be insulting or would that be like, an honor?

Bianka: No, it’s an honor.

Sabreen: An honor. You can slime us anytime.

Bianka: If you didn’t get slimed, you didn’t come right. You have to come back—if you get to come back.

Ashley: That’s true. There has to be like, I think, the original slime would be if you said, “I don't know.” So there has to be something similar for Boss Barista. If you say like a certain phrase. I have to think…

Sabreen: Like a punishment. So we wouldn't have.

Ashley: Or maybe it's like the other way around where it's like, if you admonish yourself, like if you say something negative about yourself, then you get—you have to keep it, maybe I'm stealing from you a little bit. You have to keep it cute.

Sabreen: Yeah, that's a good one. I like that.

Bianka: It's not stealing. No, you can have it. That's why we put it out there.

Ashley: What would you want people listening to this to take away from hearing you folks speak?

Bianka: (bird noises) Listen to that bird. That bird is telling you exactly what we wanted to say.

Sabreen: That you are cute.

Bianka: I mean, to take away from this? Man, there’s so much…

Sabreen: There’s so much.

Bianka: Just keep on being true to you and know that what's for you is for you and keep it cute. Make life easy, just live.

Sabreen: Yeah.

Bianka: And don't worry. Don't worry about nothing.

Sabreen: Don’t feed into anything that's not serving you or making you feel good.

Just let it go.

Ashley: Sabreen, Bianka, it's such a delight to talk to you. Thank you for joining me.

Bianka: Thank you for having us.

Sabreen: Thank you so much for having us.

Bianka: Oh, my gosh. It's an honor to talk to you every time.

Sabreen: It really is.

Ashley: Oh, shucks.

That was Bianka Alloyn And Sabreen Naimah. You can learn more about Cute Coffee on Instagram and at their website. Also, here’s one more cute photo for you:

Keep it cute and share this episode with your friends!

Get full access to B O S S B A R I S T A at bossbarista.substack.com/subscribe

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I met Jaymie Lao three years ago in Los Angeles. She was employee #1 at Go Get Em Tiger, which is an offshoot of a well-known coffee shop in LA called G&B. G&B was started by Charles Babinski and Kyle Glanville—I mention them here since they’ll show up a lot in this conversation. Charles and Kyle are two former baristas who worked for Intelligentsia Coffee, one of the country’s leading and most innovative coffee roasters at the time. One of the things that made G&B and Go Get Em Tiger unique was that it was a coffee business started by actual baristas, people who had worked on the floor and interacted with coffee and customers daily.

Jaymie worked for Go Get Em Tiger for almost nine years. She served as their director of café experiences, which meant it was her job to make sure the stores ran consistently, but also to check in with employees and hear their ideas and aspirations. A lot of what informed Jaymie’s day-to-day work was her years of experience working as a barista and knowing first-hand what baristas face. I imagine this is a common hurdle in any industry—you can tell when a restaurant is run by cooks and chefs versus rich entrepreneurs who simply wanted to own a business, for example.

Jaymie’s approach to her job involved a lot of kindness, care, and a simple wish to be her employees’ biggest cheerleaders. And I want to say, before we get into this episode, that I’ve never had anyone recount such specific conversations with their bosses and leaders. Throughout this episode, Jaymie recounts, in almost shocking detail, conversations she had with both Charles and Kyle that reflect how powerful kind words and unabashed praise can be. It’s kind of wild the words we never forget. Here’s Jaymie.

Ashley: Jaymie, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Jaymie: Yes, hello. My name is Jaymie Lao. My pronouns are she/her. I live in Los Angeles, California. I previously worked for Go Get Em Tiger for the past eight and a half years.

Ashley: What was your job at Go Get Em Tiger?

Jaymie: My job at Go Get Em Tiger was Director of Cafe Experience. I mean—an unheard of title, which just meant I did a lot of things.

Ashley: So let's talk about your coffee background. I would love to know how you got into coffee, but usually, I start these interviews with people's childhood experiences with coffee. So I was wondering if you grew with coffee in your house at all.

Jaymie: Yes, absolutely grew up with coffee in my house. It was a smell that filled every morning that I try to stay in bed and not go to school. My mom would make Folgers, auto drip. That was pretty much it.

Ashley: I love the association with the fact that you were in bed, trying not to go to school. Like maybe if I just sit really still, no one will notice I'm here.

Jaymie: Yes. I was a pain in my mom's ass for sure for never getting out of bed on time. I would sometimes sleep on top of my uniform so that it was warm, uh, for when I did actually get out of bed. It wouldn't like, shock my body because it was so cold.

Ashley: When I was in middle school, I would—this makes no sense, so just go with it.

I would set my alarm for really, really early in the morning and then put my clothes on for school and then get back in bed and then fall asleep for like an hour. Then right before I had to get into like the car for my mom to drive me to school, I would wake up like five minutes before that.

And for some reason, I would trick myself into thinking that was extra sleep. I don't know, but that's what I would do.

Jaymie: That's a good move. Maybe I've done that too. And even though I—well, even though I smelled the coffee in the morning, I never was curious about what it tasted like, because it was never offered to me. I never liked thought to like sneak sips of it until I was like a little bit older, so

Ashley: Do you remember when you really first started enjoying drinking coffee or enjoying that experience?

Jaymie: Enjoying drinking coffee? Hmm…

Yeah, I would say when I was in college, I began to enjoy it because a really good friend of mine who I met in college named Tog was really into coffee. He loved his French press. He loved his stovetop espresso maker, and, even though he was a grad student and I was an undergrad. Um, you know, he invite all his friends over to partake in his coffee ritual, and it was just nothing I'd ever experienced before.

Obviously, it was very different from the auto-drip that my mom would make at home. It felt very…adult.

Ashley: Tell me about how you started working for—I feel like we might interchangeably use these, or maybe I will and you're better about it. But I often associate G&B, which is a coffee shop in the LA market…what is that place called? Where it is?

Jaymie: Oh, the Grand Central Market.

Ashley: So G&B is a coffee shop in Grand Central Market.

And then Go Get Em Tiger is a chain of coffee shops with multiple locations in Los Angeles, but owned by the same people. So we might use those names interchangeably. I just wanted to clarify that for people listening who maybe don't know the difference.

When I was talking about interviewing you, you mentioned that you were Go Get Em Tiger’s very first employee. How did you start working for them?

Jaymie: Ooh. Um, it feels like I've actually been working for the company longer than it existed because I was such a huge fan of both Charles [Babinski] and Kyle [Glanville] for so long, even before I was employed by Intelligentsia.

It must have been at the beginning of 2013. Their pop-up at Sqirl was beginning to wind down and they were about to set up a brick and mortar at the Grand Central Market for G&B.

And at the time I was a retail educator for the Venice location [of Intelligentsia]. I remember when those two had left, they wanted to make sure that they weren't burning any bridges, that everything was on good terms. They made sure that everyone who was a manager or educator in LA knew that they wouldn't take their baristas.

You know, there's always this word poaching—I hate that word because it makes it sound like people don't have a choice in the decisions that they make for themselves.

But they made it clear that they wanted to make sure that if anyone from any of the stores wanted to work for them, they would absolutely connect with any of us first and just, you know, not like get the okay from them but like, ‘Hey, heads up, listen: we're going to hire this person or what have you.

When—and even though Charles and I were friends, when I got the call, I thought to myself, “Holy s**t. He's going to take my best barista, Marcellina.” Like, I dunno. [laughs] I was just like, “Okay, I'm getting ready for it.”

Um, and when I picked up, he was like, “How are you doing? Do you have a moment to chat?”

And I was like, “Yeah, for sure.” And he kind of went right into it.

“Yeah, I was wondering if you might want to work together again?” And I was a bit stunned because I was fully expecting him to tell me that so-and-so is going to, like, they want to hire so-and-so from the store that I was at.

He proceeded to praise me in a way that honestly, in the time that we worked together, I never really heard not because—well, I just think that all of us came up in coffee environments where like you never heard what you did a good thing. You only heard when you did a bad thing.

He said to me that when he thought of all the people that he had previously worked with, who he’d want to work with again, I was the first person he thought of. Whether that be true or not, I will let Charles answer that.

Ashley: I’m sure that’s true!

Jaymie: [laughs] I was like, “Wow, that's really nice.” And he was like, “You know, no pressure. I'll give you some time to think about it.”

I really did need time to think about it because it wasn't an immediate yes. I wasn't looking for a job at that time. I was quite happy where I was.

And so when we finally met up and he told me what the idea was, um, that it was going to be a second brand that was going to be called Go Get Em Tiger. I was like, “Are you sure about that?”

And he was like, “Yeah, it's going to be called Go Get Em Tiger.” And I was like, “Are you sure?” And he's like, “It's…it's already…”

Ashley: It’s already done!

Jaymie: “It's already set.”

I was like, “No apostrophe?”

“No apostrophe.”

I was like, “Hmm…okay…”

Ashley: I love this. I love this inside early, like, “I don't know about this.”

Jaymie: yeah. I was being kind of an ass about it. But I had to ask that question because if I'm going to go along with it and represent this brand, I want to know why.

He told me all these ideas about what Go Get Em Tiger was going to be, that it was going to be different from G&B and that G&B is a bit more of an experimental stage. It's what the specialty coffee industry is looking at when they think about who is the best in Los Angeles coffee.

Go Get Em Tiger would have essentially the same menu but would be a fully realized cafe. Go Get Em Tiger was supposed to be the brand that was going to scale, that was going to grow, um, because they wanted to have 30 stores in 2020—I don't remember if it was 20 stores 30, but he said the number and I was like, “Oh, okay…” [laughs]

I fully knew what I was getting into from day one, but I didn't know if this was going to be immediately successful, and at the time I was already a salaried employee of Intelligentsia and, you know, he was honest with me. Like this would be a step down for me in that there weren't any positions apart from ones in the cafe, for now, [and] that were hourly and that I would be taking a pay cut. So I had to think about it for a bit.

The thing that really pushed me over the edge was I respect Charles and Kyle so much. And so much of what brought me to where I was at that time was everything that they had a hand in. And I didn't know what was keeping me there. And if I couldn't name what was keeping me there, then I should take this opportunity and see where it goes.

Ashley: Did you know, at that kind of early stage, that your career would kind of morph into helping build out like all these different locations, or were you just kind of jumping in on a leap of faith that like, “I think this is gonna grow. I think this is going to be something, and this is a risk, but like, I want to be part of this.”

Like, did you know what your career was going to look like at that point?

Jaymie: I had no idea. Absolutely no idea. It was more the latter for sure. I really just wanted to enjoy where I was, enjoy the people that worked with, and make really fantastic coffee.

Like, in the beginning, we were a multi-roaster and one of the things that I absolutely loved about being a multi-roaster was the way that we selected coffees was completely blind. All the coffees on the table were samples that different roasters across North America would send us and whatever was tasting best on the table was the coffee that we were going to buy and serve. And that was, at that time, really meaningful to me.

But I didn't think that I was like, going to grow into the person or the responsibility of replicating that.

Ashley: When did that start becoming clear that this is the role that either maybe you wanted to pursue or maybe somebody asked you, “Hey, like, this is where we see you kind of growing into?” Like, when did that role start becoming kind of apparent that like, “You're going to be the director of cafe experiences—go at it.”

Jaymie: It must have been in 2015 or maybe 2016. It was when there were only two stores still—so G&B at the Grand Central Market and then Go Get Em Tiger at Larchmont. And we had done—or we were going to do a pop-up in Silver Lake. It was very short-lived. It was in a location formerly occupied by a restaurant called Lucky Duck.

So we would call it the Lucky Duck pop-up. And at that time, the Go Get Em Tiger/Lucky Duck pop up was staffed with people who worked at G&B and not people who worked at Go Get Em Tiger. And there was like a technical reason for it, like a sort of legal reason for that.

But at that time, it struck me because there were so many people who like—and when I say so many people, there were maybe eight baristas at Larchmont at that time. But some of those baristas where people that I wanted to see grow and the people who were at the time shift leads at Larchmont, well, they weren't going anywhere.

I didn't know how to create opportunities for those people to grow into more responsibility. They never talked about leaving, but in my mind, they're doing the job of some of these shift leads.

I want them to be able to do more and to be, recognized for that and compensated for that. I remember calling Kyle just randomly while sitting in the office at Larchmont because I was so upset that these people weren't being considered for these positions. Lucky duck had already been staffed.

I immediately told Kyle, “Hey, if you haven't hired for—” oh, backtrack, some context: we knew that we were going to open up a store in Los Feliz, which is why we did the pop-up in Silver Lake—to have a presence in that general region. When I was talking with Kyle on the phone, I told him, “I don't know if you've already hired someone for the GM position—” at the time, I was the GM of Larchmont. “I don't know if you hired someone for the GM position of Los Feliz. But if you haven't, I would like to throw my name in hat, in the ring—” whatever you want to say.

At that time, I didn't really know how those decisions were made, so for me to even say that, I think he probably laughed at me for assuming that, you know, they're already hiring a GM for that store, especially if it wasn't going to open for like another year.

He was like, “Why are you asking me that?” And I told him, straight up, there are these people there, there are two people in this store that I want to see grow. And I really wish that they were considered for the Lucky Duck pop up. But I feel like the only way for people to grow is for me to leave.

As much as I absolutely enjoyed working with everyone at Larchmont, I knew that me moving was going to create paths for growth and he was like, “Got it. Well, Jaymie, if you want it it's yours.” It was like, just as easy as that.

And I was like, “Oh, um, okay.”

He's like, “But you know, there’s going to be a lot of opportunities. Like, we're going to open up a lot of stores,” and I was just worried about the timeliness of that. Like, I didn't want to like, make anyone wait for that. I had to express that because it was just bugging me and he heard me and understood what I was concerned about and appreciated me sharing it.

It was at that time that I was like, I didn't think that I wanted to work at any of the other stores until I saw people within my own store not being able to grow. I felt like I was taking up all the space, I wanted to move out of that space into a different space. And then when I was at Los Feliz it was clear to me that I cared a lot about making sure that there was consistency across like all stores in terms of like the service, the culture, those things were just paramount to me.

Ashley: And then that point is that when you folks kind of came up with this idea of like, we need somebody who can ensure that consistency?

Jaymie: I think it wasn't until the end of 2017 that I really was beginning to transition into this position, into a version of this position. I think I probably had like a few performance reviews with Charles and Kyle about where I see myself in five years and what is it that I want to do.

And I would speak really broadly about those things. Yeah like, “Oh, I want to be happy. Like maybe, I wanna have a family… like a house?” None of those things are really related to how my life changes at work. I just knew what I wanted the end result to be.

When Kyle had floated the idea of this position to me, I definitely jumped at the opportunity because I had said in so many ways, in almost all of my performance reviews, that I wanted to be able to replicate the style of service that we do at the store everywhere, because I think it doesn't require specific humans to do it. It doesn't require this configuration of me, this person, this person, this person…to execute the best service possible. I think we can teach people to do that. I wanted it to believe that that, and so I was like, “Let's do it. I'm ready to like, take that challenge.”

And so opening Los Feliz and being the GM of that store helped me to realize what was possible, like if that was even something I was capable of doing. I feel good about the work that I did there, so…

Ashley: I think a lot of people feel good about the work that you did there, and just in general.

Jaymie: Nice. Thanks everyone.

Ashley: I mean, yeah. I think so. I think that’s the general—I've never met a person who I'm like, “Hey, you know Jaymie Lao?” and they're like, “Oh yeah, her? She's the worst.” Like I've never heard that.

Jaymie: Oh, thank God. Okay.

Ashley: I'm going to take a larger poll after we release the episode and I'll report the findings to you.

But I think it is really interesting that you identified that, like, “I want to be able to replicate like how successful we are at serving coffee in this location. And I believe that’s not just about the math of these people all working together in a certain way—that it can be taught.”

And it does seem that combining your focus on like helping people grow and be happy and then teaching them and giving them the skills to execute this high level of service. You saw kind of the meeting point, the intersection of those two things.

Jaymie: Yeah, absolutely.

I wasn't sure if there were other people in the store that felt the same way. I truly felt like in those days, everyone who worked at G&B and everyone who worked at Go Get Em Tiger at Larchmont were like, “We are the only people that can do this.”

And I love that about them because they took a lot of pride in the work that they did, and they knew how special it was that people just kept coming back, but I think everyone who has worked in cafes knows what it feels like to bring a new employee into the fold and how difficult it is to either be that new employee or to be someone who works with that new employee where—are they going to figure it out? Are people going to be like, “I don't want coffee from that person because I don't know them?”

I firmly believe that those new people could do exactly what we were doing, but we needed to coach them into it.

Ashley: Yeah. I feel like every coffee shop I've worked at, in some way, there's this magical configuration of people where, like, you feel like you feel like on top of the world, right? We totally understand each other and we know what this is like.

And I think that as I've gotten older, I realized like, this is cool, this is fun. But like, people will come and go for good reasons—ideally. Sometimes for bad reasons, but people want to grow and do different things. People move, people just move on with their own lives. And like, we have to ensure that people who come into that new sort of position feel that they can be successful.

That it isn't just some some magical stroke of genius that these four people like work together really well, because I can feel also really alienating if you're that new person.

Jaymie: Yeah, it's incredibly alienating and it can sometimes create resentment among coworkers and that's awful. But I also think that when you're a more experienced barista, one of your responsibilities is to make sure that people have a better experience being a new barista—in any space, like a better experience than you ever had.

Because certainly most people's first experiences as a barista are never very pleasant. I mean, I can't think of someone who's like, “Wow, this was easy. And everyone loved working with me immediately!” That doesn't happen.

Ashley: Yeah. It's hard. Especially when you're learning how to make coffee for the first time. You're struggling maybe to do latte art or like foam milk. And you're like, “This is really hard. And I just want the support to know that I can do this. Like I can get to that point that you're at.”

I imagine that a lot of your job—and this is going to sound really cheesy—[involves] heart work, like a lot of just connecting with people and being like, “Why are you here? And how can I help you be successful?”

Like, how would you describe—I don't want to say, how would you describe your job, but how would you describe the way that you connect with people to help them be successful?

Jaymie: Yeah. I mean, you're right. That it does require a lot of hard work. How to describe my job…

Like, I dunno, I was a teacher for a long—not a long time, that's incorrect.

I was a teacher for a year and I feel like a lot of my job was to see what a person was doing and try to understand why they were doing it. And not to be like, “You're doing a bad thing and I'm going to admonish you,” but to step back and be like, “If this person's not doing well on a test, why is that? Is it because there's something happening at home? Is there something distracting them? Is there something that's getting in their way of their success?”

I imagine that that was probably a lot of your job.

Jaymie: Absolutely. Yeah, I remember in those early days being more involved in the hiring process. Now, the company has HR, who is homegrown HR— Ian Hamilton, what's up, former GM of G&B.

But in those early days, when we would onboard folks, do the walkthrough in the space, at some point we would sit down and one of the first questions I would ask people is what do you want to get out of your time in this company?

I never wanted to make the assumption that people were going to be there forever. I think that that's like an unhealthy assumption to make about anyone. That was a really important question for me to ask every single person, because once I knew what they like—and it’s not that they needed to have a firm response, but I wanted them to think about it.

It allowed me to ask that question again later in one-to-one or check-ins. And if I knew that someone was looking to grow into, you know, leadership positions, that was super helpful to me. Whether they were ready for it and or not, it kind of gave me purpose to create a path for them to get to that point.

And of course, at the end of the day, it's up to them to follow that path. Meet me there, but think just knowing what someone wants out of their time, wherever they are is super important. If they're not meeting the expectations to get onto that path, then I can be totally honest with them and they'll understand why I'm talking to them about that stuff.

On the other hand, if they're not interested in growing, but they have interests beyond the company or maybe interests that are coffee company related, but not positions that exist yet. For example, at that time, when I was initially managing Los Feliz, we weren't roasting our own coffee. And some people would come and they would say that they would want to roast coffee one day and it's like, “Well, we're not roasters—yet.”

I think one thing that was always important to me and truly it was always important to the founders of the company was for Go Get Em Tiger to be a stepping stone or a launchpad for someone to do whatever their next thing is, even if it's not in the company. So if you know, having Go Get Em Tiger on your resume helps you to get that roaster position, f*g great.

That’s what we want for you. Of course you should still do your work well while you're here and be present. But if you articulate, like this is what I want and I say, “That's not something that exists here. However, I know that this other company is looking for a roaster is like going to hire an apprentice roaster. We'll have you in mind now, and I can suggest those things to you.” It's not important to me that you stay here if the thing that you ultimately want to do is elsewhere.

Of course I would be bummed to like lose a power player. But I'm not gonna stop someone from growing that would—that would hurt me more.

Ashley: One of the reasons that I wanted to interview you was kind of on that premise, that notion—it almost seems that the ethos at G&B and Go Ge Em Tiger is very much about we want people to be successful and we're never mad at them for doing what they need to do to be successful.

And I often feel that's the root of why people feel resentful of their jobs—it’s that feeling that we are supposed to give our employers loyalty beyond reproach. No matter what, we're supposed to live and die by this company. And if it can't fulfill our needs, then like this is somehow our fault.

That's why people often leave companies and like, don't feel good about it. But hearing you talk about like, “This is okay if this is a stepping stone. This is okay if this is not the thing that you want to do forever.”

Number one: that’s very realistic, but number two: it also almost turns the focus on the employee, not the employer. So it's like, “Well, what do you want? And how can we help you get there?”

Jaymie: Yeah. I think a lot of the people that I've met and asked that question to never expected me to ask them that question. They just weren't ready for that question, but I'm like, “Hey, when it occurs to you, you just holler at me. I will listen.” And everyone around you, whoever your manager is at the time or your lead, tell them that too. That's important to say.

Ashley: Right. It's important to acknowledge that the people that work with us and work around us have hopes and dreams, or have ideas about what they want for their lives. This capitalistic working world assume that people are going fold themselves smaller to fit into their jobs, to fit into their roles.

But it seems like you're going to have a better time at work when you feel like you can unfold, like you can be all parts of yourself in a way that feels genuine and feels like it will be supported and that's not intuitive.

That requires someone like you, someone who's the director of cafe experiences to foster and I don't know that that's intuitive. So it's really interesting that you went into this job and started asking these questions without like—it seems like you weren't really coached in that direction. It seems like you kind of fostered that on your own.

Where did that come from for you?

Jaymie: Oh my goodness. I mean, I really have to give it up to Charles and Kyle, because, if I haven't mentioned them enough, they were the ones that empowered me to ask those questions.

And even though they didn't ask me those specific questions for myself, when I was learning how to interview folks—and by learning how to interview folks, especially at Go Get Em Tiger and G&B like, I didn't really mean something prescriptive necessarily.

It was me sitting down—and sitting down with Kyle and Charles, so maybe a little bit intimidating because there's three people that you're interviewing with. But in those early days when Charles and Kyle were doing the bulk of the interviewing, it was really important for them to get the most natural answers out of people.

And so it was incredibly conversational. There were questions that were similar to what I had asked, but it was during the interview process and not after someone's been onboard, like I'm asking someone after they've been onboarded and they're trying to get at like what they want in that interview process, whether or not it's something that can be fulfilled, doesn't make or break their future employment.

They just want to know that people want to do stuff, that they want to do cool stuff, that they're motivated, you know?

Ashley: Yeah, no, I get that. That makes sense.

Jaymie: But I also think that like, maybe my time a shift lead in the past, or just as someone's peer made me realize how important it was to have those conversations, because it's clear that coworkers know a lot about each other.

I don't need to know, as someone's manager, all the details of their life, but sometimes they do want certain things to be considered and sometimes someone just needs you to hold space so that they can be a better version of themselves in the space that they have to work in. I got to do that and I wanted to do that, and it was really fulfilling.

Ashley: I think that my very first coffee job, and I think I've mentioned this a couple of times on the show, but my boss was really great about telling people what they were good at. And I assume that that was part of this job. I was like, “Okay, cool. That's your job as a manager.” And it felt good. It was like, “Oh, someone's noticing the work that I'm doing and is telling me what I'm good at,” and also identifying things that I might not have noticed.

A couple of years later I was working at another job and I asked my coworker—I was like, “Oh, well, what do you think you're good at? Like, I think I'm good at this, this, and that…” she was like, “I don't know what I'm good at.” And I was like, “Has no one ever told you, has a boss never ever told you you're good at these things?”

And she said no. I think for me, that was a moment where I realized that the thing that happened to me at that first job was not normal. That was not a normal part of work, even though I thought it was because it made me feel really good. And it made me feel really empowered to be like, “Oh, I'm good at these things. Maybe this is the path I'll pursue because I'm good at X, Y, and Z. So maybe I'll keep going in this direction, or maybe I'll explore more skills that kind of involve this other skill that she mentioned I was good at.”

It just feels like for most jobs that we really don't focus on the people at all. We kind of like put people in place and then hope that the company around it will inform what they do next. But that's where these unequal ideas about what loyalty is about, what turnover is about—all of that comes from not treating people as people.

And it seems like, for you, because you were on the floor for so long—and I'm going to go ahead and say because Charles and Kyle were also on the floor and they're also ex-baristas, there is this deep sense of connection that you feel with people because you're making coffee with them for hours and hours a day—that never escapes you.

I have to hope. But also seems like it informed the way that you really approached your job.

Jaymie: I mean, tremendously. Oh my gosh, you learn so much about your coworkers, not from hanging out with them outside of work, but from working beside them and doing the special dance that you do when you're in a high volume situation.

I feel like my experience has been really, unfortunately unique in that I would have people like Charles in our previous job encouraging me to go for certain positions as were some of my peers.

But everyone was like incredibly qualified for the same position, you know? And then sometimes I see certain people who like…I recognize when someone is potentially like a good consideration for a position, but no one is telling them that. Like even their GM is not telling them that or their peers are just like, “Ah, who cares? They're just going to choose whoever, they're going to choose this person.” And it's like, “Nah, like everything you say like matters.”

Ashley: I don't know, if no one's telling you to believe in yourself—and not to say that you need external validation at all times, but like, it's hard to know what you are qualified at. It's hard to know what you are good at or what people see in you.

And I think as a manager of any type, your job is to be everyone's cheerleader in a way, your job isn't to be—I have to imagine that you thought of it this way, too. Your job isn't to micromanage, your job isn't to say like, “Hey, go like clean the condiment bar.” Your job is to be like, “What's happening around this space and who needs to be told that they're awesome. Who needs that encouragement? Who needs that power? Who needs to be seen?” Right?

Jaymie: Yes. Yes! I remember in probably in 2016 or 2017, um, Billy Hawkins, who was the operations manager before leaving, which meant that he did like HR related stuff and anyway, loved Billy. He wanted to make sure that people could express praise to each other. And he would always say things like “I see you,” when someone would do something like really cool in the stores.

Then that sort of evolved into these little note cards that we would write for each other. It was like, of course branded, like ‘Go Get Em Tiger’ [stationary]. And it would say at the top, “I see you,” in a really cute font. And then someone could hand-write a note about something that they had observed about their coworker throughout their time on the floor.

Anyone could write one to anyone that could be like store internal, it'd be store to store, management to employee and employee to management—it was great. But it was just kind of a reminder of that people don't say the good things enough. And even if they did, they don't stick. It's easy to focus on the things that people are critical about.

Ashley: I don't know. I hope people listen to this episode and take a minute to just like, say something nice to say.

Jaymie: Yes, please. Please everybody say something nice to your coworkers, to your friends, to anyone.

Ashley: Jaymie, thank you for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Jaymie: Oh my gosh. Yeah. I had a lot of fun, just babbling on and on. Thank you, Ashley.

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In celebration of the Colectivo Coffee Union finally being recognized (and becoming the United States’ largest coffee union), this week I’m re-airing a previous podcast episode that focuses on unionization.

In this episode, I interview members of the Tartine Union, a group of baristas, bakers, and front-of-house staff members who work for Tartine Bakery in the Bay Area, and who announced their intention to unionize in February 2020. They were officially recognized in March 2021—377 days later.

Today, those in power are continuing to fight against unionization efforts across the industry, even though so much about our working lives has shifted in the last two years. Organized labor efforts are on an upswing—but as members of the Tartine Union showed, it can take over a year to even be recognized, let alone ratify a contract and begin bargaining.

Today, with so many Starbucks employees now unionizing—and the global coffee chain responding by bringing back the hardline Howard Schultz as CEO, even while investors urge the company to respect the union votes—it’s important to stay on top of this issue, and remember that this is a long fight. Starbucks is likely counting on folks forgetting, or on this new union push losing steam, so I hope this episode serves as a reminder that we’re in this for the long haul, and our voices and support are still needed.

This episode originally aired in February 2020. One note: You’ll hear an old intro at the start, back when I was doing topic-specific episodes called “Roundups,” so the beginning might sound a little different than a typical Boss Barista episode. This episode also reflects a previous, less-experienced era in my podcasting life, so apologies for any sound-quality issues. OK, here we go.

Hey friends. My name is Ashley Rodriguez and this is the Boss Barista Roundup, a show where I tackle a topic and ask you—the listeners—to share your stories, insights, and experiences with us.

This week, we’re talking about bread—and breaking down the fight to organize between Tartine and its workers.

Here's a quick timeline of events of the Tartine Union: Tartine is a bakery. It’s based in San Francisco. And on Thursday, February 6, the employees of Tartine presented their managers with a letter of intent to unionize. It was signed by roughly 141 people, or about two-thirds of all their Bay Area-based employees. They have four locations in the Bay Area; four in Seoul, South Korea; and three in Los Angeles.

The letter reads:

We’re proud to work at Tartine and want Tartine to be the best it can possibly be. Tartine is renowned for the quality of its products and service. We want it to also be renowned for being one of the best places to work in the Bay Area.

They go on to say: “With our union, we will work to create a workplace that is collaborative and supportive, while setting high standards for quality product, quality benefits, high morale, and good wages.” Essentially, they were asking for a seat at the table, a chance to negotiate their wages, have a say in decision-making, and know more about where their money is going.

Tartine has grown a ton in the last few years, and with so much aggressive growth, it can be hard to understand—maybe—why your wages haven’t gone up, or how shops keep opening across the globe but your hourly pay stays the same.

In response, the following Monday—so that’s February 10—Tartine declined to recognize the union.

This was expected. This happens all the time when people form unions. But in a letter the owners released, they went a little bit further than that, saying, “If they accept the card check process proposed by the union”—which is how they all signed the letter of intent to unionize—“it would mean that the union issue would be decided solely by those who have already signed union membership cards without hearing from the founders of Tartine and many other team members that feel strongly about this issue.”

They call the way the union presented their letter “a threat.” They questioned the motives of the union, and they say that there has been bullying on the internet, tarnishing the reputation of Tartine. And—just to put a cherry on top of all of this—the letter didn’t come from the owners. Instead, it came addressed from a man named Sam Singer, who runs a PR firm that represents organizations like Chevron and the San Francisco Zoo when a tiger killed one of its patrons.

We talked to two members of the Tartine Union the day after Tartine released this statement. Now the issue of unionizing goes to a vote. Everyone who works at Tartine will vote via secret ballot. And as that happens, Tartine management can do things like hire “union experts,” and the workers of Tartine can continue to rally, which has been happening and local politicians have joined their organizing efforts.

The reason I lay this all out is that there’s a lot happening, and we’re right in the middle of it. There’s a lot of push-and-pull in terms of who controls the narrative and what’s actually happening.

As you listen to the folks I interview, Emily and Mason, I want you to think about the goals of a union and what the Tartine workers actually said in their letter—and why the leaders of Tartine might not want a union, why they might use the language that they used in their response letter, and how that dictates what happens next and who controls the narrative.

Here are Emily and Mason.

Ashley: So before we get started, why don't I have the two of you introduce yourselves?

Mason: Mason Lopez, they/them are my pronouns, and I'm from the Berkeley Tartine.

Emily: And I'm Emily Haddad. She/her are my pronouns, and I am from the Tartine Manufactory in San Francisco. Mason and I are both baristas.

Ashley: Why don't you tell me where this story sort of starts for both of you?

Mason: The kiosk?

Emily: Yeah, the kiosk.

So Mason was working, actually at the Manufactory whenever they first came on at Tartine with me as a barista. We had seen the VCA—the veterinary hospital across the street—start their unionization process with the ILWU. It was just a more casual conversation of us being like, “What would this be like, what would happen?”

And then come to find out, I learned through a friend of mine who works at the Tartine Bakery at the original location on 18th and Guerrero, that they'd been talking about the same thing. They'd actually met with some folks who had worked on the Anchor Union campaign for Anchor Brewery. So we just had to merge the two restaurants and—at the time those were the only two locations, it was just Tartine Manufactory and the original bakery.

Within a couple of weeks, we had a meeting at my house, in my living room, and it kind of just started from there.

Ashley: How long ago was that?

Emily: Last April [of 2019].

Mason: Yeah.

Ashley: I mean, that seems like a long time ago, but for union talks, that's actually really quick. How did you start to build momentum? And when did you start noticing that, oh, this is something that we need or that people are looking for?

Mason: You know, it was probably right after that dinner at Emily's house that we realized, I think that so many of our concerns and the things that we really wanted in a work environment were really succinct.

For me, especially just watching the VCA struggle just right across the street was really inspiring. It was really helpful, especially in the kiosk at Manufactory, because the windows are these really beautiful windows and you can just see everything happening all day.

Emily: There was one day where we were working through one of their strikes and picket lines across the street and seeing local politicians turn up and all the other members of the ILWU come out to support them. We were like, “Wow, this—they've got power. And this union really supports their workers.”

So that was really cool to see. And yeah, it's like what Mason said, at that first meeting at my house, every type of worker at Tartine was present. We had front-of-house, back-of-house, Spanish-speaking people, bussers … and really seeing how all of us were feeling the same way that we loved working at Tartine and wanted to see it be a healthy, happy work environment for everyone.

It felt like we had momentum pretty quickly.

Ashley: I think that's really interesting that you mentioned some of those things at the end, that you all were working to try to make Tartine better. And that was the message, when you first released that [letter that] you were forming a union, that seemed really clear, that this was a group of people coming together to try and make the workplace better for everybody. So can you talk a little bit about what was it like crafting a message that felt true to such a big group of people?

Emily: I mean, from the very beginning, we wanted to make sure that was our message, that we're not here to bring Tartine down. That would be ridiculous. Why would we want the restaurants we work at to close?

But it was more that we enjoy working here. A lot of us came to work for Tartine as a company because of its reputation, because of how renowned it is. I personally had a friend who was the general manager at the Manufactory at the time who brought me over after a year of dealing with a very high-profile sexual harassment case against my former employer. And he assured me that Tartine Manufactory was a safe, equitable workplace.

I wanted to be a part of that and we wanted to make sure that continues and as the company is growing and there's less focus on each individual location we saw that wasn't necessarily the case anymore.

Ashley: Yeah. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the concerns that you did outline in your original statement to Tartine. What were some of the things that maybe folks started noticing that they were hoping that collective action could maybe start to rectify?

Mason: I feel like one of the first things that stood out for a lot of folks was transparency within the financial earnings of the company and where it's being distributed as a whole. That's something that it's just concerning to see as they continue to expand—even as we speak, Santa Monica is opening up very soon. We wanted to know how can we be that sustainable within working for this company that is promising us equity.

Emily: Yeah. You know, we were just very confused. I was personally told that the company had no money to give raises and yet multiple restaurants were opening within a few months and then one rapidly closed, as everyone knows about, they'd spent like millions of dollars on, and we want to be able to know where the money's going to that we're making and why it seems like employees, which are the face of their company, aren't their priority.

Ashley: So let's backtrack a little bit, just because I think most people have heard the word “union.” Most people kind of have an understanding of what a union is, but in the way that you folks are shaping it for Tartine, what would it mean to have a union for you folks?

Emily: At its base, a union is a seat at the bargaining table. It should help workers to take back a bit of the power in their workplace and be able to have a say in what their workplace looks like, what their workday looks like, how our labor is being sold essentially.

That to us is really important to be able to have, not just a top-down, but also a bottom-up molding of what it looks like to be a worker at Tartine.

Ashley: What was it like presenting—I don't know if either of you were there when this happened—but what was it like presenting the statement to higher-ups, to management, to the owners of Tartine?

Emily: So we both were at our respective locations, right?

Mason: Yeah. Yeah.

Emily: Kind of scary! (Laughs)

Mason: Super scary. Well, for us, for Berkeley, it's a little complicated.

Emily: Yeah. For us at the Manufactory, we weren't really sure what manager was going to be working, so we were just told to present it to the manager on duty. And yeah, we'd all met outside 10 minutes before we were going in and there's just a lot of nervous energy, but it was more like excitement.

We were excited to move forward with this and have it be public because we were working on it, you know, what feels like in secrecy for so long, and to be able to really start the dialogue between management, ownership, and workers and have it be something that we could start to talk about.

Mason: I can reflect a lot on that. It was the same for us. We were just so excited and so nervous and just really wanted to get it out in the open. It [was] almost a relief actually just to be able to be public and to start the discourse.

Ashley: So you present this letter of intent that you are starting a union, but that's not the only thing that happened. So can you walk us a little bit through the process of what happens next and what actually has happened since you presented the letter?

Emily: So yeah, what happens—and this is across the board, whenever a workplace decides to unionize in general—there's multiple steps that you take.

The first of which is actually organizing your co-workers and seeing if people want a union and as everyone's read, we have over 70% of Tartine workers, which is around 220 workers in the Northern California area, have said that they want to be a part of the union, that they want to unionize with the ILWU.

First we do that, and then we present a letter to management with the names of all of those workers. We offer them the chance to recognize our union. And as we were told by our union organizer at ILWU, the majority of owners choose not to recognize the union. So we were not surprised by that, for them—

Ashley: And that just happened, right? That just happened yesterday, just to give people kind of a sense of the timeline we're working with.

Emily: Yeah. So that just happened yesterday, where they said they’re choosing not to recognize us, which means that the decision to unionize goes to a vote. So now that goes to a vote that the NLRB, the National Labor Review Board, decides, so within like three to four weeks, that organization, this government organization, will come to our workplace and have ballots similar to how you vote when you vote for government officials, where every worker will submit a ballot that says whether or not they want to be a part of the ILWU.

It's a pretty basic process, surprisingly. Now it's a matter of making sure that all the workers are as informed as possible and feel supported by us, by fellow workers, by those who have been trying to unionize and just making sure that we stick together.

Ashley: Something that's been really powerful [is] seeing the amount of news coverage this issue has gotten and how many people have thrown their support to you folks. What does that feel like, seeing politicians and just people, like, marching with you?

Mason: Great. (Laughs)

Emily: Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of us honestly got kind of teary at the rally last Thursday. We didn't have any idea that this many people would show up. I was really stoked to see my neighborhood supervisor, Dean Preston, has been throwing his full support for us.

Having that really makes us feel like, “Okay, this is valid.”

Mason: Absolutely. Even like, I went to the grocery store like two days ago and I was wearing one of my buttons and a couple of people, not just like a singular, a couple of people just shook my hand, pats of support, a couple of really great words, just doing my groceries. The people that do care about the union effort, and what that means for communities and for people, they get it, and they're here for you.

Ashley: Yeah. I really want to talk more about what it means for a group of people to come together as a union—I think we talked about that a little bit—but it really is about having a seat at the bargaining table.

So it means—I don't know how this will translate, because as you said before we started recording, you guys haven't negotiated, so there is no definite sort of things that you will get if your union is recognized. But what are some of the things that you hope for, maybe generally, to happen if your union gets recognized?

(Pause)

I don't know if you could talk about that.

Emily: No, I think we can. I think that one of the coolest parts about when we are going to be negotiating a contract is that we want to have someone on the bargaining committee that's from every department.

At least where I work at Tartine Manufactory, it's a huge space and a huge restaurant. And we have a whole commissary space across the street where pastries get made for multiple locations. All the workers there have very different needs, and we want to make sure that all of those workers’ needs are really heard and put into the contract.

So that's important for us. [It’s] been said a lot how expensive it is to live in the Bay Area. We want to be able to see people have maybe more of a living wage. What that would look like—we'll see whenever that negotiation happens. But as of right now, I think it's pretty sad how the majority of people who make the food and clean the restaurants and serve people have to commute an hour or two every day to do that. That just doesn't seem sustainable. So we want to work on that.

Ashley: Yeah, something that came up a lot in the articles about the union was that a lot of people seem to have to take on second and third jobs, which is not uncommon, especially in San Francisco, in Oakland, for minimum-wage workers. Can you talk a little bit about that? About what it's like working in the Bay Area and working for a prestigious company that has worldwide acclaim, and juxtaposing that to the realities of working in one of the most expensive cities in the world, and making like 13, 14 bucks an hour?

Mason: It's exhausting. It's so exhausting!

It's already exhausting to have to go to work. And then—especially if you're a barista, we know, like you’ve got to go and wake up Berkeley or San Francisco. Or whichever town you're in, and you got to deal with all of these folks before they had their coffee. So this is like, this is already work.

And to have to do that, and then run across town and go to your other job and do another six hours of the same thing or the opposite—like I also do catering work and bar backing and bar work. So it's like, I could use a break.

Emily: One thing that made me really sad, that makes me sad often at the Manufactory, is hearing from workers that we can't afford to eat there.

That just doesn't really seem right. That we're serving food that we ourselves can't afford to eat. Whenever I realize that for myself even, and started hearing that from other people, I was like, “Oh, this is something that we maybe need to look at and think about more.”

Ashley: Absolutely. Especially in San Francisco and I mean, Berkeley and Oakland and kind of the rest of the Bay Area, when I lived there, I'd commute into the city from Oakland and it would be $8 just to get to and from work.

And I was like, “Wait, hold on. How is this feasible?” And then to have to argue with people for just the dignity of like—I should be paid more so that I can eat food and not have to work 80 hours a week to make my life work is kind of ridiculous for the fact that Tartine is such a San Francisco institution.

I don't know, now I'm just like ranting a little bit. But I imagine that's hard to deal with at work, especially for a customer-facing position like the ones that you two encompass.

Emily: Yeah. It is. And you know, the reality is that specialty coffee isn't an easy job.

There's a lot of training and a lot of knowledge that goes into making good coffee and to feel like that's not noticed, or that's not appreciated in a workplace, is a bit of a bummer, and we charge the same amount, if not more, as the other big names in coffee in the Bay Area. It's sad to see that's not going to the workers at all.

Ashley: So I want to talk a little bit about what happens now that the union has not been recognized by leadership. You mentioned that this will go to a ballot. But there's still stuff happening on the ground, too. So you folks are working with the folks who are on the floor with you every day, or who already signed up for the union, but what happens on the other end? What happens with leadership? A couple of articles [about the union] have talked a little bit about it, but I wanted you folks to talk about it too.

Emily: At this point, they said yes, that they're not recognizing our union and that they're going to start hosting meetings with employees and the anti-union firm that they've hired to give us their side. And I believe that that's valid in some ways. It'll be interesting to see how that goes.

I would say that, so far, Tartine has been very smart about this. They're a very massive company. They're playing this very by the book, trying to follow all the rules. They legally can't intimidate us or tell us that we shouldn't unionize.

And for the most part, I'll say that they haven't. So we're just trying to be as respectful to them in this process as well. Because at the end of the day, it's not us against them. It's us wanting to sit with them and work on this.

Ashley: I think that's a really, really important point that you just made.

Because I think it can seem like unionizing is very connected. And while there are certainly things to work out, especially when you sit down and negotiate, it is not an us versus them. This is not what's happening. I think it's really easy for these things to be painted this way.

Especially looking at articles that have been written about Tartine not recognizing the union. I was a little flabbergasted by some of the accusations that were made, especially in the SF Chronicle article about people maybe not feeling that they wanted to be part of the union, or there are rumors about people being intimidated to be part of the union, which I thought was really interesting.

To me, that felt a little bit like a tactic to intimidate others. But again, this is maybe me extrapolating a little bit. So it's interesting when those dynamics get kind of flustered.

Emily: Yeah. I mean, I think that that's intentional on their part, wouldn’t you say?

Mason: Yeah.

Emily: So, like I said, we're trying to just really stay focused on our side of the street and what we're trying to do, and it's less on their actions and more about empowering employees and making sure that the workers have all the answers that they need. Informed, unbiased answers, and that they just feel supported and safe in their workplace.

Ashley: What does that felt like, taking this endeavor on? How do you feel more well-informed about yourself as a worker? Do you feel like you've learned how to advocate for yourself in a way that maybe you didn't have before?

Mason: I feel for me, I've been a barista for a little over 20 years now. And you know, I've been through some cafes and learned some things along the way. But here in this situation specifically, I feel like I've really learned some things about getting people together. Like the way that people really will just fight for each other when they realize the same message is being translated to all of them, especially because there's so many cafes that are with restaurants and with hotels.

So you're often in service with a lot of different people in the barista scene out here. It's not just a small coffee shop. We're baristas and dishwashers and bar folks and servers. And it's not just one portion of us with the same experience. It's service in general.

Emily: It’s the service struggle.

Ashley: What is the best way for people to show their support for you folks?

Emily: We've been telling everyone to come to Tartine, to show up to whatever your local neighborhood Tartine is. Get stickers and buttons, which we've been posting about on our social media, the days where they can come by and get them. Get posters, put them in at your workplace, put them out to your house.

Just be visible and show your support. Tag us at @tartineunion on all social media. Show up and give Tartine your business and show them that a unionized workplace is going to benefit them and tell workers you support them, tell all the workers you support them, so that we feel strong and we have the support of our community.

Ashley: Is there anything else that you'd want people to know listening to this, about the work that you folks are doing?

Emily: You can do it too!

Mason: Yeah, it's possible. It's very possible. Yeah.

Emily: We had no idea that there were this many resources out there for workers and that there's people who want to help us, for free—often people want to give us space to meet and resources and information.

It's not as hard as I thought it would be. We're stronger together, and the more people that you have helping out, it's a little bit easier. But you could do this too at your workplace.

Another thing that I'm trying to continue to tell people is that work is changing. Workplaces are changing with gig work, with tech work, with contract work. It's all new and different. And that doesn't mean that your workplace can't be unionized. Any workplace could be unionized. Collective action knows no boundaries. If you want to do this in your workplace, feel free to reach out to us.

We'd love to give you tips. You got this.

Ashley: Thank you folks for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

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I remember when I met Carlos de la Torre in 2019 at the World Barista Championship in Boston. The World Barista Championship, sometimes shortened to WBC, is the ultimate skills test for baristas—to be on the world stage means you’ve already won your country’s national competition.

Carlos was at the WBC competing on behalf of Mexico, but that wasn’t his first time on an international stage. Carlos, who is the owner of a café, Café Avellaneda, and a roastery, Café con Jiribilla, in Mexico City, is one of the most decorated barista competitors ever. He’s won more coffee competitions than you can count on both hands, and is always looking for another challenge, another avenue to explore his curiosity and love of coffee. At Café con Jiribilla, Carlos only sources coffees from Mexico. He’s at the forefront of a growing movement that’s encouraging a greater shift in value towards coffee-growing countries.

That’s a departure from what has come before: As in so many countries, and as a direct legacy of colonialism, most coffees are grown in one place and consumed in another. Much of the value of coffee is added as it travels through the supply stream. From importers to roasters to coffee shops, much of the money coffee generates happens within non-coffee growing countries. But folks like Carlos are looking to change that, and to encourage people in producing countries to keep hold of their coffee, to foster their own scenes and communities, and to help raise the next generation of coffee lovers. Here’s Carlos.

Ashley: Carlos, I was hoping that you could start by introducing yourself.

Carlos: I am Carlos de la Torre, and I am a barista from Mexico. I own a couple of coffee shops and a roastery. Maybe you know me for being a barista champion a few years ago—2019 and 2018, I guess.

Ashley: That's some of your accomplishments.

Carlos: Yes, actually, today I was thinking about how, 10 years ago, I won my first competition. It was the Cup Tasters [Championship].

Ashley: Yeah, I was looking at your Instagram account and you have some of your accomplishments listed there. So you were a Cup Tasters competition winner 10 years ago, which is wild. You are a Brewers Cup champion. You are a multi-time Barista champion, and you are a Coffee Masters champion as well.

Carlos: Yes, maybe that was the funniest one.

Ashley: So I want to talk a little bit about you and your background in coffee. I almost always start these interviews by asking people what their childhood was like. Did they grow up with coffee? Did you grow up seeing others around you drinking coffee?

I really wanted to talk about competition, so I'm glad that we started with that just because you're such a decorated competitor, but I wanted to know what was growing up like for you? Did you see a lot of people around you drink coffee?

Carlos: We used to drink soluble coffee at home, but…

Ashley: Like instant?

Carlos: Yeah. My father drank a lot of coffee [ever] since I can remember. He is a doctor and he regularly needs to stay awake. My mother—she is a woman who loves accounting. Sometimes she’d pass the night making numbers, drinking a lot of coffee.

So coffee was very, very common at home, but just instant coffee, until my brother—he went to work in Japan, and his wife's family had a small farm. Then roasted and ground coffee started to come home, and no one drinks that, but we had it. And then I was looking in the kitchen and found this coffee. I drank it thinking it was instant too. And it was awful.

Maybe that was my first approach to real ground bean coffee. Then I kinda stepped away from drinking coffee, I was more into soda since I was a kid.

Ashley: I mean, what kid isn't?

Carlos: Yeah. When I turned 16, I was attracted to coffee because I had an uncle with a small coffee shop around the corner from my home.

And every day when I was out with my skateboard, he asked me to come, trying to take me off the streets. He entertained me by playing ping pong and drinking espresso. That's when I started to enjoy drinking coffee and figuring out how every shot was different and how each hand that makes coffee can make a different coffee, even with the same machine and the same coffee—because I started to pull my own shots I was like, ‘Why are mine crappy shots and my uncle’s are excellent espressos?’

I tried to get better. And sometimes, I just came to the coffee shop to help him make cappuccinos and cortados.

Ashley: At what point did you realize that this was something that you wanted to pursue as a career? Like, at what point did you decide, ‘Oh, I think I'm gonna make my life around this?’

Carlos: I always had [coffee] as a hobby. Even when I had a small coffee shop in my town, it was like, just an adventure or I don't know, a hobby when I had my coffee shop here in Mexico City. That was about maybe 11 years ago. And I was working and studying at the same time.

My coffee shop got featured in a magazine I was studying philosophy and I started to think, ‘I've never been featured in anything about philosophy. Maybe I'm not as good in this realm than I am in the coffee one.’

A few months after that, one of my professors showed us his check, his monthly check, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I'm not going to live with that. So I need to be serious about coffee because that's my future.’ Even if I want to pursue philosophy, I need something that helps me to have a…

Ashley: Have a career.

Carlos: Yes. At least a decent living because being a teacher in Mexico, it's kinda complicated in [terms of] income. My father, for example, he teaches at the university, and he's like, ‘This is just for my cigarettes.’

Ashley: Oh.

Carlos: Yeah. It's a really low wage.

Ashley: So I want to back up a little bit. I want to make sure that I understand. So you were in college and you already had a coffee shop? Was that your uncle's shop that you were talking about earlier? Or did you open up something?

Carlos: No, I opened up something? Yes.

Ashley: Okay, so that's a big, big step. What made you decide to open up a coffee shop like, what, in college?

Carlos: Yes. Yes, I don’t know? I had a lot of time [Laughs].

Ashley: You know when—I guess maybe you don't have this problem—I feel like sometimes I meet people and I'm like, ‘They have more hours in the day than I do.’

Carlos: Yes!

Ashley: I don't know how it is. I feel like you must be one of those people because you have your coffee shop, obviously you have a roasting business, you do all the green sourcing for your coffee business.

I bought a bag of your coffee beans in Chicago. They're available at a coffee shop called Dayglow, which I thought was really funny because Dayglow used to be about a mile away from my apartment. And I thought, ‘This is the only place I can get this coffee from Carlos, and it's right around the corner from my house.’

But when I picked up the bag, it says ‘roasted by’ and then it says the name. It was you. [Laughs]

Carlos: Yeah.

Ashley: And you have an almost two-year-old child and you're married and you're one of the most decorated Mexican coffee competitors. So I have to imagine that you have about 70 hours in your day.

Carlos: Yes. There are a lot of people asking about that because recently I opened another coffee shop with my wife and also another one with some friends, and I run a coffee subscription by myself. And yes, my day is like 70 hours but somehow I still have time for the Boss Barista podcast.

Ashley: I know, here you are!

Carlos: Yes, and other things too, but I'm pretty well-organized in my week.

I don't roast each bag of coffee. I have two trusty roasters with which I have strong communication and we taste coffee almost daily together and we talk about roasting the beans we have in stock. We also have a lot of support from my wife and my father, for the business and for my child.

I think I can extend my day because I have a lot of people helping me.

Ashley: Yeah, that makes sense. I'm glad that you mentioned the support team around you, but that's not to say that the things that you do don't take up a lot of time. But it's great to hear people acknowledge where they get support and where they get their sources of inspiration.

Let's talk about your coffee-roasting businesses. So at one point, you opened up a coffee shop in college and you're like, ‘This is the path I'm gonna have to take because philosophy is not getting me—is not going to get me where I need to go.’ So how did you start to really take this more seriously? What did that look like for you?

Carlos: When I opened up—I don't even remember the first two weeks. I just sold two cups of coffee to a couple of women who asked me to use my bathroom.

That month, I entered my first competition. I placed in the last spot, but somehow, I got to know the right people who helped me to understand what I have to do if I want to be like a specialty coffee shop—I didn’t even know what that was.

When my coffee shop started to gain attention from the consumers, I felt very good and started to take it seriously because I have a huge responsibility to them.

I really wanted them to be satisfied because the first time we were featured in the magazine, the guy who wrote [the article] made a promise about the place, and I felt the responsibility of [keeping] that promise to the customers.

Ashley: What do you mean promise? Like a promise to your customers that you would deliver a certain [level of] quality to them?

Carlos: Yes. Every time you get featured in any magazine, the person who wrote the story is sometimes putting the bar very high for you with your own business. So each article forces you to get better.

Ashley: That makes sense.

When did you start thinking about roasting your own coffee?

Carlos: The second time Mexico held the Cup Tasters Championship, my cousin, who worked with me, wanted to compete, but she was kinda nervous about it. So she asked me to compete with her too, and I went just to support her. Suddenly I won that competition, not knowing anything about cupping coffee.

So when I asked my friends, some of whom were champions at the moment, they suggested to start cupping a lot of coffee to train for the World Championship. I started to taste coffees, but realized that the best way to taste different roasts and beans each day is to start roasting myself. So I only started to roast to train for the World Cup Tasters Championship.

Ashley: And then you were like, ‘I can do this. Let me start roasting my coffee for my coffee shop!’

Carlos: Yeah. That was weird because I used to serve coffee from good friends who roast, like they’re third-generation roasters here in Mexico. They're pretty good at that.

Then the people start to ask, ‘Why don't you serve your own coffee?’ I started to put it like in a small grinder, just as an option, and realized that most of the customers want to taste what was roasted in-house.

Ashley: Right.

Carlos: I started to take that more seriously and just roast for my coffee shop. That's when Jiribilla came up, because I used to roast with the Café Avellaneda brand.

It was weird because I served my own coffee. I sell small bags of coffee at my coffee shop, but no coffee shop wanted to use my coffee because it's not regular that they would use coffee from another coffee shop, you know?

Ashley: Oh yeah. I see what you're saying.

Carlos: But they do use coffee from another coffee shop if it has a different name.

Ashley: Right. So just to be clear, Café Avellaneda—that's the coffee shop, and then Jiribilla is your roasting brand.

Carlos: Yes. When I met my wife, I introduced her to the green buying world, and she got captivated by the relationship with producers, and she woke that interest in me. So that's why we started a different project with Jiribilla with strong relationships and also trying to give credit to the producer.

Maybe that's very common right now, but six years ago, it wasn't. I make a joke very, very often about that, because we have strong relationships, from six or seven or even eight years buying the same coffee from the same producer. So we only have like, six different coffees. People ask about new coffees and that's very funny how people ask for new coffees each time they buy a bag, but also appreciate the long relationships because I cannot get new coffees if I don't end a relationship. It's weird. It's complicated to satisfy every single aspect of the roasting.

Ashley: Yeah.

That is an interesting problem, because I think you just put together a lot of different ideas that we have in coffee:

That longstanding relationships are very important.

They're important to the future of coffee, because farmers knowing where their coffee is going is incredibly important for their longevity.

And people like that—people like it when we talk about these things, but then people want new and different and exciting things.

So like, how do you balance that? That must be really difficult.

Carlos: Yes. It's very difficult. We have, for example, in Oaxaca, a group of producers who make about six different coffees for us and each year, some new producers want to go into this group. So, we put them in the group and took maybe the highlights of the past year and release a single-origin, single-farm, single-producer coffee.

So people can taste a new coffee that they already know in a blend of our community, but they can [also taste a single origin of this blend] by itself.

Ashley: I love that.

Carlos: Yes. It’s like, maybe a graduation for that producer, and now he has his own label.

Ashley: Right, that's a really great idea. I love that.

I want to talk a little bit about coffee specifically in Mexico, and I was wondering if there are unique challenges that you've noticed or learned about in terms of coffee-growing and coffee-producing in Mexico, because you source only coffees from Mexico, right?

Carlos: Yes. And I do enjoy coffees from other countries. There's a few coffee shops in Mexico who source pretty good beans. The only thing I think is complicated is to have fresh beans all year round for them.

Ashley: Right, like by the time it gets to them, it's already past crop.

Carlos: Yes.

That's why I don't want to put myself in that situation, and I prefer to support the local production. Also we have a lot of regions which gives us different profiles and different conditions for producing coffee.

When I started buying green coffee, the harvest was between the second half of December and the end of February. But once the different coffee regions started to produce better coffees, and also the producers got better information about how to handle the the entire cycle of the plant, now we have coffees harvested from the end of October until the last days of May. So it's a very, very long period that has allowed us to have fresh coffee all year.

I think that's one of our strongest features for Mexican roasters: that we have fresh coffee and we have the influence of one of the biggest consumers, which is the U.S. That's why we send coffee to the U.S. roasted at origin.

I really think that's going to be a huge theme in the future, coffee roasters at origin, because if maybe a roastery in the U.S. serves this exact same coffee I have, they're going to get it about four months after I got it. So maybe I can send it fresher and have the best moment of that coffee.

Ashley: That's something I was thinking about in terms of shortening the supply chain, or thinking about the supply chain from the producer to the end consumer in a different way, because like you said, keeping the roaster closer to the producer, number one—I have to imagine, I'm not 100% sure—means that more money goes directly to the producer because it doesn't have to go through as much supply chain logistics.

But two, you're also able to send that coffee roasted pretty much immediately to the end consumer, either directly to a consumer or to a coffee shop that uses them.

Carlos: Yes. And another good point of that is some coffees are kind of expensive for the local consumer. For a lot of small roasteries like us, buying great coffees, it's risky because we can't get to the end of the year without moving that coffee because it's kind of expensive, but the foreign customers, they can pay for it easily.

They’ll also promote this excellent coffee from Mexico. And that kind of turns the spotlight to Mexico, you know, because the best coffees can be expensive, and they [usually] only go to consuming countries, but they can go roasted by Mexicans in the best moment of the life of that bean.

And then, the consuming countries can turn to the producers to source in a different way—that just happened with some of the coffees used in competitions.

Ashley: Right. It seems like Mexican coffee, especially in the last couple of years, people are starting to recognize, as you were mentioning, a lot of the biodiversity of all of these different regions. I think when I first started in coffee, the only regions I knew that grew coffee in Mexico were Oaxaca and Chiapas.

But it seems like there's a lot more attention being paid to growing excellent coffee and how many regions in Mexico are capable of growing excellent coffee.

Carlos: Maybe it was eight years ago? Yes, about 2012. That was when Fabrizio [Sención Ramírez] took this coffee from Mexico to the world stage—it was 2010.

Ashley: So he was, just to give people a little bit of background, he was the Mexican Barista Champion that year. [Note: He was the Mexican national champion both in 2009 and 2011.]

Carlos: Yes. So he won in 2009 and went to London [for the World Barista Championship in] 2010. It was the first time, I guess, Mexican [baristas] were competing with Mexican coffee.

He took a coffee from a non-common region. It was a Nayarit coffee. Nayarit is kind of in the north of Mexico and it wasn't even common for locals. That's when the world realized there is not just Oaxaca and Chiapas.

When the Cup of Excellence, other states like Puebla started to shine a little bit more, and now it's even more common or it's easier to find bags of Mexican beans and single-origin from Nayarit, Guerrero, Puebla than Oaxaca and Chiapas. Most of Oaxaca and Chiapas [coffees] go into a blend for the U.S. roasteries.

I think there's maybe three main factors to highlight the unknown regions of Mexico: the competitions for baristas, the Cup of Excellence, and the roasteries who are sending coffee to the U.S.

Ashley: I didn't even consider this fact when I thought about you as—you know, you're an incredibly decorated barista competitor, and you've been to the WBC a couple of times, the World Barista Championship, a couple of times. Did you bring Mexican coffees with you each time you competed?

Carlos: Yes.

Ashley: What was that like? Did you feel a sense of responsibility when competing? Like, ‘I am bringing something of myself,’ or ‘I'm bringing something that's representative of something bigger?’

Carlos: That's a pretty complicated question to answer for me now because I have an inner battle about that.

Yes, in this moment because yes, I felt proud and I felt a responsibility to bring Mexican coffee into the stage. But now I cannot change in my mind because … when you win the Mexican Barista Championship, you kinda turn into an ambassador of Mexican coffee.

Ashley: Right.

Carlos: But when you compete in WBC as a consumer-country barista, you are competing to be the global ambassador of coffee, not just for a country. And for the producing countries taking coffee from our own country to this stage, it's kinda weird because we are competing to be, again, just the ambassador of our coffee, but in a global level, but not the global ambassador. Maybe we kind of need to change that vision because … I don’t know.

I can imagine how, maybe let's say I won the World Barista Championship. How can I be a global ambassador if I only use this Mexican coffee, how can I be an ambassador for other regions in the world? It's complicated to realize how to think about that.

Ashley: Yeah. I see what you're saying. Because it's like that expectation is not put on consuming countries. If you're the barista champion from the United States, or if you're the barista champion from some Nordic country like Finland or Norway, there is no way of being … there's obviously the weight of being the barista champion of your country, of course, but there's not a whole industry behind you, of producers, of supply chain issues…

There's not that very heavy weight. So I have to imagine the pressure on you is very, very different.

Carlos: I'm trying to figure that out actually, because I think, especially for countries like Mexico—who are developing high-quality coffees, but we don’t have the recognition of Panama for example, or Colombia, or maybe Ethiopia—the Mexican barista or the producing-country barista of an underdeveloped scene maybe has to get closer to the coffees from other countries to put on the table Mexican coffees at the same level of those other coffees.

If we compete with Mexican coffee against baristas with coffees from all around the world—we already saw the impact, but what if we compare it with Mexican coffee? Putting them at the same level on the table, just to recognize the value of your country's coffee. I don't know. Maybe that would be interesting because it's like setting a blind tasting for the judges in which they're gonna recognize, in a positive way, the value of the coffee from your country in comparison with other ones which are more common for them, like Colombia and Panama.

Ashley: Right. So I think what you're saying is that there's so much improvement. There's so much beautiful coffee coming from Mexico, but it doesn't have the established reputation as coffees from Colombia, as coffees from Ethiopia. So when you give these judges coffees from Mexico, you can tell them like, ‘You should recognize how beautiful this coffee is and how far we've come.’ But like, this is an objective evaluation.

You don't get to take that into account, how important it is that this is here. It's like, we're still used to these coffees from Colombia or these coffees from Ethiopia or whatever—I actually think a lot of people used coffees from Colombia at the World Barista Championship this year.

Like, you can't compete with that. It doesn't have that same reputation. So it's like, I can come and be an ambassador and show you how much Mexican coffee has grown, but you're still not going to award it first place.

Carlos: Yes, unless I put it next to the same Colombia and highlight the virtues of Mexican coffee in that way.

Ashley: When was the last time you competed at the WBC? Was that in Boston [in 2019]?

Carlos: Yeah.

Ashley: I'm trying to remember the winners. That was the year…

Carlos: Jooyeon Jeon.

Ashley: Yeah, that's right. But I'm trying to remember the top six [competitors], because I know … so one of the things I noticed last time I went to the U.S. Barista Competition, this was in 2020. This was right before COVID-19 shut things down, but a lot of competitors used the same coffees.

Carlos: Yes, yes.

Ashley: Yeah, what did you think about that?

Carlos: Again, that's different for us because no one is going to take the same coffee that we can bring to the stage because they don't even know that coffee. It’s like an underdog coffee, what we take to the stage?

I really think that we from producing countries need to make the effort to think as consuming countries’ baristas. We maybe need to change that vision.

Ashley: Right. It's interesting that you have almost this duality of, ‘I want to just compete as a barista. I just want to be recognized for my talent and my skill that I know that I have.’ But at the same time, [being from a producing] country, there is an expectation that I will use a coffee from where I'm from.

Carlos: And the responsibility, but also—and that's the most beautiful part about being a Mexican barista: You also have this duality of being super close to the U.S. and super close to the other coffee-producing countries. So you’re right in the middle, you're like half and half.

You have proximity to trends in coffee. You can go to the U.S. Coffee Expo. You can go to regionals if you want in the U.S. and see what's happening, but you can also go to your backyard and harvest your own coffee. It’s a very special situation that we have here in Mexico. And it's some of this duality you mentioned, is what’s kinda shaping the Mexican coffee scene.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a good point. Something to think about too, and I think that you've mentioned it a couple of times, is that—I'm in the U.S. I can pretend this is a global podcast, and I think there are people listening all over the world, but I think most of my listeners are in the U.S.

And a lot of people will ask questions like, ‘Where should I buy coffee from?’ Or like, ‘How do I buy coffee ethically?’ And that's a very complicated question. There's obviously no one way to say that, but Mexico is right there. We should be buying more Mexican coffees because if we're thinking about our environmental impact, that is like the closest we can really get.

But it doesn't feel like that's what's in front of us most times. Like I said, with your coffees, I could only get your coffee at one place in the U.S. Hopefully that's going to change soon, but it's just interesting to think you do have this proximity—you can go to the U.S. and go see a competition, but then you could also go visit a farm. And we should take advantage of that closeness, that proximity.

Carlos: We need to explore this: Why the U.S. doesn't have a lot of Mexican beans even when we are neighbors. I have a good friend who sent their coffee to two different roasteries in the U.S. and Canada, and he found out it was easier to take the coffee to Canada and then to the U.S. than going straight to the U.S.

Ashley: I mean, that's very politically charged.

Carlos: Yeah.

Ashley: Which is part of the problem. I think, the first time we met, I think—did we meet in Mexico? I don't think so. I knew I watched you compete, but I don't know if we met in Mexico.

Carlos: Nope.

Ashley: No, we met in the U.S., we met in Boston in 2019. That was the year you were the Mexican Barista Champion, you came to the U.S., but the Brewers Cup Champion who I believe was one of your employees couldn’t come because of visa issues.

Carlos: Yes.

Ashley: Then the second-place person also couldn't come.

Carlos: Yes. And I think this guy, Carlos, he now works for another company, but I'm pretty sure he couldn't make it in next year’s [competition] too. So he still hasn’t performed on the world stage.

Ashley: Is there anything that you'd want people listening to this podcast to know about you or about coffees from Mexico? Anything that you'd want people to take away from this conversation?

Carlos: I really want to encourage people to buy Mexican coffee and discover the flavors and the varieties we have, take the risk of getting that coffee directly from Mexican roasters, because we have a lot of skills. And I can tell you, we keep the best beans. The best beans always stay in Mexico.

You can have amazing cups of Mexican coffee, if you just take the moment to wait for your coffee, because sometimes it's like, it takes one week to travel the coffee from Mexico to maybe New York if you buy a couple of bags from my online store, but it's going to be worth the wait because we have fresh, high-quality coffees.

We have very skilled roasters and somehow delivery has improved a lot during the pandemic. So the times are shorter than before. It's gonna change how you see the coffee scene if you taste coffee roasted by [us].

I've tasted the same coffee roasted by us and by other roasters. The travel itself of a green bean modifies the humidity, the weather activity. So when you have it here, you can roast the coffee at the perfect stage of its life.

Ashley: Right. Something that I want to think about too is that if you order a coffee in the U.S., let's say order from a roaster here in the U.S., they're going to roast it, package it, and ship it to you exactly the same way that you would. So it's not like there's anything different happening when you're bagging and shipping it.

Because I think, like you were saying, people might be a little bit like, ‘Oh, it's going to take a long time to get to me or whatever.’ It's like, ‘No, you actually have the greatest advantage of being as close to the coffee as possible when those conditions of humidity and storage really do matter.’

Carlos: Yes, and I'm pretty sure if you are San Francisco-based and you buy a coffee from Cafe con Jiribilla in the web shop, you're going to get that earlier than if you buy from a roaster in New York.

Ashley: Yeah. I love that there's so much more roasting happening in the country. I think that's something that I've learned a lot about recently. I think—you know Vera Espíndola Rafael, who's also been on the show, and she talks a lot about bringing more of the coffee supply chain, of roasting and consumption, into coffee-producing countries. So I'm glad that you're talking more about that, about…

Carlos: Yes. It started to grow a lot and even for myself, I was tired of just tasting Cafe con Jiribilla all the time. So maybe one-and-a-half years ago, I said, ‘Okay, let's taste different roasters.’ And I started to taste roasters and also started some sort of a coffee blog about other coffees which are not mine. That turned out to be a coffee subscription.

So now I have the fortune of being able to share the coffees I taste each month with a pool of subscribers and I've tasted like—maybe you can't imagine how many roasters are in Mexico—maybe I taste 120 brands the last year.

Ashley: Wow.

Carlos: And that's specialty coffee. So it grows very quick because it's also very easy to start a business in Mexico.

If you went to roast maybe in another country like the U.S., maybe the Netherlands, opening a roastery is a huge deal. You need to get a specific space to roast, you need to bring all the coffee to your location, to your warehouse.

In Mexico, you can print some labels at home, buy maybe 50 coffee bags and two kilos of coffee from a local producer, and then rent a roaster just for two hours—and you can make your own brand of roasted coffee.

Ashley: I mean, you started a coffee shop in college just because you had time.

Carlos: Yes, it's very easy. And that helps the scene to grow very quickly and also to gain a lot of experience. We have a lot of baristas who are roasters and even producers.

Ashley: Well, Carlos, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me. I feel like I learned so much about you and how you have a bajillion hours in your day. I really appreciate you finding a couple more hours to talk to me.

Carlos: It was a pleasure. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was maybe one of my career goals to be on the show.

Ashley: Oh, that's silly.

Carlos: No, it's real and I'm a fan of the Boss Barista podcast. Yeah. I always recommend it.

Ashley: Oh, thank you.

Order coffee from Carlos! Go to www.cafeconjiribilla.com and grab a bag of Mexican coffee!

Get full access to B O S S B A R I S T A at bossbarista.substack.com/subscribe

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My guest today is Sonam Parikh, one of the co-founders of Mina’s World, a coffee shop in West Philadelphia. Sonam and their partner, Kate, opened Mina’s World 18 days before COVID-19 forced the majority of hospitality businesses to close or completely revamp how they serve food and drinks to customers.

I first reached out to Sonam because I noticed two distinctive things about Mina’s World’s Instagram page: One, many of the staff members appeared in photos over and over again; and two, baristas were often named in posts. Those seem like small details, but they felt telling, and like a rare acknowledgment that the folks who work within the space are the ones who make it special.

After I hit “stop record” on this episode, I told Sonam that I thought we’d be friends if we met in real life, and it’s because this interview really took on a life of its own and organically unfolded into a beautiful conversation. We talked about honest representations in media, saying “I don’t know” and really meaning it, and bringing in a mediator to understand the needs of your staff. Don’t miss a minute, because every word Sonam speaks is important and necessary to hear. Here’s Sonam:

Ashley: So I'm going to start where I start all of my interviews by having you introduce yourself.

Sonam: Okay. Well, hi, my name is Sonam. I am one half of the founders of Mina's World, which is a cafe located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Ashley: Can you tell me about some of your first memories of coffee? Did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Sonam: No. I grew up with chai. Chai was foundational. Every morning you would wake up to the smell of the chai breaking—the tea and the milk on the stove rising up. You could smell it in the air, all of the spices. That's what I grew up on, but on very, very special occasions, my mom would sometimes make coffee, and the coffee was very Indian-style and she would cook it in a pot, like a sauté pan or a boiler pan.

It was just the most decadent, delicious thing I've ever tried in my life. The first time I ever had it—I think I had a sip of hers—I was obsessed with it. Ever since, the taste of coffee has just been this extreme delight for me.

Ashley: You grew up in Brooklyn, right?

Sonam: Yup. Born and raised.

Ashley: Can you tell me a little bit about your parents, because I was reading that they owned a bodega in Brooklyn—I have to imagine that influenced what Mina's World, maybe, doesn't look like, but maybe some of the values of your parents' business really shaped what your coffee shop looks like now?

Sonam: Yeah, definitely.

My dad used to tell my mom and me, ‘You can never turn away the first or last customer of the day.”

It's somehow carried over into the shop, and it's so cute because our shift lead, Van, the other day, it was like 4:05 or something, when we close at 4 every day. There was a straggler, and I saw the two baristas kind of look at each other and be like, “Do we take this customer? Do we not?”

I was in the back, and it's completely up to their discretion if they take the customer or not, because the floor is theirs. Van was just like, “It's the last customer. We can't just say no.” And it was just so cute to see this thing that was passed down from my dad in Mina's World. That was very sweet.

Ashley: What was it like growing up around the bodega?

Sonam: It was really interesting. Brooklyn in the ’90s is really different from Brooklyn today. My family and I got gentrified out earlier, and the Brooklyn of that time is like a very golden period that I miss and love so much. I have a lot of memories of sitting on gigantic bags of cat food and watching my parents just be in this shop.

And it was a very stereotypical bodega with cigarettes in the back-end and a lot of canned food collecting dust that nobody bought and diapers and just like a strange assortment of things that everybody in a neighborhood would need strung together. It was extremely tidy, but just always looked messy because it was so small, you know?

It was called S&K Food Center because—I don't actually know why it was called that. I don't think that my parents really serve food there, but it was on Third Avenue in Brooklyn. I remember like very, very vaguely some of their customers coming in and taking me for walks.

Like, things are really different in the ’90s. You just gave your kid away, I guess. But like, yeah, it was the corner store that everybody kinda went to. And that's how they like came to America and tried to eke out a living.

Ashley: Did you have regulars then? I assume you must have since people would just, you know, take you on walks.

Sonam: Yeah. I think that they must have had them. A lot of the details that I have from that time are passed down through storytelling. I was really, really young, but even to this day, like my mom will get a phone call and be like, “Sonam, this person from the store who used to take you on walks just said hi.”

Yeah, I'm guessing there were quite a few regulars.

Ashley: I don't think I've ever talked about bodegas on the podcast at all. I used to live in Brooklyn back in 2009 to 2015, and I think sometimes I assume that people know what a bodega is because I think when you live in New York sometimes you assume it’s the center of the universe.

But hearing you describe them reminded me that perhaps not everybody knows what a bodega is—and not to say that we need to go into too many details, but it really is a store where you can get almost everything you need but in a very, very, very small, tight, contained place.

And especially in neighborhoods where there might be food deserts or it might be really hard to get to a grocery store—especially in New York if it's not walkable, it's pretty much not accessible—the bodega really becomes like a center of life in a way.

Sonam: Oh yeah, absolutely. I feel that was how my parents explained it to me in a lot of ways.

I think that's how a café can be, too. Where you sort of feel the rhythm of the people around you through your regulars, through the changes in humidity that caused you to adjust the grind, even through the people who come and buy their pack of cigarettes and the newspaper in the morning, through the kook who needs to like, get like seven bags of cat food every Thursday…

It just, I don't know. There's something really stabilizing and sweet about it.

Ashley: I like that you mentioned that analogy to adjusting the grind and coffee based on the weather, because it feels like the bodega and the coffee shop are reflections of the neighborhood in a very concrete way in that people come in and out, but that they're also reflections of your neighborhood in this very abstract way: of the weather, of what the vibe is outside, what's happening out on the street or around the corner comes and floods this space of community and gathering.

It's a reflection that is very tangible, but also intangible.

Sonam: That is such a good point. Yeah. Yeah. I think that is such a great point.

Ashley: I mean, you made it, I just talked about it.

Sonam: It's funny because all of the baristas at Mina’s will look out the window and be like, “Ah, yes, it's going to rain. It's going to be slow.” We ourselves have become forecasters of the neighborhood through what we know about things like the weather and the news and whatever it is that's going on in the world and relating it to what we know, which is the coffee in the shop and what we offer. In its own way, it's like this little magic that I love.

Ashley: Yeah!

What prompted you to want to open a coffee shop?

Sonam: You know, people ask me this all the time—and I do love coffee. I love coffee, but I think it's because I love serving people. I love the hospitality aspect of it. What made me want to open a coffee shop is because I grew up at my parents’ shop. As soon as I turned 15 or so I became a barista and I've been that ever since.

My dad always used to tell me, “Please don’t open a shop, please just go to school. Please just become an accountant, a pilot, anything, just don't make yourself have to open a store. It's not worth it. Don't do it.”

Lo and behold, it's exactly what I ended up doing. And I don't know why. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my dad has passed and it's my way of connecting with him, or maybe it has to do with the fact that it's what feels most natural and correct for me. Um, I'm not really sure.

I still can't tell you what possessed me to do this, but it feels very correct for me.

Ashley: I love that it's ineffable in a way, because, you know, I mean—I ask questions. This is a podcast. The idea is that I ask questions and you give answers, but not every question has an answer.

Sonam: Yeah. There's so much power in, “I don't know.”

Ashley: Did you always feel comfortable saying that when people asked you that question?

Sonam: Absolutely not. I think this could be one of the first times I've ever explained it like that. I've also honestly taken a lot of time off from doing any interviews. This is the first one I've done in at least six or eight months.

That's also something I just noticed about myself: that I have been really reluctant to do interviews and I've also been really uncomfortable to say, “I don't know,” but just the other day, I was able to vocalize “I don't know” is an answer.

Ashley: Yeah. “I don't know” is an answer.

It's a really valid answer because it gives space for people to—I don't know, keep thinking.

Sonam: Absolutely.

Ashley: That's something I've had to learn doing this podcast, too. That it's okay for me to not—I mean, I started this podcast thinking I was a f*g expert at everything. I'm not, as I quickly learned.

Part of that process is being able to say, “I don't know the answer,” and being gracious enough to say, “I need to ask a question. I don't need to assume what the answer is here.”

So let's talk about your reluctance to do interviews because we talked—I'm going to say the thing that I hate saying on the podcast—but we talked a little bit about that before we started recording.

When I do these interviews, there's always a very different level of how much a thing has been covered. And Mina's World has been covered a lot in a lot of really big publications. Like you've been in Healthyish by Bon Appétit. You've been in Eater…

There are a lot of really amazing quotes and things that I gleaned from these interviews—I'm actually kind of surprised that you were able to get those things in, because I think it's really easy to kind of just like make these articles as bland as possible—but I wonder for you, as you mentioned kind of feeling this double-edged sword with these interviews, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the attention that Mina’s World has gotten and how it makes you feel.

Sonam: Yeah. I would love to.

The first thing I really want to say is that attention has never, ever equated to financial success for us. And that would be the hope through doing these interviews. That is what we are promised. When we are asked to do these things, we are told, “This will help your business.” And so that is the hope for us.

For me specifically, the hope is that my business grows so that I can pay my baristas more. That is always going to be my first goal. When I do a bunch of these overexposing interviews and my bottom line, which is making more money, does not get met, it makes me pause and question, “What is the point of these interviews then?”

Then it makes me circle back around to this idea that these interviews aren't for my benefit, it is for the benefit of whoever is presenting the interview. It's something that Mina's World is always involved in the discussion of, which is tokenization. Are we being tokenized or are we being highlighted or are we being glamorized or like, do people actually think our coffee is good or do they just want to stick our faces on stuff?

That's become a question that all of us, as a team, talk about a lot, and that I think about constantly. And part of that is why I've really backed off on doing interviews because I've just become really wary of being a talking head about something and receiving no productivity from it, for the things that really matter to me.

And what really, really, really matters to me is being able to give my staff enough money, that they can just chill and enjoy life and go make art and go on a vacation and not have to worry about a second job or getting a very frivolous tattoo. They should all be able to do that whenever they want to. My bottom line is getting that money in their pockets.

And when people are like so obsessed with the things that make us different as a team and wanting to highlight that, it makes us all feel tokenized and alienated, you know?

Ashley: Right. That's a really good point. Because it's, as you were saying before, we started recording, it's like, “When are you interviewing us? Are you interviewing us for Pride month? Are you interviewing us because you're doing like…”—even in one of these articles, the designation is “Queer Table.”

Sonam: Yup.

Ashley: And then even in the first sentence you say, “Not just the gay best,” and it's like, “What's happening here?” This article feels contradictory.

But then you are promised those things of like, “This will be great for your cafe. It'll get you exposure.” How often does that actually translate to anything? Like did this article come out and suddenly you had like 30 people out the door?

Sonam: No, that's never happened.

Ashley: Yeah. So like, why does it matter? It seems like it takes away from the things that do actually work, which I imagined for Mina’s World is a lot of community presence and investing in the people around you.

Sonam: Yeah, it's a lot about maintaining our community fridge, keeping the shop clean, trying to make sure we stay on top of all of our scheduled raises and orders and trying to make sure we keep cups and sleeves in the shop because of the supply chain, which has been enormously funny and sad through the last three years.

A running joke in the shop is just about the supply chain in general. And yeah, those things are just more pressing to me now because I understand that people want—I think that a lot of people with media power want to showcase what they know about diversity but they don't necessarily want to invest in it and see it get furthered.

You know, all of these publications, if you really want to see us go farther, if you want to keep seeing us on your pages, maybe something you can do is, after you do your interview, make a huge order at Mina's World, a shipping order, and get coffee beans for your team for the rest of the month.

There needs to be some sort of return because I really cannot eat views and neither can any of my teammates.

Ashley: Right. It seems like there's no, there's no return for you in a way that is tangible to your business actually surviving, even though that's the promise of these articles—that exposure will get you more people through the door.

And then at the same time, I think that there's this strive in these articles to present you guys as perfect. Like, “Look, they're queer or they're BIPOC-owned and they're doing it! They're crushing it.”

There's this very, like, almost rainbow-washing positivity that’s spun on this, and something that I'm really getting from you and this interview is that s**t is not perfect. It is hard, and you don't always have the answers. And very rarely do I see that tension dictated in any of these articles because there seems to be this overwhelming need to present issues of diversity or people that are being highlighted because they're quote unquote “diverse” as a very positive, great, like happy-go-lucky, spin, if that makes sense.

Sonam: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, it's funny because my candor is the same in those articles and this interview. I'm very much the same person across the board. What comes across in an interview is always what the interviewer gleans from me or whatever their objective for the article or what bylines they need.

It's really all about them, you know? And that's fine. I understand that, I've signed up to do it. So I'm part of this equation and stuff, but I think the thing that I've learned over the last two years with Mina's World is really getting a harsh understanding of why people contact us—and it's never really because they really believe in us. It's because there are certain times of year where you have to find certain kinds of people to fill your pages so that you can check off some boxes.

All I'm saying is that if you need to check off those boxes, attach a price tag because it's shitty. And the irony of being like, “Wow, look at this one place that's still standing!” is that like you have these institutions, and you have no idea how hard it is to stay standing when there's no financial support from the places that laud them as such great places.

Ashley: Yeah.

Sonam: And the other irony is that they're not such great places!

How can a two-year-old business run by an idiot like me ever be an ideal café? I'm still learning, right? I've never gone to café school. I’ve been given the power to manage somebody else's café. I've never even been a shift leader at somebody else's café. I was always told I was too passionate or too this or too that, or too whatever.

I've never even been given the keys to anybody else's shop, you know? So it's just like the idea that I'm so qualified to be this diversity angel or something is hilarious to me, because I've never, at this point, to be honest, I've only run an operating, open café for 18 days. I've never even had an open cafe. It’s incredibly strange.

Ashley: I think there's something that happens when people talk about something totally new and different that they haven't heard before people do—something totally new and different where there's an expectation and almost a mythologizing that you're going to do this exactly right.

But that does a disservice to you, the person behind it, when you're like, “I'm still learning and there's so many lessons for me to take in. And I want to be told when I'm making a mistake.” I want to be told in an honest way that like, “Hey, maybe the thing that I'm doing is not x, y, and z. Let's work on making this better because that's how this becomes a better, more accountable place, is that we feel safe in expressing those concerns.”

But sometimes it feels like out of your control in a way. Because you're painted in the media and a certain light that like, you're beyond reproach, but that's not true. You don't want that to be true.

Sonam: It's not true. And I get reproached all the time and I'm so thankful for it and appreciative of it. The thing about my shop is that all of this press and media and like, whatever, it doesn't go beyond the window. Inside of the shop, the team and I are very real with one another.

We have a lot of talks about a lot of things and we all make group-based decisions. Like there was a very, very large media company—the largest—who did this big piece on us. One of the components of the piece involves somebody coming to the shop and this person messed up in every single way they could have.

And no matter how much this company paid us and how much exposure it did get the shop, as a shop, nobody was happy about it, and we're just not working with them again. We're not doing it again. It was not beyond reproach where they were like, “What are you doing?” you know—and it was a good learning experience.

Ashley: How do you cultivate a culture where people feel safe expressing these concerns?

You don't have to have it all figured out, but it seems like a pretty pivotal tenet for you. It’s that decisions aren't made by you just because you're one of the co-owners or they're not just made by Kate because she's one of the co-owners. It seems like decisions are made as a collective.

Sonam: Well, I don't have it all figured out, but what I do know is that I had to be called on that. Sharing power is something that my team and I discussed at length with a mediator. It's not for me or Kate wanting more power, but it is for me and Kate not understanding what power there is in being the co-owner of a café and understanding how to use that power effectively and also where to share that power.

Ashley: I love that you said that, because I think if there's anything I think about more than anything—what a clear sentence there, Ashley—but if there's anything I think a lot about, it’s power, and I want more people to think critically about power because it's insidious. Like you don't know you have it sometimes, and it will absolutely influence the decisions that you make.

I think people often paint bad leadership as like a bad apple, but power is a multiplier. Power will influence the way that you make decisions in ways that you often don't know. So what was that like having a mediator there and having to talk about things that maybe you hadn't realized?

Sonam: I think that in the beginning it was really scary because being told that you’re making any negative feelings occur in your workplace feels really, really bad. Of course there was a lot of self-blame, obviously, and shame in that, because there's always shame when you're told that you're doing something wrong, especially when you are a person who worked very, very hard and as a people-pleaser, and to your own detriment, to your own detriment in this situation.

But like, when you can sit with your shame, and sit with yourself and be accountable and be amenable to being accountable, and when you have as gracious and incredible of a team as we do at Mina's World, you will receive the space and understanding to rectify the ways in which you have not distributed power well enough and then get to do that, which is what we're doing right now.

And that can look like a lot of things. For us, it looks like working on equity and not just being everybody's gay café on the outside. Since I've stopped doing interviews and caring so much about the media, what I've instead turned to is actually internal repair fully—because I don't care anymore what everybody on the outside needs or wants to say about us.

But what I care deeply about is the internal harmony of my shop, and that the members of the shop feel safe and comfortable inside of there. I can't control what is going on outside or what people say about me, but I can control the literal temperature in my shop, emotional and otherwise. I can at least make people feel or create conditions that honor safety and boundaries.

And that's my job. Like that is literally all I am here to do for Mina’s World.

Ashley: One of the quotes that I was really interested in that made it into one of these articles—that I was surprised by—was trying to be as harmless as possible. And I think that sort of spoke to some of that—and I want to be clear that being harmless as possible doesn't mean, like, never making mistakes, but I think it means focusing on the circle that you occupy and not necessarily extending yourself outward and being bigger and doing big gestures to the detriment of the people that are closest to you. And it seems like you had a real reckoning with that.

Sonam: Yeah.

Ashley: Yeah. What has it been like to really turn inward and focus your attention more inward? Because I think that that's something that people forget—that like it starts, it starts literally by looking at the people next to you and saying, like, “How do I serve you better?”

Sonam: It's been the most gratifying and … full experience. I think that nobody ever … I don't know many people who have opened a business and then have had to completely—completely—reformat every single aspect of their business plan to be retrofitted to a pandemic and then survive it for years now.

I think one of the results of that is the external is so much less. There's not people in the shop except our team in the shop, laughing our asses off or being really quiet because everybody's having a bad day or listening to music or whatever it is that we do in there.

I was not seeing things with a clear lens when I started out. And I think why people do that, and why I did that, was because I was so full of good intentions. So full of good intentions. But one's intention does not always equal what their impact ends up being.

That's something I've really learned about. Through this process of reckoning, of being like, “I don't need to do these interviews. I don't need this attention because I don't know if it's positive for my shop or doing good things for my people.”

It was really helpful because—imagine building a building, but the base of it is built on popsicle sticks. How is that useful? You can't put bricks on popsicle sticks. It's going to teeter and totter and no matter how strong the top of it is, it's going to break. There's nothing to stand on.

And similarly, you have to build something that you can stand on. So no matter how long it takes, until our insides, until the team, until the shop itself, until our internal reserves feel full and sated, and our needs are met, I can't engage in messing around with the outside world right now.

I want so badly for my shop to feel fortified and to feel sufficient and strong. Those are all things that I take really seriously now, because I see that no matter what, a shop can only survive when there is strengthen your team, and strength comes from being able to rely on your managers and your bosses. Strength comes from when you have accountability within your team and when you all communicate with each other really, really well.

And that looks like actually liking where you work. And by liking where you work, I don't mean that we all have inappropriate boundaries with each other. It means that there's basic respect there and that everybody is accountable by being on time, your employers aren't inappropriate with you, that you get paid on time, that your raises come in every three months as they're supposed to, that you're not being cheated out of the things that you're owed and that your good hard work is acknowledged, and that when there's a problem on the team or you're feeling like you're not being treated properly, that is addressed immediately.

Having a people-based and a person-forward team is, I think, one of the most essential aspects to having a solid cafe. People ask all the time, “How come you don't have high turnover?” or like, some people will be like, “Wow, you really just have the same baristas.”

And it's like, yeah, why would I not? I really care about them—appropriately. I don't want to know about their personal lives. I don't want to be their friends. I will drive them to the hospital and cook the meals to the point of detriment when they are sick—whatever is appropriate in our relationship as we've discussed one-on-one during our meetings, and whatever is within our set of boundaries. Without that you can't have a shop that can be cute and be in magazines and be out there with like, little mugs and subscription boxes and stuff.

All of that stuff is really cute and fun and creates money, which is another necessity. But if you don't have a strong team, all of that is going to fold so fast and then your money is going to fall through the hole, too—we don't have any money, so we don't have anything to fall through, but I assume that's what’s going to happen.

Ashley: It's funny that you mentioned how important, how pivotal this is. And clearly this is something you're incredibly passionate about—I kind of like, hate using that word—but it's something that you feel really strongly about, but that doesn't come up in a single article that I read about you. It feels like people are sort of missing the point.

Sonam: Yeah. I think I'm realizing the point isn't me. The point isn't who I am or what I actually want from my business or something. I think the point is what the angle of the article is or what it's topically related to. Like, is it about being queer or is about Pride month, is it—I don't know.

Ashley: I feel like we talked a lot about big issues, but we also kind of just put the media out on blast, which I'm very into.

But I also think that this is a really interesting conversation for people who do read articles about coffee shops that they love or are interviewed for their local or national publications to really think like, “What is the point of this? How am I being portrayed and what does this mean for my business?”

This isn't necessarily the direction I expected to go in, but I'm really into it because I don't think that this is a conversation that many people have. So thank you for being so open and honest with your experiences on this topic.

Sonam: Yeah, of course. Um, it's probably not going to do much for my public profile, but here we are.

Ashley: But more than anything, when I do an interview and I think about like, “What's the point? What do I want to get from somebody?”

And part of it I tried to leave completely open because I think that there's a natural cadence that sometimes happens with people that—like you and I will talk, and we'll find something that is really compelling to both of us. I think that that's pretty much textbook what happened in this conversation.

But at the same time, I also think, “What compelled me to this brand or what compelled me to these people? Why did I want to talk to them?” I think that I really wanted to talk to you because of turnover, if I'm being totally honest, because I feel like I saw the same people in all of your Instagram posts.

And I was like, “Oh, there's something good happening there.” That made me think of all the times we're told in coffee that turnover is natural. We're seeing that play out in all of these union-busting arguments that baristas don't need unions because there's high turnover. We don't want to invest in this “not professional” skill.

Sonam: What?!?!

Ashley: Oh gosh, yeah. I feel like I read all about unions right now because it's like, my obsession right now. I see people talk about, especially laypeople who are just commenting on Facebook posts—which I shouldn't do. I should never read those comments and I always do.

And it's always like, “Why would, like, a barista want a union? They're just like a student or this isn't a professional job.” And I'm like, “You buy coffee every day. Who do you think you're going to buy coffee from?”

Sonam: Exactly.

Ashley: So I think it was interesting to kind of combine those two things.

I dunno—I like getting really meta in these conversations, so it's fun to like reflect back on the conversation.

Sonam: Which I just love about you by the way.

Ashley: Thank you. But I also love the idea that we discovered something new as well. I love that you had an answer that you hadn't shared before, and felt comfortable sharing, which is a big honor. I really appreciate that you were so candid in this conversation. I feel like we discovered a lot of really honest things.

I wonder, as we sign off on this conversation, is there anything that you want people to know about you that we maybe didn't cover about Mina's World that you want to leave people with?

Sonam: I think that I genuinely want to say that, like it's an honor to get to be a part of Mina's World. It's not mine and it's not Kate's—it's everybody who participates in it. It's a product of a lot of desire for goodness, but it's not inherently good or bad. It just is. And what people construct of Mina's World I can't control.

What I can control—I'm doing my very, very, very best to put intention and goodness into what happens. I don't know. I never thought that I would be here. I never thought I would be doing this. I never thought I would be on this podcast that I used to listen to when I was 25, but here we are.

And another thing is just frankly, please support Mina's World. We are a really small business, really, really small. We don't have private investors. We begged one of our parents, like we begged Kate's mom for a loan that we are still paying back and will for the next 20 years.

So if you would like to buy some coffee beans, go to mw4u.net and load up the cart because you will seriously be supporting a very talented group of individuals and a shop that genuinely started from scratch.

I think there's a lot of respect that deserves to be put on that.

Ashley: Sonam, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I've really loved this conversation.

Sonam: Thank you so much for having me.

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My guest today is Eric Grimm, an old friend and someone who’s involved in coffee in a variety of capacities. Eric both works with Ghost Town Oats and The Chocolate Barista; does consulting work for mobile coffee events; and is also the director of positive outcomes at Glitter Cat Barista, an organization started by their wife, Veronica Grimm. Glitter Cat hopes to reimagine the coffee industry by making events like coffee competitions more inclusive, and one of the ways Eric has approached building more accessible spaces is by examining how human resources functions.

Human resources, or HR, is a complicated subject within the food and beverage world. Maybe you’ve heard the phrase, “HR protects companies, not people” and felt it described your experience—or maybe you’ve never interacted with an HR person before. In this episode, Eric explains the intention of a human resources department or point person, highlights their role in setting the culture or tone of a business, and emphasizes the need for workers to understand their rights and how HR can help them.

Of course, that’s not always the case, and this episode shines a light on how hard it can be to advocate for yourself. I learned so much about my own work history in this episode—how I misunderstood labor laws, or made mistakes that I couldn’t identify at the time. I hope this conversation helps you feel empowered in your job, allows you to feel grace for yourself, and that it inspires you to grow and take action. Eric shares a generous amount of empathy and care throughout this episode, and it’s a perspective that’s really resonated with me. Here’s Eric.

Ashley: Eric, let's start by having you introduce yourself.

Eric: Hi, I'm Eric. (Laughs)

Ashley: That’s enough.

Eric: That's it. That's it. I'm Eric.

I am a 13-year coffee industry veteran at this point. I hold a great many positions. I recently referred to myself as a Renaissance B***h. And I think that that holds very true with what I'm doing right now.

One of the big things that I'm doing is I work for Glitter Cat Barista, which was founded by my wife, Veronica. I hold the position of Director of Positive Outcomes—which is a term from animal sheltering, actually. It just very much fits in with a lot of what I do for the program.

I like to think of myself as an emotional support animal. Anybody who goes through the program, I make sure that they're feeling okay. I make sure that imposter syndrome isn't totally consuming them. I also get to do a great many projects within the program. One of them is directly related to hospitality and HR, which I'm really excited about.

Ashley: Tell me about how this part of Glitter Cat started.

Just to give some background on Glitter Cat: It is a way for people within the coffee industry who maybe don't have access to expensive training materials, coaches, or anything like that to compete in these big barista competitions.

We've talked a little bit about them in the podcast before, but essentially there are these barista competitions, and they're a big deal. There's a lot of bells and whistles, and Glitter Cat helps people of marginalized identities compete in these competitions—but then during COVID-19, [Glitter Cat] transitioned into being a digital competition so that people could still participate, learn about coffee, enter the coffee community, but there are all these other projects that Glitter Cat does in terms of bettering the industry. So how did some of these projects sort of start springing up?

Eric: We like to believe that Glitter Cat is this umbrella organization—that anybody who goes through it probably initially [entered] to compete in some sort of competition, be it the U.S. Coffee Champs or our own DiGiTiTiON. They can do whatever they want to try to re-imagine the coffee industry and we'll support them any way we can.

Back in June of 2020, there was obviously this big national reckoning on race. There were coffee companies just coming out of the woodwork to either respond to their own crises, which kept piling up, and also those who had fewer crises who just put out plans to either hire more Black baristas, promote more Black coffee professionals, make their cafes more welcoming spaces, deal with unconscious bias… And a lot of it was b**t, frankly. I think a lot of us were put off by certain things and a lot of us still knew that something needed to be done.

So we worked on a commitment to Black coffee professionals and enthusiasts that included something where we would work with retail coffee businesses to try to establish some sort of standards.

I worked on this project initially with Bud Taliaferro [a former Glitter Cat competitor] and we wanted, at first, to be super righteous about it—to be like, “Hey businesses, what are you going to do to be accountable to your promises here? What are you going to do about everything that's going on in the nation currently? What are you going to do in an extended way past the point where the news cycle is constantly reporting on it?”

Initially, it was very like, “Rah rah, we're going to do this and we're going to make everything better.” Then we realized it's not quite that easy.

For one thing, being a business owner is incredibly difficult. It comes with a lot of responsibilities that we're not necessarily aware of, even in some administrative roles, and it just boiled down to: Operations are really tough to change, but they can be changed. And the way that you can change them is through human resources.

Human resources deals with all of this stuff. It's not just who writes your paychecks. It's not just who deals with grievances. It really touches every element of the business.

Initially, we were getting Bud certified to be a human resources associate professional, and then I decided to do it as well while we were working with our two initial beta test companies which are Greenway Coffee Company in Houston and Vertex Coffee Roasters in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I recently just completed my associate human resources professional certification, and it was a wild experience.

Ashley: I have to hope that you got some sort of very fancy certificate that you're going to frame and hang up in your home.

Eric: I did not get a certificate. I got a digital badge, which seems so modern, right? It's the equivalent of what, like a hundred likes on Instagram or something like that?

Ashley: I love the equivalency. Some of the experience that you have wanting to learn more about HR has a little bit to do with your own background I believe, right?

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I'll be perfectly honest. A lot of my motivation to get HR certified came out of pettiness, which, you know…

Ashley: The founding of Boss Barista is pretty much all pettiness. So I understand that.

Eric: Right? You take your anger about something and you don't say, “Hey, I don't need to be angry.” I just need to make my anger into something. I need to have my anger be a motivating factor to make things better for people. I don't necessarily even need to rub it in the faces of the people who've made me angry before.

But basically my background with HR before was I worked for small coffee companies for years, and there wasn't any HR. There was just a lot of really well-intentioned small business owners who could not handle everything. So grievances went unanswered. A lot of fights happened and often it was just, “Oh, well, I need to move on from this company and find another small company,” which I think is how it works with a lot of people who work with very small companies.

Ashley: I just did an interview with Sierra Yeo from the Kore Directive—she's based in the United Kingdom—and that was a theme that kept coming up in our conversation constantly.

You work at a company, you start out thinking things are great, but the minute that there are problems, there's no recourse for how to deal with them. So then you just keep moving on and it feels like your career just keeps going in this lateral direction because, as we were talking about it, we realized that for a lot of coffee companies, there's no way to deal with conflict.

Eric: Exactly. And it's a maddening experience, just the back and forth, leading with your emotions, which is not necessarily the sign of a good leader, but also is not something that is being taught to leaders. I think, generally you just get into this position, especially if you're a coffee shop manager, of, “Hey, you've been doing a great job as a barista. Maybe even the lead barista, of course you can manage,” but there's not often a guidebook, especially for these smaller companies.

Ashley: So your desire to learn more about HR was partially driven by the work that you were committed to doing for Glitter Cat and partially driven by your past experiences.

I was wondering: What was your conception of HR before you started this course? Because I know for me, the first thing I think of when I think of HR is, “Oh, they're there to protect a company. They're not here to protect me.”

Eric: 100%. And that's what I thought of it.

Eventually when I got into a position where I worked for a bigger company that had HR, that was what was happening. A lot of it was compliance with laws, which obviously needs to happen. There's no way that small business owners can know all of the laws that they need to be compliant with—that many are often breaking. But I also saw so many things that were just incredibly demoralizing, particularly with conflict resolution, that were more about protecting the company from lawsuits than they were advocating for employees.

When I was about to get into this program to do this 10-week course—that would end in a 125-question exam—I thought, “Okay, I just need to take from this what I can. I just need to find out what these laws are, what these standards are, so that I can manipulate it to my will and make it better for employees.”

Ashley: And that's not what you learned?

Eric: Not at all. In fact, HR has best intentions possible, as a concept.

It came out of labor crises that led to the forming of unions. It was in fact meant to protect employees. It's in fact these bad actors, particularly as you move higher up in these corporate levels, that bend all of that to basically benefit these companies and to keep them not liable for lawsuits.

There was so much to learn. It was really an exhaustive, comprehensive view of HR, which was very exciting and very daunting at times. I can't even say that I have retained all of this information, but still I have this 425-page textbook to refer back to. I have a teacher who I can consult with and send messages to and be like, “Am I interpreting this correctly?”

Because that's the other thing, is you have to interpret laws. And interpreting laws is really, really difficult. Even if they are spelled out to a T, it's really, really difficult to say, “Hey, are you actually being compliant with this? Or are you wiggling out of it? Or is there a little bit of gray area here?”

Ashley: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Because I feel as a barista, when I first started learning about jobs and my rights and things like that, I would maybe ask my employer and maybe they would have a different interpretation of what a law meant. But if I go back to those experiences, I'm like, “Wait, no, that's not quite right.” Or, “Oh, I see how they made this work for them, but this really should have been working for me.”

It's really hard to read laws, especially if you don't have a background in HR or law or if you're 17 and just starting out and learning what work even is. So it's really interesting that you talk about how these laws are meant to be interpreted and how you do need someone who's almost like a translator to explain how they work.

Eric: Yeah. You need that from both ends too. We're not just talking about baristas. Baristas probably need it more because they are, for lack of a better term, lower on the totem pole, and they're not given this information upfront, but also business owners can't possibly know all of this stuff that they have to be compliant with, that they have to take into consideration, both when they're starting their business and as they're growing their business.

It's a lot of stuff to go through. It's a lot of things to have, especially because, even in HR school—which is a very funny thing to say, “HR school,” right?—in HR school, one of the first things you learn is that businesses with fewer than a hundred employees often just don't have an HR manager, which makes sense.

It's like, if you think that you can do it as a business owner, but you also probably don't have the capital to have a pretty expensive person on salary to make sure that all of this stuff is being taken care of.

Ashley: I have to imagine as well, for small coffee companies who have anywhere from two employees to maybe 10 or 20 employees, there's this idea of casual happiness—and I'm going to coin that term, I think—of the idea that, “Oh, we're all together and we're happy. We don't need a ton of rules or guidelines or anything because this just works.”

I imagine that people internalize HR as a way to regiment that experience, which is absolutely not true. I think we're learning from unions like Colectivo and the Tartine Union that rules are actually really, really helpful for creating a framework for people to be happy. But I wonder if that was something that you felt or experienced during your time in coffee—that “We don't want rules because like this just works,” or like, “I don't want someone to tell me how to do things!”

Eric: Absolutely. You feel a sense of terrific independence when you get to be the one person who's working at the coffee shop. You control the music, you control the mood, you control all of that.

I think that's the first thing you think. “Oh, now there have to be rules.” I think that's also what a lot of coffee company owners who don't want their employees to unionize then say, “You have so much freedom. If we go down this path of unionization, or if we go down this path of having very specific HR, then there are all sorts of rules. There are all sorts of rules that everybody needs to follow and it makes it into this regimented existence.”

But that really does not have to happen. There is so much room to interpret, to joyfully interpret, all of these things that can ultimately not only help out baristas, but can help out coffee company owners as well, can make everybody's lives easier. Can put everybody on this right path to as much social justice as you can accomplish in a coffee company.

Ashley: What were some of the most surprising things you learned doing this training?

Eric: I think one of the big things—so I knew about exempt employees before. It was something that I learned a little bit too late after I had become a coffee shop manager and then moved into a different role as a director of events. [I learned that for exempt employees] that salaries have to be at a certain point for you to be exempt from overtime. Administrative, management roles … they fall under this category and finding you…

Ashley: Just really quickly: Can you define exactly what an exempt employee is?

Eric: An exempt employee is an employee who works full-time and who meets a certain salary threshold. It is well above what hourly minimum wage is. [Exempt employees] meet that threshold, which means you do not have to pay them overtime—which makes sense for certain roles, but think about being a coffee shop manager.

You and I have both been coffee shop managers before. It's not only a full-time role, but you have to be available to deal with crises. Are you keeping track of your hours when you're doing that?

Ashley: Sometimes? If I was getting paid—there are certain jobs that I got paid hourly, and some jobs that I got paid a lump salary. I mean, it really depends, but let's talk about that salary exemption, because I have to imagine that most coffee shop managers who are maybe in that latter position of not necessarily keeping track of their hours, maybe getting a lump sum every week or month, probably don't meet that threshold salary.

Eric: Quite possibly. I certainly wasn't. So right now the annual salary of an exempt employee should be $35,568 nationally.

Ashley: Okay.

Eric: And there are seven states that have different rules from that: that put it above, either slightly or considerably. Some states have different laws depending on how many employees you have. So for example, in California, if fewer than 25 employees make X amount of money, fewer than 26 employees for the whole company, exempt employees make more money.

And it's the same in Washington State, and oddly Alaska is one of the seven states that has higher than the minimum requirement. California and New York are—not surprisingly—the highest. I want to know if you can guess what the minimum is in California. So we're talking about in California, if you have more than 26 employees, and New York is specific to New York City.

Ashley: Okay. I lived in both states. I have worked as a manager in both states. I'm going to tell you what I made in those positions and see if it met the minimum threshold. So I worked at a coffee shop in Oakland and I was making $18 an hour as the manager, but I was paid a salary-ish. So it was kind of a hybrid, but there were solo shifts, so I also collected tips. So it was weird, but $18 an hour got me to about $40k... I'm doing the math right now. It's like 18 times 40 times 52 got me to $37,000 a year.

Eric: In building up your salary from tips or potentially bonuses in California and New York, you have to be making at least $58,000 a year.

Ashley: (Bursts out laughing) Okay. Okay. My first coffee shop job was—not my first coffee shop, but my first manager job was in 2012. So maybe the laws have changed since then, but it was in New York, New York City. I was making $600 a week as the manager and I was not taking any tips. Which is wild. So $600 times 40 times 52 is—nope, that's wrong math. $600 in a week times 52 … I was making $31,000 a year as a manager.

Eric: I'd have to check it to see if that is in fact compliant for 2012, because [the salary threshold] even went up from 2020 to 2021. But three years ago, when I was in a different administrative position and I found out what managers were supposed to be making, because it correlated to my salary as the manager of a different department, that it was in the $57,000 range.

Ashley: I've never made that much money.

Eric: It's wild. To be clear, also in California, if you have fewer than 25 employees, which a lot of smaller businesses do, it's $54,000, but even still, that's a considerable amount of money that you may or may not be making.

Ashley: Right. And that's an important thing for people to know, especially when they do make that jump from barista to some sort of job that is salaried, because that's usually the progression of these jobs, right? You're a barista, you're making an hourly wage, you're taking home tips, and then you have to weigh if that next promotion is even worth it. Because for a lot of these positions, you know, it was an open secret at a lot of places that I worked where the managers or people in salary positions made less than the baristas because of tips. And because of these constraints, these like restrictions on salaries.

Eric: Exactly. I think that's probably one of my biggest takeaways from this entire experience of learning the general ins and outs of HR, is that people just don't know these things and the information is out there, but it's out there in a lot of different places.

Even in trying to get this condensed information in table form, it took me a while to search it out. This isn't necessarily on government websites, on the Department of Labor website in digestible form. You really have to hunt for this information.

I know that a lot of smaller coffee businesses are struggling with this. I know even medium-to-large-size coffee businesses, where the owners are still doing all of this, they're still taking on all of this … and it's too much, it's too much for all these people to keep all of this stuff straight, which is why, beyond the initial idea of us just making businesses more accountable and doing better as far as Black employees go, as far as Black customers go, you have to be doing better for everybody.

You have to have the opportunity to ask questions in a judgment-free zone, which is what I want to do. That's what I want to be for people. I want to be that for baristas as well. I want people to come to me and say, “Hey, is this enough money for this?” And people do, which is wonderful, but I want to spread that out beyond people I know. I want you to be able to come to me and say, “Hey, I don't know if this is fishy, but it might be fishy, right?”

Ashley: You and I are probably both uniquely poised in that we both see a lot of those questions. I get a lot of questions about like, “I got offered this amount. This was my previous position. What should I do?” Or, “Is this enough money?” Sometimes I'll do that kind of searching where I’ll go to Department of Labor websites. I'll go through statutes and laws for specific states—but you're right. Number one, this information is really hard to find. But if a person's asking me this question, I have to imagine that there are 10 more people with that question and they just don't know who to ask.

Eric: Absolutely. This seems to be a major issue across this industry. It has been as long as we've worked in it.

Ashley: Exactly.

Eric: I believe that the answer is not to tut-tut the people who are doing it wrong. I still want to lead from the idea that people just don't know any better and then present them that information and go from there.

It can be tailored to each company. I do want to offer consulting services at this point to make it easier on businesses, other than just giving them a bunch of information and say, “Have at it, interpret it yourself, go for it.”

I think that this comes into play with two different possible options. With baristas: Come to me, my DMs are open, ask me whatever questions you have about human resources, operations—obviously we've just been talking about salaries and that's a huge part of human resources—but even in just like the ethic of being in a company and employee rights, I want to be there for you in order to do that.

Businesses, especially businesses owned by the marginalized communities that we serve through Glitter Cat, I also want to help you out as well. Businesses not owned by people from marginalized communities: I can also help you out. It might cost a little bit more.

Ashley: As it should.

One thing that I want to talk about is what an employee who works at a company that doesn't have an HR program can begin to do to advocate for their rights, because it can be really daunting if you don't have that structure in place, or you don't have a structure to depend on. What are some of the things that you've learned that baristas should at least be aware of—beyond exempt versus non-exempt? What are some things that they should take away from a conversation with someone like you?

Eric: I think that they need to know that there are government agencies that specifically deal with all of this. That's the big thing—that you can make appeals to those agencies, for better or worse, potentially report a business that is doing unlawful labor practices, which a lot of them are.

I think that you can also hopefully approach it as more as a conversation with business owners in order to just see where they are to see if the intentions are right or they're just falling short because they don't necessarily know any better. Perhaps they're completely exhausted, which is often an excuse that we run up against. That is no excuse, really, but still to try to get your finger on the pulse of where business owners are actually at, as far as their employees are concerned, and to determine if it's good for you to stay with that business.

What I hope will happen through our work through this, and hopefully through people being inspired by our work through this, is that they will start to have not just a bare minimum, but great standards for what it is to run companies and to serve employees in that capacity, because your job is your life, whether we like it or not.

It's not your whole life necessarily, but it's a significant portion of your life. You think about it when you go home, it's very difficult, especially with the emotional labor that comes with working in a coffee company, particularly in customer-facing roles, to leave it behind. You do need it and you do need to be treated well. You do need to be advocated for.

Ashley: It seems like the general understanding here is that the more we set these expectations up in individuals, in people—be it people who are looking for jobs like baristas, who are maybe entering the fields or going to another position, or people who own and run coffee shops—that the expectation will just be met equally.

Like I'll go into a job interview and say and ask, “What are your salary minimums?” or something like that. That's kind of an off-the-cuff question, but the idea is that I'll be empowered to ask these questions more. The more that I know about these things, and once more employees kind of set that expectation—no, that's not right either.

Eric: No, go with it because I'm getting spurred from it.

Ashley: Yeah, okay. So—I don't want the expectation to necessarily come from employees because that's unfair, but at the same time employees have the power to change what's happening by setting these expectations. It's one of those things where like, yes, coffee shops need to be paying their baristas more money, but if this is a long-term goal and baristas need that money now, then they also have to advocate for themselves. Does that make sense?

Eric: 100%. And it happens at the very beginning. It happens in the interview process. I think if you can think about times where you were interviewed—did you ask a lot of questions, especially in the beginning when you were first getting into coffee?

Ashley: No, I didn't, I started asking more questions later.

Eric: What was the response when you were asking more questions in interviews?

Ashley: I think—so I think it's hard for me to use my experience as—no, that's not true.

I would've said it would've been hard for me to use my experience, just because at the time, towards the later part of my career, I was working for Barista Magazine, I think people were a little bit more afraid of me.

But I did actually apply for a job where I—recently, not that long ago—where I asked about salaries and instead of them answering the question, they asked me what my salary expectation was. I remember having a moment where I was like, “Don't answer that question,” but I did. They mentioned that their salary range was perhaps a little bit lower [than my salary expectation], and then they stopped talking to me.

Eric: Mm. I mean, this gets back to an issue that you and I have been talking about for years, which is salary transparency. Why aren't these on job descriptions? Because would they have significantly fewer employees if they actually listed what the salary range was?

Ashley: Or what will we think about that organization once we found out what the salaries were?

Eric: Exactly. And perhaps look quick to judgment.

I mean, I'm stupidly optimistic. I'd like to believe that people can change once confronted with the error of their ways, especially with paying people enough, but the long and short of it is if that were really true, I think we would have seen, especially once all of the wage surveys went out a few years ago and we saw the wide range of what people were making as baristas—it didn't change a bit.

Ashley: No.

Eric: Which is really disappointing, but it is ultimately putting, I think, a little bit more pressure and setting more standards.

The companies who truly want to make a difference in this industry: Be radical about it. Have wage transparency. It's not actually going to affect you in a negative way if you were putting your best effort forward, you know?

Ashley: Yeah, totally.

Right as the pandemic started—no, maybe even before—I interviewed one of the founders of Oddly Correct Coffee, and they are super transparent about their wages. Every job description says, “We start at this amount.”

They have a wage guarantee as well. So you are guaranteed to make $18 an hour, be it through a mix of wages and tips. Or if your tips do not get you up to $18 an hour, they will compensate you for that. But they're super transparent about it. They will list for you how this works. And if they can do it—they're not a huge company. It's not about having a ton of muscle behind your company—then why can't other companies do it?

I think it comes from them being very organized. When I had this conversation on Boss Barista—you can go backwards, it happens in January of 2020—they spoke very specifically about just having a plan and having things written down.

Eric: I think a lot of companies are afraid to do that. They're afraid of anybody peeking behind the curtain in any sort of way. And look, you can keep things close to the chest. Absolutely. Especially where it protects people.

But if it's not protecting people, don't keep it close to the chest. In fact, not only is it not protecting your employees, it's not protecting industry at large. Companies have to make these big grand gestures because other companies have to be compared against them. That's the way capitalism works. Isn't it?

Ashley: Something that I think is really interesting about this discussion that we're having about HR—and I want to extrapolate it a little bit outward—is that it's not necessarily just a responsibility to your employees, even though I would argue that that's your first responsibility and I think you would agree with that, but it's also a responsibility to the coffee industry at large. If we believe that this industry will continue going and continue to be a bastion of coffee, then we have to invest in people's ability to work within the industry.

Eric: 100%. Absolutely. That's what I hope to continue to do with this HR program.

I don't just want to be a gatekeeper of this information that I've learned, this information I have in this enormous f*g textbook. I want not only for people to have that information, I want to make more HR professionals. I want to get a lot of people up to this point where they are HR-certified. Even if they don't become heads of HR at coffee companies or wherever they end up going, it'll still empower them with more information to be better leaders, to set this example that eventually people will have to follow if they want good talent, if they want to get baristas in at an entry level and then have those people help grow their companies.

Ashley: Are there any suggestions that you have for coffee companies who are maybe listening to this and thinking, “Well, I can't employ an HR professional. Maybe I'm not necessarily interested in a consultant for a one-time thing.”

Is there a model that a company like this can employ where maybe someone in their business gets HR-certified and they work 10 hours a week on this or something like that? Are there ways to incorporate some of the practices that you've outlined?

Eric: I think so. Absolutely. For one thing I want to put out the initial idea that I have, that I have absolutely no time to do, because it would be my one focus, which is I wanted to create an HR collective.

Basically one or multiple people overseeing HR services for multiple companies that had fewer employees and could charge a reasonable price per employee. That would help out with conflict resolution. It would help out with setting proper wage standards, with keeping companies compliant. Somebody needs to take up that idea. So that's my call to action for everybody.

In the meantime, my HR certification, with the class to learn how to take the exam and the exam itself, was about a thousand dollars, which I don't think is a whole lot of money to invest either in business owners themselves doing that or in [employers paying] employees to oversee it for, like you said, not necessarily 40 hours a week of a full-time job, but to give them a potential salary increase and to give them a skill that they can also potentially take somewhere else.

I think what you and I have talked about at certain points, but that still doesn't get said enough, is investing in employees beyond their time with you is really, really crucial. It's not only crucial just as somebody who's trying to steward people. Who's trying to make professionals out of people. It's better for your company, because if you say, “Hey, I know that there's potentially a time beyond our company for you,” often, I think they'll stay. Often, I think they will be able to invest in your company, because they'll know that you don't just care about them when you are in the shop. When you are answering emails, you care about them beyond that.

Ashley: That's a really, really good point that I don't think enough coffee companies take into account. And I think that one of the things that I've repeated more than I've repeated anything else—okay, I'm going to say that that's like the third thing I've repeated the most.

The first thing I probably repeat the most is document everything, which is an important part of this conversation. The second thing I've probably repeated is your boss is not your friend. But the third thing I've probably repeated is that baristas or anybody that works for you—when they leave, they're your alumni, they're the people who are going to talk your business up, or they're going to tell people, “Don't buy coffee from this person.” Or, “I had a terrible time working here, and this is why.”

I know that you and I have had fond conversations of the people we have worked for who we have really enjoyed, and being able to share that is really exciting. So realizing that the people that you employ are going to maybe leave or carry with them experiences that are going to go beyond just your time with them, I think, is really, really critical. I feel like people get really, really stuck on this idea that knowledge must stay within this business. I'm not really sure where that comes from.

Eric: It comes from nervousness and from competition, doesn't it? The idea that we're all competing with each other when in fact, we're just trying to keep this industry afloat, we're trying to keep this industry accountable and we're trying to keep it equitable for as many people as possible. At least I think a lot of us are, so yeah.

I can't help but think how wonderful it was when I was in a supervisory position and people would come up to me and ask me for a recommendation while they were still working for me for another job—that was a brilliant experience. That meant that they trusted me.

They trusted me and the idea that they would be able to move on to something that would be better for their work-life balance, or better for them money-wise—certainly because I could never imagine that I would pay them enough—was wonderful. It was a really enriching feeling.

Ashley: It feels like, as we wrap up this conversation, that we've obviously talked about lots of concrete things, knowing the difference between exempt employees and non-exempt employees, knowing how much you should be paid if you’re salaried … These are all really important, but we also talked really holistically about just an approach to employment that it feels like HR gives you the framework to build.

Eric: Yes, absolutely. The amount of things that it covers in a company—it covers everything in the company and that I could never have imagined, especially when you're getting most of your HR services from whatever your payroll company is: No, they actually set the culture and they should set the culture for your company.

Whether that's you as an employer who have some grounding in HR doing that, or whether you have an HR manager, you can't forget it. HR is setting the culture for your company that will last beyond a lot of people's employment there.

Ashley: Eric, thank you for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Eric: Thank you, Ashley.

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My guest today is Courtney Heald, lead roaster for Modern Times Beer and Coffee in San Diego, California. This interview starts slowly, building up to a roaring thunder as we go.

Courtney shares her experiences of staying with a company while it’s going through a public moment of reckoning, and answering for the harm it’s caused—there were multiple allegations of misconduct and sexual harassment at Modern Times made back in May 2021. An employee was fired, and eventually, CEO and founder Jacob McKean stepped down.

During that period, Courtney decided to continue on with Modern Times and dedicate her energy to advocating for herself and holding her superiors accountable. Courtney suggested herself as a guest for the show, and I’m glad she did. We emailed back and forth a few times about this conversation, and I think we uncovered a lot of feelings about accountability and self-advocacy during times of turmoil that feel incredibly universal.

When a boss or an employer causes harm, there are reasons to stay and reasons to leave—money, safety, comfort, and your emotional wellbeing and capacity all have to be taken into account—and this conversation isn’t meant to be a recommendation or endorsement that one path is better than the other. Instead, it’s meant to capture one person’s experience, and how she learned to use her voice to demand better for herself and the people around her. Here’s Courtney.

Ashley: I was wondering if you could just start by introducing yourself.

Courtney: Okay. My name is Courtney Heald. I'm the lead roaster for Modern Times Beer and Coffee in San Diego, California.

Ashley: What are your first memories of coffee? Did you grow up drinking coffee or seeing people drink coffee?

Courtney: My first memories of coffee are with my mom and her best friend. So they would just always get together and they just loved coffee. They would always be drinking coffee. I didn't drink it as a kid like my cousin did. I always thought that was weird and like, adult. But I was always around it, and my mom and her best friend had dreams of starting a cafe and all of that.

When I would go to my grandma's house and after family dinners, they would always have coffee with dessert. So it was just always around me. But I actually got into coffee immediately after high school, I got a job with Starbucks. I started as a barista and I was there for eight-and-a-half years.

Ashley: Oh, wow.

Courtney: Yeah. [Laughs] Everyone's very surprised. I'm like, I did like it when I was there. But it was—

Ashley: Oh, I have no shade against Starbucks in the context of people getting their first coffee jobs, because I'd have to say probably over 50% of people in specialty probably got their start there.

Courtney: Yeah, I feel like we always joke—whenever I meet someone who worked with Starbucks, we’re like, “That’s where the majority of people start.” Yeah, it was great. I feel my love of coffee found me there.

Ashley: Was it intuitive or obvious when you first started working at Starbucks that…you got there and you were like, “Oh, I love coffee,” or did it take some time?

Courtney: I think it took some time. It was kind of sneaky. I was the person that drank the very chocolatey Frappuccinos and the chai [lattes]. Then it went to white mocha and then I was starting drinking shots of espresso over ice…

And then I eventually went to a reserve store that had the Clover machine when they had, like, the small-lot coffees. That's when I started drinking, like, coffee, like from different countries and/or countries that I hadn't seen produce coffee before, I guess. Or that I guess wasn't as well-known for production. Then I was like, “Oh, coffee can taste—it's nuanced. It's not just super dark, robust, bitter.” [Laughs] If that makes sense.

Ashley: That totally makes sense. I think everyone kind of has that moment where—especially if they just get a job in coffee just to have a job—there's that moment where you're like, “Oh, coffee can taste like blueberries or it can taste different from this other thing that I'm used to.”

I feel like for so many baristas, that flavor sensation or that taste memory is often the first one that we hearken back to when we talk about how we got into coffee.

Courtney: Yeah! Like coffee pairings! I remember doing that at Starbucks, doing the black apron [training] and pairing the lemon loaf with their Kenyan coffee and just getting those citrus notes. I'm like, “This is wild! Like food and coffee!” [Laughs] Yeah, it was great.

Ashley: You were at Starbucks for eight years. What did you do after that?

Courtney: I just realized it was my time to go into more of the specialty world. I just wanted a more, I think, more of a personal relationship than with Starbucks, and more—I wanted to learn more about coffee and kind of the behind-the-scenes, and I guess be more focused on coffee itself. I was just over the corporate feel because I was around it for so long.

So then I went to a coffee roaster in San Diego, Bird Rock Coffee, and I was for three years, I believe. And that grew my love even more, training there. That was the first job where I learned more about coffee during the orientation there with the owner than, I feel like, my whole career at Starbucks, just because it got really focused, like hyper-focused.

Ashley: That totally makes sense. When did you make the jump from being a barista to maybe thinking about roasting? Was that an obvious jump for you or was it more happenstance?

Courtney: Kinda both. I've always wanted to learn about roasting. I think that's my personality of just wanting to learn more about whatever I'm into, I wanna learn about everything—where it starts and then how it affects the final cup and all of that.

But that happened—I feel like I haven't even been roasting for a full year. I think it'll be, actually it might be this month. It might be a full year of roasting. When I came to Modern Times, I started in the cafe and then when the pandemic and quarantine started everything shut down on the hospitality side.

I jumped into the production [side that] needed help. We were still roasting and giving coffee for wholesale and online orders. So I was helping with bagging and then there was a need in roasting. So I started just training for that and then kind of just fell into it. So yeah, it was kind of happenstance, but it was also the desire to learn was there too.

Ashley: I mean, obviously both can exist together, but I mean that's real happenstance. But like, if COVID-19 hadn't happened, do you think that you would've fallen into roasting?

Courtney: I don't know. I definitely said that in my interview, during my interview at Modern Times, [that I was interested in roasting] because I know the coffee team here is pretty small and the job, like the growth, you know starting as a barista … it’s pretty accessible to grow in coffee on this team. The mentorship is there and we’re all coffee nerds and just want to teach each other things. And I think that’s a reflection of the company too. There’s a lot of cross-training.

And then COVID happened, and then…

Ashley: And then it just accelerated your pace. It was like, “Yeah, I’m getting in there.”

Courtney: It definitely accelerated [things] and that I was like, “Okay, the cafe shut down. I don't know what I'm doing. I will just help with production,” and then got into it.

Ashley: You've been in coffee for quite some time.

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: At least over—if I'm doing my math right—at least 12 years.

Courtney: Yeah. I think so. I'm 32 and I was 18. Yeah. Over a decade.

Ashley: Something that's come up on Boss Barista a number of times recently—especially—is the way that we establish our careers in coffee.

There seems to be this very typical hierarchy of: You're a barista and then maybe you're a lead barista and then you're a store manager and then you start that process all over again if you get mad at your employer or something happens and there's nowhere to grow—that's come up a couple of times on the show recently.

I was wondering, did you feel like you were stuck in this almost like, repeating cycle for a while? I mean, you stayed at Starbucks for a really long time. So I wonder how you were thinking about your career or growing, or what was supposed to be the next step for you? Did you think about these things as your career was going in different places?

Courtney: Yeah, I definitely did. I definitely felt stuck a lot of times—in pretty much every spot that I worked at.

I don't know if it was me or the places I was working for or like, so I've done the like, shift supervisor, the assistant manager, all of these different things, and something just didn't fit. And I didn't know what that was. I didn’t really feel like I wanna be a store manager. I feel like I would get stuck in that, like at these specific jobs that I've had.

What I wanted to do was like, I love coffee itself and I love human interaction, so I think that's how I've moved through my coffee career currently—and even thinking about the future now, I don't know if I wanna roast forever, but I still love, even as a roaster, I'm still learning something new about coffee and it's still like, there's still kind of like a sense of wonder there.

And just getting out the different flavors from the coffee, it’s like, “This is wild how different factors play into like, getting more out of a coffee.” And then also just the people that I get to meet through just working in coffee, like that’s what I’m drawn to in this career and why I'm drawn to different workplaces.

Ashley: It seems like you've made this like, big bucket almost of like, “These are the things I like about coffee. I like the things that it allows me to do, the things that it allows me to learn,” and that's probably why a lot of us continue to stay here. I know that's why I continue to stay.

But then when you get to the specifics, when you needle down a little bit more, then there's like a big question mark: “What do I do? What would make me happy?” And what I like is that you identified some of the skills that you—you see strengths in yourself. “I like interacting with people. I like discovering the nuance and small things, like changing a roast curve very slightly or changing a pour-over recipe by like a gram or two”—I'm just giving, you know, just making up stuff there as we go; who knows if that's what you like.

But I think what often happens in the coffee industry is that we focus on these titles because we don't really know necessarily how to identify like, these traits, or we don't know how to rectify the difference between a job title and like the things that entails, and the things that we just like to do in coffee.

I'm kind of in the same—I feel like in the same place as you, I’m 34. I've been making coffee since I was 22. And I felt that, like that same pain for almost 10 years of just like, “What do I like about coffee? Like I know I like these things, but what does that actually mean, job-wise?”

Courtney: Yeah. Like quality manager? There's like these titles that kind of box [us] in, but that's not necessarily something I wanna do, like, 100% of the time. Like I wanna do—I like to do everything [Laughs], but does that exist? I don't know. [Laughs]

Ashley: One of the things that I'm interested in is we're obviously—so it's 2021 for posterity’s sake. If people are listening to this in the future, I was gonna say in the past, but that's not a thing [Laughs] unless something, something wild happens in the next couple of years and we're able to travel—

But we were emailing a little bit about the things that we wanted to talk about and some of the issues that we were thinking about in the coffee industry, and you wrote something that really struck me about being in jobs, trying to figure out what the right thing to do is in a job, and eventually kind of deciding maybe that you have to go. That maybe this isn't the job for you, but you've talked about this job specifically and choosing to stay even in the midst of turmoil.

And that reminded me of an episode of Boss Barista that we did—God, like two or three years ago. It was with a group of baristas that unionized at a coffee shop called Mighty Good. And one of the lessons that I took from them, because I asked them why they stayed—there were like, rampant issues with the way that employees were treated. There were accusations of racism, and I asked them why they stayed. And they were like, “Well, it was our responsibility to change things.”

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: Which you kind of hearken to in your email. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about like this kind of—I don't wanna say late stage in your career because that implies that we're somehow a lot older than we are, which we're not.

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: But like I wonder, do you think about this point in your career now differently than you did maybe in the earlier stages of your career?

Courtney: Yeah, for sure.

I think, I don't know if it's just me getting older and I don't wanna go through the thing of finding new jobs or whatever, or if it's just realizing that like, we all have a responsibility to just be better and help each other be better through that.

I feel like in my early stages of my career in coffee, I was just so young and I'm like, “I'll just go.” I didn't have a lot of experience with other places of work. And so I thought, “Oh, maybe this other place will be better”. And I think gradually they were, but then I just found out like, everyone's human and no company is perfect, no matter how progressive they might be or open about talking about things like, or I guess to be transparent. When stuff goes down, there's no company that's like safe from that because all humans can mess up, I guess.

Yeah. So it's just thinking about—there's times I'm like, “Should I just leave?” And definitely there's been a lot of turnover this past year with this company of people, just like—it was their personal decision to just go—and I was like, I could, but then what if I go somewhere else and the same stuff happens?

I've seen companies do a lot less and with what's going on here, like I'm actually working for a place where they're trying and there's actually like, action steps that everyone is doing. And like, I see that people want to work together rather than just—I'm a fan of accountability and keeping each other accountable rather than just canceling something and the problem is still there.

Ashley: One of the things I thought a lot about as we were talking about places that have committed harm—number one: you're absolutely right. They should be held accountable, but what does accountability look like? Does it look like the people who are working there currently working together to make a new system? Does it look like maybe somebody at the top leaving a company? It could look a lot of different ways.

But then what happens next? I think that's what I find really interesting about your response, is that there's steps, there's more to do and it's not like anybody's immune, there's no one perfect company—obviously some places are going to do better than others. But I think your experience speaks to, I think, an experience a lot of baristas have where you have this moment where you're at a job and you think it's great and then it's not, and then you leave it … and then you go to another place, and you think it's great, but it's not.

And perhaps it's because you're a little bit older now, because I think when you're young, it's really hard to make a big connection between what's happening and what you're experiencing. But I know that as I've gotten older too, it's like, “What can I feasibly do to change something? Can I change something?”

And that's part of the question, too, is “Can I change something?” If not, then I have to go. But if I can change something, how do I see that through and what emotional capacity do I have to make that happen? And it seems like you made that assessment for yourself and you decided that you do have the emotional capacity to see through meaningful change.

Courtney: Yeah. And I'm learning to use my voice more too. And like, “Well, I will just, I'll speak up for myself and kind of advocate for myself, and see if that is heard and if I'm listened to,” and I think that's a big tell to see if I can like, work with a company and work with the people around me.

Ashley: What does that look like for you?

Courtney: [Pause] I think to have co-workers and people that I feel comfortable going to, like, just with asking, even if it's just like, “Hey, I would like a title change,” or, “I would like a raise,” or something like that. And bringing different things up and kind of seeing, or just even having, like, my supervisors coming to me, letting me know the steps that they're taking and just different things in getting me a raise with the title change or whatever.

Or like weekly check-ins. At this job, I do have a pretty, like, we have pretty consistent check-ins with supervisors and stuff like that. In past jobs, we did not have like consistent reviews. And yeah, I don't know if that's just because like staffing scheduling. I have no idea, but it seems like at past jobs, I haven't, that wasn't as much a priority as much. But yeah. Does that make sense?

Ashley: [Laughs] I'm gonna ask you the question again, because I think that you talked about the company. I want you to talk about you.

Courtney: Hmm.

Ashley: Okay, so I'm gonna ask it again. And I might even keep this in just to annoy people. [Laughs] No, but I think it's easy to forget like your power in this, and that's why I wanna push you on this is like, how did you decide, like how did you build up the confidence to say, “No, my voice is valid. Like, I can be a force for change by using my voice.”

Courtney: Hmm.

I think it was just my own personal, like my personal frustrations and things that got me being upset, but then also I was the type of person that just like, let things go. And like, even people would say, like, “Oh, like you carry stress well,” and like, just because I would internalize it all and just get really quiet.

But then it would really bother me. I would just like, rant about something that was bothering me or whatever. And then I'm like, I should—because I was afraid to bring it up. I was a little conflict-avoidant. But then I think I just realized that I like, just when I say like, when I found people I can say things to, and have it be met with acceptance and not like resistance, then that was telling to me that I can be honest with what I'm feeling and thinking.

Ashley: I think what you just said about the way that you internalize stress or internalize conflict is incredibly common. I think that's why I wanted to hear more about it, because I think people are often prized for that. Like you even said it, like, “Oh, you handle stress well,” and you're like, “Is that really a compliment? I don't know if it should be.”

Courtney: It was in like, every review that I've had. [Laughs]

Ashley: Every one?

Courtney: Yeah. Like, and a lot of it was always like, “That was a compliment, you work well under pressure,” or, “You handle stress well.”

Ashley: I mean, there's some, like, good in that, but there's like…

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: Also not. That's also telling that what we get prized for is often to keep our mouth shut.

Courtney: Is that the patriarchy? I don’t know. [Laughs]

Ashley: I mean, it's partially, I mean—I often go back to power, just because I think that power's a little more universal in terms of—one of the things that I think, and I think this goes back to some of the stuff that you were saying earlier, is that it's not just about one thing. It's how power works. Like power is structured so that it goes unchallenged.

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: And that's how the patriarchy works. That's how racism works. That's how gender discrimination works. That's how any form of discrimination works, by making it unsafe to challenge the status quo, and I think you kind of spoke to that a little bit earlier about how this isn't necessarily … the problems that we've been having in the service industry, by and large, not just coffee, not just beer, not just restaurants, have to do with like, hierarchal structures of power and not being able to challenge them and who is in positions of power.

And that's why there's so many problems everywhere. That's why it's not a bad apple problem. It's an industry-wide problem.

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: And just hearing you talk about how you are reviewed at your jobs, you're like, “Yeah, of course, like this is what we reward. This is how we reinforce those power structures.”

And I really like that you kind of detailed how you personally dealt with it because that's, I think, a really universal way in which we deal with the stresses of work. That we like go home and then complain about it, or we find another outlet or we become really resentful.

I think the best piece of advice I ever got for a job that I quit a couple of years ago was to quit before I got resentful. And I realized I've been letting myself get resentful at every job because there's no outlet for me. So I wonder if that speaks true to your experiences at all?

Courtney: Yeah, definitely. I think that's why I left a lot of past jobs, because I was starting to. I don't know, looking back, I probably was [Laughs] or I definitely was, but I think to me, to my past self, I was thinking that I'm like, I'm starting to get resentful, but I think I totally did. So now like going forward, in choosing to stay and work through hard things, it’s almost helping me to not be resentful and speak up when things are bothering me.

Ashley: Yeah. Right. It's allowing you to be a change-maker. So that instead of this like situation lingering over you—let's say you didn't get a raise at work and then you're resentful and you quit, on the other end of it, you can say, “I didn't get this raise. Like, how do I deal with this? And how do I say something that's meaningful at work and then actually deal with this problem so we can move on?” We can move forward. We can do better.

Courtney: Totally. Yeah.

Ashley: Has that been hard for you? I wonder if this is a conscious, like, personality shift or even just like—I wouldn't say maybe personality shift—but like conscious shift in the way that you approach work.

Courtney: I think so. It is like, it isn't a natural, like—it's not natural for me to initiate those things. So it's definitely like, it takes some effort for me to vocalize those things and speak up and choose to advocate for those things, I guess.

Ashley: Right. And it's also hard cause you're, you know, you're at work and it's hard to know sometimes, especially if you're alone or you're the only one who experiences something.

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: Like, “Did I experience that? Was that really that awful?” Am I—like, those questions that, you know—I just would just air an episode with Sierra Yeo and a lot of those questions come up. Like, “Am I the weird one here for complaining about something?”

Courtney: Especially when no one's talking about it, or it seems like no one is speaking up either. You're like, “Am I the only one that feels this?” And then it's not until someone like, I don't know, whistleblower or whatever, like on something I'm like, “Oh, like you too, okay.”

Ashley: It seems like the team, your team that you work with at Modern Times now though—I don't know if this is accurate, so maybe you can explain it a little bit more—but it seems like you folks have gotten better at making space for conflict.

Courtney: Yeah. I would think so…

Ashley: But like, also understanding that you could work through the conflict. So I was wondering like, how have you as a team grown together to make Modern Times better?

Courtney: I think it's through—like the tangible steps that we've taken is we've brought in third parties to do mandatory, like all-staff meetings of how to basically like manage conflict and diversity inclusion trainings, and bystander trainings, like how to approach things and speak up when it's needed. And then also just, like on the smaller, like the coffee team itself, is just open—kind of like open lines of communication, that the supervisors will just say, like “You can come to us with anything.” And just like that constant reminder.

Ashley: Do you get constantly reminded of that? “Hey, you can come talk to us if you need anything?”

Courtney: Yeah, actually I do. Yeah.

Ashley: I love that, because I think it's easy for folks to say, “Oh, my staff can come to me.” It's like, but did you tell them? Did you say it?

Courtney: Yeah, totally. Either if it's like on our coffee team Slack channel or if it's just even personally—like a supervisor will say, like, we'll just have a one-off, like one-on-one. Just like, “How are you feeling today? How's it going? Work or personal?” Like just, yeah, just to check in.

Ashley: Are there any personal victories that you think you've achieved for yourself in the last couple of months? Maybe getting a raise—or you mentioned a job title change, anything that you're particularly proud of?

Courtney: Ooh yeah, a few things. I mean, getting a raise and having the job title of lead roaster—that was great.

Ashley: Did you have to advocate for those, like I'm wondering how those came about?

Courtney: Yeah. I advocated. I was advocating myself for the raise, like this past year since becoming a roaster, and like yeah, I was told that the title would come with a raise and so I just kept saying that and then it happened. And also I roasted a coffee that got—what was the score? It was like a 93 on Coffee Review. I think that was the score. Was it a 92 or a 93?

Ashley: I mean, anything in the 90s…

Courtney: So that was really cool. And I'm like, “What? This is awesome.” So just like those little reviews, of just being nervous of profiling coffees as a new roaster and having my coffee taste good and getting that feedback from people, like it’s just—it makes me feel good. And yeah.

Ashley: So have you been able to use those victories of like, “Hey, my coffee scored this on Coffee Review and I've been able to achieve these really cool things. Like now, like what does this next thing look like for me? Do I get this raise? What does that plan look like?”

Because I know that one of the things that I get a lot of DMs about is how to ask for raises at work and it's often as scary—it's so scary. It's so scary to ask for money at work that even the first, like, even just like that entrance way to say, “Hey, can I get more money?” is daunting. And it often takes a lot of persistence and it seems like it probably took some persistence from you. So like, how were you able to stay the course and say, “No, this is the thing that I'm gonna get, I'm gonna keep working on this,” but also like, remain respectful and like stay, you know, employed, I guess?

Courtney: Yeah, yeah. I dunno. I think it's just trying to research the amount of work that I put in for a company and the wage of a roaster. I was kind of looking at what an average roaster makes in San Diego, like looking at that pay and then like, what's livable, how much work am I doing? What's this emotional labor, physical labor, like all of this.

So I think that's what I was trying to go for. I don't wanna ask for too much. And then I also don't wanna undershoot. And then I was also looking at like, what I made as a production assistant. So I'm like, I feel like this, like as a roaster, it takes a little bit more physical labor with things, and also mental labor.

It was challenging to ask like, during a pandemic and constantly seeing the—what was it—the financial reports throughout this year, and how we're doing. And so I guess like early on in the pandemic, it was hard because like, people were taking salary cuts and people were being let go and stuff like that. So that kept me from [asking].

But then I had a—someone who didn't work in coffee or beer or anything was like, “Well, is your company profiting during this? Like, are you still producing things and making money?” And I'm like, “Yeah, we're still at work. We're working twice as hard and producing things.” So yeah. She's like, “Well, like advocate for yourself.” So I think that helped me.

Ashley: Yeah. I love that you said that. I love that you said you're still producing things. You're still making things.

Courtney: Yeah.

Ashley: It's so easy for us to feel the guilt of a company—which, companies are not people, let's all remind ourselves of that—but it is easy to feel that guilt of like, “Oh, other people are taking salary cuts,” and maybe there is some room to be understanding, obviously. Like, maybe you can't gimme a raise now, but like, what does six months look like? I'm not advocating for unreasonableness in this situation, but I think you are right to anchor your ability to advocate for yourself on like, “I am bringing value. I am continuing to bring value. I am probably bringing even more value now.”

Courtney: Yeah. Like if anything, we're all working—if you're working during this pandemic you're probably [working] twice as hard.

Ashley: I mean, the reason I left one of my last jobs—I keep saying the reason like there's one reason; there's like 70 bajillion—one of the reasons I left is that my boss was continuously telling us, like, how much of a hit the company took during the pandemic.

And that the same thing was happening, where we were working twice as hard. And I'm like, “Well then what is our value? What does this mean that we're working twice as hard? Like where is our value going?”

And it seems like there was at least a little more transparency at Modern Times when people were talking about salary cuts that they were taking, or some of the sacrifices that they were making. But at the same time, there was room for you to come in and say like, “Actually, I'm adding a lot more value. What's the plan?”

Courtney: For me. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

Ashley: Is there anything that you would want people listening to this to know about you or take away from a conversation with you in it?

Courtney: I think it's just that I care a lot about where I'm at. I care about doing a good job and representing something well and getting the most out of [it]. I'm going to make coffee, and you're going to spend money on something, like a product or spend money on coffee, whether it was me being a barista or me being a roaster, like you're gonna have the best espresso ever, or I'm going to try to get you what you like out of an espresso or a coffee. I wanna meet people where they're at.

Ashley: I'm gonna try to summarize it real quick and say, “I really give a s**t about what I do and I wanna make it so that you really like what you're having.”

Courtney: Yeah. That's exactly it.

Ashley: Courtney, thank you for taking time to chat with me.

Courtney: Thank you so much.

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My guest today is Tio Fallen, an award-winning roaster and co-founder of Three Keys Coffee in Houston, Texas. This isn’t my first time talking with Tio: He was the October featured roaster for another project I work on, Matchbook, where we pursue unique coffee experiences with roasters from across the nation. Our prior conversation had this really jovial vibe, so I asked him if he would be a guest on this show.

The name “Three Keys” refers to the three valves on a trumpet, an instrument Tio grew up playing. Music is featured prominently in his brand—many of the coffees come with playlists, and he uses flavor notes the same way you’d think about musical notes. Three Keys, which he founded with his wife, Kenzel, is deeply personal and a reflection of Tio and his family, but it’s also open to interpretation, which is where this episode gets sticky and weird and really interesting. As we talk about the relationship between coffee and music, we dive into uncharted territory about what it means for a business, an idea, to be embedded within you. It’s something I think about with Boss Barista: Where do I end and where does this thing—this podcast, this platform—begin?

It’s hard to pin down just one theme to this episode, but if you’ve ever thought about opening your own business and the emotional rollercoaster it involves, I hope you learn a lot from listening. Here’s Tio.

Ashley: Tio, I was wondering if you could start just by introducing yourself.

Tio: Hello, I'm Tio Fallen; I'm the co-founder and roaster at Three Keys Coffee here in Houston, Texas.

Ashley: How did you get into coffee?

Tio: That's a good question. I think it was a series of events, right? You know, starting with just being very passionate, being a coffee enthusiast.

I used to travel a lot, and one of the things that really intrigued me about going to various countries was to enjoy or take in their coffee scene. So like, going to coffeehouses or small cafes and really getting the idea of that particular region’s expression of coffee.

I would say some other sequence of events that kind of tied into it or were at play included randomly finding out that coffee roasting was a thing—or isn't. [Laughs]

I was in a watchmaking class. It came about that a co-worker of mine, he was part of this watch club in Houston—and they have these weekend sessions where they invite people in and you get these vintage pocket watches, and then part of the class is tearing them down, dismantling all the parts, and then putting it back together. So in and of itself, that part is really cool and brings out the nerdy side of me.

But the icebreaker for the event, one of the guys was talking and he was like, “Yeah, in my free time I home roast.” And I was like, “Oh, snap. You can really do that? That's a thing?”

And he's like, “Yeah, yeah! I get beans and store 'em.” And so we just had this little conversation about it, but like, that was a lightbulb moment for me.

I guess the final inspiration, or something that pushed me over the hump to say, “Let me try my hands at this. And you know, if I fail, whatever, but I want to try,” was actually the passing of my grandfather.

During this funeral, I'm just sitting there just hearing all these people, people came in from all over and people are just reflecting back on his influence in their lives.

But what I did think was, “How—if I left this world tomorrow or next year, what would be my legacy? How could I make a mark on the world in a positive way through something that I love?” Obviously he had his passion and his love—what's my passion, what is it that I love and that I can share?

And for me, coffee was that answer: something that I love, that I think I can do really well and that I can share with people. So that's kind of how we get to where we are now with Three Keys.

Ashley: I love that you were able to put all of those different puzzle pieces together. It seemed it was a passion project, but also this moment for you where you had to reflect on, “What direction is my life going?” which often happens during loss. It all fits together.

Tio: Yeah, it really is, like you said, pieces of a puzzle or connecting dots. Even as I was thinking about what the brand could be, I really leaned into and tapped into my life experiences.

Thinking about the influence of my grandfather and him being the reason why I started playing trumpet in the first place—and the fact that I played trumpet from elementary school all the way up through college—that was a big piece of me. That was my passion before coffee.

I was heavy into music and heavy into being the best trumpet player I could be. The reason why I stopped is more so of a fork in the road of, like, “All right, you're in college, you didn't go to college to major in music. You went to college to major in engineering because you liked math and science, but you're struggling.”

You know, you have a choice to make. I thought at the time, the more responsible thing to do was to say, “Hey, I'm just gonna focus on getting my degree and getting a good GPA or what have you, and focus on establishing a career in engineering.”

In doing that, I had to put away that piece of me. But I felt like, as I was thinking about coffee and how I could share my expression of coffee to the wider audience, I could leverage that personal experience, that unique experience—that's not unique to me, but it's my story—and I could tell it through coffee.

That's how the name Three Keys came about, being that it's the three keys of the trumpet. Being a teenager, idolizing folks like Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, I felt like there was a story that could be told there as well, through a genre of music that is widely accepted and widely appreciated as the essence of improvisation, originality, and the artistic and creativeness that is jazz.

All of that to me is something that can be expressed through coffee. [Laugh] And as far out as that sounds—

Ashley: No, it doesn't sound far out at all.

Tio: I just felt like there were parallels there.

Ashley: There's something really interesting about what you were saying before, about this moment in your life when you were in college and you have this thing that you've been doing for so long—playing trumpet and exploring music—and then you have this other pathway and you almost had to shelve one of them to pursue the other, which feels like such a linear way we're taught to approach life.

It seems like, as you got older, you were like, “No, there's these parts of me that are important. Just because I don't have to express them as like, ‘I'm a trumpet player, so I'm gonna be a trumpet player.’ It's like, ‘No, I'm a trumpet player. I'm a person who loves music. Let me find another way to harness this,’” which is not something that I think we're taught as children, or even as young adults, to do.

It's really interesting that you were able to take this thing that was so much part of your life and find a new way to translate it.

Tio: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you hit the nail on the head.

We’re sort of given this linear approach to what your pathway should be. It's like, “Go to school, get an education, pick a career, establish that career, and there you go,” that's your life, right?

But life is so beautiful and nuanced that you can make of it what you want and just tap into and draw from those experiences—your life experiences—and create your own path.

I just think about the saying, “the road less traveled,” and sayings like that where there's no cookie-cutter approach to what your end results should be. I just think about how it took a while for me to realize that I could do both.

Ashley: It seems like with Three Keys, you found this way to take things off a shelf that had been shelved and say, “They can live a new life.” Like they can be something else, so they can exist in this [new] way that still feels true to you, that's part of you, but without being so, “Oh, I love music. I have to play music to express that.”

It's like, “No, I love music, and I find commonalities between coffee and music and my personal understanding of both and I’ve found this new life and this new way.”

So just to give people a timeline of your life—just because we've been jumping around a lot and incorporating all these different aspects of your past and your present and even a little bit of your future—before you started making coffee or before you started roasting, you were an engineer.

Tio: Yeah—still am.

Ashley: Talk about that! Talk about what your days look like, or—what your whole life looks like is a very general, very big question. But what does a day in the life of Tio Fallen look like?

Tio: It's pretty intense. Day in the life: Wake up around 6, 6:30. So let’s rewind that a little bit.

It's like, Tio went to school to become a mechanical engineer and took a strong interest in energy conversion. Like, how do you take something and convert that into energy so that we can do things? So I looked at all forms of energy, oil and gas, solar, wind, fuel cell technology—various forms of energy or ways to produce energy. What I would say is that how I ended up in oil and gas was really just a function of where technology was at the time. And granted, I’m old as f**k, I’m 38. [Laughs]

Ashley: Shut up, stop it. You're not that old. [Laughs] I'm 34. We're hanging out in the same area.

Tio: We're in that age where we have an appreciation for life before crazy technology that it is today. I still remember pay phones and pagers and…

Ashley: I was just watching—have you ever seen the show “The I.T. Crowd”?

Tio: No. No.

Ashley: I feel like you would really like it. But it's a British show and in one of the episodes, one of the characters gets a new phone and it's a Nokia phone with like, four [pixels] on it. It's black and white. And I was like, “I remember those.”

Tio: Hell yeah, my first phone was the Nokia, me too. And then those awful ringtones—I remember all of that. I remember like, that transitioning to [AOL] Messenger, when Facebook first came out, all that stuff.

So anyhow, long story short—coffee, especially during the time of COVID and putting together my own business, that was the outlet, that was the opportunity for Tio to be more of who I want to be as a person and how I want to operate on a day-to-day basis.

The other piece of that pie is [coffee is like] a little bit of therapy. It's so, so therapeutic for me to be able to turn off that other part of me, whether it's at 4 p.m. on a Monday and then just turn onto coffee and be able to enjoy creating and doing something that I really love and care about. I can just be more intentional and communicative with people.

So I think I forgot the question, but I think that's fine. [Laugh]

Ashley: It's always fun to see where people take things anyway, like where people's minds go when they hear a question and try to figure out what's the thing that they wanna talk about. I'm always interested when people take a question beyond the scope of what I had imagined it to be, because it's really exciting for people—I don't know. I love it when people ask questions and it makes you think of something else [Laugh] which is really exciting. I don't know. That's just me nerding out on that kind of stuff.

It's funny that you mentioned therapy and using coffee as a form of therapy because you're the second person who's been on the show who has said that—the first person is Maggy Nyamumbo, who owns Kahawa … oh, I forget the…

Tio: 1893!

Ashley: 1893! OK good, I was like, “I know it’s in my brain.” But the way that she talks about coffee is a very therapeutic response, which is really interesting because I don't think I've ever thought about that—not just the process of coffee, I can imagine sitting at the roaster and allowing your senses to really take over is very therapeutic.

It's almost like your brain is turning off and a primal form of thinking takes over. But then at the same time, there's also this very tactile experience of, “I am making a thing that is physically in my hands that I'm serving to people.”

Tio: Yeah. I would say that the ability to create something or to make something is so therapeutic for me, and the fact that I can do it in a short amount of time. It only takes me like, 20 minutes? 20 minutes.

Whereas my day job, I'm working projects, and sometimes it takes six months, eight months for something to materialize, for me to feel a sense of accomplishment or achievement. Whereas when making coffee, I know within 15 minutes whether I'll be proud of it or not. I can theorize within 15 minutes whether I'm proud of it.

But there's also just the little things. I'll tell you—green sorting is so therapeutic for me. Being able to just turn off my brain and just … it's like those little workbooks you have as a kid. It's like, Where's Waldo. You're looking for the outlier in a picture with a thousand different things.

Green sort is kind of like that—you have a table full of just perfectly processed beans or a hodgepodge or whatnot, and you're just looking for some that stick out and just that, doing that, is a sense of therapy.

We green sort everything. Even on the roasted side of [coffee], I'll do a sort. I'll look for quakers [beans that never get roasted and look pale and smell like peanut] and [chipped beans]. I don't know if that's an OCD sort of thing, but for me, I can mentally be in a different space and really focus on sorting and it's so easy. It doesn't require a whole lot of caloric brain power. [Laugh] Yeah, just hone in on it.

Ashley: I wonder for you—I had a conversation with somebody recently.

So I do yoga pretty much every day, at least for a little bit. I think that for me, when I'm most successful at yoga is when I'm only thinking about the sensations in my body. I'm not thinking about like, “What does this look like?” I'm not thinking about the world around me. I enter a flow state. They're like those seconds, long moments where I am totally focused on the thing that I'm doing and how it makes me feel versus all of the exterior surrounding, for a lack of a better word.

I wonder if that's a sensation that you feel. Do you look for those moments of being in tune with a different sense of yourself?

Tio: I do. Like you said, it's so much a distraction that when you're able to—when you're able to block that out and really … and even the distractions in your brain, because your mind is racing, like, “Oh, I got this going on…” So when you have that ability to cast all of that out and really silence all of that and have just this, like you said, this flow state where you're just existing in the moment, you're not anxious about what's to come and you're not regretting what happened previously, but you're existing in the moment and you're breathing and you're enjoying that breath, that breath of air that you take or you acknowledge, you acknowledge that breath of air that you take.

Those are peaceful moments that I try to exist in. [Laughs]

Ashley: I wonder with Three Keys, and this is something that I struggle with too—Three Keys is so you, it is a reflection of your past, it is a reflection of the things that you're interested in.

It exists, and I mean this as both a compliment and also a critical thing to extrapolate on, but Three Keys could not come from anybody else. Tio Fallen made Three Keys and it exists as a thing that you've made. I wonder how that feels for you sometimes? Do you ever feel like you're on display? Do you ever feel like there's too much of me in this? Like I need to step back?

Tio: Yeah. I do feel like I definitely fight being on display. I've had philosophical conversations with Kenzel about like, how much of ourselves do we put on display in this? She reminds me that part of our story, what makes us unique is the personal touch.

The whole idea of connecting with people is about literally connecting with people, being—what's the word I'm looking for? Vulnerable. Showing like, “Hey, this ain't easy.”

Sometimes we're roasting and I have my kid with me, and he's tired and ready to go. But part of what you see at Three Keys is you're seeing a dedication, you're seeing a dedicated father that also is a dedicated roaster that is also encompassed in a brand that is a reflection of a life experience. And that absolutely is very intentional. I knew that for Three Keys to exist, I wanted to break the mold of what I felt like third-wave coffee had become.

Ashley: Yeah—I wanna hear more about that. Tell me what you were seeing and how you wanted to break that.

Tio: I felt like, with third-wave coffee, what I was seeing was coffee presented through fictional narratives, like a brand based on something that you would find in [Laughs]—I dunno, I'm having trouble articulating this, but things that are like, what does this exist in? Does this exist in a Moby Dick book?

Ashley: I see what you're saying. It's like, very precious language. Sometimes what really bothers me—this is really stupid—but when people use like the royal “we” in their marketing, for some reason, I dunno why that bothers me, but it's like, who are you talking about? Who is this? Not to say that I need to know about every single person at your business, or even if you want some of that distance, I totally understand. I think there's very twee—I don't know if that's even the right word for it, but there's this very twee interpretation of a very precious approach to coffee.

Tio: Yeah. I have very conflicted feelings about Starbucks, right? Part of me is like, I appreciate how Starbucks pushed coffee forward. But I felt like one thing that happened with Starbucks and that success is that people are trying to replicate that.

Again, going to these fictional representations, I think the Starbucks logo is some freaking ocean. [Laughs] I don't know what the heck it is.

Ashley: It's an ocean mermaid, yeah.

Tio: Ocean mermaid. Like, that's the branding for the coffee. I felt like since then, a lot of third-wave brands became these sort of fictional representations, and yeah, it's hard to identify with that.

Whereas Three Keys is very abstract because you can have miscellaneous interpretations of what Three Keys are like: the Three Keys to success or Three Keys as three pillars of … just things like that. Whereas literally I was just thinking about the valves on my trumpet. But until that next layer down, it's very intentional that this is supposed to be art-inspired, music-inspired, and [fueled by] ingenuity.

Like that's me: the three key valves on the trumpet plus the three pillars of what we stand for. It's a very true story. It is like literally an autobiography of you, of me, told through coffee. So that's why it is difficult for me to sort of disconnect myself from it and let Three Keys stand alone, as much I'd love to.

One day maybe Three Keys grows to stand separate from me or Kenzel or our family. But I'm also the force suppressing that from happening [Laugh], if that makes sense.

Ashley: Well, there's a couple of ways to interpret that. Number one, I wanna go backwards on what you were saying about Starbucks, just because I went to the Starbucks website—or, not the Starbucks website, this is not a Starbucks website. But according to this website, I'm on a website called Mermaids of Earth [Laughs] and it says that “when the Starbucks coffee chain was being started in 1971”—I'm reading from the website—“the owners wanted to ‘evoke the romance of the high seas and the seafaring tradition of early coffee traders,’” which I get. That makes sense. Especially when you think about what Starbucks was in the early 1970s, which was just roasting [and selling] coffee beans.

Now there's really no connection to that. I have to imagine that's because of growth and because of the changes that Starbucks went through, now they serve actual coffee drinks.

But then I think about what you're saying, about Three Keys and how that is literally an autobiography of you, but because the term “three keys” is kind of ambiguous, it can be taken into other directions. So when I was thinking about what you were saying—that maybe in the future, it'll be a little bit disentangled from you and Kenzel and your family—in a way, that's good too, because at some point you're gonna hire people, probably. Maybe you won't, I don't know. But at some point other people are going to be able to shape the vision and the ideas of Three Keys and you want that to exist too, where their visions can have room to grow.

Tio: Yeah. That is the facts, as the kids say, that is factual statement. I think that's gonna be, I won't say struggle. I will say that's gonna be our biggest challenge as we continue to grow.

When it's your passion project and you think of it like, this is my baby. It's hard to allow other creative visionaries to influence that. I think that's just gonna take a little bit of opening up for Kenzel and me. And I think we can do it. We have the capability to do it. That's not beyond our personal disposition that we can't open up and let others in and let that influence take shape. But man, that would be so hard.

Ashley: It's hard, but it's also like … I don't know. I think about this a lot when—

Tio: I'll say this.

Ashley: Yeah. Go for it.

Tio: I'm a big fan of Ralph Lauren, okay. You think of Ralph Lauren: He's built this entire empire and he's still the face of it. But there were a couple years where he gave up his like CEO or chairman or whatever, and brought somebody in, a guy that was like, an executive at The Gap [Laughs] and it ruined the Ralph Lauren brand for two years. The quality of the garments went down, and that's probably a bad analogy, a bad story, but it's just kind of like, man, you take that leap of faith, but you also don't wanna regret it.

Ashley: I think it's all a risk.

Tio: Yeah. It's a risk. There would be a point in time where that risk is definitely worth the reward. It's gonna come at a point where either there's some imbalance in my life where it's like, I really need to focus my energy on my family or really focus energy on the things that are in front of me right now and allow someone to help me, help us focus on where we can take Three Keys.

I think I'm very spiritual, and so I'll say this: I feel like God will reveal that moment in time. Like it'll be so apparent and it'll slap me in the face, hit me in the face where it's like, “Yeah, this is that moment that Ashley and I talked about back on our podcast.” I'm gonna remember this moment and it's gonna be the catalyst for making that decision because I'm like, this was meant to happen.

Ashley: One of the reasons I wanted to push on this idea—and I've never owned a business, so this is coming from my own limited experience—but when I was a barista, at my very first coffee job, there was a woman who used to come in and she really connected with two baristas, me and this guy named Pat. And then there was a point where she only wanted Pat and I to make coffee for her and, bless my manager at the time, she handled it really well. She was very nice to her and she said, “Hey, let me buy you a coffee today. I'm gonna make it for you. But we can't have special requests. I can't have a barista on bar, who's making drinks, step off so that one of these two people can make drinks for you.”

She was very understanding of that. And it was one of those moments where I really reflected on like, what is this business? Or what does this job mean for me? What does it mean for me to encompass this, but to also be on a team of people?

Again, maybe this is not a perfect analogy, but I think a lot about those moments when something grows or something changes or something becomes something else. When does something become the sum of everybody's collective experience, if that makes sense.

Tio: Yeah, I think it does make sense because Three Keys and how it will evolve will be dependent on our ability to become a team. I think about it. I think about that a lot in the sense of like, “Man, there's roasters out here and they have a team and if only we had a team or with the team, there's more creative ideas that'll come to the table.” Things can go from idea to actual product in a much faster timeline.

Ashley: Can I ask you a music question? I don't mean to cut you off.

Tio: Yeah, yeah.

Ashley: Something I've been thinking about a lot—I don't know if you can answer this—but I think a lot about how [session musicians] can jump into something and create something without necessarily being invested. And I wonder, is that an experience you've ever had where you just get to play music with other people, even if you don't know them, to make something else or just riff? I imagine that has to happen in jazz a lot.

Tio: It does happen in jazz a lot. I think you have to have a certain confidence in yourself and in your abilities to do that effectively.

Ashley: I see an analogy there in coffee.

Tio: Yeah. [Laughs] Yeah. Dang, that's the curve ball. You just threw me a curve ball.

Ashley: I'm good at this. This is what I do: I make you think.

Tio: I will say that—so let me put it like this. It's not just Kenzel and I, and so I think that you see a lot of us and maybe there is a poor job on my part to also express and represent the people that help us or that support us, or the people that are on staff.

Ashley: I don't see it that way. I'm just wondering, and I feel like you and I have gotten to this really interesting territory of what identity means and what it means for your brand to represent you. By no means do I think that you have poorly represented anything. It's just really interesting when a brand is so much of a person and that person has to struggle with how much of this is me and how much of this do I allow it to be.

Exploring the idea that a brand is you, but like, it also is not you—you can remove yourself from it a little bit if you want to, but it could also be bigger than you. And that could be really exciting.

Tio: I think, to that point, Matchbook is a perfect example of going off, riffing, joining another group for a special moment in time to create something that's true. And just like various collaborations I've done, like with Three Keys or that Three Keys has done, things that we've thought about or just things I've done outside of Three Keys— like the Glitter Cat release.

So there's definitely the Three Keys thing. And then there's my standalone things that I get to do. But I do think, just off what we're talking about, this is definitely more conversation, less interview because you're actually putting things in perspective for me in terms of like…

You know, you think about the direction you want, that I want the business to go. Now this adds something to think about, right. To reflect on, to chew on before I go to bed or before, when I have my glass of wine tonight or something—to really visualize that.

I'm a very visual person, I like to visualize something. How do I visualize this in unfolding and try to think about how scenarios could play out, what potential outcomes—almost like a little mini computer running.

Ashley: I mean, that makes sense.

Tio: But you've added an extra data point to this conversation.

Ashley: I’m gonna bill you for this conversation later. No, I'm kidding.

Tio: I appreciate the question. Because it allows me to kind of—it's obviously something that I haven't really thought about, and hasn't really been asked to the level, which makes me like, kind of scratch or go beneath the surface, you know?

Ashley: Well, I just find it so interesting. I'm so fascinated by the reasons people start businesses and maybe that's why I have so many questions about it and I feel like it's so—especially in coffee, and I think your story harkens to it—but you are much more intentional about it than I think most people are, but starting a coffee roasting company is pretty low-risk.

You can buy a home roaster. I mean, there's money obviously, and there's cost involved, but compared to opening a coffee shop, you can do it at home. You can start a small mail-order business at home.

I think a lot of people go on this idea of—because people interact with coffee every day, and I've worked in coffee shops for 10 years, I can't count how many people have come in and been like, “I wanna start my own coffee business.” And I ask them even a single iota of like, “Why do you wanna start this?” And they have no answers. They're just like, “Oh, it just looks easy.” And you're like, that's f*g the dumbest reason.

Tio: Good shops evoke positive energy, good feelings. And people are like, “I want this for myself,” you know what I'm saying?

Ashley: I totally see it.

Tio: But this is, behind the scenes, it's hard to maintain that level of a solid operation. That takes a lot of planning, a lot of commitment from the staff. A lot of commitment from the managers, the owners—there's a lot that goes into it.

I heard someone phrase it like this: If you have a coffee shop and there are people that come in, those are your guests, they're not customers. They're your guest. And to create that sort of experience is not easy. Otherwise it'd be like McDonald's and you just go and grab a coffee, you're a customer. That's literally the customer experience, and you get your coffee, it's transactional and you're out the door.

But to be in a position where, to go back to your story where there's a guest and she literally only wants her coffee from you and one other person, there's a problem with it, but it's also a testament to the level of commitment in your craft and what you brought to work every day. Like you brought your A game, you know? It's hard to create that. I think that's where people kind of miss that material fact.

Ashley: Right. I think people forget why people come into coffee shops, and I think that you're right. We veered a little too far the other way with that, with that one customer, so we had to recalibrate and bring it back to the middle which was not a bad problem to have, as I reflect on it now I'm like, “Oh, what an interesting problem to have/ We had like, too dedicated of a customer.”

But I don't think other people really think, “Why would somebody come here? Why would somebody buy this coffee?” What I love about talking to you is that this is a question you think about a lot.

Tio: Yeah. Why would people come to Three Keys? There's so many options. And how do I keep people returning to Three Keys?

One thing I thought about as I asked myself that question, there's so many options—why would somebody want to buy my coffee—but I thought my answer to that was that it was more than just the coffee, it was about a full experience, the full sensory experience, including the playlist—like I gotta curate a playlist to support this coffee. If it's a Brazilian dark roast, I'm going to curate a Brazilian bossa nova playlist. The packaging has to be dope because I want to invoke a sense of emotion when you see the vibrant colors so it's a full, multi-sensory experience.

The more playlists I can offer to pair with the roast, different roast profiles, the more I can have those returning customers, because the customers also want some variability or some—they just don't want the same coffee every time. So let me offer, let me make sure I'm very intentional about the scope of my coffee program. I absolutely have to have as much coffee from every continent possible, because I just don't want to have only Central America, South America, or only East African coffees. If it's within my abilities to do so, I want to show the global variety that is coffee and the variety of music that can be paired with it.

So yeah, that was a little bit of that intentionality again kind of manifesting itself.

Ashley: Tio, thank you for taking time to chat with me. I appreciate it.

Tio: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.

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Happy 2022! I’m thrilled to welcome the year with a new lineup of podcast episodes. It’s my hope that the guests we have slated will challenge your ideas and perceptions of coffee, service work, and what it means to build equity—and I can’t wait to share our conversations with you. If you haven’t subscribed, please do below:

Kicking things off, today’s guest is David Lalonde, co-founder of Rabbit Hole Roasters based just outside of Montreal, Quebec. A lot of businesses say things like, “We do things differently,” but David really means it. Together with his business partner, Sophie, he aims to bring coffees from emerging and re-emerging origins to the forefront, and talk very frankly about coffee’s history of colonialism and exploitation.

David started a roasting company because he had a lot of questions. Why do most roasters buy Brazilian coffees solely to put into espresso blends? Why are coffees from one country fetching higher prices than others, even though they have similar taste profiles? Through Rabbit Hole, David attempts to chase down those answers—and in turn, has provided an authentic and sincere approach to buying coffee differently. Here’s David.

Ashley: David, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

David: Absolutely. My name is David Lalonde and I'm the co-founder and roaster and various other roles for Rabbit Hole Roasters in Canada. We’re in a small city that's called Delson, right next to Montreal.

Ashley: How did you get into coffee?

David: I got into coffee about seven years ago. I wish I had a better story to tell. But it's one that I've heard a million times before.

Specialty coffee was not really present in Montreal and then I left for a three-year trip—it was supposed to be one year but stuff happened. When I came back, the scene was booming.

I had a coffee aficionado friend that brought me to this coffee bar and I had an espresso and all I could taste was blueberries. Nothing else. The classic, “Oh what's in this cup of coffee?”

I was working in a restaurant at that time. So I was used to tasting recipes and wine and cocktails, so tasting was always a huge part of my life. But this coffee thing was so crazy to me—that it was not flavored.

Three months after, I dropped my very secure, high-paying job in the restaurant world and I decided to be a part-time, minimum-salary barista in a cafe, and that's how I got here. That's I got started in coffee.

Ashley: What made you want to start a roastery specifically?

David: I wanted to start a roastery because I've worked for other roasters before. I also did a little bit of consulting, helping—by the way I hate that word “consulting.” But anyway…

Ashley: I hate it too. Thank you for pointing that out! (Laughs)

David: It’s a word that I really hate. But anyway, I was working for myself for a brief period of time and I was helping some roasteries buy their green coffees by either tasting, helping them develop profiles, etc…

Even if I couldn't roast coffee at that time, I could taste really well. But all my ideas that were beyond tasting, beyond taste profiles, or beyond coffee brewing were all met with some [form of], “Oh yeah, that sounds interesting. We can do this later,” or, “This is really complicated for…” insert whatever random reason that cafe owner or roastery owner will throw your way to make sure that they can keep you a bit longer without actually doing what you want to do.

I'm a terrible employee by the way…

Ashley: Right, I mean, so am I.

David: So I just had to do things my way, and this is where the idea of doing Rabbit Hole emerged, because I could see that—just for the record, I don't think that the companies I work for did anything bad in terms of buying the coffee and roasting the coffee and running their wholesale program. But it's just not the way that I wanted to do it, and I'm pretty stubborn when it comes to that.

So I was briefly employed by those people and then I was like, “It's just time to go into the world and try to start this coffee company, this dream that I have of buying from emerging origins and really forming relationships that are gonna make sense for the farmers and not just make sense on Instagram.” This is really where I wanted to go with with Rabbit Hole—do things a little bit differently and do things my way.

Ashley: I was wondering—you mentioned that one of the things that you wanted to do was highlight emerging coffee regions. Was that something that you were trying to push when you were working for these other coffee companies, and it just was met with—not necessarily resistance, because you mentioned it's not like they were doing anything wrong—it just wasn't the way that you wanted to do it? What was that moment for you where you realized, “This is important to me. This is something I want to pursue”?

David: That's a good question. At first I didn't know what was bugging me about any of the roasters that I would see, but after a couple of years in coffee I think I just realized that the origins [people picked to offer] were pretty much all the same. People wouldn't dare deviate from that.

So you had to have a Brazilian coffee or darker coffees for blends, you had to have coffee from Ethiopia, you had to have coffee from Colombia—these were the main origins—and then you would have to sneak a Kenyan or a coffee from Guatemala in there.

Because I was a baby barista, I didn't know much in the beginning. I did my own research and I started to get interested in the world of coffee at large and then once you realize that coffee is produced in more than 30 countries, you're just like, “Why do we keep buying from the same three or four countries all the time?”

It really intrigued me, and I was like, “Is it because the coffee is not good?” But it wasn’t that. It was just, “This is how we've been doing things for a while and this is how we're going to keep doing things.”

But I was sure that there was a whole world out there of different farmers’ stories, different tasting notes, different everything. So that's how I really got intrigued—once I realized that you could really seek those coffees out.

I started to taste everything that I could from any origin in the world and it kind of just stuck with me when I was a barista and when I was working with other roasters. This is something that I knew immediately that I wanted to incorporate at Rabbit Hole, but we didn't start like that. Starting a business in itself was pretty crazy and so we had Brazilian coffees for blends in the beginning, and then we experimented with small quantities of emerging origins.

After only six months, Sophie and I sat down and we were just like, “Yeah we wanted to be different, but we're not that different after all.” So we had a big, big shift, maybe six months into the business, where we literally stop buying from most [popular coffee] origins to just really focus on the emerging—which is an interesting term because…

Ashley: I was about to ask you about that, because I would say that, as I look at some of the origins that you buy from, it's not necessarily emerging—but I'd say maybe ignored?

David: Re-emerging?

Ashley: Or something that specialty coffee has just decided to not pay attention to.

David: Yeah, exactly. I like to think of those lesser-known origins in different terms, right? So for example, we're still the only coffee roaster in Canada with coffees from Yunnan in China.

For me, this is really an emerging origin. They've been producing commercial coffee only since the late ’80s on any sort of large scale—they had coffee trees way before that. But specialty coffee is [new] only within the past decade or something, or even a bit newer than that. So this, for me, is the definition of emerging: it's kind of new right?

Then we have some other origins that I would qualify as maybe re-emerging. We have coffee from Yemen on our menu, but Yemen is the first country in the world to produce coffee, so to label them “emerging” I don't think is right. I don't think it's fair, because they've been doing this for literally centuries. But it's hard to find Yemeni coffee on most roasters’ menus, right?

So either it's emerging, re-emerging, or sometimes just lesser-known origins. I don't know how to label those things, but basically if it's a coffee that you've rarely seen, there's a good chance that we'll be interested in learning more about those coffees and maybe incorporating them on the menu.

Ashley: I feel like when I was first getting into coffee, there was this idea of coffee origins that I just never knew how to ask questions about.

Like you said, coffee grows in 30 different countries, and I maybe knew about 10 of them—and I had no language to say, “Why are we not buying coffee from these other regions?” Now, more people are talking about it which is great. So, I've had Sahra Nguyen from Nguyen Coffee Supply [on the show], and she buys exclusively from Vietnam, which is awesome.

Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world, and when I talk about Sahra and the episode that she was on, I had people on my Instagram account say, “No, we don't care about robusta. No, that's gross,” and I was really intrigued by that idea that we have such ingrained ideas about coffee quality from particular countries that we've never learned to challenge.

David: Yeah, that's a really good point. First of all, I've had a couple of coffees from Vietnam, including robustas from Nguyen Coffee Supply. I had one coffee from Sahra, a robusta, it was delicious and I truly enjoyed it.

I didn't enjoy it more or less than any other coffee that I was having at that time. It was just a different experience—some days you want to drink beer and some days you want to drink wine. That's perfectly fine, but you're not going to compare one to the other. [I try to] always go back to—if you buy robusta or if you buy arabica or if you buy from Vietnam or from Colombia or from wherever—who is this going to benefit?

There are a lot of farmers that are farming robusta and with climate change, there's going to be even more robusta being produced because arabica trees are basically dying [and will continue to die] if we don't change anything with the way the world works and how we buy coffee.

So sometimes I feel the coffee industry is just stuck in this thing where we’ve been doing this thing for a long time so we have to keep doing it that way—but no, because let's not forget that coffee is a colonial product. If you've been doing this a certain way since the days of colonization, then we for sure need to change the way we approach certain aspects of the coffee industry. 100%.

Ashley: That's a really good point and that's something that Rabbit Hole is really open about: that coffee is a colonial product, and that you're attempting to really face that head-on.

Was that an intentional decision that you made when you first started Rabbit Hole, or was it something that developed over time as you learned more and more about where your coffee was coming from?

David: It certainly was not in any business plan before we started Rabbit Hole, to focus on the colonial aspect of coffee. The first goal was to start this business and not go broke, then learn how to roast tasty coffees, and learn more about the details of coffee-roasting and learning how Cropster works and the roast curves and the theory—and tasting a lot of coffee.

I'd say the first six months of Rabbit Hole were really about learning the business, learning about buying coffee, and learning how to roast coffee and assess roast defects. But after that, this is when we wanted it to be different and this is where we realized like, “Wait a minute! We paid $1.75 for the first Brazilian lot that we bought.” I would say it was a really decent coffee, it was definitely specialty, definitely had multiple tasting notes. It was a good coffee.

Now, why is our Mexican coffee that's really similar to that one Brazilian coffee—why was the Mexican coffee $3.50 and the Brazilian $1.75? Literally half-price for a coffee that had almost the same profile.

This is what got us started into digging more into things. It’s almost three years later since we had this realization, and once we started to learn more about the colonial past of coffee, there was basically no turning back. This is something that's becoming really important to Rabbit Hole as a whole—is to focus on highlighting those issues that are directly linked to colonization and slave labor.

Ashley: What was that like, when you first started incorporating that sort of dialogue into the way that you talked about coffee? Because when I go to your website now, I mean, it's mentioned everywhere.

David: Pretty much.

Ashley: You guys have a blog where you talk a lot about the different coffee origins that you're buying coffee from and the way that colonization has affected the way that coffee is traded, especially Haiti. Those are the articles I was reading recently, especially because I just bought one of your coffees from Haiti.

I had never had a coffee from Haiti before. I've been in coffee 11 years and I've never heard anybody really talk about it until you folks, and I think the folks at Dávila Kafe Coffee really highlight this origin. I wonder: What did it feel like when you first started presenting this information to people? Were they excited to learn more? Were they not interested? What was that like?

David: At first it was mostly just for us. We really wanted to learn more, making sure that we were not crazy before we would talk about this more publicly, but it was clear that it was all over coffee. Any origin, basically.

We just decided to just start doing research. It was almost a natural transition to be like, “Oh they're the roasters who are focusing on those crazy origins, those lesser-known origins.”

We kind of had this feeling that, even if it was just because of taste profiles and roast profiles, that we were a little bit different from other roasters just in the origins that we would feature, so it almost felt like a natural transition to start talking about more important stuff, because we're already different. So might as well go all in here—it's hard sometimes to do a pun, but go down the rabbit hole. (Laughs)

I'm not doing this on purpose, but that's also why we chose that name, by the way. It's really hard to talk about coffee without saying “rabbit hole” at some point.

I wish we would have more engagement on those posts, on those articles, but I’ve got to say that we've attracted like-minded people, whether it be other coffee shop owners or baristas or importers or home consumers—they’ve really identified, not identified, but they’ve really engaged well with those posts, and with this type of content. Because sometimes we have people that are completely ignoring us when we do posts that are about colonialism or the fact that we should pay farmers more, and they just disappear.

When we start talking about brew methods, then they come back, but for the other people I feel we've reached that kind of niche—maybe niche is not the right word—but the people that are engaged with us now like us because we've been doing this for a long time. They're really all in with us and expect this from us, and they like this from us and they want to really participate. Most of them are cafe owners or home baristas and they now see their roles because of those articles and how they could impact coffee in their own small way just like we're doing in our own small ways with those articles, right?

It's really just about sharing information because we have access to that information, but we also really invest money in researching. We pay one of our—actually, our only—employee, Roxanne, who's got a degree in Latin American and Caribbean History, so she was perfect to do this research on Haiti.

I'd say that overall, the reception is really good and I don't think people have any bad intentions, but just people don't know, so we've taken it upon ourselves to put this information out there, whether it's fun and well-known or whether it's uncomfortable and less-known. We just want people to have access to as much information as possible, because we think that this is how coffee will change in the long run.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a really good point. Number one: Making information accessible means that there's potential for people to change, and that people can't make changes unless they know what is actually happening around them.

But something else that you mentioned—that I wrote down—is that when you're really clear with your intentions, which it feels like you are with what you want to do with Rabbit Hole, the people who are like-minded are going to come find you. They're going to buy in, and I think that that's a really salient point to make.

When I talk to some other cafe owners, sometimes it feels like they don't really know what their intention is, like “Why am I here? What am I doing? What is my mission?” It becomes almost a race to the bottom, and I think that has a lot to do with this singular pursuit of quality.

Like you were mentioning earlier, that everyone buys the same coffees—everybody’s roasting them the same ways. Cafes look the same, and I think it's this insecurity about, “What is my intention, and what do I want to do with this cafe space or this roastery or this brand?” that almost makes it a funnel towards this very singular, very specific pursuit of quality. It seems like you saw that.

David: Yeah, absolutely, and it's really hard in life in general if you don't know why you're doing something, or why you're in business, or why you go to that—I don't know, that grocery store. In any aspect of your life, if you don't really know why you're doing something, I feel it's almost impossible to do it and have fun or do it well.

This is an interesting question, in a different type of angle that I've always been playing with in my own head every time we're about to do something with Rabbit Hole—whether it's my idea or Sophie's idea—like, does it matter, right?

This is a very interesting question especially in the coffee industry because, like you said and like I said, everything feels the same in most cafes or roasteries or whatever. But the question is, “Why do I deserve to do this in the coffee industry? Why do we deserve to take space in this industry?”

This is a question that I've been asking myself mostly in the last couple of months, because sometimes people think that I don't like coffee from Colombia, for example, because we don't have any except for decaf—but I adore coffees from Colombia! I think they're delicious and if I would have to drink one coffee origin for the rest of my life, and I cannot drink anything else, I would choose Colombia in a heartbeat, even if we don't have any on our menu right now.

But why would I bring Colombian coffees in when everybody in my city has coffees from Colombia? So we always try to find this approach where we're going to take a different type of space because it's going to attract a different type of coffee consumer, and then we can buy from different origins—and this is how to broaden your horizons, right?

I just thought I'd share this because it's a very interesting concept to me. Whatever you do in life, maybe always ask yourself—why do you do this? If it works out and you like it, why do you deserve to be doing what you're doing in the context of your own industry? This is something that's been driving me for the past couple of months.

Ashley: I like the question of, “Why do you deserve to take up the space that you do?” because I think that's a question—especially now with COVID and with people leaving cafe jobs or not wanting to work at cafes anymore, and business owners kind of being like, “What do I do?”—but the question is, “Why do you deserve to own a business? Why do you deserve to have employees who break their backs working for you while you're paying the minimum wage?” I don't think people ask themselves that question a lot. Especially when it comes to business ownership—why do you deserve to be here?

David: Exactly. We're a very small business. So it's Sophie and I, and we own Rabbit Hole, and we have one employee, but not one time do I think, “Why does Roxanne deserve to work with Rabbit Hole?”

It's the other way around. I'm just like, “Why do we deserve to have her on board with us in this crazy project?” When I learned about her background, about the studies that she did, I'm just like—I wanted to write this article about Haiti and Haitian coffee before we had any on the menu, and obviously I'm gonna ask Roxanne to do it. I'm not qualified to do all that research, this is what she studied—literally.

So it's just about always, whatever you do as a business owner, why do I deserve to do this? Why do I deserve this employee?

It’s a different outlook. It just puts things in perspective, and in my opinion, this is how you build an ethical business, because most of Roxanne’s job is bagging coffee and roasting coffee with us and doing logistics. And sometimes it's not the most fulfilling job.

I think we pay her well for this. But then we also need to—not keep her, but help her feel fulfilled in other aspects, and that she can use her background and the thing that she really, truly loves and try to incorporate this in Rabbit Hole.

When you ask a question like this—why do you deserve this—it makes everything more holistic in a sense, and everything makes more sense because—it just does make more sense.

Ashley: It feels silly to try to explain it. But you're absolutely right. It just makes sense.

It's like, “Why wouldn't I ask my employees what makes them happy?” or, “How can I be of better service to you?” because it is a privilege to employ people. It's a privilege and an honor when people want to work for you and do work for you, and it's interesting how often the narrative is the other way around.

I think I get what you’re saying, that we would engage the employees that we have, the people surrounding us, and ask them, “What makes you happy? How can we help you get to the point that you want to get to? Maybe you don't want to work here forever. That's totally fine. How can we help and support you to get to the next place?”

Because I think for a lot of business owners, the question is often in reverse. It's like, “What will you do for me? How will you give me your labor in a way that is beneficial to me?” Often the narrative is framed around employees being lazy or being not committed to work. Especially that's happening a lot now, because of COVID. But at the same time, there's a proven way to do this better. It's just about flipping the question around.

David: I agree with that 100%, because if I look at myself before I had a business, there was never a doubt in my mind that I would not stay with those companies for more than two, three, even four years—even if everything was great. I just knew that I would need new challenges and I would want to do my own thing or explore different aspects of the coffee business.

But the best way to keep employees longer is to really focus on them, and not just literally extracting everything you can from them, making them miserable, and then you repeat this cycle.

If you just make sure that they're as happy as they can be with whatever they want to do in the future—this is how maybe they're gonna see like, “Wow this is actually pretty dope. Maybe I'm going to stay here for a year or two longer.”

For a small company like us, if we were to lose 100% of our employees—which is one person—of course it's going to impact Rabbit Hole. But it’s our job as business owners to make sure that [our employees] feel fulfilled, that they want to stay here as long as they can, but it's also our job to make sure that we're going to support whatever it is that they want to do deep down.

If it's compatible with our business, that's great. In the case of Roxanne doing research, that's amazing, but sometimes it doesn't work that way. If she wanted to be like, a professional volleyball player, I can't help her with that. But I'm going to support her any way I can.

It's a stupid example, but you know what I mean.

Ashley: No, I totally know what you mean.

It's funny—I'm going backwards a little bit—but it's funny that you mentioned the pun of Rabbit Hole, because when I was Googling before we hopped on this call, I was like, “Let me see if I can find some articles about Rabbit Hole.” I couldn't find very many but everybody mentions the phrase “rabbit hole” when they talk about coffee, which was really funny to me that you mentioned that.

Something else I want to talk about—something I've been talking about a lot on this podcast, and it's something that I still feel we don't explore enough—is the idea of risk when it comes to the coffee supply stream, and how roasters are often the people that are asked to take the least amount of risk on.

It seems like, with the way that you buy and sell coffee, you're assuming some of that risk—by working with coffees that maybe nobody has ever seen before, or being really upfront about the cost it actually takes to get these coffees here.

I was wondering if that's something that you think about—how risk is spread out throughout the supply stream, and what you can do to assume some of that risk and take it away from farmers, take it away from baristas.

David: Oh, 100%. I think about this all the time, and this is mostly my main job at Rabbit Hole.

I'm the one buying all of the coffee—mostly because of my background, because of my tasting abilities—and I think about this literally every day. I'm just like, “How can we make sure that the chain, across the board, is going to be more ethical?”—or the word that people will employ pretty loosely here is “sustainable.”

I think about this pretty much every time I think about green coffee. I'm going to think about, “How can we make sure that there's going to be the least amount of risk, not just for us, but for the farmer, for literally everyone?”

So one of the easiest things is to commit to buying coffee for multiple years with a farmer. Regardless of—not regardless of taste, because specialty coffee needs to be in a certain quality range—but if a coffee, for example, is an 85-point coffee one year and it's 84 points the next year, some buyers will just drop the relationship with the farmer and they’ll go see their neighbors. But that's devastating for the farmer that you just ditched.

And let's be honest: After roasting, if you do pre-ground coffee, coffee with milk, an espresso machine that's poorly dialed-in—the difference between an 83-point and an 87-point coffee, for most people, is going to be almost negligible. Maybe not for the black filter coffee drinker that knows more about coffee, but it's always about mitigating the risk for the farmers—at least that's what I focus on.

So doing contracts in advance that are not just based purely on taste and on scoring points for coffee—that's number one to mitigate the risk.

Second of all, if you want to do anything that the farmer is not used to doing, or if they’re going to do something special for you, you need to pay for that coffee regardless of what happens. You need to assume that risk.

The stories that I've heard in the past of roasters asking for some experiments and then the coffee doesn't taste the way they want and then they just bail on the coffee because it doesn't fit their profile anymore, or they changed their mind because there was no contract…

And let's be honest: If there was a contract, what could the farmers do, really? If you buy coffee from Vietnam, and you're a roaster in Canada, like…

It's all about starting slowly and building those relationships so that everyone gains a little bit of trust in the process. Then it’s just about paying more for coffee—literally. We cannot be the ones making most of the profits. I don't care if it's the importer or the roaster or the cafe reselling bags—we make way too much money in consuming countries versus producing countries.

This is not breaking news. Maybe for some, but if you're in coffee a little bit, this is pretty common knowledge.

Ashley: Yeah, it's not breaking news. But I think to be able to say it so plainly is.

David: Yeah, and literally 90% of the money [that is made by selling coffee] doesn't stay in producing countries. So if that's not the definition of colonialism or extractivism or imperialism, I don't know what is.

This number, right there—that about 90% of the money from coffee doesn't stay or doesn't go back to producing countries—is just crazy. You know the system is broken 100% if this is the case. I guarantee you, right now, because it's produced by white people, if a winemaker in France only kept 5% of the money, and then I'm reselling wine in Canada and I'm making 95% of that money, this wouldn't go well. Because it's white people producing the wine in France mostly, it’s all about this colonial past, once again.

I keep coming back to this when we talk about risk and how you mitigate risk. And it’s because we just assume that coffee needs to be cheap because people don't really know where coffee comes from. [To some], coffee is an exotic product.

For most people, if it's produced in Papua New Guinea or Ethiopia or Colombia—it's just not produced at home, and it doesn't really matter in their minds where it's produced as long as they have tasty and affordable coffee at home. So it's just about paying more for coffee literally.

This is how we've tried to build our contracts with our importers, exporters, or directly with the farmers, and it's about open discussion. What are people willing to pay here? What can I pay you? I'm very honest about my margins and what can I afford for certain types of coffee.

To be honest, for most coffees, I can afford to pay way more than what they received in the past. There's just a couple of coffees where it's a bit more price-sensitive, for cafes or for office buildings and stuff like that, but even then we pay a lot of money for it. It all comes back to just paying more for coffee. If [farmers] have more money, then they assume less risk. It’s as simple as that.

Ashley: Yeah, it seems pretty simple and straightforward. You listed pretty basic things that people can do.

Number one: Pay more for coffee.

Number two: Promise to buy that coffee year in and year out.

Something I want to talk a little bit about—just because I wanted to use some of the things that you've talked about in this episode, and apply them specifically to coffee origins—I want to talk about Haiti because, like I mentioned earlier, I'd never had a Haitian coffee until I ordered it from you.

David: Yep.

Ashley: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about Haiti as an example of some of the practices that you hope to embody. Why was it important for you to add a Haitian coffee to your menu?

David: First of all, Haiti used to be the world's number-one producer of coffee. This is something that I didn't know until a couple months ago. I've been in coffee for a long time, but if you would have asked me, “250 years ago, who was the biggest coffee producer?” I can guarantee you that Haiti would not be in my top 10. I just didn't know that at all.

So you can see from that—if they were, at some point, the biggest coffee producer, and now they're literally not known for producing coffee, and especially not specialty coffee, it just fits our mission so well of putting back some of those origins on the coffee map. Let’s try to build those relationships, because Haiti used to be such a huge producer of coffee.

It's very tasty coffee, and because of the way coffee was brought there, they still have very old trees and untouched varietals that are often linked to pure Ethiopian heirlooms. It's fascinating from a taste perspective, from a colonial past perspective, and we just really wanted to start building this [bridge].

It was really hard, to be honest, to find a coffee that was from Haiti that I felt comfortable selling on the menu, because there's not that much infrastructure for specialty coffee. It's mostly commodity coffee, and I've had some of the worst coffees that were labeled as specialty. I received some green coffee and I was like, “I really want to be involved there, but I still need to be able to sell that coffee.”

That's the only part that sucks about the job sometimes. I would really love to be involved somewhere, but the quality is simply not there, and I would just be stuck with all that green coffee.

Ashley: Yeah, but it seems like you're challenging the way that quality is understood—which I also think is important. We were talking about this idea of the single pursuit of quality, and how everything is kind of going towards sameness, but it seems like with Rabbit Hole—and obviously this happens slowly—that you're challenging the way that people want to purchase coffee.

As a coffee person, as a person who's been in the industry for a while, I saw that there was a Haitian coffee and I immediately wanted to try it. That was completely true, irrelevant of terms of quality. I’m a different market. You know what I mean?

So it's interesting to hear people talk about different ways that people buy coffee, because I don't think that we really honor that. I just want to push on that a little bit, but continue on with what you were saying.

David: Yeah, for sure. That’s a good point, and we really try to change how people taste and perceive certain coffees because, like I said before, once it's roasted, once the coffee ages, once it's served in a cafe or in a kitchen or in a super automatic machine, the difference between an 83-point and an 86-point coffee is so small that most people won't taste the difference, right? Especially with milk and sugar.

Ashley: Right.

David: If taste is not the main driver, what should be the main driver? It should be building relationships and making sure that the people producing this coffee have a livable wage and that we’re paying more than the cost of production.

There’s something that you said earlier about how we approach those origins, but for us to buy a couple of bags of an emerging origin—we always sell out of that coffee. Super, super fast.

Every time we bring a new origin—so in the case of this Haitian coffee, we've never sold so much of a new coffee, of a new origin, in the first month of releasing a coffee. Haiti holds the record for the most amount of bags sold for a new origin that we released because people were curious.

We also had all of those articles educating about Haiti’s history and past. Not just about coffee but overall, and all of those things were not linked to taste.

I think that we've reached a point in the coffee industry where the narrative that Rabbit Hole has now would not be fit to be a roastery in 2006. It was so hard to find tasty coffees early in 2004, 2005. It was not that easy to build relationships remotely. Social media was not really where it is right now, and communication wasn't either.

I was traveling, just backpacking, and I remember a time in 2006 where there was no Skype, and if you had to chat you had to go to an internet cafe. The world evolved really quickly. So if I would have been a coffee buyer in those days, it would have been wildly different, and it was important to focus on quality first early in the 2000s because we were coming from commodity coffee. We had to show people that, “Look: specialty coffee is really special because it tastes different.”

But I think that nowadays, in 2021, if a roaster labels themselves as specialty roasters, you can assume a certain level of quality. You don't have to ask, “Oh is this going to be garbage?” or, “Is this going to be okay, or is this going to be exceptional?” I think it's always going to be tasty, right? As long as it's tasty—and for me, tasty is just clean and sweet with no defects—and then after we can discuss more specific tasting notes, like if it’s tropical or citrusy.

In my opinion, [those specific tasting notes] don’t matter at all. You can seek out those coffees if you like them. As a coffee buyer, I think that it's my job to buy coffees for other reasons beyond taste. As long as it's tasty—and specialty coffee now produces tasty coffee way more easily than 20 years ago.

So I just thought that this was worth mentioning. People stress about, “Oh, am I going to like this?” Most of the coffees that we buy are tasty, and I'm not saying you're going to like them all, but I think they all qualify as good and decent specialty coffees.

Ashley: Right, and like you were saying, you sold out of that coffee faster than you sold out of any other coffee that you've sold, which is really interesting because I think it proves that point, that people aren't necessarily just buying for quality.

I think what you were saying about, in 2006 where we didn't have social media, we didn't have ways to connect or engage on these issues, the only entry point that we had was quality and taste—that’s really key, because in 2021 we have so many other tools.

David: Exactly, and this is one of those instances where people in the coffee industry are going to get stuck on something.

It's like, “Oh but specialty coffee was born because, on an SCA scoring grid, every coffee that's scored above 80 points was labeled as specialty and this is how we can sell coffee to people for more money—because it is specialty coffee.”

But I think the definition of specialty coffee now, maybe I'm mistaken, I don't know exactly in terms of taste, but a coffee can be labeled as specialty coffee if it's above 80 points on a scoring grid. So I think we need to expand that definition, because it's so easy to find coffees above 80 points right now, it's ridiculously easy.

Anyone can start a roastery, call one importer, and they're gonna have a bunch of coffees above 80 points—it's super easy. So if this is becoming the standard and it's really easy to find, we need to expand that definition of specialty coffee, and it cannot be only about taste.

I would argue that taste now, for me specifically, because it's so easy to find those above-80-point coffees, we need to switch and put taste second, because they're everywhere, and put relationship coffee—or whatever other word that you want to call this, as long as you think about the farmers—first, put origin first, and you work with that, with the coffee that's tasty already.

Ashley: David, I could talk to you forever, but we’re towards the end of our time here.

I was wondering if there was anything that you wanted people to know about Rabbit Hole that maybe isn't obvious, or something that you maybe don't get to talk about as much?

David: I'm gonna need a minute to think about that.

Ashley: We could probably do a whole second episode.

David: Yeah, probably about social media and coffee accessibility and all of that, right?

But I think I've covered, in this last bit, about expanding the definition of specialty coffee. I just think it's time to rethink how we buy coffee, how we develop relationships at origin, but also how we engage with consumers and home baristas, because sometimes the people think the work stops in the cafe with the baristas, and then once people pick up a bag of coffee then the job is over.

But those consumers, if they can get as engaged with coffee as they are with craft beer, craft cocktails, wine, or new restaurants, and any other fine and tasty products—people love to drink, people love to eat, enjoy alcohol, coffee, whatever, you name it and it's booming.

I feel that one aspect where the consumer is completely left out, and there's no background stories or—I’ll try to gather my thoughts, because I don't want to say there's no good information, but like maybe true information, or different types of information.

Like you said, the Haitian coffee is a good example of a coffee that's tasty, but it's not a Gesha. It’s just clean and sweet with a couple of nice notes. But people got so engaged with it because of the articles that we did, because it's a lesser-known origin, and you can clearly see that coffee consumers want to know more—but we’ve got to give them more if we want to keep them in.

We have to include customers if we want to sell coffee for more money, because if we pay more for coffee, we have to sell it for more. It's pretty basic business. I think that we need to have more people doing research or writing articles or sharing information that's aimed at true development at origin, and not just for marketing purposes.

Did I make any sense now?

Ashley: No, you made so much sense.

David: Sometimes I feel like my brain is going and it takes me about 30 minutes to really focus on a subject. Now we've been talking for 40, 45 minutes, and I feel like I'm just hitting my rhythm.

I just wish that there was more information that could be for educating the consumer and not just for roasters or a coffee company's marketing. This could be a whole other episode, and you’ve probably talked about on your podcast before, if I remember correctly.

I'm going to end with this: We have to start doing things for real change. Not just for marketing purposes. You have to do things holistically so that it makes sense, not just in coffee but also beyond coffee. We need to think about livable wages, no matter how [a farmer] spends that money at origin.

We have to step out of this idea of using information only if it benefits the roaster. We have to think about how to use that information—if it makes sense and if people are gonna be able to engage with it. That was pretty hectic, but I hope that people will get what I'm trying to say.

Ashley: I think they'll get what you're trying to say. I feel like I get it.

I really appreciate you coming on the show and being so passionate about the way that you buy coffee, in the way that you roast coffee, and I just really appreciate your time. Thank you for joining me.

David: No, thank you so much, and just a quick ending note: I had some goals that I wanted to achieve when I started Rabbit Hole, and being interviewed on the Boss Barista Podcast was one of them, because this is a different type of podcast. It really is about bringing something else to the coffee industry. I really appreciate having a moment to chat on the Boss Barista Podcast because I've been a huge fan for a long time, so I can check that off the list of things that I wanted to do.

Ashley: (Laughs) That's what I'm here for: Checking things off your bucket list.

That was David Lalonde, co-founder of Rabbit Hole Roasters. Check out the Rabbit Hole website, where you’ll likely see a rotating selection of coffees not being offered by any other roasters in North America, and if you really want to learn more, check out their Instagram page at @rabbitholeroasters.

Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll see you in two weeks.

Get full access to B O S S B A R I S T A at bossbarista.substack.com/subscribe

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Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we’re bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, here’s a handy link to do so:

This is Part Two of a conversation with freelance writer and PhD student Rachel Northrop about coffee markets. If you haven't yet listened to Part One, I strongly suggest you start there—Rachel gives a primer on how coffee is traded, and what the coffee futures market looks like.

In Part Two, we’re now looking at their application. How do coffee markets affect the actual price of coffee? Why is the commodity price for coffee far below the cost to actually produce coffee? (Coffee is traded at about a dollar per pound, but the cost to produce coffee is often two to three times that amount.)

So how is that possible? This is where we move past the theoretical and discuss the impact on coffee farmers, and the way markets are designed to potentially exploit the labor of others—often replicating colonial power structures in the process. Here’s Rachel:

Ashley: So we're in Part Two of my conversation with Rachel Northrop. Thank you for bearing with me for this long on this topic. And the last time, we talked a little bit about what a futures market looks like. And we came to some really big ideas about how coffee is traded and how a futures market is just a tool for trading and a tool for managing prices, but towards the end of our conversation, we came to the idea that the specialty market never has to pay the price of the C-market. That's almost completely independent.

I think probably one of the reasons that the C-market is so heavily tied to what specialty coffee does is that we treat markets as this monolith, like the [stock] market. So I was hoping in this part of the conversation, we could talk a little bit about what farmers are actually paid, and really look at the transactions between farmers and people who are buying coffee. So I guess let's jump into it a bit, just to go over that last point a little bit. How does the C-market price of a coffee—“what's happening on the floor in New York”—relate to what farmers are actually paid?

Rachel: Yeah, thanks for having me back to continue this conversation. [It’s] hopefully not too abstract for everyone who's listening to make that connection. And this is where again, I mentioned before that it's sometimes tricky to talk about this in satisfyingly declarative terms, because there are so many qualifications of, “Well, it can be,” or “it could be,” or “sometimes,” and that's because there are just so many different ways to trade, meaning to buy and sell something, in this case containers or bags of coffee.

I think that's a good point to start on, is that the price that the futures market discovers can be totally separate from the contracts for physical coffee. One way the two can be related is by something that's called “differentials,” meaning that you price either above or below, plus or minus the price that's on the futures market.

And again, one reason that people do that is because that's something that they can use as part of the hedging process. Those differentials essentially are a way of saying, “I know my coffee is not worth this number that's being discovered on the C-market, so here's a way of building in either a quality premium or some way to account for that difference.”

And those differentials can be as much or as little as you want them to. They can be a few cents, they can be $5. Again, that's at your discretion when you're writing those physical contracts or contracts for physical coffee. But just still having that futures market as that benchmark in there allows people to use the price of the risk management tool of hedging. If that's something they're choosing to do.

And that's where you can end up with dollar amounts that are $3, $4, or $5 a pound for coffee, but still somewhere in there have used the C-market as a part of the pricing process. And again, just because it is a shared number that everyone can see, and it provides that starting point—especially if you're hedging coffee—then you need that same shared starting point to undertake your price management, risk management hedging process.

So that's one way that the two can be related. There's actually a really great graphic. I encourage people to look into all these different resources that are out there. The Colombian Coffee Federation (the FNC), on their website, actually has a really great graphic that shows what I had people draw out for me as diagrams when I was in Colombia. There are people who offer the extension services who are great about helping producers with other questions.

And I just sat in line on the office hour days and got the people who worked as “extensionistas” to answer my questions too, including drawing out a little equation. The Colombians call it “la tablero” or “the signboard,” [which is the] price that producers see when they go to drop off their coffee at a co-op [and] how that price is calculated.

It has several components. You have to do a lot of conversions. The coffee on the futures market is traded in U.S. dollars per pound, and producers in most countries deliver their coffee in kilos and the local currency. So right there, you already have some conversions that have to take place in the units of measurement and also in the currency. So part of the price that producers are paid also has to do with local currency fluctuations that are changing due to a whole other host of factors.

So sometimes even if the C-market price doesn't move that much, coffee might be worth a lot less or a lot more in a certain origin, just because the value of that currency has changed. There's factors like that that are related to themes of global finance and relative values. But that's something that affects different countries differently at different times. And then in this Colombian FNC graphic, it also shows the way that it goes from the C-market price, and then there's a conversion to the Colombian peso, and then they subtract a few cents per pound for all the funds that they gather and manage and use for the extension services and for some of the other trainings and support and different things that they offer to the members of the FNC.

And also in Colombia, they have [what] they call the “factor ve la miento,” which is your conversion unit based on the quality of your coffee, like how many defects, how many pounds of parchment do you have to deliver to yield one exportable stack of 70 kilos? They have a calculation like a base, I believe it's 94 is the base factor that's factored into the price, and then depending on if your coffee has a higher or lower factor, your price adjusts a little bit. It really is like a calculation. So it starts with the C-market, which again is this benchmark starting point. And then from there, it calculates all those other components.

Another interesting thing is that if you're a part of a cooperative, very often you receive one price at the moment in which you deliver your coffee, but then at the end of the year, the whole cooperative as a business sees what their earnings are. Then because producers are members, meaning owners of that business, they'll then receive another as part of the end-of-the-year settlement, which works differently in different cooperatives.

Colombia is actually an interesting origin because they're offering different options for producers to do their own hedging in terms of if you decide you want to receive a certain price, now, maybe that means you do or don't receive something else later, or here are different ways to enter into agreements, to deliver a certain amount of coffee at a certain price, but make that agreement ahead of time.

So to circle back to that question that producers had asked me back in 2012 in Costa Rica and Colombia, when they say, “Where does the price come from?” Well, it does start with that New York C-market price as being the shared globally visible price, and then a series of calculations through currency conversions and through weights and measures conversions, and with different premiums added or subtracted for quality with any tax or contribution to a shared fund deducted from that, or the premiums from certifications, that's something else that can be built in there.

So that's how you get to the signboard price. But one of the questions that I had was, “Why is that number from the C-market used? Why that number? Why not start with some other benchmark?” And that's because, if you think of all of the trade of coffee happening cyclically, is that the co-ops are buying from their members, but they need to buy at a price that makes sense with what they're able to sell that coffee at, at that moment.

They have one amount of coffee coming in their doors, but they have another amount of coffee going out the door. So if the coffee that's going out the door is going out the door at one price, there's no way they can then pay a price that's double that, let's just say, for what's coming in.

And so that part was very cyclical, conceptually, hard to wrap your head around. And that's where I think it's interesting to just think about how much of the price is designed to facilitate the trade of goods versus to make life livable for either the end user or the very first producer.

Ashley: Yeah, no, that's a good point to make, that the reason that some of these benchmarks are used is because you have to continue to participate in the market. It's better to sell your coffee at a lower price than to not sell it at all. And if you're that middle person buying coffee from cooperatives, and then if you're the FNC, then selling it to larger producers, if you pay $4 a pound and then you’re only able to sell it for $2, then that makes no sense. The system breaks.

Rachel: Right, exactly. So that's sort of the connection. So really, and this is a sort of oversimplified statement, but the only reason that you need to use the globally visible trading price as the price that you pay for your raw material is because you also need to sell at that globally visible price at that same time.

Ashley: That also necessitates that people are paying at that price too, right? I mean, this would never happen because we're in a global economy, but like, if everybody decided that they weren't paying that price and they were paying $2 more, then you could say, “Oh, the market is working in this way. I can do this.” I don’t know…

Rachel: Right. Basically, yeah. It could always happen that the price moves in your favor, meaning that all of a sudden the market moves and the person who's buying coffee will pay much more than what you paid for it. If you're a cooperative in Colombia and you're buying from your members, it could happen that in those months that the coffee's in parchment and being milled and prepped for export to sample to roasters and importers and everybody, it could happen that in those months, the price jumps up by 20 cents.

That would be great. And in that case, you would have bought it and then sold it at a higher price, just because that's what happened in the market. But the reason that you were using these visible, shared benchmark prices is because that would be great. If that happens in that case, you sort of don't need insurance. You know what I mean?

It's almost like thinking about, if everything goes well, then you don't need any of these protection tools, but the tools are always designed for the chance that it won't. And so that's why it's called “price risk management,” because inherent in every transaction is the risk that what you bought will be worth less when you go to sell it or the other way around now, what you need to buy will be so expensive. And the moment that you need it, that you won't be able to afford it.

Ashley: Right? So then if that happens the whole market just breaks.

Rachel: Right, that just means that no one can do the thing that they need to do. And everything sort of stops. And everyone just goes bankrupt in one season of trying to either sell or buy whatever they need. And so that's why it's called a “risk management tool.” Is that again, if everything is working great and there is no risk, then you'll always be able to sell something for higher than you paid for it.

You'll always be able to buy a product at a price that is within your company's budget. And that will end up with a bag of coffee on the shelf that consumers will buy. Like if there were no risks, then you wouldn't need any protection. You wouldn't need any management tools, but there is always inherent risk in any transaction that the price will move against you.

So all of these tools are basically using them just to protect yourself from the price moving against you. In the example, if it moves in your favor and it jumps up, you very well could have paid those producers 20 cents more for all that coffee, because at the end of the day the market changed and that was where you were able to sell it, but you can't take that risk as the person who's in the position to have to forward the coffee to the next party in the chain.

And so that's where again, the cooperatives—because they're a group—if that happens, then those proceeds are split among the members in different ways, depending on how the cooperatives are organized and which funds go directly back to the members versus which stay in a shared development account. And if you're selling to an intermediary where you're not a member of the co-op and you don't get the benefits of that, then, you know, you just missed out on that.

So to go back to your question, when we say the market, it's true that there's a ton of mini markets within the market, that you have this big coffee futures exchange again, which is this giant global price discovery mechanism. But then at the end of the day, you have people buying and selling coffee in thousands and thousands of local contexts where things like the currency or the cost of imports and transport, and all these other things, are fluctuating constantly and changing. And so what makes sense in those different little local markets looks different. So you have different ways of managing that risk.

And I think that one of the things that's tricky is that, again, this market is designed as a price risk management tool. And I do think that one of the things that is worth trying to better understand is why some people in the supply chain have more access and expertise in using that tool than others do. And I think there are other people who are in organizations who are asking that question as well.

I think in the SCA’s Price Crisis Response Initiative, that was on their list of recommendations, was expanding access to both the education and to the actual capital. This is sort of like an insurance policy. It's a great tool, but if you can't afford the insurance policy, then you can't make use of that tool.

Ashley: That's a good point. I actually just wrote that question down, [about you] mentioning the SCA. A couple of years ago, there was a big focus turned onto the C-market and the coffee price crisis.

And in the way that we've been talking about C-market pricing and how the futures trading market is kind of a tool, one tool that one can use for pricing, I was wondering, and you've answered this a little bit, but I was wondering if you can expand on it: Why do we care about the C-market? Like, why has the SCA—I mean, you can't answer for the SCA, obviously—but why do we care about this price if generally, we can step away from it really easily?

Rachel: Right, well, so that's sort of where it gets tricky, is that we can step away from it really easily, but again, it becomes really risky. If you're operating in a cash market with no regard to that standardized or that globally visible shared price, then there's a lot more risk because you can't use that tool to protect you.

And again, you have all of the exposure that if you buy—thinking as an exporter or an importer—if you're buying expensive coffee from origin and you're paying the producer whatever the producer is asking, and they're saying, “This is my cost of production. This is my margin. Here's what my coffee's worth. Take it or leave it.” And someone in the connective business buys that coffee with the hope of then selling it onward, they're 100% exposed, meaning that they have no guarantee.

They have no tool, nothing that says that they will be able to recoup and then some what they paid out for that coffee. So that is why most people in the coffee trade use the C-market-discovered price or some sort of hedging tool in some way, because there's a ton of risk otherwise.

And again, you could say that one risk management tool is really strong relationships and knowing who you're working with, and just being able to be confident that they won't default and that they won't dishonor and abandon their contract. And there's plenty of successful coffee companies that don't use hedging tools, that have other ways of managing their cash flow and their operations and their sourcing and everything that have found a way to be successful without using these.

So it's not to say that there's any way of doing business that is 100% required, or that is 100% off-limits, but you just have to know what the limits and possibilities are of the different tools to then decide in your case—based on either your volumes or your market or your customer base or your timelines or the competition in your area or whatever it is—piecing together which of these work to make you confident that your business will be able to trade, buy and sell at prices that don't put your company out of business, basically.

Ashley: Right, that makes sense. And it makes sense why it can seem a little esoteric for us to talk about the C-market when the majority of specialty coffee doesn't pay the C-market price—but seeing how intertwined the C-market price is with differentials or how places like the FNC have to determine how much they're selling for. Because if they buy coffee for way more, and then they can't sell at the market, then that doesn't work and it kind of keeps the whole market going. And I think it's easy to listen to this conversation at this point and be like, “Oh man, those two b*s are talking about market stuff. Like they're all posi for it.”

BUT, I think this is the part of the conversation where we move a little bit to the idea of price versus cost, and talking a little bit about how—I'm going to go ahead and say that this is not a tool that is advantageous to most farmers, I would imagine. So I wonder, this is where we can talk about the idea of, who does this tool serve, truly. So yeah, go for it.

Rachel: Yeah, correct. And one thing to mention too is that, one of the things that specialty coffee has congratulated itself on, and then also at the same time been quick to check itself on is that—and again, I'm not speaking for farmers that are capable of speaking for themselves and explaining their own situations, very articulately—but we know that most people who produce coffee do not produce 100% specialty.

In fact, we could maybe change those percentages a lot when you're saying that most, if not all, producers produce only a certain percentage that is specialty and [for] the rest of their coffee, they are subject to local prices, whether it's what the cooperative is paying or what another private buyer is paying to move the rest of their harvest.

And there's also plenty of people who have much more expertise than I do explaining how, if you take out all the best stuff and put that in a small pile, then the remaining pile will actually be, you know, lower-quality. And that will be subject to maybe the C-market price minus something, because the overall quality of what's left is now lower.

So you have all of those things to consider. So even if we—meaning we as individuals, or we as a company or as a sector of the industry—are paying prices that are much higher, it's always the question of, for what percentage or for what amount, and then, “What's happening with the rest of the coffee?”

So all coffee is coffee. And so yes, we can segment out specialty coffee and maybe have one type of contract for one volume of it, but then what happens to the rest of it? And what does that mean for everyone involved?

And again, this gets sticky where there's no easy answer. That's why, I repeat, I'm not making any suggestions or telling anyone what they should or can do, but just offering different ways to look at this from a 20,000-foot systemic perspective and some of these conceptual things. And so even if an individual company is not trading coffee, buying and selling it at a price that's based on the C-market price, it's very likely that people in their supply chain do have to sell a fraction, if not the majority of their harvest, at that price.

Ashley: Right, and that's a good point to make too, because we can remove ourselves entirely from the C-market in a way. Mentally we can say, “Oh, we're paying this much for this coffee.”

But like you mentioned, if you're only buying, let's say it's specialty, so 20%—because anything above an 80 is considered specialty, so I'm just gonna use those numbers, even though that might not be accurate. But if you're only buying 20% of a harvest at a higher price, as you mentioned, you're taking away from the quality potential of that other 80%, and it's probably sold at an even lower price. So it's interesting just to make sure that those correlations between specialty and the C-market are really strong, because even though we're able to divorce ourselves from it sometimes, they're always interrelated and they're always interconnected.

Rachel: Yeah, so this is something I'll just offer as my own observation again, from my research. It's really interesting to look at the history of these markets. So there actually used to be a lot more futures markets than there are today, meaning separate exchanges. So oh gosh, I don't have these exact notes in front of me, but the history was the New York Cotton Exchange existed first, and then there was the New York Coffee Exchange, and then it became, I believe it was, coffee and cotton merged. And then you had coffee, cotton, cocoa, and sugar in one exchange in New York.

So we see mergers and acquisitions happening in lots of industries. And that's actually also happened with the futures exchanges themselves. And to me, that seems really interesting, that you had these exchanges that were private entities operating in different parts of the country. We used to have grain exchanges in Kansas City and I think there was even one MidAmerica Exchange. There were a couple of different ones in Chicago.

And then today you're really left with the New York Stock Exchange and the Intercontinental Exchange [ICE], which trades products that used to be on different exchanges around the country. And then you're left with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which is in Chicago and still trades large volumes of grains and other, I believe, currency. And there's a lot of financial futures and things.

So you've had this consolidation of these exchanges. What's interesting about the Intercontinental Exchange is that the exchange itself is a publicly traded company. So the Intercontinental Exchange actually owns the New York Stock Exchange, but it's also a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange. And then Intercontinental Exchange is also now merged with the market in London that trades robusta coffee which used to be called the Liffe, London International Financial Futures Exchange.

And so to me, that's where it gets really interesting. If a company is publicly traded then it must be profitable. That's sort of in its bylaws and its raison d’être. So the exchange itself, even though they, as individuals, don't trade, or they as an entity don't participate in their own exchange, the fact that the Intercontinental Exchange is a very, very large and very profitable business that is also publicly traded, that to me is interesting.

And again, that's where it gets really tricky, because we're talking about coffee and we're talking about contracts to buy 10, 20, 100 bags of green coffee. But the exchange that we're trading on is just part of this global financial system at a level of scale that's kind of impossible to think about.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean, maybe I'm wrong on this, but it seems like this is a system that's been designed to work for a certain group of people.

Rachel: Yeah, and I think it was maybe not designed that way. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't the original intention when a group of traders founded it in New York in the 1800s. But what has happened, whether or not that was the intention, is the fact that these exchanges have merged and there's very few of them and this is the only place you can trade coffee.

So it’s effectively also a monopoly. That's where it gets into this interesting cyclical argument of, you need everyone in one place if you want the price discovery to be the most accurate. But if everyone's in one place, that's a monopoly—this is the only exchange that you can trade coffee futures on.

Actually I shouldn't say that. That's not true. I do believe there's a domestic one in Brazil and there either are or can be or have been other local exchanges in producing countries. But in terms of global coffee contracts, both arabica and robusta are now traded effectively on the Intercontinental Exchange.

So I think that if you're looking at that sense, absolutely coffee is traded in an environment that serves people with massive amounts of capital who are helping each other move and grow those massive amounts of capital. And people who are operating in the futures market not for hedging reasons—and they call these commercial versus non-commercial traders. That's something else. There's different reports where you can see the number of positions that different participants in the futures market have taken.

The Global Coffee Platform had a really great webinar back in November where the CEO of ICE came on and explained the arabica futures contract in a really easy-to-understand, straightforward way.

So you can see that the exchange is a business and it's part of these much larger businesses, and the people who are participating in the exchange for speculative purposes are trading everything. They're not just trading coffee. If you're a speculator, you're speculating, you've got a whole portfolio of different futures, contracts, options, contracts, you know, stocks, bonds, currency, whatever, the whole nine yards, and [the futures exchange] is just a small component of that.

So again, that's part of why the people who enter for speculative purposes are not intending to ever take delivery of a received delivery of green coffee, but they're also not paying attention to coffee exclusively. It's part of this whole giant financial ecosystem. I do think that that's also something else that makes it hard to parse out the price of coffee [as something that feels] unique or in a vacuum, is that a lot of people who are trading are trading lots of things. So people who are trading contracts for speculative purposes won't just look at the value of one thing. They'll also look at relative values or some movements over time.

And so you have coffee as just one product among this whole array of futures that people can trade. And that's where some of the critiques that I think are valid of the futures market is that there has become very little to no correlation or association between a futures contract and what they call the “underlying fundamental,” which means the physical coffee itself.

Ashley: Right, which is wild!

Rachel: Yeah, so the whole idea of futures contracts, which makes them, I think, much more fascinating and different from stocks, is that when you own stocks—let's say you own stock in Apple. You don't therefore own a certain number of iPhones.

You can't ever exchange or trade your share of Apple for stuff, you know? But in futures contracts you can, and the exchange actually has warehouses with coffee. Again, this is a very small percentage of how the coffee trade operates, but if you wanted to [as] “buyer and seller of last resort,” you could buy coffee from the exchange, or you could sell your coffee to the exchange, provided that it meets the specs of the standardized contracts that they have, and that it's in the right warehouse and port and from countries of origin that they consider, they call them “deliverable growths.”

And so that, I think, makes it really fascinating. But at the end of the day, that mechanism still exists, that those contracts can be converted into a physical unit. They have a value that directly corresponds and sometimes in some cases can and does literally correspond to delivering and receiving coffee.

And that's something very different from most other financial instruments out there. So I do think that's part of the argument that people have made, or are trying to make, or are in the process of making, is that if you have a futures contract that is tied to an underlying fundamental that still is deliverable or receivable from one of these contracts, then maybe there should be more of a connection between the price of that contract and of that physical good.

But then on the other hand, there are production contexts that have efficiency because whether it's different environmental conditions or different technologies for harvesting, planting, and fertilizing the varietals that are grown, there are people that can produce coffee at prices around $1 or $1.50 or $2, whatever it is. There's a whole range of where a coffee producer can be profitable.

That also makes it tricky, because who's to say that if it's profitable for one person at this price to sell coffee, just because it's not profitable for everyone, does that invalidate the fact that it does work for somebody? And that’s, again, where differentials come in, is that one of the things that they can do is to try to absorb or account for that difference.

Ashley: Yeah, it's interesting to try to break down the difference between price and cost, because it's clear, obviously, that—and you've laid this out really beautifully—is that the cost of coffee, the cost to produce coffee, is not the same as the price of coffee. Those are two totally separate things. But then when you look at the cost of coffee, that's also not a fixed number based on what you were saying earlier, with environmental factors or in Brazil [which is] a highly efficient country, the cost of coffee is way lower than somewhere else where there isn't as much technology implemented.

So thinking about those two numbers in totally different ways I think is really helpful to understand where the price of coffee comes from, or some of the factors that come into play, because I think we still, again, look at it as this monolith of like, “Everything works in this one particular way. There's one market. Price means this. Cost means that.”

Rachel: Yeah, and when I mentioned in our [earlier, pre-podcast] conversation the idea of cost came up because a lot of the writing that I've done is about climate and coffee and agroforestry and different systems for sustainable production. And part of what's happening now is that in different sectors (whether it's agriculture or finance), there are people who are trying to put a price on carbon.

Which means that “we” as a global community are trying to calculate and put a number on things in the past where we have not put a number, meaning how much carbon is emitted, or how many metric tons of greenhouse gas are emitted from certain activities or are admitted from different land-use changes and things.

And so that thought, even though that seems super separate from the process of pricing coffee and price discovery on a futures market, is we're in this really interesting global moment where we're about to create a brand new market for something that has never had a price—that being emissions and greenhouse gas and carbon credits and cap-and-trade and all those different terms that are out there now in buzzwords now.

And actually the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) just added a new climate change futures contract that has to do with exactly that. And so there's about to be a trade for actual carbon credits, but before they even get through pricing the carbon credits themselves, there's ways to trade futures against these things.

So again, just to bring this all back to cost and price, I think that very often there are costs that are not necessarily dollar costs that are either not taken into account or not fully taken into account in the process of putting a value or price on something.

So in the past, looking at land-use change, or looking at emissions and greenhouse gas output, carbon footprint, [was all] maybe not taken into account in calculating the cost of doing business in a certain industry or in a certain way, or in a certain location. But if you suddenly decide that that cost matters enough to put a dollar amount on it, then the prices for things might change, or you might have a new thing that needs to be priced.

And so I think that's part of what's interesting in coffee, is that we as an industry are finally paying the full cost, meaning that at different points in history—and here's why I'll make a nod to the episode that you recorded with Maggy [Nyamumbo], where she talks about the colonial and the slave labor history that's involved in coffee—and for basically the first majority, the first half, more than half, or even through the present day, so much of the labor that goes into coffee production is either not accounted for at all or is only partially accounted.

So I call that “un-or-undercompensated labor.” And so, if the way that you're calculating a cost, which then helps you calculate your price for the physical trade of something, if that initial cost calculation doesn't account for paying a living wage to every person who does a job related to that product, then of course the price that you're discovering for the physical contract won't reflect the full cost.

And that is part of what skews the price that's discovered in the futures markets. So I think that the coffee industry has lots of great examples of where everyone in a production context is being fully compensated at or above a living wage. And I think those are wonderful, and there's more and more of [those examples] happening. But I think it's almost daunting to think that maybe even the price that we pay as consumers for so many things, whether it's clothes or food, that those prices do not account for the full cost, whether it's of different environmental impacts or of the full labor along an entire production chain.

And so that's where it brings it back to the consumer side, or to us. And that's why I think I have a hard time thinking about price just about coffee, because the same concepts apply to literally every other food stuff or final product that is available anywhere. If you want to know how we get the price of coffee, then that makes me want to know: How did we get the price of anything, like bread or eggs or milk or local fruits and vegetables with the clothes and the sneakers and cars? And these mechanisms of calculation go into all of it.

We're recording this during COVID-19, so as we see different things happen globally that are traceable and related to climate change and land-use change and our interaction with the environment and its interaction with us. If we start to have different methods for calculating costs, like really doubling down and saying, “Okay, how much does it cost to deforest this swath of land to then plant our food on? Like really, how much does it cost, not just in the dollar amount of planting it, but in the future problems that we're causing ourselves by emitting that much carbon from that land-use change?”

So as we change our calculation methods, I think that's also an opportunity to change our pricing methods, but then all of that comes back to us as consumers. And are we ready to spend more of our income on food, spend more of our income on clothes, if those prices change? So I think that's something else I always try to keep in mind with thinking about price and thinking about value is, if you value something, then that means that you understand that, “It's okay that I'm spending a greater percentage of the money that I have on something, because the true cost of it, or the full cost of all the different human labor that went into it, and all the different environmental sacrifices that went into it, has this much higher dollar amount. Am I ready individually to pay for that? Can I pay for that? What else has to happen in my life to possibly revalue some things?”

So yeah, I think it's tricky. There's a lot to be critical about, for sure, in having a futures exchange at the center of the pricing process for common goods. But then on the other hand, if we don't have that pricing process at the center and the cost of everything goes up significantly, are we still just as happy to abandon it? It's sort of like this cycle that we didn't ask to be a part of, but here we are.

And that brings us back to a lot of products going back to what I mentioned in our first conversation, about being interested in the locavore movements and what you can eat that's grown within a reasonable radius of where you live. And I think that there's some separate conversations that can be had about things that do have a local alternative versus coffee as a product, because it has to have a supply chain because it's growing conditions are limited.

Ashley: That's an interesting distinction there. When you circle back on all of this, it actually can come back to, “What can we consume locally? How do we make that chain between the person who makes the thing and the person who consumes the thing smaller, so there's not as much market interference?” I guess you would say.

But then again, coffee is one of those things that we can't do that with, but what I've seen, being really helpful in the coffee supply stream is this idea that the more that coffee is consumed within the country it's produced, the more that farmers are paid for it. So I wonder, where does that leave us? And I know you also mentioned, we're recording this during COVID-19, so this really could be a hard reset moment for us too.

Rachel: Yeah, and I think that's a great point. A lot of producers that I know, and those that I don't, it's all over the internet and also from people I've heard from directly, of producers setting up roasting operations and opening cafes and realizing they have this wonderful, delicious coffee. Well, of course the first people you want to share it with are the people closest to you, meaning your friends and families and neighbors and communities.

And so I think that's an exciting trend. If the more great coffee stays closer to where it was produced, if that means that, again, those of us that are importing it to other places, maybe we have to value it differently, I think that's totally fair. And I do think that this is an interesting moment of, like you said, a hard stop, or at least a pause on a lot of the coffee industry.

And it's difficult for many people, and it's difficult to try to wrap our heads around, in terms of hospitality and community and how we create that. And the experience of drinking coffee is something that's social, but we're socially distant and limited at this moment.

And I think it's a really great opportunity to step back again and consider some of what we talked about in this conversation and the previous one, that coffee is coffee. And so we've sort of created some distinctions and some divisions of specialty as being one thing and then non-specialty or commercial commodity coffee being something else. But just remembering that it all happens on the same continuum. The [COO] of Ally Coffee, where I work as the content manager in addition to my other freelance writing jobs, the COO there is Ricardo Pereira, and he mentioned in a recent interview this idea that we have more people brewing coffee at home now than probably ever before.

And so it's actually a really interesting moment to see what is a comfort coffee [for people]? What do they gravitate towards, or what resonates with them in this time of uncertainty and perhaps fear, worry, sometimes sickness, sometimes apprehension and all these different things that people are dealing with? Is there a way to deliver coffee that brings joy and connection and community to the consumers and the people who drink it, the clients who drink it and the families and homes where it's being brewed and prepared, but then also honors that full cost and that full price at origin?

Is there a way to strike a balance between something that satisfies both? And maybe part of that balance means honoring blended coffees or darker roasted coffees or coffees that are just satisfying in some immediate familiar way without going through that work of segmenting them off and differentiating them as specialty. And doing that and buying from producers, either their whole harvest or different portions of the production of a different farm or co-op or community, and what that might mean for them also during a time of uncertainty. So I do think that if we know that at the center of this pricing process and price discovery process is a tool that is very abstract and complex that you know, it certainly has its merits, but it certainly has its flaws.

And just being conscious of how we can connect with consumers through offering [other options]. I love blended coffees. I love medium-to-dark-roast coffee. I grew up in New Hampshire and we have some delicious dark roasts up there in the winter. That's the biggest treat, to just snuggle up with a cup of coffee that's chocolaty, almost smoky, nutty. And for me that's something that I associate with lots of great memories and people and connections and stuff.

And I think I'm not alone in having that experience. I think there's a lot of opportunity in creating connection and value in different ways with different types of coffee than maybe the specialty coffee industry has been fully open to in the past, but in this new reality that we're all living through right now, I think there's hopefully a lot of time to look at some of this stuff from these bigger-perspective, bigger-picture angles, and to maybe have a realization that we might not have had in the frenzy of everything that we were doing before.

Ashley: This has been maybe one of the most illuminating conversations I've ever had. I learned so much, and I appreciate you being so instructive and so clear and answering my pestering questions when I didn't understand what you were saying. So thank you Rachel so much for sharing your time. I really appreciate it.

Rachel: Thank you. Thank you so much for braving the abstractions and everything. And I hope for everyone listening that again, this was something that not just answered some questions, but opened some new questions. And again, I encourage everyone to try to do their own research and read lots of stuff and dig into whatever you can find out there.

Part One of this episode is available here.

Thanks for listening, please share with your friends, and leave a comment. This two-part episode is the last of our December Rewind series. See you in 2022!

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Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we’re bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, here’s a handy link to do so:

Today, we’re re-releasing our episode with Rachel Northrop. Rachel is a freelance writer; a PhD student at the University of Miami; the former content manager for Ally Coffee; and the author of the book When Coffee Speaks: Stories from and of Latin American Coffeepeople, which collects interviews with coffee farmers from South and Central America. At the time that she wrote When Coffee Speaks, Rachel was living in New York, and when the farmers she spoke to heard that, they asked her about coffee prices. Coffee is traded on the New York Stock Exchange, and they assumed that she’d be familiar with the system. She wasn’t—but she made it her personal project to learn more.

What she uncovered was dense and rich and informative, so we broke this episode up into two parts, which originally aired in October 2020. Part One is a breakdown of how coffee markets work, and Part Two looks at these markets with a critical eye, asking why this system continues to govern the sale of coffee—and who that hurts and leaves out in the process. Here’s Rachel.

Ashley: So before we get started with this conversation, I think it's going to be important to note that there are going to be a lot of really big ideas about how coffee futures and contracts, and the economic systems around coffee, are going to work. So let's start not in a complicated place. Rachel, I'm going to have you just talk a little bit about when you became interested in coffee.

Rachel: Thanks so much for having me on Boss Barista. For me, being curious about coffee started when I was working as a high school teacher in New York City, and every morning I would get my coffee—a small cup of black coffee for a dollar from one of those street carts on the corner. While I was teaching, I was also blogging a little bit about sustainable food and farmer's markets and some of these locavore restaurants and different eating styles that were coming up in New York about eating food that was grown locally.

And so I started to get curious about, “Huh, I get this coffee every day and I'm seeing coffees that are roasted locally, coming up at farmer's markets and other places.” But I sort of became curious about, “Where does my regular coffee come from? Where does my dollar-street-corner cup of coffee come from?”

So I ended up actually leaving my teaching position and taking about a year [off] in Central and South America, in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Panama, and Colombia, just trying to figure out a little bit about where coffee comes from and putting that together into a book of interviews that became When Coffee Speaks, is the title of that book.

And then while I was doing that, I also started freelance writing for two coffee publications, Tea & Coffee Trade Journal magazine in 2012, and then Fresh Cup Magazine in 2014. My coffee interest came from just being a very average coffee drinker, but then as soon as I got to Central America (Costa Rica was the first country where I started), I realized there were so many things that entered into coffee production that I really needed to go do my homework about.

There were people talking about hybrid varieties of plants and all these different agronomic systems, and I was like, “Oh, wait a minute. I'm an English teacher and a writer. I don't have my science chops like this.” And then during the process of interviewing people who were on the producing side or working at cooperatives, I would ask them questions and I would always give everyone an opportunity to ask me questions, just as part of the process of getting to know people and building trust and fairness.

When they heard I was from New York, one of the questions that was most commonly asked from Costa Rica through Panama into Colombia was people said, “Oh, you're from New York City. That's where the price of coffee comes from. What do you know about that?” And so they would ask me that and I would be like, “I don't know where the price comes from. That's not the part of New York City I live or work in.”

But that question kept coming up, and especially interesting was that association between New York City as this faraway place and it as the maker of a price. So that was a question that I didn't have an answer for when people were asking it to me, in the field that first year that I was in coffee, but it stuck with me. And as I put When Coffee Speaks together, I tried to explore it a little bit more. And I paid attention to the differences in systems for pricing between the different countries that I was in and tried to ask more questions about it. And then as I continued to do different freelance stories, I kept that question in mind and kept researching that in the background, and trying to piece together how I could answer that question, which turned into, about eight years later, still—

Ashley: I was going to say, we haven't answered that question yet, have we?

Rachel: Right, and I think that's what makes it a great question—but also a difficult one—is that it doesn't have an easy answer.

Ashley: So I think that that's actually a good framework to think of this conversation, that question of, “Where does the price of coffee come from?” And by no means are we going to, number one, answer that question, because you've been working on it for eight years. And, two, a lot of the things that you are probably sharing come from your background as a freelance journalist, as a researcher, as someone who doesn't trade coffee, but has studied it for the writing work that you do.

But before we get into that, I'm always really compelled by the little details of people's lives. It's kind of incredible that you had a question and you were like, “I'm going to go find it out. I have this cup of coffee in my hand and I'm going to go find out where this comes from.” Have you always been that kind of question-asker, a person who pursues questions as far as they go?

Rachel: Yeah, I'm sort of curious, but stubbornly so; probably far more than is good for me. That was actually how I learned to speak Spanish, by living in Spain. I was an exchange student for [my] junior year of high school. That was sort of the same thing where I just decided, “Huh, I wonder what it's like.” I grew up in New Hampshire in a small town, in the central mountains of New Hampshire. And so I just was like, “Huh, that seems interesting and different over there. I wonder what it's like.”

And then I just went and found out and then did the same thing with coffee, which actually was part of the reason why I was looking to [explore]. I love New York City and have a deep love, and always will have, for New York, but because I grew up in the mountains outdoors, at some point New York becomes a lot of city very quickly.

So that was why I was interested in getting to know a different part of the world and its mountains and its culture. And then using the Spanish that I learned from living abroad, so a lot of things just came together that ended up being something [that I did]. I had the Spanish from Spain, which is very much not tropical. It has agriculture, but certainly not coffee. And then I had the mountain experience from New Hampshire, and they converged in Central America.

So I was able to do the initial research and then I actually did return to teaching in New York for a few years after that, but continued the coffee freelance writing. It was in 2015 when I also started working for Ally Coffee as the content manager.

Working for an importing company, even though I'm not the one who does any of the coffee buying, that added another perspective in seeing how the supply chain operates, the flow; knowing about the timelines and some of the processes for physically purchasing coffee volumes from around the world.

Again, that was just another piece in getting to hear from different producers in different countries, and all these different pieces over time have contributed to me coming up with different ways to approach an answer to this question about where does this “magic number,” where does this price come from?

Ashley: Cool. So let's dive in and let's try to figure out at least some of the contributing factors to this number. So let's start, I guess, pretty broadly. And again we talked a little bit about this a little bit earlier, and we said this a little bit before we started recording, but a lot of this perspective that you're about to offer comes from your work as a freelance writer, and it's a question that you've been exploring for a long time. So where would we even start with a question like this? Where does the price of coffee come from?

Rachel: Yeah, it was interesting. And the thing that struck me, and why I decided to approach it from that original question that was asked of me, was that there was a very strong association among the producers in Central and South America between New York City and the price of coffee. And that struck me as odd because there are no coffee farms in New York City.

And so I was, I was sort of curious like, “Huh, why? I'm coming to where the coffee is. Why do they think the coffee price comes from where I come from?” And so what we've been alluding to here is the Coffee Futures Market, or what's called the “C market.”

So the Coffee Futures Market originally was traded [at] a physical trading floor in New York City, and now all of that trading happens digitally. It sort of happens everywhere. There are no floor brokers and no more pit trading for coffee at this time. But it was the New York Coffee Exchange that was in New York City, and that was where these futures contracts were traded. From that process a price is derived, and then ultimately that number that comes out of the daily trading in New York City (or currently on online platforms) yields a price that then translates to what producers see when they sell their coffee in Central America.

And so that understanding, that was why they were asking me that—that all producers know that in New York City, a price of coffee is discovered, or the price comes almost magically. And that's what's been interesting, is that's part of the actual truth of this, is that it sort of is magic about how a price is generated by a futures exchange. It's almost as mystical as people think it is. And then it's mythical, but at the same time, it's also very much math and technical.

Ashley: Some of the “mysticalness” that surrounds that is that it seems from—again, this might be me asking you to explain it to me like I'm a five-year-old—but it seems like a lot of these conversations are happening totally independent of where the actual coffee is coming from. So it involves no person who physically has the coffee to be like, “This is the price of the coffee. Here, I am selling it to you.” It's like, “I have this coffee and somewhere way far away, someone is using magical algorithms to figure out how much this thing that I currently have that I'm in charge of is worth.”

Rachel: Right. It's an interesting angle to approach the question, because from that perspective it does seem very nonsensical, this number is very much divorced from this thing that I've grown on my land over the course of the years and have been cultivating possibly for generations.

Just to back up, what I learned—and this is information that's out there and I encourage everyone to look this up and to research it—so what I’ll explain a little bit about now is just what a futures market is in general, and then I'll tie it back to coffee.

Ashley: Yes, I would love that.

Rachel: Yeah. So I do think language is powerful and that we should try to be as accurate as possible in whatever we're talking about. Even I have been saying so far, “the price of coffee,” but what happens is that the New York C-market price, that is a futures exchange, which means that that is a marketplace where contracts are traded. So that is a separate activity, what happens in New York City, so to speak, but it currently happens on [what is] called the Intercontinental Exchange [ICE], the owner of that marketplace of that exchange.

And again, that is a digital platform and you have to be a licensed broker, and there's a whole process to participate in trading on that exchange. And you can see all of that. And again, I encourage everyone to go to www.theice.com, [the website for] the ICE Intercontinental Exchange. Look up the specifications of that contract.

And just to get a sense of all the different products that are traded with futures, which include other agricultural things, metals, currencies, it starts to get really abstract, but basically what a futures exchange is, is there are contracts that correspond to physical units of coffee. So you can trade those contracts, meaning buy and sell those contracts and never see a green coffee bean in your life. And that is a very common way to participate in a futures exchange.

The futures exchanges in the U.S. go all the way back to the 1800s. The first one was in Chicago—the first one in the U.S.—and actually way back, they go [as far back as] rice exchanges in Japan in the 1600s. These are places where people will come and buy and sell these contracts as a way of anticipating what will or will not happen, or might or might not happen with the actual supply and demand of a product.

So you have a contract, and if you purchase that contract that entitles you to the delivery of the physical goods that matches the specifications on that contract. Vice versa, if you sell that contract, then you must deliver goods that match the specifications on that contract.

Ashley: But can I ask where the contracts come from?

Rachel: That's something that the exchange itself has set up, basically, the terms of the contract. You actually don't physically receive a piece of paper that you can hold. It's your broker who would manage the call, your position, how many contracts you have. And again, there's a whole system, and this is similar to if you know anything about stock trading, in some ways it's similar. But futures contracts have expiration dates. They have certain months of the year when they expire, and certain days. There's a whole trading calendar, again, on the ICE website. I encourage you to go and just take a peek.

But these contracts, if they expire, you either owe the physical good, or you must receive the physical good as specified on that contract. But that’s the last way [it happens]. They call that “the buyer and seller of last resort.” That's fairly uncommon.

What most people will do is that they will either buy back a contract that they've sold or sell a contract that they've bought. They call it “closing a position,” or undoing the position that you took in the market. There's a way to do that as a hedge, meaning as a protection for whatever you're physically buying and selling in real containers of coffee, but you can also buy and sell these contracts purely with the hope that the value of them will change in your favor, which is speculation.

And again, this is something that exists. There are futures contracts for cotton, for soy, for cocoa, for sugar, for corn, wheat, all sorts of stuff. And again, different participants in the futures market have different goals. Some people trade contracts in order to, what they call “lock in,” or protect a price, meaning that you want to use a future contract to know what you will pay for a product in the future.

And we won't get into [that]. Again, I am not a trader. I'm not providing anyone any instructions or advice for how to hedge or how to speculate; none of that. But there's a way—just trust me on it—that you can use the trading of futures contracts to what they call again “protect a price.” Sometimes that's described as a risk management tool.

But then there's other people who buy and sell contracts for speculative purposes, meaning that they hope that the sale of those contracts or the purchase of those contracts will work in their favor, and earn them a profit just on those transactions, [and] for them it doesn't matter whether or not it correlates to a physical unit of coffee.

That's a very, very brief overview of how an exchange operates, and they call that whole process “price discovery,” which, again, that's the part that does feel a little bit mystical in this way, that there are just people, whoever they are—and that's actually something else the exchange guarantees, is anonymity—so that when you buy and sell a contract, you don't know who the other party is.

The exchange acts as [a sort of] clearing house in the middle. And part of the way that works is that way it's like a guarantee, because you're trading through a clearing house, you know that you'll receive—or you know that you'll owe—whatever the amount is. And there's very, very clear procedures for all of this in how these transactions actually take place.

There's something called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) that oversees all of this and regulates it and sort of audits and checks to make sure that everything's happening the way it should—and the exchange itself, like the “house,” doesn't play, so to speak, so that the owners of the marketplace do not buy and sell in the market. They just operate and “oversee the orderly operations of the exchange,” I think is how they phrase it.

At this point it's even more abstract again, because everything happens online and there are no longer floor brokers gathering in the same room together in front of a ticker in New York City. Now all the brokers and traders just work from wherever they are in the world. That's the process of price discovery, is that the price that's generated every day is just the results of every trade that was placed. So the price moves up and down as people buy and sell contracts at either higher or lower prices.

And again, those are futures contracts, so that does not mean that everyone who's buying and selling in the futures market has any intention or any interest in ever buying or selling green coffee. In that sense, the two are totally separate, meaning that you can buy and sell futures contracts and never see a green coffee bean. And in that way they're separate.

But getting back to the question of coffee that people want to know is, “Why is that [the] price that those people are ‘discovering’ somewhere?”

Ashley: Right—how's that related to what actually happens at origin?

Rachel: Right? How does that mean that when I go to the co-op on Wednesday, that that's going to be the number that I'm paid for my coffee, or when I go to the intermediary to deliver my green coffee? And so that's where, again, what I'm about to explain is from just a theoretical overview, the conceptual process of how this works.

One of the things I've certainly learned, too, is that part of the reason it's really hard to talk about this stuff in general terms is because—I would say it's probably safe to say that every single coffee transaction is unique. If you go through the whole chain of how a container of coffee got from origin to a roastery, there's probably something unique about every single one of those transactions, meaning the order in which people confirmed, how much they wanted, how much they wanted to pay for it, what the quality was, which port it’s going to.

All those things, they all have to happen, and they all have to happen more or less in the same order, but it's by no means a scientific process.

Ashley: Why is that? Is that because of different customs and different countries, or you mentioned even just the ports that they can enter? Why is that not uniform?

Rachel: Yeah, that's part of the beauty of the physical trade, and that's what people will recognize in the basket of things that can be called direct trade, is that sometimes a transaction is initiated by a producer offering someone coffees. Sometimes the transaction is initiated by a roaster seeking out coffees. Sometimes it's initiated by a connective business, like an exporter or an importer, either offering coffee or sourcing coffee for someone, or looking to fill their spot position.

So based on all those many ways that a transaction can be generated, everything else happens in slightly different orders, just depending on when those pieces all fall into place. So the way that then translates to these pricing mechanisms is that one benefit of this “mystical”—it’s not mystical, but—one benefit of this price-discovery process is that the number that is generated every day, that everyone sees as the C-market price, that number is one number, and it's visible to everybody.

And this visibility has actually increased with the internet, meaning that maybe at different points in time this number was not visible to certain people in the supply chain. But certainly with the internet and certainly with better connectivity and improved dissemination of information in different ways, this number is not something that the exchange hides. It's not something that they delay. You don't have to pay to see it. It's something that is publicly visible. It's reported by all the different news outlets that report on markets and things. And it's basically public, open, free information, and everyone can see it. And so the benefit of having a single price that's publicly shared is that then you can use that as a benchmark and everyone is seeing the same benchmark.

That's sort of where I think it's interesting, at least for me in this process of trying to understand the futures market—especially at this [time that’s] being called the price crisis, and watching prices fluctuate, knowing that they're below the cost of production for probably the majority, if not the vast majority, of coffee producers in the world—that the C market has gotten a lot of flack for generating a number that doesn't cover the cost of production for people.

But I think one of the things that I've tried to understand through the different years and angles of looking at this is trying to understand what the “tool” itself [a futures market], what that “tool” is designed to do.

And then from there you can sort of look at, “Okay, is the ‘tool’ being used correctly? Is it being used as it was designed? Or is it maybe being misused?” Which then leads to other questions of, “If the tool itself is being used correctly, then maybe there's a flaw in its design, or maybe that tool is not the tool that we need for this job.”

And so looking at some of those questions, you can be critical of this tool and its role in the coffee trade, or the futures market’s role in the cocoa trade or in cotton and corn and soy and all sorts of other things. But it's also interesting to look at [how] it works, and to question if maybe there's also elements of this tool that are successful and that are positive.

And I do think one of those things is the fact that when you get one number that is visible to everybody, then everyone can use that as a benchmark, and there's not a question of, “Oh, you just made up this number because it serves you.” So even though it's this sort of nameless, faceless “price discovery” process, because it's nameless and faceless almost makes it fair in one sense, meaning that it's discovered by everyone's collective activity together.

And because it's the result of the market rather than the result of some individual naming a number, then everyone can use it for what they call “fix contracts,” or to “finalize contracts.” And there's a couple different ways, again, where that might be useful to you because you're also hedging, so that if you have a price where you fix a contract for physical coffee, you might use that same price when you're doing your hedging activity also.

But there's a huge qualification to that, which is how do you then say something is fair if you know it's not performing this other very important function of compensating people? I think one of the things to keep in mind, and what I've noticed about the stated goals of a futures exchange—which are to provide price discovery and to offer opportunities for hedging and price risk management, and then to be a buyer and seller of last resort—but those are all goals that are designed to facilitate the trade of products.

Unfortunately, in that design, there's not any stated goal that says, “We will make sure this number is either fair to the people who are producing the raw material or, on the flip side, that it's fair to the consumer and that we won't let it get above a certain point because then no one can afford something.”

So that's where there's other mechanisms, either for international agreements or regulations from different bodies, whether it's exporting countries, importing countries, there's sort of a bunch of other things that have come into play at different points in history. You can look at something like oil, which is also a commodity, but has the OPEC—essentially a cartel—to inform its prices in ways that coffee doesn't.

So you have a features exchange, which one of its benefits is that it generates something that everybody can see at the same time to collectively use as their benchmark, but then one of its huge drawbacks is: What if that number is very un-useful to you?

And so I think that's part of the reason why we've seen in the coffee industry a whole bunch of different ways to buy and sell coffee that don't rely on the price “discovered” by the C-market. And so I think that's something else important to note, is that price again exists, but there's no obligation to make that the price that you pay.

Ashley: Right, and we talked about that a little bit before with direct trade or even just some sort of interaction between producers and roasters—roasters can pay whatever they want or importers can pay whatever they want. Just because the C-market is a certain price doesn't mean that they're obligated to pay that price. I think I'm going to try to summarize what you just said. I think I'm going to try it. I'm gonna see what happens, just to make sure that I understand it.

So it seems like, number one, it's important to look at what the point of a futures exchange is. And I might ask some more clarifying questions on this, but it seems like the point of a futures exchange or a futures market is to make sure that there's at least any sort of benchmark that there is at least some benchmark to talk about the price of coffee, as opposed to, there is no benchmark, so you could pay a hundred dollars or you can pay 2 cents. It at least somewhat limits the range that we're talking about.

And two, that you have some frame of reference so that it doesn't change. I mean, obviously the price of coffee changes day to day, but I'm imagining two people and it's like, “You're going to get 50 cents for this per pound and you're going to get $4 per pound.” It's like, “Wait, what? Why is this different?” Does that somewhat make sense?

Rachel: Yeah, yes, all of that is in there. And I think one point to make to explain why a futures market exists … again, I'm very slow to form opinions, so I have no opinions on what the right tool is or what the best tool is. I think that's why it's so important to look case by case. If you're buying a hundred containers of coffee every month, maybe you do something different than if you buy one container of coffee a year.

I think the same way that we say in specialty coffee, “There's a home for every coffee, and a coffee for every home,” that's the same with all these different tools too. I think you can look at what the best use is for each tool and what the best tool is for each situation and go from there.

This is just one in our basket of tools, but part of the reason that futures exchanges evolved was to limit the ability of one or a few people to manipulate the physical supply of something and therefore manipulate its price to falsify a supply and demand by stockpiling something and then releasing it.

If you can imagine back in the [early and mid 1800s], coffee's still what they call “break bulk,” [being transported] in the bellies of the ships. Today, there's still limited ports in the world and limited warehouses compared to the number of roasteries or farms. So if you own several of those in a region of the world, you could theoretically stockpile the coffee to make it very scarce and drive up the price. And then you'd be the first one to flood the market, get the high price. And then all of a sudden the price drops and anybody else who's trying to sell coffee has that low price.

Or the same thing could happen with weather events. You could have these frosts or other extreme weather events come through that all of a sudden eliminate supply and have these very brusque changes, either literal or manipulative ones in physical stocks, which would then create these shocks in the price of something based on how much everyone's willing to pay for it and what it's worth on the street, if you will.

So part of what a futures exchange hoped to do was provide some stability, meaning, “Okay, we don't know what the price is going to be three months from now, but if you trade this contract at a certain price, you can effectively guarantee yourself this price trading this contract now, and then paying whatever the price is. Once it actually comes time that you are ready to buy and sell this physical coffee, and then if you net the two of them, it will even out to the price you want.”

So that's sort of the concept of the hedging function. But it gives people a tool. And again, because everyone can see the same price at the same time, it gives everyone theoretically the same ability to hedge. And I do think one of the things that I've noticed is that hedging and using the price protection tools or risk management tools available from the futures market is a lot more common in the middle and downstream parts of the chain—meaning connected businesses and roasters—and a lot of that has to do with things like financing.

Just the dollar amount that it costs to buy and sell these contracts, each contract corresponds to a container of coffee, so they're very expensive. And there's also options against these contracts, which gets into a whole other level of derivative products.

Ashley: Oh gosh. I was just about to go backwards a little bit and ask you about the idea of hedging. Cause you've mentioned it a couple of times, but I'm not 100% sure I understand it. So can you go backwards and explain a little bit what hedging means?

Rachel: Yes, so again, this is just a very theoretical overview. This is not what I do in my day, so what I'm presenting is sort of a conceptual way to understand the tool versus any tips on how to use it. But what hedging allows you to do is essentially set the price that you'll pay for something or that you'll sell something at in the future. And the way that happens is through trading futures, contracts that correspond to your physical coffee contracts.

Basically they're a way to make sure that the coffee C-market doesn't move wildly outside of your favor. Because imagine that you agreed to a contract at a certain price and then six months from now, when you want to deliver that coffee to whoever you sold it to, the market had dropped and somebody says, “I don't want to get it from you. I'm going to go get it where it's cheaper.”

Basically, hedging allows you to have these contracts for physical coffee, where people are more likely to honor the price of those physical contracts if they also have a corresponding position in the futures market, that when they net the two of them, when they balance out the two of them, gives them a price that's favorable to them.

So again, it's sort of tricky to explain without actually getting into numbers and seeing it [in action], which I don't quite want to go down that path, but basically it's a way of protecting yourself from the price either moving way up or way down. Because again, you probably know how much coffee you need as a roaster a couple of months before you need it. Or the same thing as a producer, you know, as you're harvesting the coffee, you know about how much you have to sell.

And in that meantime, you don't want either the price to bottom out on you if you're trying to sell something and you don't want it to skyrocket if you're trying to buy something. So you can effectively lock in the price of the moment by buying or selling your contract at that price, and then you do have to either buy or sell that contract back to close out your futures market position.

And then at the same time you're buying and selling the physical coffee, and the sum of those two transactions or the difference in those two transactions, the transaction that happens entirely in the futures market and then the transaction that happens entirely with the physical coffee. But those two, when you take the difference between them will equal out to a price that you can calculate in advance essentially.

So it's basically not just to protect against these huge movements going in the opposite direction, but by using different hedging tools, it also just gives you the ability to forecast and sort of know, more or less, what you're going to pay for coffee over a period of time versus just waiting to see what the market does or whether it goes up and down. And without worrying about someone defaulting on physical contracts that you have with them. So does that help?

Ashley: That did help a lot. And I think we emailed about this a little bit and mentioned it kind of casually. I had a feeling that this episode might need to be broken up into two parts because we've barely scratched the surface of the outline we made. So with that in mind I want to ask you one final question before we transition into the next part of this.

But something that I find really interesting throughout all this talk about the C-market as a tool and the way of thinking about this as a tool for a very specific purpose is the marketing and language around the C-market price versus direct trade, or some sort of other relationship-based coffee price system. Because I think for so long as I know, as an educator in the past, I've been taught that we are meant to promote this idea that we pay more than the C-market price.

We pay more than what is on the futures exchange because it's like a dollar per [any given commodity]. And I think it's interesting to almost completely untether that from what essentially we tell ourselves we do in the specialty market which is, “Oh, we pay more,” but these two things are obviously relational because it's coffee. But at the same time, and you mentioned this earlier, the C-market doesn't have to necessitate anything about what we actually pay for coffee.

So with that in mind I was wondering, does that ever bother you? Do you ever notice that same sort of rhetoric?

Rachel: I think that's part of why I wanted to accept your invitation, to talk here on Boss Barista, was just to help clarify, because I think, again, this is very abstract. I describe it as thinking that algebra makes sense. You know? It checks out. Logically algebra is sound, but algebra is not common sense. That logic wouldn't check out if someone didn't sit you down and force you to solve for X a hundred times until you got it.

And so thinking about all this stuff like hedging and futures is kind of the same. Logically it checks out. It does make sense. It does all work when you calculate it. It's been around for 100-150 or so years—I think it was 1882 or something [when] the coffee exchange opened.

So clearly there's a logic to it that works for some people and among them some exporters and some large producer groups, but it's not common sense. And so I think that's where it's tricky, is that if you're a producer or if you're a roaster, or if you're just someone at the grocery store, these things don't make sense unless you've sat down and tried to piece the algebra of them together.

I think that's where it just gets tricky, because while some of the statements people might make about paying more for coffee than what's on the C-market might be true, I do think that sometimes they're not necessarily the most relevant attribute to highlight about the process of making that coffee. And I think sometimes it can create a little bit of noise where maybe there doesn't need to be noise.

Because, again, everyone decides at their own business, and at their own individual level, how they come about agreements and how they want to honor them. Hedging is a tool that makes it easy to honor your agreements, because you know that you sort of have insurance against [them], that there won't be some price movement that somehow makes that contract that you want to honor because you're friends with somebody—if that becomes a financially dangerous decision, then what do you do?

That's part of where, again, one tool is that [hedging] lets you see into the future or trade into the future on a futures exchange. To avoid having to ask those questions of, “Oh, we have this contract at a certain amount, but now the market is doing something totally different. Do we honor this contract that we made or do we go with either someone who's going to pay more because the market's more, or do we go with buying something cheaper because it's now available cheaper?”

But again, depending on how you run your business, just whether the size of it, the type of coffee, all those different questions, the relationship you have with the people you're sourcing from, you can draft physical contracts at literally any price you want, and you can honor them no matter what that market is doing.

But again, I think it's kind of hard to explain how—not revolutionary, but how wild that might seem to just say, “We honored our fixed price contract that was for a very high number, even though we could buy coffee very cheaply over here.” That's sort of a harder one-liner to pitch, I guess.

Sometimes I'm also curious about how much those claims resonate with consumers or resonate with people who drink coffee. I think that's another piece of this, is that not only is the aspect of futures market and price discovery not necessarily common knowledge to every single person who works in the coffee industry, it's not necessarily common knowledge to every single person who's buying coffee. So that's where I always want to make sure in the writing and everything I do, I always want to make sure that I know what I'm talking about before I talk about it.

And so that's something I think is tricky with price because again, it's something everybody interacts with every day at their companies. You know how much you have to go through the process of either buying coffee or pricing your retail bags or something, and your consumers see the price of coffee at the grocery store. They see the price of a latte at a certain cafe.

So it's something we all interact with daily, so it feels very familiar on a lot of levels, but again, there's all of these processes in the middle that come from these fairly sophisticated and very abstract—but also very logical—tools like futures trading.

And that also informs everything, you know, the cost of other normal household goods that include basic grains or even there's contracts for live hogs, there's contracts for metals, there's contracts for orange juice concentrate. I mean, this has a lot to do with how the grocery trade evolves and everything too. So yeah, it’s a little bit tricky to single coffee out in that way when it's found with all these other systems.

Ashley: I have a lot more questions to ask you, which will come up in the second half of this interview.

Part Two of this episode is available now.

Thanks for listening, please share with your friends, and leave a comment. This two-part episode is the last of our December Rewind series. See you in 2022!

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Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we’re bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, here’s a handy link to do so:

Today, we're re-releasing our episode with Maggy Nyamumbo. Maggy is the founder of Kahawa 1893, a social enterprise aimed at connecting farmers directly to consumers in an attempt to get more money back to farmers. Maggy is a trained economist—she graduated from Smith College in 2011, went to the London School of Economics, got her MBA at Harvard, worked for the World Bank and on Wall Street ... and in this episode, she breaks down the economic dynamics of coffee pricing. Coffee is a global commodity that passes through hundreds of hands before getting to your cup, and Maggy illuminates how there's so much money in coffee, but rarely does that money go to farmers and workers.

This is a really dense episode—when we first aired it in November of 2019, someone told me that they took out a pen and paper to write down many of Maggy's arguments. I hope you learn as much as I did from this conversation. Here's Maggy:

Ashley: So if you're in an elevator with somebody, what would be your elevator pitch for what you do?

Maggy: Yeah, so Kahawa 1893 is a farm-to-cup coffee company. The way we define that is, I’m a third-generational coffee farmer. My family has a coffee farm in Western Kenya where we process our coffee together with other neighboring farms in the area in a cooperative. We then import the coffee into San Francisco. We roast the coffee locally here and we distribute it to specialty coffee shops, specialty grocery, offices, direct-to-consumer, Amazon … all of those channels.

I started Kahawa 1893 with a goal of essentially creating a better supply chain for farmers in Kenya to get a living wage for the coffee that they produce. The biggest issue with the coffee industry has been that farmers don't make enough money to live off of because the global coffee prices have been low-cost to production.

Kenya, where I'm from, has one of the highest costs of production, actually, because of the kind of coffee that they produce and how they've decided to produce it. So it's very expensive to produce, and farmers getting really low prices for that means that a lot of farmers are not making money growing coffee. So for me when I saw the specialty coffee movement growing, and Kenya having a really good profile in specialty coffee, I thought that I could help farmers get direct access to markets and hopefully be able to make a living wage out of a coffee.

Ashley: It's interesting [your background] because you grew up in Kenya, you've been on farms, you've picked coffee, but then you didn't grow up wanting to be a coffee farmer. You actually studied finance and economics. Can you talk a little bit about the trajectory that took you to this moment of starting Kahawa 1893?

Maggy: Yeah, so it's funny. Growing up in Kenya and around coffee … so coffee has always been known as a “poverty crop.” It's essentially a catch-22 almost: “Are coffee farmers poor because they grow coffee or do poor people grow coffee?”

Coffee is considered a poverty crop because for a long time it hasn’t really delivered for farmers. Before the ’60s, farmers were actually able to make money growing coffee. Coffee was a crop that middle-class coffee farmers in Kenya could grow and actually educate their children with, and this was because there was a fixed system. Essentially there was an international coffee cartel that controlled the price of coffee and was able to maintain that price in relation to cost of production. After that failed, the prices plunged and now the prices have been low [compared to the] cost of production for most farmers.

Growing up, instead of seeing how coffee farmers struggled, including my family, that was the last thing that I wanted to go back to. [It was] something that you did because you had nothing else to do. It was really the last thing that was available for you to do. When I moved to the U.S., I went to college, got my MBA, I worked at the World Bank, and worked on Wall Street. And when I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, I was funnily enough attracted to go back into coffee because of my background.

When I was working on Wall Street, I was looking at different industries, and I was very surprised to see what was happening in the coffee industry. First I saw that there was a lot of consolidation going on in the coffee industry, but I also saw that there was a lot of growth within [the specialty coffee industry], which means that farmers could differentiate themselves.

I was thinking that there actually could be a way for me to apply my skill set in the industry to be able to differentiate my farmers and also be able to help them get the gains from specialty coffee.

Ashley: So your focus is primarily on Kenya, which makes sense, because that's where you're from. I was wondering if you could provide some context about the specialty coffee market in Kenya in particular, because it is very unique both because of quality, but because of its history as well.

Maggy: Yeah, so a little bit on the history of coffee. As you know, coffee was first grown in East Africa, the original place [was] in present-day Ethiopia, but back then there were no borders. So where we are in Kenya, it's in that region of the world where coffee grows sort of naturally on its own.

And then, it was brought over to the Middle East in Yemen, and then it went to Europe and then Europeans brought it to Latin America, and Brazil was the largest coffee-growing country. During the slave trade, Brazil received, I think, five times the number of slaves that came to America, and that was because of coffee.

Coffee is an industry that is very labor-intensive and requires a lot of free labor. And so, for Brazil, coffee was such a big crop for them, and even when the New World abolished slave labor, Brazil would not let go because they really needed slave labor for the coffee industry. And that's why Brazil was the last country to abolish slave labor in 1888.

And so the reason we're actually named 1893 is because I like to go back to the history of where coffee started in Kenya, and kind of rethink how I could have built that system better if I’d existed. And so what happened is, in 1888, when the slave trade was actually abolished in Brazil, the European trading companies needed a new source of labor.

So then they came to Africa in, you know, starting in 1890. By 1893, they had set up plantations in Kenya, so Kenya was colonized by the British. The British came in and pushed the locals away from very fertile land, they set up estates and plantations there, and then employed the local people—well, not employed, but obviously used them as free labor.

And so we see that Kenya as a country is founded on producing coffee. It was coffee that Britain wanted out of Kenya—still wants out of Kenya, because Kenya still supplies a lot of its coffee to British companies. That's actually part of our independence deal that we made with Britain.

One thing that people don't realize is when African countries got their independence, it wasn't a freedom out of the blue. We made deals with our colonial countries, so Kenya made a deal with Britain. It's like, we're going to have the white settlers give up their power locally, but they need you to provide, to keep providing the free labor. They need all the people that have been working on the farms to keep providing free labor. And that's kind of the system that we see still right now that continues on the continent—in Kenya, especially.

And I'll touch on this a little bit, on a big question I get about Kenyan coffee, which, as you know, is the most expensive origin in the market in general. It's going for about $5 a pound versus the $1 market rate. But the average farmer out of that gets about 20 cents. A cooperative that's doing really well would get 80 cents a pound.

And why is that? A lot of that money is being captured by the colonial companies that are still in Kenya. That's something that's been going on since colonialism, and that's something that's continuing because Kenya is a neo-colonial state. So we have full freedom, but we're still canonically colonized by Europe.

Ashley: I think it's really important to talk about the pervasiveness of colonialism, because I think when you talk about the end of slavery in certain countries at different years, it seems like, ‘Oh, that's so far away,’ but at the same time, we're still seeing these effects really concretely. And it essentially translates into a different form of labor that's undervalued or free. Which I think is really, really important to remember.

Maggy: Yeah, and it's one thing that's sort of key to Kenya in particular because of how we produce our coffee. We produce our coffee in cooperatives, and we have to do it a certain way, and this way is codified in the law. It's like institutionalized racism in the law of things that we can and cannot do to make sure that we're getting British coffee companies the coffee that they need.

And so when I speak to the coffee industry people about, you know, “Why are we still not getting money to Kenyan families?” And then they're like, “Oh, Kenyan farmers are not productive enough.” And then I'm like, “Okay, so why are they not productive?” It’s because they have to produce coffee a certain way. It's the law of how they have to produce.

And it's one of those things where “Big Coffee” has put different countries into different buckets of what they should produce. They have Brazil producing a certain type of coffee. They have Vietnam producing a certain type of coffee. And they have different countries helping them develop their menu, but they want to pay a Kenyan farmer that's producing coffee manually the same price they're paying someone producing mechanical coffee in Brazil.

So that's part of the issue of where we have Kenyan farmers producing coffee in a way that essentially is producing a really high-quality cup of coffee. But they're still not getting compensated for that labor that goes into that. But then they actually can’t change it even if they want it because there's a law. So if you're a [multinational corporation] and you have a small country that you want to do something, you can just tell them that.

Farmers are not allowed to even stop growing coffee without a permit. So you need a permit to stop growing coffee. You'll be fined if you actually cut down your trees. There are a lot of ways that [multinational corporations], like Starbucks and Nestle, can force small countries to do things that serve them better than what small holders really need.

And the example where we see that really done well is in Kenya. Kenya is the exact opposite of Brazil. They’re really two opposite [countries]. Brazil [produces] high-volume, mechanized [coffee], and Kenya [produces] low-volume, really manual, higher-quality coffees. But Big Coffee wants to pay the same price for those two coffees.

So the farmer in Kenya with a small farm doesn't have the productivity of Brazil. And the way that we've been able to maintain this comes to how we legitimize it. Kenya has an auction system that legitimizes that kind of system. So it says that, “Okay, so we have an auction, which means this is fair.” But it's really not fair. When you go into the process of how the auction works, you realize that the auction makes that process of oppression legitimized.

Ashley: Right, and it goes back to the ideas that you were talking about, institutionalized racism and racism essentially being written into the laws and the way that coffee farmers can even interact with the things that they produce.

Maggy: Yes, they're forced to do things a certain way that don't serve them necessarily, but they serve the needs of Big Coffee. So when you think about it, right—and we'll talk about this a little bit more—which comes to the crux of the crisis, right? So especially when we think about the current coffee prices, the only two countries that can really survive at the current price point are Brazil and Vietnam. Those are the only two countries that can produce coffee.

So can you imagine what would happen to the specialty coffee industry, which is really the higher-value part of the industry? If all the other countries suddenly stopped producing coffee, what would happen to the specialty coffee industry, and what would happen to the value of coffee? So I think that's one of the questions that goes through my mind is, “How do we think about pricing the coffee in Brazil and Kenya in the same way, when they're really two very different products that we use?” Like, imagine a Blue Bottle or a Stumptown, just with Brazil and Vietnam coffee. How does that look?

Ashley: Right. Something that I think that you do really well is that you're able to break down these problems in a very succinct and understandable manner. I wonder, with the limitations in the Kenyan coffee market that you outlined, how does someone like you as an entrepreneur start to think, “Oh, these are ways we can start to solve these problems?”

Maggy: In the Kenya case, and in the discussion that you had with Vava [Angwenyi], she explained how, because of the way the system is set up, it's really institutionalized in a way that only European companies can export that coffee. And even to go an extra mile, in the law for a long time, you were not allowed to roast coffee independently. And that's why Kenyans didn’t drink coffee up until recently.

That was one way to make sure that Kenya was only for extracting green coffee. You could not roast it. And right now in Europe, they have prohibitive import taxes, which means that even if Kenyan farmers—they need to be like Hawaii, where they have their own brands. And that's what we're trying to do with Kahawa, is being able to roast [under] their own brands. That way they can capture the end value, which is where most of the value right now sits.

That to me is how I see farmers in Kenya who have really great coffee, delicious coffee that should still exist in the market, but the current pricing dynamics make it almost impossible for anyone to make a living out of coffee. But if there was a way for them to do direct-to-consumer, and be able to cut to that last mile—which is where most of the profits are—then we can actually start to think of a business model that fits. And so for us, my goal when I started Kahawa was, “How do we get money in their hands?”

So you know, how do we get money? We can’t change the system on Day 1, as, you know, it's institutionalized for a reason, so you can’t change it on Day 1. So what can you do? For me, [since I am in America], I actually have access to that end market, right? What if I could cut to that value of the end market and share it with the farmers?

So that's what Kahawa was. And specifically for me in Kenya, there's this statistic that you really should know about: Over 90% of the labor comes from women. The labor on the farm, the labor in processing … all of that labor-intensive work is done by women. And there's a reason for that, right? Because it's unpaid work.

The logic here is, think of a male person in Kenya. They're too proud to do work for free, men. Men of any color are too proud to do work for free. And so they're like, “Okay, I can get a dollar at the market. My coffee is worth $5, but the market is willing to pay [only] a dollar for it. I'm not willing to work for a dollar. But you know what I can do? I can push my wife, who I control, and my children, who I control ... I can put them to work and then get a dollar. So their work is worth $5. So I'm deploying $5 worth of work to get a dollar back.”

And that's really what's happening. We're seeing the direction of race and gender, where we're seeing sort of marginalized groups along the racial lines, and then marginalized gender is being pushed by society to provide free labor.

In the U.S. we think of free labor as sort of the work that we women are doing for free at home, right? The cooking, the childcare that we're doing for free, and [we’re] not rewarded. But in coffee, the system has figured out how to actually mobilize that free labor at the farm level.

And also in Bangladesh, they also have done that in the sweatshops. It's a similar dynamic, but now at the farm level. So you're able to, without saying it, you're pushing men to put up the women to work for free or a pittance, for like a discount, obviously a 20% discount.

Ashley: That's such a powerful metaphor to use, especially when you equate it to the ways that we understand unpaid labor in the United States. We understand that as the cooking and the cleaning, but then you just spread it outward and that's exactly what's happening. And in a lot of coffee-producing countries, like Kenya.

Maggy: You hear the question a lot of, “Okay, the market will correct. The market will correct.” Because if farmers can’t sustain these prices, why do they keep producing? Right. That's the question you hear, right? That’s what the main defense from Big Coffee has been. “We're trying to correct the market, because if these prices aren't sustainable, then why are people producing?” But what they’re not understanding is that more and more marginalized people are being pushed to provide free labor. So the children, the women are being pushed to provide free labor.

Ashley: That's such a powerful point, and I wonder, as an economist, how do you take that perspective of using the market to both solve this problem, but also to really explain how the market is failing? Because what you just said about how marginalized people will often have to take up the brunt of the work that others don't or aren’t willing to do is super powerful. I've heard that before too, that, “The market will correct,” and, “Why would this happen if the market wasn't going to correct for it?” So how do you rectify that?

Maggy: Yeah, that's the [moral of the story]. If you push a Big Coffee person to the wall, that's kind of their moral standing of, “I'm paying market prices because that's what's good for us; because that's how the market will correct.” But they know that the market will not correct. It's going to be in oversupply for a long time. And so that's a really good question.

When I think about the current coffee crisis, which I think about all the time, and going back to [me being a] Black woman in coffee, [I am someone who embodies] the two things that the industry exploits for profitability: racial inequality and gender inequality. Those are the two kinds of elements that are holding coffee profitability intact. If we were suddenly to attain racial equality and gender equality, and we actually had to pay what it costs to produce coffee, do you think we would need a new business model for coffee or not?

Ashley: Absolutely, we would!

Maggy: So that’s really something for a lot of people to think about. As much as we're pushing equality, racial and gender equality, if we were to pay minimum wage for production to produce coffee, coffee would not be served the way that it's served today. So that's something for people to really think about.

But back to your question of what are the issues that are really affecting price—so there's three things, and I'm going to “bucket” them into three areas. The first one is that we hear a lot that there's an oversupply, so there's too much coffee being produced relative to demand. You've heard that one, right? And then the second one is, there is too much speculation on Wall Street. Wall Street is where the coffee prices are determined. [The theory is that] there are traders that are speculating on what the future prices are going to be and that's getting out of hand. It's becoming disconnected from the realities of the cost of production.

And to pause there a little bit, it makes sense because, remember, when the coffee business model was designed, labor was a non-issue because labor was considered to be free. So labor was either something that was going to be free from slaves—when you paid for your slaves at the slave market, you had already paid for your labor going forward, right? It's like buying a house—or in Africa, the labor was going to be free because you just forced the natives to work for free.

So the only two things that you were thinking about were diseases and climate change. And our market still behaves that way because that's the business model. Labor is still assumed to be free. So unless we change that idea that we need to specifically start paying for labor and change the business model, that's something that speculation will always be trading, like in the 1800s.

And the third point is that it's a fact that Big Coffee is unwilling to pay for Black and Brown labor. So those are the three elements. Do you agree with them? Are those three points you've heard people talk about?

Ashley: I don't think anyone has ever used the term “Big Coffee” before, which I find really fascinating because you use it a lot. And I think it is really helpful to think about how powerful actors, like the ones that you mentioned earlier, can influence the politics of an entire country.

Maggy: Yeah, I call them Big Coffee. And later on, I’ll tell you how Big Coffee behaves a lot like Big Tobacco and Big Pharma. And we have to start thinking about them that way.

But anyways, so three things: One is there's an oversupply, the second one is speculation is messing up the prices, and the third is that Big Coffee is unwilling to pay for Black and Brown labor under any circumstances, regardless of what else is going on. And so for me, when I think about those three things, they're all true. Those three things are all actually interacting. What we have again is Big Coffee being unwilling to pay for Black and Brown labor, which is essentially using the Wall Street market to legitimize, similar to how we use the auction in Kenya to legitimize that market.

You can think of Wall Street as a place where you legitimize. You don't want to pay for labor. So think of it: If there was no Wall Street and Nestle had to pay for coffee and they decided to pay a dollar now, people would complain. We'd be like, “Nestle, you cannot pay that. You need to pay the market price.” But now Nestle can pay a dollar and say, “The market has approved that I should pay that price.” And so I think the best way to think about it is that Big Coffee is now using the market to hide behind not wanting to pay for Black labor.

And then the third aspect, which is essentially what we're witnessing, is oversupply, and that oversupply is because we have false signals. We have people acting differently. The average person or the average family is looking at the market and trying to study it and saying, “Okay, this is how the market is, and I'm going to behave a certain way.”

But the reality is, however the market moves, the biggest thing that we can change is the willingness to pay. For me, I get back to what we're seeing in the market [which] is a consequence of three things interacting together. And we're going to be in oversupply for a long time, because as you know, in Brazil, because of the technology that they have, we can produce all the coffee that we need.

Jeffrey Sachs just released a report actually this month, and he said the same thing: Brazil and Vietnam can produce all the coffee that we need. All the other countries can stop producing. And those two countries can produce all the coffee that we need. So Brazil can respond to coffee shortages overnight. We're never going to be in a shortage. So we’re permanently in oversupply. Does that mean that we're going to constantly be at this $1 price point? This is the new $1 price point. So how do we think about that going forward?

Ashley: I don't know! But it is absolutely illuminating hearing you talk about the coffee supply crisis, because it seems like if you go into—

Maggy: It's not new. This is like, it's a new normal that we need to face that this is the price that a mechanized farmer can survive at. So what should we do?

Ashley: Right, exactly. So I wonder how you see yourself in that system. One of the things that you mentioned is that you cut out the middleman and you go directly from producer to consumer. Is that scalable at all? I wonder, is that a solution on a small scale or a large scale? Do you look at large-scale problems? How do you think about that?

Maggy: I think we need an industry reaction, obviously. Right? So ideally we need something that's scalable. And I think what Jeffrey Sachs proposed was [about] a $10 billion fund to support farmers over the next 10 years. He said that this is the new price. Going forward, we're not going to move away from a dollar.

And when I think about that, and I know that if it's a dollar, my farmers are getting—what, 10 cents or less? You can't even buy fertilizer with that, right? Essentially, how do we think about alternative markets? For us, how can we participate in this specialty market where we can [get] farmers a better price? But even more so, we invite consumers to basically send their tips directly.

We're thinking of this really as the way we think about waitresses. Their wages are below minimum wage. So when we pay for our bills, we add a 20% tip to make sure that they're getting the minimum wage. We understand the dynamics of the restaurant industry, and so as a consumer, we've chosen to support that.

So for us, Kahawa, we introduced a tipping mechanism where we have a code on the back of the bag. You can scan it and you can send a tip directly to the farmer. And we think that that's an almost 21st-century Fair Trade system.

With Fair Trade, their deal was you paid an extra dollar or more, and then some of that made it to the farmer. It's unclear how much of it made it to the farmer within a dollar. I think once everyone took out their share along the value chain, I think they said for each dollar, 5 cents is getting to the farmer. So we're saying, what if, instead of paying a dollar extra for your coffee, which you should be (people think it's expensive, but the prices are still on the lower side), you can send a tip directly to the farmer.

We see that as one way where consumers can be actively engaged with where their coffee is coming from and choose to support [the farmers] directly. So that's one approach.

The other approach is an industry-wide approach where as an industry, we actually start to think about what moves the needle. And so far the discussions that I've seen around how to solve them have just been really kneeling at the edges. And they've really been about supporting this oppressive system, like, “How do we hold this oppressive system in place so that we can also benefit?”

I can go a little bit into detail, but I don't know if you have any other questions around that.

Ashley: I mean, I have so many questions, but just touching back a little bit on the idea of value and who creates value: Before we got on this call, we were talking a little bit about some of the things that you wanted to talk about, and relating back to the idea of a dollar being the “new normal.” And then also thinking politically about the moment that we're in, and how both responsive coffee prices seem to be to the political climate, but also at the same time, when you say that a dollar is like the new normal, that also feels like, incredibly unresponsive. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that dichotomy, about what is actually influencing coffee prices and where can we expect to see prices fluctuate, or where do we actually expect to see change happen, as the politics around us change and interact with us.

Maggy: Yeah, that's actually a really good question. As you know, coffee is a political crop. I mentioned earlier that we used to have a cartel, which was an international coffee system that used to control the coffee prices. It acts a lot like our oil, which has a cartel. That's how they keep the prices sort of stabilized a little bit.

So coffee used to have something similar, and the way that that was kept in place was an agreement between the producing countries and the consuming countries; for example, the U.S. and Brazil. The U.S. is the major consuming country. So the U.S. really is the biggest driver of what happens in the world around coffee. The U.S. likes that system, likes to stabilize coffee prices because when coffee prices destabilize, they cause a lot of harm in the world.

So right now a lot of the immigration we're seeing on the border: That's coffee. [There are a] lot of people coming from Guatemala and Honduras that have been displaced. When we had the last coffee crisis is what produced the Rwanda genocide. That was the coffee crisis.

A lot of really bad things happen when coffee prices crash. Ethiopia had a green famine, and that was because of coffee. So you have these political things that can be put in place by looking at how to stabilize coffee.

Anyway, back during the Cold War, the U.S. was incentivized to stabilize economies so that they didn’t turn to Communism. The U.S. kind of led the movement of making sure that coffee-producing countries had stable pricing and a stable economy so that they didn't turn “red.”

But after we saw the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, since then, the U.S. has never been incentivized to stabilize those countries, because there's no Cold War going on yet. That's one area where it’s kind of coming down to, “How does that affect us?”

So currently Trump just essentially upheld that the U.S. doesn't want to stabilize the coffee prices. That just happened recently. Depending on the administration—if we have, let's say, Democrats in power—depending on their politics, they might be incentivized to look toward stabilizing the coffee economy. Maybe they will want to stem the immigration that's coming to the border. They might be incentivized to actually force Big Coffee to negotiate better prices. So that's how politics comes in.

For me personally, I've been actually following this current political climate very closely. And one of the most interesting solutions that I've seen put forward is, Andrew Yang, one of the candidates, has something called UBI, which is Universal Basic Income, and what I really like about that is he's acknowledging that technology is essentially making it harder for labor to catch up, or labor to be compensated accordingly.

And so, because a lot of the benefits of technology go to very few people, very few winners take all the benefits. So he's saying, how can we distribute those benefits to everyone? And we're seeing that with Big Coffee, they are taking all of the benefits of technology. So as Brazil gets better and more and more productive, Big Coffee’s able to take all those benefits, but it means a lot of the labor gets marginalized even more.

So I think for me, the reason I was thinking, “We need to figure out a way to get money directly in the hands of farmers,” is because that's where they need it the most. They need money in their hands directly. And if there was a way for me, a dream solution would be a place where as an industry, we agree that we need a stable market. We need diversity of regions, and the current speculative market is not a good vehicle for that.

We agree that we can provide a basic minimum wage for all the coffee producers in these countries, because we can. And then have them keep producing the coffee. And that's how we can keep deforestation low. We can reduce all of the problems that come with plantation coffee in Brazil. We can have farmers in Ethiopia still grow their coffee in the original place, but actually get some money growing it and be encouraged.

Because of climate change, we're going to lose a lot of varieties to climate change. If we only concentrate our risk in two areas, it means that in 10 years, if there's some kind of event, there won't be any coffee left. So as a sort of coffee collective, we have to think of ourselves as a country, and think of our producers as citizens, and think about, “How can we give each one of them a basic income for them to keep participating in the diversity of coffee?”

Which is what adds value to the coffee. When we think about coming back to value, when we think about how we market coffee, a lot of the marketing is attached to the production. It's attached to how carefully it was produced, the varieties, the farmer toil, all of that. And if we were suddenly to just have mechanized coffee, the narrative breaks down and suddenly no one spends $10 for mechanized coffee, right?

And in case of an outbreak of disease or a warming in Brazil, then coffee is going to be a luxury. And so I'm thinking that the industry would come together and figure out, “How do we get a basic income for all coffee producers to keep them growing coffee for the future?”

Ashley: That's really fascinating to think about the narrative that we create in coffee, where we talk about handpicked coffee and this process that's almost romanticized. And yet as technology moves forward, that's not going to be the narrative that we have. So we almost shoot ourselves in the foot a little bit, relying on this narrative for the addition of value. It’s also misleading because, as you mentioned earlier, although we almost co-opt the value that is created by producers, almost all the value, monetarily speaking, ends up in the hands of importers, roasters, the people who touch the end [of the process], which is a really interesting dichotomy.

Maggy: It is. And I think, Ashley, this is going to be so important, because as you know, fake coffee is coming, lab-grown coffee is coming. We already have lab-grown meat. We already have lab-grown diamonds. So as more and more people realize the cost to our environment of growing coffee, they're going to be convinced to buy coffee that's made in a lab.

And so how are we going to convince people? I guess it comes back to, is it worth it for a lot of people being put through a lot of pain in these developing countries to produce coffee that we can't pay them to produce when we can produce it in a lab? Ten years from now, you have a choice of coffee that is slave-free, grown in a lab, versus coffee that you don't know where it came from. How many children died to bring it to you? Like, what will you choose?

Ashley: I'm even thinking of the example of diamonds. When you talk about getting an engagement ring, for example, you want a cruelty-free diamond. In 10 years, are we going to end up in that same situation with coffee where traceability is going to be so important that we want to know that it was grown in a lab, or did it come from almost synthetic means because we can at least trace that really concretely? Which is wild. I have never thought of that.

Maggy: Now that I think about it, I think we're going to start to see more—and this is just the political side of me—there's been a lot of backlash now towards billionaires and towards the plutocracy. And we've seen that backlash. Have you seen that? A lot of articles coming out?

Ashley: Oh yeah! I mean, remember when Kylie Jenner was called the first self-made billionaire or first self-made female—or youngest [billionaire], and people were like, “Uhh, that's not correct.”

Maggy: Yeah. I know! So we’re starting to see a backlash in the billionaire class. To me, in a way, it's almost like we cherrypick which industries to backlash at any one time. It's fashionable to backlash. So when I think about the damage that Big Coffee is doing in terms of … so I think of earlier I said [there is a link between] Big Coffee, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma. These are three kinds of companies that produce addictive substances. Coffee is addictive.

They kill. But the only difference is that coffee kills the producer in the long run, because they can’t feed themselves. They drown in the ocean trying to immigrate. So [Big] Coffee, Tobacco, and Pharma (which are essentially opioids), they kill the user.

But coffee is still killing a lot of people, but it's killing producers. The reason we don't have the same outrage level is because it's killing people of color. Justice is not as swift when your victims are people of color. So I'm hoping that in the near future, the same backlash that we're seeing going towards Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, that people will start to see that the victims of the coffee also need justice. That's my hope. When you ask about the future, I think we need to start talking about how much human damage Big Coffee’s irresponsibility is causing in the world.

Ashley: So let's, let's talk just a little bit about Big Coffee, because recently Starbucks announced this initiative where they were going to give back $20 million to coffee producers. To me, that sounds kind of like a Band-Aid, or not even a Band-Aid. A Band-Aid is not even the right word because that implies some sort of healing. It sounds like a—what's the word for it—it's like a red herring almost, or just a distraction.

Maggy: They're covering their tracks. That's their brand. Their brand has always been about, “We're doing good for farmers.” And so there was so much outcry. I mean every day I was reading articles online from industry news. It's almost a one-sided conversation where the farmer and the people that are concerned with the farmer's livelihoods were having their own conversation. They're trying to tell Big Coffee to respond, and Big Coffee was not responding. And, for Starbucks, this was something that they had to respond to, I think, and that was one of their responses.

Ashley: So that, how do you see the role of Big Coffee answering responsibly? Because for better or for worse, Big Coffee is here. We have it. It's part of the market and it's influencing the market. So what, to you, would signal meaningful change?

Maggy: First, I don't know if you read the article on Sprudge about them reaching out to Starbucks to ask for actual pricing? Did you see that article?

Ashley: Yeah, I did.

Maggy: Yeah. So that was one thing where I've always essentially had an issue with Starbucks claiming to be 99% ethically sourced yet won’t give us the figures. So how are we supposed to know? How are we supposed to check?

And then kind of knowing in the industry that they really were not lifting their weight based on the market. There was a disconnect between their marketing to consumers and essentially what we're doing in the back. And I think for me, one article that I thought was super interesting, and it was talking about someone that traced back a bag to Colombia, to meet a farmer that was part of the Starbucks cafe practices. And this farmer actually said they prefer selling their coffee to Nestle because Nestle paid more. I thought that was so funny.

But back to that. So I think that their article is really [interesting]. And I'm glad that the industry is—industry media in general [is starting to cover this topic], hopefully because they have other external sources of funding, as you know. The problem is we're not able to criticize Big Coffee because they fund everything. They fund the research, they fund the media. So there’s no place to criticize Big Coffee, so I was kind of happy that Sprudge is starting to go there. They talked about how 20 million essentially translated into less than 3 cents a pound for farmers.

But I think that for me, when I first saw it, when I saw this thing, I think it was early in the year, last year, my first thought was, “Oh my God, our problem right now in the world is that we have too much coffee. And that our solution is to give farmers more seedlings?” You know what I mean?

It's like, “Oh, we know we have an oversupply, but our contribution to you is, we want to stick you with more coffee.” Right? To me that was the reaction. And that kind of captures a lot of the sustainability programs because they're designed to make sure that we have an oversupply. All the programs that are designed to increase the amount of production, which is not the right thing to do.

That's why I'm very skeptical of sustainability programs because they're designed around, “How do we make sure that oversupply is the new normal so that the power dynamics are always in Big Coffee’s favor? and farmers are always taking the big risk?” Especially now, going into climate change.

The farmers that I work with, last year during the harvest season, our yield was down 40%. Can you imagine? Yield is down 40% when coffee prices are their lowest, and this is because of climate change. The rains were, you know, late, and we're going to see more and more of this. And who's going to take the blunt of this climate change risk? It's farmers, right?

I think for me, the thing that Big Coffee can do is work towards stabilizing prices. And I know there's criticisms around, “Okay, if you put up a high price, we're going to have too much coffee coming out of Brazil, because if you put a $3 price point, then everyone in Brazil is profitable and they're going to produce everything, right?

But I think there's a way that the industry can design a market, that's essentially fair to everyone. They can design a market that produces a minimum wage for Kenya producers, a minimum wage for Colombia, for Vietnam—that way you maintain that diversity, but at the same time, you also think about what's the environmental damage that's happening. How do we make sure we're taking not just price as the only input, but how are we thinking about the holistic humanity? Thinking about humanity and the environment, not just the bottom line.

I think for me, when I think about Big Coffee's role, Big Coffee first has to decide they want to pay for Black labor. That's one thing. I definitely want to understand why Big Coffee is unwilling to pay for Black people's labor. We're tired of giving you free labor. Okay? Like, start to pay us. I really want to see a Big Coffee person come out and say they want to make sure they’re paying for labor.

And I think when I say “Black labor,” people are confused, because people don't realize Brazilian manual labor is mostly coming from Black slaves and you know, Black people that are slaves in Brazil. One district that is 80% Black provides all of the labor that goes into coffee in Brazil. So when I say Black labor, people are like, “Oh, but most coffee is coming from Latin America.” But [my response is], “Yeah, by slaves that were in Latin America.”

So back to your question. I think for me, I'd love to see Big Coffee really figure out that they actually want to stop dehumanizing Black people and start to pay for Black labor. That's one thing I want.

I think that we will have to think about [the fact that] Big Coffee leaders are profiting from the same way that their predecessors profited, which was “How do you put free Black labor to use?” And I want to see them really come to terms with that and decide that they actually want to pay labor as a priority.

So that's one, and then the second one is, “How do we stabilize prices?” And then we need to stop hiding behind the market because we know Big Coffee controls the market, so that you can't hide behind Wall Street when you control Wall Street.

That brings me to my other point, which is, again, the composition of the market, which is when the biggest coffee company is also a private equity company that also can trade in coffee on Wall Street, then you get a lot of conflict of interest going on. But I'll stop there. I know that's a lot.

Ashley: I mean, it's a lot, but I feel like you need to write a book or something. I need all of these ideas!

Maggy: I've been meaning to write a blog post, but maybe after this discussion I will have my ideas a little bit more fleshed out. Make it more accessible. I might do an article to just kind of capture a lot of what we've spoken about so that more people can [learn about it]. But it's, it's a lot though, you're right.

Ashley: It's such a complex problem, but the way that you describe this problem feels so accessible. So I feel like you've really found a way to communicate the issues that you're seeing on the market in a very tangible manner, but still very much accepting that this is a complex issue with a lot of contextualization needed.

So just to wrap up, I was wondering with all of this information, what can a barista take from this? What can somebody at the very other end of the spectrum leave from this conversation and be like, “This is what I can do tomorrow,” or “This is what I should be able to bring attention to today.”

Maggy: Yeah, and I think that baristas are kind of at the point where the consumer interacts with the beverage, right? They're at the forefront of this war almost. And then we put them there and we don't give them all the information that they need. Sometimes when I go to a cafe, I feel bad, asking all the questions like, “Where is this coffee from? Do you know if it's direct trade?”

So baristas do a wonderful job of sort of articulating that information to consumers who sometimes don't even care as well. So making it interesting enough to care.

And I really liked the series—I don’t know who led it, but I think you were involved— the one, “Ask Me About Cost of Production.”

Ashley: I'm not part of it. I did record an episode for the show, but Caryn and Mike Nelson who own Junior's Roasted Coffee in Portland, Oregon organized that.

Maggy: I really liked that. I felt like [it would be beneficial to] see that at the coffee shop and a consumer that's interested [might] pick that up and ask questions. That's really one way that just having that information [in a way that’s] not overbearing—because I know some customers really just want to get their coffee and they don't want to talk.

So [you could] have that information maybe placed around the coffee shop so people can read and understand. And I think that for baristas, I think that because they're the first line of defense for their brand, they need to learn more about what actually matters. And I know in your previous podcasts, you've talked about some of the shortcomings of specialty coffee, which is a lot of the things that we care about at the cafe level may not be good enough for farmers, right?

Like the micro-lots, right? They may not translate. So just making sure that they are aware of what's going on, they're aware of how farmers can be helped. When they're having conversations with consumers, they can talk about, “Okay, this coffee may not be…” like the example that you use, which is, “This is an 84 point coffee, which is delicious, but we know where it came from. We know what’s happening with the farmers,” versus, “We're pushing 91 in your face because it's the best coffee we've ever had, but we know that the farmer didn't get paid.” Does that make sense?

I think baristas being informed that we can be nerdy about extraction, we can be nerdy about latte art, but also being able to tell consumers that you should care about the quality is not just about, “Okay, this is the best coffee that's ever been on the planet,” but also that we need to support brands that are doing the work that's needed on the ground. Not just talking, but they're “walking the talk.”

And as you know, I have sold green coffee to two companies. So I actually know what companies are saying versus what they're willing to do. So I think that baristas are the ones that can actually push their employers to either walk the talk or educate consumers about what brands they should care about.

Consumers don't always know what to look for in a brand, but [baristas] can tell them like, “This shop pays this amount,” or “This shop does something that's beneficial to the farmer.” But in a way that's genuine and authentic, so not using the things that sound good, but don't make a difference to the farmer, but making consumers care about these things. These are things we may not be putting in your face.

This cafe could be beautiful and look the best, but you need to also look at what does this brand mean for farmers? And one—just to loop in this—we have to think about specialty coffee. We have Big Specialty, so the three or four major specialty coffee companies are owned by Big Coffee, right? When you go to like a Blue Bottle or Stumptown or Intelligentsia, you're really patronizing Nestle or [JEB Holdings], right?

And so for me, what I've actually struggled with, if our problem is trying to change the minds of JEB or Nestle (and as you know, Starbucks is also kind of owned by Nestle). As much as specialty coffee wants to have their own discussions, I want to see Big Specialty challenge their owners to change. Because one big decision, as you saw at JEB, one big decision on extending payment periods to 360 days, wreaked havoc on farmers.

So one coffee company can change the whole industry. In this case, they changed it for the worse, but that's the kind of decision where a Big Specialty [company] that's talking a lot can talk to their parent company about doing better things for farmers. And that can have a [more] major impact than some other programs that may not.

So that's my radical thing for today, which [might be] controversial. I don't want to hear Big Specialty brands lecture about all the good that they're doing when your parent company—where all your money is going—is wreaking havoc. So I want baristas to be brave.

And I think, Ashley, you've done such a wonderful job by the way. When I found your podcast, I cried because as you know, there aren't many people of color or women of color in the industry. And I was essentially again—as a Black woman and knowing that racial and gender inequality, are really what the industry exploits for profits, so knowing that my two identities were being exploited for profit and not being, not having someone to talk to or to even acknowledge that—I think finding your podcast that was smashing the patriarchy, I cried.

I was like, “Oh my God, I found my people.” So yeah, I've been a big fan from the beginning. And so this is such an honor to chat with you because you're doing wonderful work.

So if anyone hasn't told you, you made a difference in my life. I think you're making a difference in the lives of so many people by empowering baristas who are the first line of defense, who can influence culture, who can make brands cool or not cool.

And when you start talking about “pretend specialty” and “real specialty,” and pretend specialty is going to talk a big game about helping farmers when your parent companies are oppressing farmers.

So that's my controversial point today.

But I think I want to see more Big Specialty brands—where their parent companies are oppressing us—start to confront those instead of lecturing us about what they're paying for. Okay? So that’s my controversial point, which you can cut.

Ashley: No, I'm going to keep all of that. If you want to give a controversial take every day and I can tack them on to the end of all of my podcasts that'd be a delight.

Maggy: When you [told me] this is one of your questions, I’m like, “What is happening in the industry?” I see people talking a lot about prices, about helping farmers. But I'm saying if you can just go to your parent company and tell them to even increase the price, which they can influence by 20 cents, you can change the industry. Right? You can change the industry.

So that to me is I want to see more baristas start to talk about their employers. Obviously the word “transparency” has been such an amazing way to let people see behind the scenes. So I want to see more baristas really tell us the truth of their brands doing what they're saying, and brands we can trust.

People use 1% of their purchases for marketing when 99% of their purchases are exploitation. So I want to talk about the 99% exploitation. I don't want to hear about the 1%. That's really what I'm tired of. I’m tired of the 1% marketing. I want the 99% exploitation, and how can we move the needle on that?

Ashley: I don't think I've ever had a conversation that has challenged my thinking and really opened up the way that I understand the coffee world as much as this conversation with you. Thank you so much for lending your insights. I'm already thinking about what a part-two conversation between the two of us would look like. You're just, you're amazing. Like, you're, you're just incredible and you need to write 800 books or something.

Maggy: I hope I don't get into trouble, you know what I mean? I don't have anything to lose.

Ashley: Right, and that's a good point too, I think, to think about this conversation between me and you, is that you own a business, I'm pretty much unemployable. But this is a low-risk conversation in a certain way. I mean, it is high-risk because you do own a business and you're still a figurehead, but there's a lot of freedom that you and I can have in this conversation to say—

Maggy: Yeah, you're right. That's one thing I think of: If I don't, who will? Because a lot of people really cannot [speak out]. This is what they are thinking, but they can't really say it.

Ashley: Right, but there's a power to putting that into words and giving people, at least an ear to say, “Oh, someone else is thinking this as well. Maybe I can talk to my boss about this.” And it's not so much about baristas not wanting to have these conversations, but giving them the tools to have them, like the Barista Wage Spreadsheet, you know? That was just an idea someone had and then they went with it. There's just a lot of power to hearing ideas and seeing examples, and I hope that people listen to this and think, “I'm going to talk to my boss about this,” or “I want more focus on this other thing.” And I just hope that they leave with a better understanding.

Maggy: Yeah, I hope so. I know it was a lot. This is like my therapy almost, where I'm downloading all this info on someone that I know understands. You’re not being like, “Oh my God, I've never heard that before,” but you were being like, “Oh, I've heard that before, but this is like a new perspective on it.” So this was such a great discussion to have with someone that's knowledgeable and empathetic about the situation.

Ashley: If this was your therapy, then you can come do therapy here anytime you want it.

Maggy: I know, this is my free therapy. I mean, I get frustrated again as a Black woman from a producing country, as you know, it's a shitshow. I sometimes get frustrated. To be a little bit candid, I didn't always speak like this. I've been a bit more reserved, obviously fearful of, “What are people gonna think of me? I gotta be p.c. [politically correct].” When I look at it, if I don't say it, who's going to say it? We have to fight. We have to fight for freedom. Freedom does not just come on a plate. And so this is where I'm thinking. Coffee radicalized me. I did not really care too much about politics or any of the social issues that much before I came into coffee, because I was in a little bubble, but coffee has radicalized me.

And one of your questions was around social justice, and seeing the levels of inequality [in coffee] radicalized me. When you're a Black woman in coffee, you're an accidental activist. Because you can't not be an activist because of everything that's coming at you.

But thank you so much, Ashley. I really appreciate you making time for this chat and inviting me

Ashley: Anytime that you want to be on the show, you can be on the show. Thank you again for talking to us.

Thanks for listening, please share with your friends, leave a comment, and I hope you enjoy these treasures from the archives!

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Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we’re bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, here’s a handy link to do so:

Below, you’ll find an episode from Alice Wong, editor and founder of the Disability Visibility Project. Back when this episode aired in August 2018, there was a lot of talk about bans on plastic straws, with many arguing that they were wasteful and bad for the environment. Alice came on the show and rightly challenged that idea, saying that the straw-ban debate erased the perspectives of disabled people and was an example of performative environmentalism. Since this episode aired, Alice has edited a book called Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century. You can pick up her book; visit her website, DisabilityVisibilityProject.com; check out the podcast that Alice works on—and listen to our conversation. Here’s the episode:

Ashley: Oh, man. We’re doing this. So could you introduce yourself to us?

Alice: OK. Hi, my name is Alice Wong. I live and work in San Francisco. I’m a longtime coffee drinker and a coffee lover, and I’m a disabled activist.

Ashley: You have a project called the Disability Visibility Project. Can you talk a little bit about what that is?

Alice: Yeah! So I founded the Disability Visibility Project in 2014, and it’s basically kind of two things. It’s a campaign to encourage people with disabilities to record their oral histories. I have a community partnership with StoryCorps, which is a national oral history non-profit.

The reason why I started this project is that I don’t see enough media and enough history about our community. So this is my way of giving back and also encouraging people to tell their stories and create their own history. And one thing that’s really exciting about it is that, as a partner with StoryCorps, they have a relationship with the Library of Congress. So anybody who participates has the option of archiving it at the Library of Congress. And since 2014, we have over 140 oral histories recorded so far.

That, to me, is kind of amazing, because this is a gift for the future, and it’s a way of recording who we are right now. And that’s, I think we can think of history as something way back when, but we are constantly creating history. Even right now as we speak, you and I are creating history on Boss Barista!

And the Disability Visibility Project kinda snowballed into an online community. So I have a podcast, just like you, and I have various online communities on Twitter and Facebook. And it’s really giving us a place for us. So that’s kind of what I’m all about.

Ashley: So obviously, you’ve been doing this activism for a long time. But recently, I think your activism sort of intersected with the coffee community because of all the straw bans that have been going on all over the United States and even internationally, I realized.

In your article that you wrote for Eater, you mentioned that, I think, Scotland and Taiwan are moving to removing plastics and removing straws in basically all aspects of life. So can we talk a little bit just about that in general? Like, what were your initial thoughts when you started reading that more and more municipalities were considering banning plastic straws?
Alice: Yeah. I think as I started reading more and more about the ban in Seattle, the ban in Vancouver, you know, I really listened to what disabled people were saying. And on the ground, people were saying how a lot of the decision-makers at the city level were just not really paying attention to what concerns people with disabilities are having.

Each kind of ban is different; some have an exception for people with disabilities, and even that is problematic in itself because of how these exceptions are written and enforced. Again, you know, bans are, I think they really need to be carefully constructed.

And based on my observations of a lot of these bans and this trend toward phasing out plastic straws, a lot of it has been just in reaction to PR campaigns by environmental groups who are just seizing this moment, using celebrities, and raising awareness without really thinking about the implications on actual marginalized people.

And that’s where the performative aspect is really disturbing—because Starbucks announced their [ban], it was really, it made a lot of news when they said they were gonna phase it out. And we’ve seen after the Starbucks ban that so many other larger [companies such as] Shake Shack, all over the country and the world, large corporations are doing this.

And this is part of the, I think, trend toward social responsibility. A lot of these corporations are just trying to appeal to Millennials and really be as “woke” as possible. And I think you know, in the rush and in the urgency to do that, and to do good, they’re really neglecting some real moral concerns. And that’s really unfortunate.

Ashley: What drove you to be more vocal about this on social media? Because you are. You’re pretty active about it on Twitter, and you wrote an article that we mentioned earlier for Eater about some of the responses that you were getting.

Alice: Yeah. The straw ban really is visceral. It really hit me in the gut, because this is about a daily activity: drinking. If that was threatened by, if your right to drink and eat was threatened, I mean, it’s very real. And I think what’s really—and it’s not exaggerated, right—I think what’s really sad is that people think, “Oh, don’t worry about it.”

I’ve had so many non-disabled people online tell me, “Don’t worry. You know, these bans, these exemptions, you’re gonna be fine, you know? There’s no way you would be denied a straw.” And I’m just like, if you just understood what it’s like to be disabled and how every day, even with an apparent visible disability like mine, you are constantly scrutinized.

The microaggressions are just so real that people just assume that everything is going to be OK and that we should all—pun intended—suck it up for the greater good. And I think that’s what’s really missing, is that the conversation has always been about if you’re not with us, you’re against us. And we’re saying this is just another erosion in our way to participate in public, in our ways to be part of society.

Some of my friends online have already shown me these little signs posted at restaurants that are really passive-aggressive about, “We’re not serving, we’re not providing any straws anymore because we care about the environment. Thanks anyway!”

People are actually being really proud of not providing straws, and that, to me, is another sign that—let’s say, people are saying, “Straws are bad,” and they say, “Oh, people with disabilities should bring their own straws.”

So let’s say they bring their own straws and start using them? In this kinda climate, you can imagine the kind of possible harassment or criticism they’ll get just for using a straw in a public space. If you look at Santa Barbara, where they have one of the most punitive bans with really steep fines and even jail time for establishments that provide plastic?

I mean that’s really where you’re creating conditions that send a message to people with disabilities, older adults, all kinds of people that may need straws, that your way of life is not welcome. Your way of life is not normative. And what do you do with that? You’re just basically marginalizing us, shoving us away, and telling us that we don’t belong in the same place as you do.

And this is 18 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, after decades of disability rights activism that really fought against segregation and against the days where there were laws called Ugly Laws.

So I’m not sure if you realize this, but in the old days, there were laws that disabled people and all kinds of people were not allowed in a public space because they affected people. Just their mere existence made people uncomfortable. And I really do see a connection between these straw bans and these kinds of historic laws that discriminate.

Ashley: You just said a lot of things that were really interesting, and I kinda wanna unpack some of them. So one of the things I think you mentioned in the straw ban is that there’s this mentality of, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us.”

Alice: Mmhmm.

Ashley: Have you gotten that kind of feedback from people like, “Oh, you must not care about the environment”?

Alice: Yeah. Definitely on Twitter and on Facebook a lot of folks have said, “Well, I just don’t understand why you have to use plastic. Why can’t you use a reusable one?” Or, “Why can’t you use a compostable one?” And then I would explain, and somehow, these explanations are not adequate. And a lot of people straight-up said, “This is what we all have to do in order to reduce plastic pollution.”

And you know, I am all on board with reducing my consumption, but I’m gonna do it in a different way. And I think this is the limitation of this whole movement toward zero waste, that it doesn’t account for different lived experiences. It’s very dogmatic. It should be an ideal, and the way we do it, we should be able to build in flexibility.

People have definitely been very, very confrontational and very aggressive about my own story, about my own life. One person said I look weak. He actually said my story and the way I talked about needing a plastic straw, he’s like, “She seems weak in telling this and explaining this.”

I was just so stunned by that because it’s as if I’m trying to ask for pity or that somehow I’m inviting pity, when I’m just really being honest about where I am and where my relationship is with plastic. And I think we all have to have honest conversations about our own relationships with plastic and with consumption and capitalism. And I just, with everything I do, I try to keep it real.

Ashley: Right. And I think you mentioned in the article too that there are ways that you can cut consumption of plastic—in way, way more drastic ways—and those are things that are not being talked about at all. But even just the idea that you have to justify your story seems to be a big theme, just in activism in general, the fact that you or others in your community say, “Hey, this is a thing we need, or this is a thing that hurts us.” And the question isn’t about, “Oh, how can we help you, or how can we do better?” But the question is, “Well, how does it hurt you?”

Alice: Yeah. And I think it’s been a common occurrence. For anybody who uses Twitter, all they have to do is go to #StrawBan and #SuckItAbleism, which is a hashtag that I think I created, but I’m not really sure if anybody else might’ve thought of that earlier. But you can see a lot of disabled people over and over again being demanded by non-disabled people to explain themselves, to provide free education, and always having to confront not being believed.

And that kind of interrogation is a real example of the power dynamics, as if there’s this sense of entitlement, as if we have to slice and expose so much of ourselves just to say, “Hey, we’re human. We also, we’re just like you,” where actually, that should be the default that our needs are just as valid as yours.

And I think right now, we’re still—it’s 2018—and we’re still at a place where our needs are not, they’re not seen as equal or as important as anybody else’s. So that, to me, has been really telling. And it’s really just a drop in the bucket in terms of the larger conversation about ableism in our culture.

Ashley: Yeah, can you talk a little more about that, and unpack how this issue has really opened up a bigger lens on how we view ableism in our society?

Alice: Yeah, I feel like it’s so ingrained in what we do and how we think and the language we use. I myself am learning all the time. I myself am working on my own internalized ableism. It’s really so much a part of our culture that sometimes we don’t even see it, and it’s really until disabled people have been pointing it out and naming it that we finally really see it fully manifest.

So I think that’s one of the things, one of the reasons why I started the Disability Visibility Project is that for a long time, our stories were told by other people. It might be by a reporter, and it’s framed as inspiration and like, “Oh! Look at these poor disabled people!” Or you know, “Oh, look at these amazing people who are just so angelic or so innocent!”

And often, it’s also told by advocates for us like our parents or non-disabled people who are seen as our representatives. And this is where we really need our space and our own platforms to really be true to ourselves. And this is what ableism does, where we are not centered, and I think a lot of marginalized communities are not centered.

Everything about the representation in the media, we have such a long way to go in terms of Black, Indigenous, people of color, women, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA folks. So it’s really interesting that disability is often still seen as an afterthought or not even considered in marginalized communities because, again, disability is often seen as this very medicalized, individual thing. That it’s a health problem. It’s something that’s broken or something that’s wrong with an individual.

But really, it’s a culture; it’s a community. And for a lot of folks, it’s a socio-political identity. That’s what it is for me. You know, we are a people, and we have a history. So whenever we center ourselves, I think that’s really the goal, to really shift from this white, cisgender, heteronormative default. In most of our broader conversations, how do we bring in everybody else? And that, to me, is always where I’m gonna be coming from.

Does that answer your question? I hope it does.

Ashley: I think it does. I think I asked a very vague question. With that in mind, we are gonna take a break, and we’ll be right back.

[ambient electronica music break]

Ashley: Welcome back to the show. We are talking with Alice Wong who is the founder of the Disability Visibility Project. And you just talked a little bit about the larger lens of ableism and how it affects the way that we talk about disability. I was wondering, what drove you specifically to activism? When did you start thinking of yourself as an activist?

Alice: You know, I really was reluctant to even use that word for a while because my upbringing is, my training has really been in academia. I went to grad school for sociology. I always thought my world was gonna be about research and teaching. I really became much more politicized as a younger adult, and I think a lot of ... I really became an accidental activist, you know? And I was always worried about identifying as an activist because I really had a very—I think a lot of people have a very—narrow sense of what does it mean to be an activist.

Sometimes I think you have to be somebody who’s a grassroots community organizer, you know, somebody who lays their body on the line, somebody that just gives their all. And I think I really fell into it as just living as a disabled person where I had to advocate for myself versus other kids.

I really realized that systemic change is what it’s all about. It’s about changing the system. It’s about changing institutions. It's about shifting the culture. And that work is much more difficult, and that work really requires collaborations, partnership, and mobilization with multiple movements.

It’s not just about bettering yourself. It’s about how do we lay the [groundwork] for the future generations so that we don’t have to repeat this work again and again?

So you know, I was an accidental activist where in grad school, I started connecting with other disabled students, moving to the Bay Area. You know, San Francisco, I feel really blessed to be in a place where there’s such a vibrant and diverse disabled community so that I really saw the power and the beauty of our community.

And then I became much more comfortable in thinking about how there’s all kinds of activism and all kinds of value. Most of my work is through online communities. There used to be this false divide between different modes of activism. And I do really believe that sharing information, telling our stories, even using Twitter with a hashtag, those are all really effective forms of activism, and they all work well together with other types.

It’s not a contest. They’re not in opposition to one another. They’re just different approaches. So yeah, it took me a long time to be able to say “I’m an activist” out of my own insecurities about what is an Activist with a capital “A.” What does that really mean? Do I even count compared to the other folks who’ve been doing this their entire lives?

So yeah. It’s been ... I’m a constant work in progress, I think.

Ashley: I think you hit on this a little bit: the idea that social media is a really powerful form of activism, and it’s not a contest. Something that I’ve seen a lot recently is this idea that social media activism is not real activism. Like, if you don’t show up, that’s not activism. And I think you touched on that really eloquently, that there are a lot of ways to participate.

And even just like you yourself had to conceptualize this new idea of an activist—because we have these very strict ideas of what they are—but that’s starting to change. Which is really great, ’cause that means that more people can participate and tell their stories.

Alice: Yeah, and I think again, there’s something very ableist about activism in itself where you have to do x, y, z. What does that mean? I think that, what are the normative expectations to be a “real activist”? There are a lot of people with disabilities and a lot of folks that can’t travel. For example, I can’t fly, and I can’t make it to a march, some rallies.

For me, it’s such an expenditure of my own energy and my own safety that I don’t go to rallies; I don’t go to marches. But that doesn’t mean I’m not in solidarity with the folks that do. And I feel like social media has given a lot of people who are really badass organizers and activists online doing the work, doing the labor.

You may not be able to see the labor in the same ways as people holding signs and people wearing their hats, but they are there doing the same work. They may be doing it from their bed, they may be doing it in front of their computer, and they may be doing it at a doctor’s office, you know? So I think there’s a whole lot of invisible, unaccounted-for labor that does happen in online spaces that really people just think of as lazy activism.

Whenever I see that kind of term, “slacktivism” or “lazy activism,” about online activism, I really do see it as an ableist attack. Because for some people, this is their world; this is the world where they are the most empowered. And why is that? It’s because the built environment and other movements aren’t inclusive enough. So we find environments where we are able to have the most potential impact.

Ashley: So I wanna talk a little bit about the built environment because for many of the people listening here, they either work in coffee shops or they own coffee shops or they interact with very physical spaces on a day-to-day basis.

Something that I was thinking about a lot in your article in Eater is the idea of hospitality, and how making barriers to getting things like straws, making exceptions that make it more difficult for you—to have to take another step to get a straw isn’t great hospitality. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it is like for you to go into coffee shops and to not experience the same type of hospitality in a number of ways, not just in treatment, but in the way that spaces are created for you.

Alice: Yeah. I really [have had] some great experiences at a lot of cafés in my neighborhood. And I just wanna give a shout-out to my neighborhood cafés that I really love in San Francisco in The Mission: I love Sightglass, I love Atlas Café. And I go there because when I go there, it’s not a big deal if I have to ask for help. And I do ask for help for a number of things.

For example, some of the places have higher counters, and I need assistance with people bringing my drink to my table, people adding sugar for me to my lattes, asking people to put a lid on my cup because I can’t grab the lid because they’re usually on a counter that’s too high, and even asking for a straw.

And so far, it’s been when people assist me and it’s not a big deal—that, to me, is great hospitality. Because that’s what it’s all about. It’s not a special thing; it’s just part of good service. And I have been in places where people have really given me very clear non-verbal and verbal communication where I definitely don’t feel welcome.

For example, cafés or restaurants where it might be a smaller space, so my wheelchair might have a little bit of difficulty turning around or moving a chair out of the way. And you can tell sometimes people just give me this look, like they just can’t be bothered. They’ll roll their eyes; they get a little huffy. As if I just take up too much space.

Little things like that really send these messages that somehow, I’m just taking up too much space or that I’m asking for too much. And I think, for the folks who are listening to this podcast, you’re gonna encounter all kinds of people: people who have non-apparent needs. Sometimes you can’t see what their access needs are. Or people like me who are a little bit more apparent in terms of having a different way of moving and being.

And I think what you do is just be as open and as receptive and responsive to their requests, and try to be as accommodating as possible without it being overly unreasonable. And I think that goes a long way, and I think that builds a lot of goodwill with all kinds of people, with all kinds of customers. Because I really want to be a loyal customer. I truly appreciate places where I feel welcome.

And unfortunately, it’s because there have been a lot of bad experiences I’ve had even in San Francisco, such a “progressive” place—it’s not really always that great. So when I do feel welcome, and I do feel like it’s not a big deal when people help me, I will go back again and again because they deserve my patronage.

Ashley: Right. I think something that really just stood out to me is the idea—and you mentioned this earlier—of problematic exceptions. So you can give a straw to somebody if they ask for it, but that is just a step that further marginalizes groups. And I think what really stuck there with me was this idea that you’re being denied the same experience as everybody else. The whole idea is that you should be able to go into a coffee shop and have a drink the way that you can have it and leave.

Alice: Yeah. I think what’s really sad is that these bans, these ideas that these exceptions are good and that we should be satisfied with exceptions because, “Oh, we’ve listened to disabled people. They’re gonna be OK. All you have to do is request one.” And I think what gets kinda lost in that is that it’s assumed that café owners or restaurants are gonna be ... how do they interpret the need and the request?

I mean already, if you just ask people with disabilities their experience in public spaces, a lot of people are questioned all the time about their right to have a service animal, their right to use parking with a placard. I mean there’s a lot of people who just think, “You are not allowed. You are not valid. Your needs are not legitimate.”

And again, it’s this question of who is worthy, and who’s doing the judging? Oftentimes, it’s gonna be non-disabled people in positions where they can judge. And that, to me, is super problematic because there’s no way to enforce—no matter how much training and how much outreach a city does with small businesses about these exceptions, you can’t change the way people behave and think about disability through a ban, through an exception.

And that, to me, is where I know in my gut that there will be cases of people who will request a straw who will have to be answering all kinds of inappropriate, invasive questions about their “medical need” for a straw. And that’s just a downer for a casual hangout with your friends for brunch or for an evening out. People just wanna have a good time, and that, to me, is the total opposite of hospitality.

Ashley: Agreed. And I think that was a really important point for you to put in there, that it’s completely the opposite of hospitality. It’s exactly making people feel uncomfortable for the things that they need.

Shifting gears a little bit, I’m intrigued by people who also like to tell stories because that’s obviously something I really like to do. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your podcast. What kind of stories do you look to tell? What are the things that have resonated with you the most? And what are you hoping for the future?

Alice: Yeah. You know, there’s just so much within the disability community in terms of issues that we care about and also about our culture that most people don’t know about. And I really wanted to show the huge range and diversity of disabled people and just really increase the diverse representation of what does it mean to be disabled.

As a disabled woman of color, I really don’t see enough people of color who are disabled represented. I think right now, the default image in a lot of, for example, stock images of people with disabilities are practically all white. And if you even look at Hollywood movies, representation of disability, it’s often a wheelchair user, white male or female.

And again, this is where us telling our stories, us really amplifying people that may not have the same reach of visibility, that, to me, is really important. So you know, I talk about political issues. I talk about people just living their lives and their experience. The lived experience, to me, is really important because it’s for us, as a community, for us to be able to see ourselves is incredibly important and powerful.

I think about young folks as well who are just working through their own identities, working through their own stuff. And I also think about non-disabled people who want to be better allies, who want to be better co-conspirators to take down and smash ableism with us, that by listening and learning straight from us, hopefully it’ll make a difference. So having our stories out there on the Internet, who knows who I’ll reach. And I hope that’s why, I’m guessing that’s why you do your podcast as well.

Ashley: Yeah, that’s definitely part of it. Maybe this is a little off-topic, but I just released an episode about abortion, and I’ve never had more people reach out to me. And that felt really wonderful in a way.

Alice: Isn’t it interesting? And as a creator—I don’t know about you, but it’s like you really have no idea the impact your work will make. You put it out there with the best intentions, and it’s amazing, I think. It can’t be underestimated, the ripple effect of just a little story. And that, to me, is just so ... it keeps me going. It really, you know, every time I feel frustrated or that people are shitting on me or criticizing me, I think about, “OK, there has been influence; there has been a difference.” And it makes me feel good. It keeps me going.

Ashley: What would you want people listening to this to take away from listening to you?

Alice: Well, I hope that for the coffee community, that they think about accessibility; they think about inclusion. Whenever they talk about customer service, whenever they talk about hospitality, they think about all kinds of communities that are part of your customer base.

You may not see them. They might not be as apparent to you, but they are part of your customers and maybe potential customers. Whenever you are considering changes to your practices or policies, think about the most marginalized communities. Think about how it will impact them, and hopefully, let that be instructive in how you wanna make changes. So I guess that would be my messages. And just to be kinda open and receptive to changes.

I really wanna give a shout-out to Nick Cho from Wrecking Ball Coffee because when I first started tweeting a lot about the straw ban, he tweeted me, asking me about, “Well, what would be the ideal situation?” And I gave him my advice, and he actually took it to heart.

I suggested that if you make compostable straws readily available, that you also make plastic straws readily available. Or if your compostable ones are by request, then you also offer the option of plastic ones. You know, I guess to quote a line from my essay in Eater, if a café could offer four different kinds of milk and a restaurant can offer 50 types of beer and wine, they can offer two types of straws. And I think it goes a long way toward giving people choices and giving space for all kinds of people to be part of your world.

Ashley: That’s awesome. That is … I’m happy to hear that people are listening to you and taking that advice into account. And like you said, it was as simple as interacting on Twitter and asking for your advice.

Alice: I felt so honored by that because, above all the negative stuff, that ... this is, again, a great example of being open and connected and seeing how there is a difference, where people do change and people are paying attention.

I also wanna thank you for opening your space and allowing me to be here to share my story and hopefully, influencing more people in the coffee community. Because I love coffee! And I definitely want all communities in the food service industry to really think about inclusion and accessibility and how we all may have implicit biases. And to really be open and honest about working through that. And we can do that together.

Ashley: Thank you for being on this show and being so open and honest with us. If people wanna talk to you, or if they wanna reach out to you, what are some ways that they can find your work or engage with you on social media?

Alice: Yeah, sure thing! So for folks who wanna email me, I’m at disabilityvisibilityproject@gmail.com. So email me anytime. And also, I’m on Twitter @sfdirewolf ’cause I’m a fan of Game of Thrones.

Ashley: [chuckles]

Alice: You can also find more about the Disability Visibility Project at DisabilityVisibilityProject.com.

Ashley: I was just there earlier today when I was doing all my questions and notes for this episode, and I was reading the story about the high schoolers who started the disability museum. There’s so many amazing stories on your website. So definitely check those out.

Alice: Oh! Thanks so much! And feel free to be part of the community and join in and just be part of us. I think everybody’s welcome.

Ashley: Yes. And thank you so much, again, just for being here and being open with us.

Alice: If I could also encourage folks who are podcasters who may be listening, another aspect of accessibility that I try to also promote is to make sure that, if you do have the capacity and capability, to include transcripts with your episodes.

Because being just an audio-only format really does exclude a lot of people, not just Deaf people but a lot of people where, for various reasons, audio is not the best way to process information. So podcasts that provide transcripts really do show that they wanna have a broader listenership/readership. So if any of you are podcasters out there, please consider that.

Ashley: Yes, and that is something that will be provided with this episode and hopefully with some backlogged episodes. Because that is not something that we have done in the past, and that is really important, and I’m really glad that you brought that up. Thank you for providing me with a contact for transcription, and that’s something that we will be working on. Like I said, this will be our very first episode that is transcribed.

Alice: Yay!!! See?

Ashley: Yeah. You just have a conversation. Things are getting better.

Alice: And for disability accessibility, that’s what it’s all about.

Ashley: Oh, thank you so much, Alice.

Alice: Oh, thank you so much! I just really enjoyed talking with you today.

Ashley: Me too. Thanks again, friends, for listening.

Alice: All right. Bye!

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Hey friends. For the rest of the year, we're bringing back old episodes of Boss Barista. Part of the reason we’re doing this is because the community of listeners who are part of Boss Barista is so different than it was just a few years ago. But also, many of these episodes carry lessons and ideas that I still carry with me and are worth revisiting. If you haven’t subscribed to the newsletter yet, here’s a handy link to do so:

Below, you’ll find one of the most popular interviews I’ve ever done, and what I think is one of the most transformative conversations Boss Barista has ever aired. This episode features Karla Boza, who owns a coffee farm with her family in El Salvador, and originally aired in July 2019. From the pricing crisis facing coffee farmers to advocating for your work’s worth, Karla’s stories and perspectives have completely changed me—and I hope they change you, too. Here we go:

A few weeks ago, I was honored to attend Re:co, a coffee convention that invites speakers from all over the world to talk about these big ideas in coffee. This year’s conversation was focused on coffee prices and the crisis that we face as the price of coffee dips lower and lower.

I talked to the head of the coffee price crisis response initiative a few weeks ago, so if you want more context on that, listen to the Ric Rhinehart episode a couple of episodes back. But at one of the lunches during the conference, I met Karla Boza, a third-generation coffee farmer in El Salvador.

And the way that she spoke about the coffee crisis was in a way that nobody else was at this conference because it affected her everyday life. She was one of the handful of coffee farmers at this conference talking about coffee prices.

Don’t you think that maybe more of the players affected by the crisis should have been in that room, talking about this crisis? In this conversation that I recorded with Karla, which you’ll hear in a moment, we talk about the flaws in coffee buying. We often applaud coffee roasters—the folks that are on the other end of the supply stream—for being transparent with their prices, but are the prices that they’re paying actually changing the lives of farmers? Mostly, no.

Being transparent doesn’t make a price fair, and oftentimes the business of paying a higher price comes with a demand from a coffee farmer to do something extra for their coffee to stand out or taste different, which ends up costing the producer even more money. In this episode, I urge you to rethink the way that you consider quality, not just in coffee, but in every realm.

Karla’s experiences with coffee buyers—ranging from being tricked by an importer who told them that their coffee was st, to another noting that it was a standout from the samples that they were sent—question where quality really comes from, and if we should be basing our price standards on arbitrary markers of quality. This is easily one of the most informative and remarkable conversations I’ve ever had, and I promise we’ll be hearing more from Karla in the near future.

Before we begin, I should note that the term “coffee stream” comes from Keba Konte, owner of Red Bay Coffee in Oakland, California, who used this term during his talk at Re:co, which is the event that Karla and I met at. So without further ado, let’s listen to our conversation with Karla Boza.

Karla: I am Karla Boza, I am from El Salvador, and I am a coffee farmer. And my farm is San Antonio Amatepec, and it's located in San Salvador, so it's 15 to 20 minutes away from the city, so it's in a pretty urban area.

Ashley: Did you grow up on the farm? Is this a generational family farm?

Karla: I would technically be a third-generation coffee farmer, and [my dad] technically started this farm. He bought it when it used to just be used for grazing, part of it, and there were no trees; nothing. And then another part of it used to be a stone quarry, so then it was sort of like the private stone area for a local architect. Then he would just be blowing up parts of the hill whenever he had a project. So there was nothing there before, and then [my dad started the farm].

I didn’t grow up there. I grew up in the main part of the city and we used to go every other weekend to the farm with my family. I wasn’t ever really taught how to be a coffee farmer. I would just go there to hang out with my family for the weekends.

Ashley: So at what point did you decide that that was something that you and your family wanted to do?

Karla: So my dad had been doing this specifically at this farm since 1969, which is when he bought it, and ever since then he had been working in that. And I don't know really why [my sisters and I] weren't ever really involved up until maybe a few years ago when it was SCA [Specialty Coffee Association of America Expo] in Atlanta.

At that point I had finished college and I had studied sociology, something that wasn't related at all with coffee. I was working at a nonprofit with water projects, so nothing to do [with coffee], right? But my sisters called me and they were like, you know, “Our farm is certified by Rainforest Alliance, so [my dad] sent in some samples and he was invited to the yearly breakfast that they do at SCA.” So then I was like, “Okay, sure, I'll go there with him and support him and everything.”
So we went to Atlanta and that's sort of when I started to get more involved. At the SCA, my whole mind was just blown with how incredible the coffee industry is, because we hadn't ever really been involved in specialty coffee. We were growing specialty-quality coffee, but we weren't involved in that area simply because we didn't really know how it worked, or even in my personal experience that it existed.
I had gone to specialty coffee shops before, but I didn't really see the difference between that. [I just saw] that maybe they were brewing using certain methods or things like that. So that's sort of where I started to get involved. And I saw how my dad’s coffee, the quality that he was growing, belonged to this other category of coffee that wasn't being recognized.
Up until then, what we were doing was that all of the coffee was turned into a local mill. Literally a little truck would show up to your farm, you would load the coffee cherries, and a few days later you would get paid. We never knew where it ended, where the coffee went, who was buying it, at what price it was being sold ... nothing, because we were getting paid at market prices. Every once in a while we would get paid a little bit more because it was Rainforest Alliance-certified.
So then at [the SCA] breakfast, we happened to be sitting with this lady who was a Q grader and she happened to remember our coffee. And I was like, “What?!” This whole time we had been told by this local exporter that our coffee was s**t. Literally, that's what he told me. We would ask [the exporter to send samples to the SCA] breakfast and they'd be like, “Oh no, your coffee is so bad that we just mix it in with all of the other coffees, so then we don't really have any traceability for your coffee because it sucks.”
So we're like, “You know, okay, whatever. It is what it is.” And then [we wondered], “How come this woman who is a Q grader, who's cupped thousands of coffees, happens to remember this one specific coffee from a shitty farm?” So then we were like, something's wrong here, you know?
So then that night I started Googling our farm and I realized that the exporter had been selling our coffee to specialty coffee roasters in the U.K. and they were using everything: They were using our pictures, our story of the farm, my dad's name, a picture of him ... everything. And I was like, whoa. So I asked my dad, “Did you know that this is going on?” And he was like, “What??” He had no idea.
So that was part of it. The other part happened the next day when we were going around the show, and my dad found some friends and they were talking, and then this guy—with me standing next to my dad—he goes up to my dad and he's like, “I am so sorry that you only have three daughters, because who's going to look after the farm afterwards?” And I was standing right there and I was like, “What??”

I'm very stubborn, and my sisters are as well, so that's sort of what pushed me to get involved and be like, “No. The next time I see this man, I want to show him that I got involved in something that he thought that I didn't belong in.” So then it was more to prove him wrong and to get the value out of the coffee that we were producing. It was a mixture of things.

Ashley: That's ... this is a story that you have told me before, and I'm still listening to it and I'm like, “Oh my god!” The idea that you would be told that your coffee is terrible and then someone else makes this huge profit off of it. Do you think that's something that happens a lot—the lack of information to farmers being exploited?

Karla: Yeah, definitely. This is our story and it's very sad and everything, but at the same time, what makes it worse is that this is the most common story that you will find across coffee farmers. We have all had this happen to us. It's not something unique to [our farm].

[Farmers may say], “This local exporter is only paying this much,” or “This local exporter is paying that much,” and they are all prices that are just so bad. Then when you talk to roasters or Q graders, they tell you, “Coffee from El Salvador, even if it's grown at a low altitude and it's not well taken care of, and this and that and blah, blah, blah ... it's generally really good-tasting. It's usually—maybe not necessarily specialty [grade], but pretty much up there.”
So it's pretty sad to see all of these older people [getting taken advantage of]—because you know, most coffee producers these days are of an older generation. All of these people are the age of my dad, or maybe someone's grandfather. They are all being told these lies that are just horrible. And they're being taken advantage of, either by local exporters or international importers.

Ashley: What does the coffee scene look like in El Salvador right now? You mentioned before that you had been to some specialty coffee shops, but you weren't really sure where your farm fell in that realm until you went to SCA.

Karla: Before there were maybe one or two coffee shops that I didn't even know were considered “specialty” up until now. The thing is that our local market is flooded with really good coffee because we produce it. Even the coffee that is maybe not the best out of that farm, it gets sold locally and it's still pretty good.
So without knowing it, everyone here has been drinking really good coffee for a while. But then what's happened recently with the market [being] so bad right now is that a lot of farmers have decided to open up their own coffee shops. Out of nowhere you see all of these coffee shops popping up everywhere, and they have really good coffee. There have also been some roasters that are popping up as well, and they are roasting really well.
It's something that I'm so proud of because now not all of the good coffee goes abroad. A lot of it stays here and it's starting to get recognized. All of these coffee shops are starting to have guest roasters come in or they open up cuppings to people so we can start to evaluate our own national product in a way.
Just yesterday I was at this mall that just opened near our farm. It's like a strip mall. In the food court area, there's this coffee roaster. So I went in to see if I could offer them samples for coffee and they were just like, “Oh no, thank you for your interest, but this is actually the coffee roastery/coffee shop of a farmer.” So I was like, “What??” It's so cool that everyone is starting to get interested in selling their coffee in the local markets. That's really cool.

Ashley: Something you mentioned earlier is that one of the reasons people are starting to produce and consume more coffee in El Salvador is that the market outside of El Salvador is really bad. Can you talk a little bit about that—what it looks like selling your coffee to exporters?

Karla: Sure. We started selling our coffee independently a year ago. After Atlanta, we were all left with this big question in our mind of what we had to do in order to survive. I started looking into it with my sisters, and we convinced our dad—we don't have our own mills, so we convinced him [to go through] a local privately owned mill that is specialized in processing specialty coffee. We convinced him. We had no idea of what we were doing. We were just angry about the whole situation of people taking advantage of him and everything.
So we went through that route and I think that the best thing that has happened to us has been having social media presence. I opened up an Instagram page for our farm, posting pictures every once in a while, commenting on stuff ... the usual. When it was time for the harvest and to start selling our coffee, we had never done this before and there is no manual or instructions and how you become, you know, like a coffee ... not an exporter because we're technically not exporting it ... but like commercializing all of this coffee.
So I just started reaching out to people through Instagram because that's what I knew how to do. I started reaching out to some roasters and, fortunately, Girls Who Grind Coffee in the U.K. were interested in our story. We sent them samples and they got back to us pretty quickly, and it was just so amazing to hear this first confirmation of having someone value not just yourself, but having someone else value your coffee and be willing to pay a fair price.
Dealing with them has been so incredible because it's been completely transparent and we have both been moving on our ends to see that everything goes well, and that was really cool. For this year, we already had sort of proof that our coffee was valued elsewhere, so we continued the same strategy: going to different shows, sending samples and everything, and it has been pretty good.
What we have found that has worked for us the best has been approaching roasters that share the same values that we do. They are interested in transparency, they are interested in female empowerment ... all of these things that we value—sustainability, the environment—and that has been pretty cool.
I have also tried to approach importers and it has just been the complete opposite [experience]. I think that we have been talking to some importers since maybe November of last year and they take a month or so to get back to us. Clearly they're not interested, you know?
I spoke with this other importer in the U.K. and it was pretty bad. Supposedly their page said that they specialized in selling coffee that was sustainable and that they valued all of these great social and environmental things, then we started talking [to them] and they were like, “We only pay like $115. So that's $1.15 per pound.” And I was like, “What?? If you value all of these things, then you know that that's not enough.”
Fortunately we found an importer who we love. They're based in Canada and it's called Mountain Coffee. We're working with them this year to import our coffee to Canada and to parts of the U.S. and they have been great. They came to see the farm, they saw the mill, they met other producers that we really love here, and they were really interested in purchasing coffee in a way that is fair and respectful on both ends.
That has been pretty neat. So I think it's sort of the strategy that has worked the best for us has been going on Instagram and sharing our images and everything, and then also looking for partners who have our same values.

Ashley: What does that mean “to purchase coffee fairly,” to you?

Karla: To me it just means not only recognizing monetarily the value of coffee. It’s definitely working outside of the C market, because the C market is not sustainable. It's not realistic. It doesn't reflect the actual value of a coffee.
Aside from that, it means going outside of the C market and going outside of scoring numbers. If a Q grader scores your coffee at an 80, which is where you're told that it's “just specialty,” it doesn't mean that it's any less valuable than something else, like something that is scoring higher.
Also valuing the local impact that you're having on communities; the fact that you value your workers [and] that you respect them; that you value and respect the environment as well; that you're doing what you can to make the working conditions the best that they can be through your circumstances.
That is something that I would also like people who are purchasing coffee to take into account whenever they are purchasing coffee in a way that is fair, taking into account these factors. I don't necessarily have a number [to say], “It needs to be above this or that,” because everyone's costs are different, and the things that they're doing are different as well. So those things change.

Ashley: No, that makes sense. It makes sense to, number one, make it very clear that the cost of production for every farm is very different. Because it's easy to say, “We're paying this much more because the C market is this,” like, that's a number that could cover every farm, which I'm sure is frustrating to see on your end.
But I think something that you said that's really interesting is going outside of scoring. So I think something that we talked about—because we met at Re:co in April of this year in Boston—and it feels like roasters will say, “Hey, we're paying more for coffee,” but there is a demand on quality that seems not viable, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.

Karla: Sure. So when I say to value coffee outside of scoring, I mean that there are other factors that you need to take into account. Just talking about scoring, I mean, we've had our coffee scored by many different people in many different countries, under many different circumstances and I would say that a lot of them are certified Q graders, which sort of standardizes everything despite all of that.
And we have still gotten very different results, which personally, I think that that is completely normal because I find this obsession with standardizing coffee almost silly, because from a grower’s perspective, it's almost impossible to have it rain the same amount every year or to get the same amount of sunshine and all of these other factors that we don't have control over.
The fact that we get told that we get paid on quality and not even the Q graders can decide on what “quality” is, or the score that we get, or the attributes that we have, or the aftertaste, or “the this or the that.” Out of all of these reports, who do we base it on? Because it's not that they are different in one or two points. It’s that sometimes some people score it at an 81 and others at an 85, you know? Does that mean that the person [that said it was] an 81 who was also a Q grader ... I don't know. Those things, they just don't make much sense to me.
And I think that it's also very unfair because I think that this obsession with standardization and coffee and making everything repeatable and all of that doesn't happen at origin, and I don't think that it happens in roasting either. You can get two very similar cups of coffee and that's great, but they won't be identical.
At the point when it touches the barista's hands, they won't be able to make the same espresso or the same pour-over twice. It can be very similar, but it won't be the same, and just because they taste differently, it doesn't mean that the value is different. Coffee goes through so many different hands that you can't make it the same twice. And I think that is something that, instead of penalizing it in [the coffee score], we should value it and be like, “Wow, I had this one really good cup of coffee,” and just keep it in your mind, then value it for what it was, because it's going to happen once and that's okay.

Ashley: Right. Does it happen often where maybe you're working with a roaster or an importer and they make a demand or request for a value add, like, “If you try doing this, we'll pay more. If we try doing this sort of growing process, we'll pay more,” and are those requests viable?

Karla: A few years ago (well, maybe last year), I was talking with some roasters and they were like, “Do you have any fermented coffee? Do you have any of this?” or something like that. And I was like, “Guys, we don't even have our own mill, so no, we don't have our own fermented coffee. We are barely learning how to make naturals and how to process [honey processed coffee] this year, so we haven't gotten there yet.” And they'd be like, “Well, you know, if you did this one type of fermentation with this one type of yeast, it would all work out and your coffee would be so great and this and that.”
And, you know, I really value their opinion and I’m sure that they are great at roasting, but that's what they know how to do. You know? And I don't know how to ferment coffee. I know for a fact that they don't know how to ferment coffee either, so the fact that they're putting this pressure [on us] for those stories, I don't think that it's safe.
I am thankful and fortunate that I have this background in sociology that makes me question everything a thousand times more so that I'm not as susceptible to going out of my way and being like, “Okay, this year, we're going to ferment our coffee, even though we don't know what we're doing and we're just going to do it.” You know?
But I know that other people—other farmers—they don't have this mindset. It's like power structures. [The farmers] value the input of roasters and importers a lot more than their own experience and their own judgment and what they know how to do. So then if you have someone who has this purchasing power come and tell you, you need to ferment your coffee, I am sure that a lot of them, without having a clue of how to do it, are going to go out of their way and do it.
Maybe they'll get lucky and they'll do it really great, but most likely they won't. It puts a lot of pressure on producers to sort of jump whenever a roaster or importer tells them to jump, even though maybe that's not what they're used to doing. So it's good if you are telling people good meaning, well-meaning suggestions like, “Maybe you can try this,” or, “I have seen this [at] another farm,” but not give it as an absolute truth or demand.

Ashley: Right. It's interesting that you talk about the idea of power structures, because I think you're absolutely right that when a roaster asks a farmer to do something, like try a naturally processed method or to grow something like this, it's really a play of power to say, “We will pay you more,” because there's always money involved and it's impossible to ignore that.

Karla: Exactly.

Ashley: So how do we remove that power from roasters? I mean, maybe “remove” isn’t the right word, but how do we start to acknowledge the fact that this is a system based on power structures?

Karla: I think that what is happening right now with the coffee crisis, I have noticed that it has made a lot of producers very angry. It's the good type of anger that makes you become a lot more aware of where you stand and what is fair and what isn't. I have seen [the farmers] become a lot more aware and be like, “You know what? I am not going to sell my coffee for 70 cents a pound after processing. I am not going to do this because someone told me to. I am not going to do that simply because it's the best thing that I can get at the moment.”
They're starting, I think, to respect themselves a lot more out of this frustration and this anger and this lack of recognition. Even though it's something horrible that is happening right now, because a lot of people are really struggling and they're really suffering, but at the same time, this has made them realize that we are the base of this whole industry, and without our well-being—without our survival—no one else is going to have a job.
It has sort of made them realize that they are definitely needed and that they need to be definitely valued a lot more. I think that it sort of starts with that: having producers become aware of their role in the industry and how much they're needed and how they also get to have a say in everything that happens. Just because someone is offering you a dollar for a pound of coffee after processing, while the C market is at 90 cents, that's still not a good price, and you shouldn't feel the pressure to sell your coffee simply because someone tells you to.
I understand that sometimes the situation forces you to do something that you don't want, but as long as you are aware of what you should be receiving and how much you deserve to be valued, I think that that is a start to sort of changing these power dynamics that are happening.

On the other end of importers and roasters, I think that if you simply talk to a producer—I understand that a lot of the times there is a language barrier and that it's really hard, but—as long as you're asking questions and you see farmers as real-life human beings with families, with a job that is supporting your own livelihood as a roaster, I think that you start to value people more for who they are instead of just some random person within the coffee chain.
I think that slowly, that is maybe how you can start to change these power dynamics, but it definitely needs to start with the empowerment of coffee producers.

Ashley: One thing that really struck me when I first met you ... we were at Re:co, which is a big conference bringing all these coffee thinkers together, talking about big issues in coffee. This particular Re:co was about the coffee price crisis, and when I talked to you, you seemed angry, and I wonder what it's like to be in a room in a non-producing country, mostly surrounded by people who don't grow coffee, talking about a problem that affects you directly.

Karla: Yeah, that was pretty shocking. Fortunately this year I had the opportunity to be a Re:co Fellow, which is something that I'm really thankful for because it opened the doors to an event that I had really always wanted to attend because it just seemed so cool. This year the topic was the C market.
Wow. People who have a say in this are talking about something that's really important and that affects me.
So I got there, really excited, and once I started seeing that even though the whole topic was the C market and how hard it is to be a farmer these days, there were no farmers in the room other than maybe a few people. If you're going to be talking about someone, then I think that someone needs to be in the room, especially if you're supposedly discussing how to help them out and how to realize the struggles that they're going through.
So that was really shocking to see. At the same time, this is the Specialty Coffee Association. So we're supposedly talking about this coffee that gets paid pretty well based on quality and everything else that we have been talking about that isn't always so simple. Right?

And we were in those rooms when they asked us to have the group sessions and everyone was just going on about how maybe we needed to create not a C market, but an “S market” for specialty coffee. And I was like, “What??” You know? This is what got us here in the first [place]. Why are we replicating something that we know for a fact doesn’t work?

And then someone else was like, “Where are we going to base this market at?” And then someone else was like, “We don't need to base it anywhere, physically, it can be the internet.” And I was like, “Whoa whoa whoa,” you know? We're all talking about these things that don't really matter as much right now, because right now we're in a crisis and this is not something that we're going to solve in a day, but it's something that we need to be talking about for what it is and not replicate the same systems that have brought us here in the first place.
Surprisingly enough for me, [in this conversation] I didn't know where I stood, because if these were the big thinkers in the room and these were their concerns, then I don't know what I am as a coffee farmer because I don't see my future in there and it doesn't seem very good for me at the time or in the future, according to what they were saying.
I was so surprised that the only people who cared about this were the people from Walmart. I was like, “This is just so wild.” You know? The things that we hear about this company are pretty bad usually. They are known for the horrible things that they do, and yet their employees, their representatives are the only ones who seem to care.
And they were asking a lot about the conditions of what it is to be a coffee producer, our costs, what we were doing, what they could do. I was like, “You know, there's Walmart in El Salvador and [you could] actually open up your shelves for local roasters of specialty and non-specialty coffee to put their products in.”
So that was pretty helpful. [The representatives said], “We feel bad because we represent Walmart.” And I was like, “Actually, don't, because you are doing a lot more than a lot of the people who supposedly should care more and who are supposedly more in tune with ethical things. They’re doing a lot more.
In the case of El Salvador, at least, I know the person who roasts the coffee for McCafé, which is the coffee side of McDonald's, and they are paying a lot more for coffee than a lot of specialty importers are. So it's just this wild situation where the people who were supposed to be responding to this crisis weren't, and the other people who are often the “villains” of everything in the world were [comprehending better] what is going on. So yeah, that was a really weird experience for me, but it was very eye-opening as well.

Ashley: What has the coffee price crisis done specifically to you and your farm? How has it affected you?

Karla: Our farm [has] stopped working maybe about a third of the coffee farm, because it's just not viable anymore. We have also had to lay off a lot of people. And every year we used to give everyone [raises] and this year—well, for the past two years —we haven't been able to do that. So, that has affected their households as well. It has been pretty bad.
Then we have also had to take out a bunch of loans from the bank. In El Salvador there are only two banks that are giving loans for coffee because it's so risky right now, and the interest rates that they offer are extremely high. And one year we were only able to pay the interest rates and not really pay our loans, so that sucked as well. We lost maybe over $500,000 U.S. dollars just in that.
So yeah, it's been pretty bad. And this is the best-case scenario for El Salvador right now because we're also part of a local co-op and they are really good. They are maybe one of the best functioning co-ops in El Salvador right now. They're very transparent. They're very efficient. They have their own roastery, so they make a lot more earnings.
And despite that, since so few people are turning in coffee—because a lot of them have shut down their farms—their productivity has gone down, so that has impacted everyone else's prices. That has impacted us a lot as well because that used to be sort of a more stable way to sell our coffee and now it isn't. So yeah, definitely a lot of bad things.

Ashley: Yeah, no, none of that sounds good.

Karla: Yeah.

Ashley: It’s pretty jarring to hear it all laid out like that too, and I think it bears repeating because I think that still this hasn't landed for a lot of people.

Karla: Yeah. I think that a lot of people know that something is going on, but they don't really know what it is, and I think that those would be the majority of the people that are more aware. But generally I think that people don't know how bad it is and how we're not being very dramatic about this.
Like what I just told you, it's not even the worst. It just ... it is what it is, and it's our reality. And like I said, we are one of the best-case scenarios of farms right now in El Salvador. A lot of [farms], they just shut down and they locked the gates of the farm, they fired everyone, and that's it.
It's so ironic because this is something that my dad tells us all the time, that his friends who used to be coffee producers, the ones who shut their farms [down] about three to four years ago, are doing a lot more, they are a lot healthier, they feel a lot safer financially than people who are still in coffee right now. So he's like, “What if I would've just shut down the farm a few years ago? We wouldn't be in this situation right now.”
But then he takes it all back and he's like, “Well, but then four or five families wouldn't have a job, and maybe 20 or 30 people who are seasonal workers wouldn't have a job, and then the 20 or 30 coffee pickers that come for the harvest wouldn't have a job either. So yeah, it's pretty bad. It's actually really bad right now, the situation.

Ashley: So what does viability look like for you? How do we begin to change that trajectory?

Karla: This is maybe our last year that we will be working the farm if it doesn't work out. [My sisters and I] have become a lot more involved and we have been going to fairs because we have realized that's the only way that you can make a human connection with roasters and with importers and that has paid off pretty well.
So we're selling our coffee definitely at a higher price than the C market. But then we still have to see if that's enough, and if it's not, then I think that this might be the last year that we're working the farm. That's something that we're facing at the moment.

Ashley: That's really incredibly real and I'm honored that you shared that because, again, people aren't realizing quite how serious this is: Coffee will be gone. I'm feeling a little lost for words, honestly, because you are the base of the whole industry, which you just said too. And I don't know why we haven't reacted appropriately.

Karla: I think that it's just this lack of empathy, really, that is part of the problem. Because, for example, once you get to know about what is going on and what happens ... you're a person and you're a good person, so that causes something in you when you start asking all of these questions, and I think that's part of what needs to happen as well.
If you are a coffee shop owner and you get your coffee from elsewhere, ask your roaster how much they're paying for coffee. If you're a roaster ask your importer how much they're paying for your coffee. If you're an importer, ask your coffee producers how much they're spending on producing this coffee. I think that by asking these questions, you start to humanize coffee a lot more.
You start seeing that behind coffee there is the life of the barista, the life of the roaster, the life of the importer, the life of the coffee farmer, the life of the coffee transporter, the life of the coffee picker, and everyone else. There are just so many people that depend on this crop and there is no room for us to be selfish about it and not be transparent either.

Ashley: Is there anything else that you want people to know about you and your farm?

Karla: Yeah. I would like everyone to know that our doors are open. If you want to come and visit, let us know. I think that people also need to maybe see for themselves what is going on. If you prefer another country you can ask me and, if I know someone there, I can ask them. If you have any questions, my Instagram is public.
You can ask me whatever you want to know about coffee production, because I really do believe that as long as this information is out there and as long as it's accessible and as long as people are at least slightly interested in finding out what's going on, then things can change.
So if you have any questions: ask them. Don't be afraid. Don't be scared. Don't be embarrassed. There is room for everyone in the industry to grow and to be better about what we're doing and how we're doing things. Like I said, a lot of people depend on this and we all deserve to be recognized for what we do because we're all doing a great job and that needs to be recognized.

Ashley: Karla, thank you so much for being on the show and thank you for sharing your stories.

Karla: No, thank you for being interested [in me] telling these stories about things that happen in this industry. If there's anything else, just let me know.

Ashley: I know, I already have a list of questions I want to ask you for a follow-up.

Karla: And just one more thing, because I don't want this to be depressing and horrible for whoever listens to this. I go to a lot of these meetings in coffee and it's usually a lot of older, older men who are very negative about how things are looking and they feel very sad about how it is.
Like I said, our story is not unique. It's very common for a lot of people, but fortunately despite all of this, you know, you've heard me laughing throughout this whole interview and it's not that I think it's funny. It's just that we have this saying in El Salvador, “No se dona, para se goza,” [which loosely translates to], “Maybe you're not winning, but at least you're enjoying it.”
So it's sort of like making the most out of things, you know? So whenever you go to these meetings, you hear all of these men laughing about how ridiculous it is that someone offered them a dollar per pound for their coffee. They're just crying—crying out of laughter because it's just so ridiculous.
So we're definitely struggling, that's very true, but our take on things has been to adapt to the situation, to see what we can do to move on, because this is something that we love to do. We would give anything—well, we're giving everything that we have to keep working the coffee farms. It's something that we genuinely love doing and that we do with a lot of pride. Even though things are really bad, we're making the best out of what we have. So even though it's pretty bad, we're still enjoying it as much as we can.

Ashley: That's nice that you were so generous to help end on a positive note. That was very kind of you.

Karla: You know, it's not like the most positive thing, but yeah.

Ashley: Well, thank you again for being here and it was an honor to talk to you.

Karla: Yeah, no problem. And just let me know if you need anything else, if you have any more questions, or if you'd like to discuss anything else as well.

Thanks for listening, please share with your friends, leave a comment, and I hope you enjoy these treasures from the archives!

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When Frankie Volkema and her father, Tim, decided to become Q graders, they didn’t know how much that single decision would influence their future.

The Q grading certification is a coffee education and tasting test meant to standardize how professionals judge coffees for defects, flavors, flaws, and other traits, in order to make growing and buying decisions.

Frankie, at the time, was 13 years old. She would become the world’s youngest Q grader. She’s 15 now, and still holds that title, but the Q grading class also introduced her to a very important fact about coffee: The average coffee farmer is in their mid-50s, and if we don’t make farming viable for young people to pursue, the future of coffee is in jeopardy.

Frankie and Tim started Joven Coffee, a line under Tim’s existing coffee brands, Schuil Coffee and Sparrows Coffee, that showcases coffees from young producers. All the farmers that Frankie and Tim work with are under the age of 35, and together, they’ve created a specific market for their coffees.

Buying coffee from Joven means directly supporting the next generation of farmers. In an industry that easily veers toward the esoteric, Frankie and Tim Volkema haven’t just raised important issues, but have presented them in a way that’s easy and digestible for drinkers—and that’s never been more critical. Here are Frankie and Tim Volkema:

Ashley: Every now and then we have more than one person on the show. We have two people joining me today. I was wondering if we could start by having Frankie introduce herself.

Frankie: I'm Frankie Volkema. I am the youngest Q grader in the world. I became a Q grader through spending a lot of time working with coffee. [My dad] and I did that as a bonding thing to become Q graders together, me and my dad.

He can probably tell you more about Schuil Coffee and our coffee companies, but I'm also the founder and brand ambassador of Joven Coffee, which is a line under Sparrows Coffee.

Ashley: And then Tim, if he could take it from there.

Tim: Sure. So I'm the owner of Schuil Coffee, Joven Coffee, and Sparrows Coffee. I got into the coffee business almost five years ago and I came in through an acquisition of Schuil Coffee, which is a 40-year-old coffee company that was started by Gary and Gladys Schuil. I have a kind of boring business background before that.

Ashley: I think it's funny that you say “boring,” but I'm like, “What did you do before?”

Tim: I'm happy to go into it if you want.

Ashley: I would love to hear that. I think those things are super interesting to me.

Tim: I came into coffee directly from Amazon, actually. That was my most recent employer prior to coffee. Right out of undergrad, I went into finance consulting. I did mergers and acquisitions for Deloitte. Then I went back to business school at Kellogg, which is Northwestern's business school, just outside Chicago.

Then I went to Kraft Foods for five years, and then I started, with a partner, an Indian version of Chipotle called Kasa. That's in San Francisco and that still exists. My partners now own it and operate it. I went to Amazon and then we moved back to Michigan for family reasons. My wife's family and my family are both from here. We both grew up here and then left for a long period of time and came back.

That's when I was looking for my next thing. And just looking at a bunch of different opportunities, and Schuil was the right kind of company at the right stage in its transition. It just sort of worked out, and I'm super grateful that it did.

Ashley: I'm eager to hear both of your different experiences with this question. This is a question I ask almost everybody when they come on the show, so I'll start with Frankie: What was it like growing up with coffee in your life? Do you remember coffee from a young age?

Frankie: My parents have always drank coffee since I've been alive, but I never really paid much attention to it. It was just always an adult drink. I never tried it really until my dad bought Schuil. And then I was around it a lot.

I just heard about it a lot. My parents started to get really into it, and looking at different origins and different [roast] levels of coffee. I learned more about it through kind of eavesdropping and just being around Schuil. There are a lot of posters up on the walls about where coffee comes from and how to produce coffee. So I've kind of learned through that, and that pretty much sparked my interest for coffee.

I didn't really know much about coffee or really cared about it until around sixth grade, around age 11. But then after that, my interest for coffee really grew and I started to learn a lot more about it.

Tim: And you were sort of trapped at Schuil because it was like, a babysitting thing.

Frankie: I couldn't get anywhere. You had to watch me.

Ashley: And you became the youngest Q grader at 13, is that correct?

Frankie: Yes, that is correct.

Ashley: Did you pass the Q exam the first time?

Frankie: In the first week that we were there, I passed all the tests except for one of the cuppings. Then I had to go travel a couple months later to a different class, to just pop in and retake the cupping—which is a coffee tasting—afterwards. That's when I passed the Q, but yeah, it was a couple months later than the first class.

Ashley: That's wild. That's so cool. We'll come back a little bit more to how you two started taking the Q grading exam together, but Tim, I was wondering if you grew up with coffee in your life?

Tim: Not really, to be honest. My parents were never big coffee drinkers, and I don't think … I'm always amazed at how young people nowadays get into coffee. I don't think I had my first cup of coffee ’til after college, actually. I distinctly remember it was at a Starbucks in Chicago because it was right before an interview that I had coming out of college and I was like, “I should probably—I'm like an adult now, I should probably try this.”

It came to me later in life. Then as I lived in these other larger, bigger cities, obviously there was like, a really amazing coffee shop on every corner. [That was around when] the third-wave coffee movement was taking place as I was getting through my 20s and 30s.

I got really into coffee as a consumer, but really didn't know anything behind the scenes. I had no idea what scoring was. I really didn't know why I liked what I liked. I just sort of went with—I just tried a bunch of things and I was like, “Oh, I think I like Blue Bottle,” but I couldn't have told you why.

Ashley: I think something that you said, Frankie, that's really interesting that I want to go backwards a little bit on is: Tim, you buy Schuil and obviously you have your kids around. I was wondering what it was like to have a coffee business, but also have a family and have children grow up in that business.

I don't think that we have a lot of examples of that in the coffee industry right now. So I wonder what it was like for you to have this business that's maybe not a family business, but at the same time, you're like, “Well, this is my family business. They're always here all the time. The people around me are growing up around it.”

Tim: I guess it would have been like any kind of business that we were in. It was just our circumstance that we have three kids and they all have different schedules. We used the business as a dropping-off point where Frankie would come after school and she would do homework and whatever and watch Netflix.

At some point though, we were doing a cupping and I was like, “Why don't you just try this?” I think you said, “I don't think I want to.” And then you did and you were really good at it.

We were working with another person, David Poole. He's a longtime coffee person who lives in LA, and he was helping us. When I first came into the business, I recognized that I really didn't know anything about coffee and I better get smart about this if I'm going to do a good job at it. We have a mutual friend from Equator Coffees—Helen Russell—and she introduced me to David.

David would come in periodically during the beginning, especially helping us evaluate our green [coffee] program. He was really our green coffee consultant at the beginning. And he was pretty surprised at your ability to pick up notes and articulate them at your age. He was, I would say, a catalyst certainly for your interest in this idea that you might want to get your Q.

Ashley: When was that?

Tim: You were 11?

Frankie: Probably 11, maybe 12.

Ashley: Do you remember this Frankie?

Frankie: Yeah, I do actually. I don't know if it was the second [cupping] I did or the first one, but I just remember one where—and it was in, we had a remodel at Schuil since then, so it was in the old Schuil cupping lab, which is also the break room.

We had the cups set up on a table and I was really nervous because I was like, “Oh no, they're going to judge me if I don't know what I'm doing.” I know it was just supposed to be fun, but I know I put some pressure on myself like that.

I remember everything and thinking like, “Oh, this is so fun that I get to be with all these adults.” And I remember tasting one of the cups and being like, “This is really woody. I feel like I taste some wood in there,” and they were like, “Wow, that's a great tasting note, Frankie.” I was like, so proud of myself. I remember that specifically.

Ashley: That's wild that at 11, you were able to articulate the term “woody.” Maybe when you're 11, you're closer to an age where maybe you put your mouth on a tree or something—maybe that's where that comes from [Laughs]—but that's still pretty impressive to be able to make that connection.

You mentioned that at that cupping that's when people identified like, “Oh, hey, Frankie can really taste these notes.” At what point did you two decide to take your Q grading exam together?

Frankie: It just started out of curiosity. We weren't like, right after that coming for more like, “Oh, let's take the Q together.”

After that [cupping], my dad was like, “Do you genuinely enjoy doing the cuppings and coffee tastings?”

I was like, “Yeah, I think it's fun. It's cool that I a little bit know what I'm doing.” So we looked into it. And we talked to David too. We said, “Is there an age limit? Or could this be a possible thing for us to do together?” That's when we started looking into it.

As we learned more about the Q and about what it entailed, we started to get more excited about it as a possible thing for us to do together and a way for us to learn a lot more about coffee in general. So I feel like it was probably a month later that we decided to sign up for the course and started tasting coffees more and preparing for that course.

Ashley: So you two take this course together and you learn some pretty transformative information during that time, right?

Frankie: Mhmm.

Ashley: Tell me about that.

Frankie: The course was six days—three days of classes, and then three days of testing. The classes consisted of a lot of general coffee knowledge to tell us about coffee processing methods, about producers, about the coffee plant itself.

We did tastings and we talked through the tastings and what things to look for [with] certain scores. We also did the practices of the tests that we would be taking in the last three days. The majority of the chunk that was just general coffee knowledge was really informative because we learned all about the processing methods, like I said, and things that will help us connect with coffee and actually help you in the tests later, because then you can think about like, “Oh, what region is this coffee from? What kind of notes would it have? What kind of defects or imperfections might be common in this coffee?” and just things like that.

Tim: And they went off-script a little bit, which was nice just to talk about the supply chain—the farmers and the co-ops and the exporters and the importers. That was also helpful. And that's what sort of led us into this discussion around the aging farming population, especially in Central and Latin America.

Ashley: Frankie, can you speak a little to that—about age and coffee farmers?

Frankie: When we were in that coffee course, one of the main things they told us was that there was a problem in the coffee industry, and that was that the average age of a coffee farmer was about 55 or 56, and that was too old.

There weren't enough young people that wanted to take over their parents’ or family’s business, because they didn't see it as a viable career option. They didn't think they would be able to make enough money.

We heard about that and we were like, “That's a problem.” We want to help get more young people in the coffee industry and then make sure they can also make enough money.

Ashley: So you take this Q grading exam and you learn this information, and then I imagine you go home—what do you do with that? How does that ruminate in your head?

Frankie: At first we just talked about it a lot. I remember being at the course and saying, “Well, that's really interesting. We never heard about this, as coffee consumers, and as a coffee roasting company, we had never heard about this issue.” We didn't really have any means to do anything about it at that point and I hadn't even gotten my Q yet since I failed the first time, since I failed one of the cuppings. So then I had to finish it, but we wanted to do something about it, but we really hadn't formed an idea yet.

Later we were invited to go on a trip to Colombia to talk to young producers and to talk to young farmers and taste our coffee and see coffee farms. That was a confirmation that we're actually going to do something,

Tim: I would say it was a progression too. So it was more of just a side comment at the Q, and then once you've got Q, we started connecting the dots a bit later—on that you would be a really good person to have this conversation, because of your age. So it came together, I'd say, a little bit later, but the seed was absolutely planted probably when we were at the Q.

Ashley: It's interesting that you mentioned that being not necessarily a throwaway comment, but just something that was mentioned as a fact about coffee—that the average age of coffee farmers is in their mid-50s, and that's going to be a problem because young people aren't taking over farms.

Obviously what makes you stand out is that you took that information and you took action. So at what point did Joven start to really formulate as a concrete idea?

Frankie: I would say that the idea of Joven formed a little bit before we went on our trip to Colombia in November of 2019. We had an idea that we wanted to do something, and that something would be some form of our own line of coffee, or something that would support these young farmers specifically.

So I went down to Colombia to talk to a certain co-op that we knew had a young producers program, so we knew about that before we went down, but then the name for Joven and the exact thing—we're going to have a line and we're going to have only coffees produced by this criteria, by [farmers] ages 35 and younger, and it has to score an 84 or above—all came a little later, after we had solidified the first group of young farmers.

Ashley: What's your elevator pitch for Joven? When someone asks you, “What is Joven?” what is the response that you give people?

Frankie: I'll usually tell people that Joven is a line of coffee that celebrates and showcases young coffee farmers’ talent. We sell coffee from farmers ages 35 and younger to ensure that young farmers are getting paid for their coffee. We only buy coffees that score 84 or higher to make sure that it is high-quality coffee, so that the farmers get a good price for their coffee and can make a living off of coffee farming.

Ashley: What is it like when you tell people about Joven’s mission? Because I know for me as a coffee professional, I've read that statistic before—that there's a problem in coffee with people not taking over farms, that farmers are getting older and older—but as you said, that was new information to you at the Q grading exam. Also, I can't imagine that most consumers know that. So I imagine that part of your mission is almost like a public awareness campaign.

Frankie: Yeah, that's a huge part of it because the only people that really know about that statistic and this issue are people already in the coffee industry, and even some roasters don't even know about it.

I think especially in the U.S. and on the consumer end, it's something that nobody knows about and that's mainly part of our goal: to get people aware of the issue and what's happening so that we can get more people interested in, more people to buy coffee from us, but then also other roasters to be like, “Hey, I want to get in on this issue. I want to help out. I want to start selling coffee from young producers specifically,” and have that become a bigger thing that people want to support and want to become more of a widespread thing that people want to donate their money to.

Ashley: So most people buy coffee—you’ve mentioned grading, you’ve mentioned scores. Most people probably buy coffee based on those scores, they cup a coffee, they give it an 84, 85, 86, whatever … they'll make buying decisions that way.

What was it like when you first approached the importers that you were working with and said, “Hey, we actually have kind of a different goal. We want to buy these coffees from young producers that score this amount.” Was that a question that they had ever gotten before, or had anyone ever asked about young farmers?

Frankie: I think when we went to Colombia and we talked to these co-ops, they gave us the impression that [it was] not very many roasters. We were one of the first roasters that had ever specifically asked for coffee from young farmers and was specifically interested in this issue.

They were really excited about us being there and we're really excited to showcase their coffee. I think just to answer that question, yeah. We were like the only people that were really interested in that specific issue.

Tim: This is a problem they're obviously well aware of. They have these programs where they're training young farmers to produce better coffee so they can get better pricing. And that's amazing, but to develop a market in the U.S. that was, like Frankie said, I don't think that, to our knowledge, has been a priority for any other roasters up to this time.

Ashley: Yeah, that's a good point, what you were saying: that this is an issue that many people in producing countries are well aware of, and we can certainly treat it from that level, from the producing end and encouraging more young people to get into farming on that end, but there has to be a market for it as well. So I imagine that's where Joven kind of thinks about—not only are we buying these coffees from young farmers, but we're also creating a whole new market for them as well.

Frankie: Exactly.

Ashley: That's something that I find really interesting just about your business model in general, with Schuil and Sparrows—is that you have experience in branding things for different audiences. So was that something that felt intuitive or natural for you folks to do?

Tim: Did it feel natural for you, Frankie?

Frankie: Yeah. My goal was always to push the young farmers thing. I guess it felt natural for me to be like, “This is my purpose. This is Joven’s purpose.” If you are somebody who cares about cause-based things or wants to help a certain cause or secure the future of coffee and make sure you have coffee to drink in the future, then you'll like our product.

Tim: I say for me, it did feel natural, especially because coffee is segmented in a way that you're seeing in other coffee companies, really large ones, be very specific in their messaging.

So one example I would use is Death Wish where they have Robusta [coffee] and it's highly caffeinated. That's the message that they push now. Is that going to speak to me? No, it won't, but there is a segment of coffee drinkers that it really does speak to, and they've had great success there. So we're like, “How can we use that same sort of segmentation and specific messaging to reach an audience for this purpose?” That's really how we thought about it.

Ashley: I love that because I think for a lot of coffee roasters, we kind of focus on a singular message of quality—not to say that that's bad, that's obviously a good pursuit, but quality involves a lot of buy-in.

It involves a consumer already having a base knowledge to understand what quality is, especially when we're facing consumers who probably come into coffee shops and they're like, “I just want a cup of coffee.” So can we segment people in a way that matters to them.

I can imagine making a decision about coffee as a consumer, if I don't know a lot about coffee and saying like, “Okay, I don't know the difference between this Ethiopian coffee and this Colombian coffee, but I understand that I want coffee in the future and I want to invest in coffee's future. So I go in to buy this coffee that supports young farmers.”

Frankie: What's been really interesting for me, what I've seen of the consumers of Joven, is that it's not all just people that are really into coffee or that go to Madcap every day and want that super high-quality coffee.

It's a lot of people that hear about the story and are really interested in it and have never—they always drink whatever coffee in the morning. But since they've heard about Joven and about the issue that we're pushing, they have been drinking our coffee and have been like, “Wow, this is really good. I've never had coffee this good before, and I've never appreciated coffee for what it is and for the farmers that are producing it.”

I think that's just really cool to see people that have never thought about coffee in this way before be transformed because of Joven’s mission.

Ashley: Right? You've almost given people an accessible point for them to engage with your coffee, but then it opens up the door for another experience. They're able to say, “Oh, I bought this coffee initially because of this, but now I'm learning so much about how coffee can taste—let me take that next step.”

You're almost bringing in the next wave of coffee drinkers in a way.

Frankie: I would say so.

Ashley: I think you are!

What does it feel like, being the spokesperson for this brand? Because I mean, part of the brand is that you are a young person. Are you excited to be that spokesperson, that front person?

Frankie: Yeah. I love it. I love being the person that people ask me questions about Joven. I love being the person that people are like, “I'm so happy. I'm so proud of you with your coffee. And I love your mission so much.”

I love to be able to share that too, because I've always been a public speaker. I've always liked public speaking and doing speeches and talking in front of groups of people and stuff like that. So for me to also use that talent that I have to share this message and to talk about what I'm passionate about and make sure that people know about it has been a really cool experience for me.

I'm really grateful that I have this opportunity. And yeah, it's just really exciting for me.

Ashley: I was about to say, I was thinking about when I was 15 and I was like, I don't know if I could do this right now, be on a podcast. So that just landed for me—how well you do public speaking, which is awesome. It makes sense that that's something that you're passionate about.

How do you folks talk about the future? Because you obviously do Joven, you work with these farmers, but I imagine part of the business model is always thinking ahead.

Frankie: I would say that our main goal for the future is to get this awareness of the issue of young farmers out there, and to get more consumers interested in it, and to also get more roasters to support that issue and start selling coffee from young farmers and to create this market for this young talent.

[We want to] make that a more widespread thing, that a lot of consumers know about and that more people want to support. We’re not trying to be selfish and like, “We want to be the only coffee company that sells young farmers’ coffee. We want that to be our thing.” We want everybody to know about it and for everybody to start supporting it so that we can all support the future of coffee.

Tim: Specifically we would, along those lines, like to essentially force the hand of more co-ops and importers to sponsor projects like this.

We started out buying, you know, not a small percentage, but less than half of this co-op’s—Cafe Norte—output of their young producers program, and heavens, I mean, it's not all of it, but it's almost all of it now.

Frankie: Like 80% or something.

Tim: The more that we can do that, the more demand there is for this, I think it's going to be really great when we start to see more of these programs pop up, because they know that it will get purchased.

Ashley: I think what you mentioned earlier—getting more roasters interested in this project—is really, really pivotal. It seems like you folks think about this issue from a really multi-faceted level.

Tim: We’re trying to. Certainly, and again, as Frankie's said earlier, we're a business—we want to be successful of course, and spread the word about this issue, and sell coffee along the way. But that's not really the reason we're doing it. We're not trying to be this enormous—Joven's not really designed to be this enormous company.

It's more designed as the front-runner on the education side, and then if it gets larger, that's great. If other roasters follow us, that's also great, it's not really about trying to build this one entity into as big as it can be. It's more about trying to get this issue out there.

Ashley: Right. Exactly. What's it like working with each other?

Frankie: I love it. For me and my dad to bond over this is a really great thing because I mean, he has other things with my siblings where he can bond with them and spend time with them. But for us to have this thing where we traveled to Colombia together, that was super fun. We do cuppings together and to have this thing to connect over, especially since he's busy with work, I'm busy with school, so it's easy for us to not be able to spend any time together or just to be like, “I'm going to hang out with my friends, I'm too busy for you or whatever.”

It's nice to be like, “Well, now we're doing this thing together.” So we have to spend time together and then we can bond. And I don't know. I really like it. For him to be kind of my boss or my mentor, I guess, and be really good at cupping and for us to be able to talk through that, it's just a blessing.

Ashley: I'm always really into how people work together. I think it's really interesting that you're obviously father and daughter, and you have this one very specific relationship, but then you have this other way that you connect with each other that's totally independent of that, but still is obviously informed by your father/daughter relationship.

Tim: Yeah. I love it because there's only so much detail a teenage girl's going to go into with her dad on how her day was, you know? I'm just being realistic here and saying that it's nice to have this additional stream of content that we have in common, that it's helpful for us to, or it just facilitates more time spent together, and it gives us a good excuse to travel together. Selfishly, that's been a really cool part of it.

Ashley: What would you count as some of your biggest successes?

Frankie: I think my biggest success is Joven for sure, because it's me being able to take something that I'm good at—coffee tasting and being a Q grader—and being able to take that and use it for good and use it to better our world.

I think that's a success for me, even if Joven doesn't grow as much or we or I don't end up doing coffee for the rest of my life, since I still have a lot of it left. I just think it's already a success that we've been able to reach this many people through Joven and hopefully more. Yeah, that's my biggest success.

Ashley: What about within Joven? Are there any particular relationships that you've fostered or any coffees that you've sold that you've been like, “Yeah, this is cool.”

Frankie: I think it's amazing that I was even able to travel to Colombia and meet some of these young farmers whose coffees are part of Joven, and to talk to the people who are in charge and to see a whole different culture.

I’d never been to South America before, and it was just so cool to see how people lived there and how coffee was such a huge part of their community. I was just so glad that I got that experience to see. I think that's amazing. I would like to go back to Colombia and back to South America and to other countries that we get coffee from. But I think that trip specifically was very eye-opening and really, really amazing.

Tim: Just the idea of this value chain from coffee cherry all the way to its end product. All we're doing as roasters is cooking the beans. It was very apparent and, as relates to coffee farming in general and not just to young farmers, but it's so much work on the front end. That was just so eye-opening I think, for you, Frankie, and for my first time, to see how much goes into the production and processing and sorting of coffee by the time we get it, literally most of the work's been done.

Ashley: Right. That's a good point. I think something that's come up a lot on the podcast with some other guests is the idea of risk, and how roasters can take on more risk for farmers.

I think this is one example of that—it’s identifying an issue on a farm and saying, “We're going to specifically make this a thing that we focus on and we're going to make a market for this,” and assume—not necessarily assume some of the risks, but we're going to make the investment worth it. We're going to say we think that this is important and we're going to make a funnel for it, essentially. Maybe funnel is not the right word, but you see where I'm going with that.

Tim: I think to your point, we will forward-contract this coffee, so we'll do it before it's done. And so there's by creating—

Ashley: Explain that a little bit. Just what the idea of forward-contracting is.

Tim: Sure, so not to be confused with the C-market futures. Forward-contracting would just be that we commit to—let's say, I want a whole container of this Cafe Norte youth coffee. We'll commit to that before it's ever produced.

So before the crop is harvested, they know that we are committed to buying a container. We sign a forward contract with whatever importer you're working with on that—that would be facilitated typically by the importer. You'd sign a contract to say, “I'm buying X number, let’s say 300-some bags of this particular coffee. And I will take it between this time and this time.”

That's a commitment that we make as a roaster and then that trickles down to the farmer and they know that they already have a source for that at a given price. They ship a pre-sample and we have to approve it. They can't not deliver the quality we're expecting, but at least they know that that coffee is already sold.

Ashley: That's something that comes up a little bit throughout the show, which I would love to get more into—obviously not at this time, but the idea of contracts and how contracts are often formulated, and what a contract actually means.

Something that I've heard from some producers, actually also in Colombia, was that during COVID-19 a lot of people found ways to get out of contracts which is a big deal, which is a big problem. So being able to say, “I am going to buy this coffee at this price, and this is promised or ready before you can produce it,” is a really big deal.

Tim: Absolutely.

Ashley: What would you want people to know about Joven that maybe gets glossed over or maybe doesn't get talked about as much?

Frankie: I think probably the one thing that we don't emphasize as much is that coffee itself is a very complex drink, and the fact that—and like my dad said, the value chain just has so many steps—and for the farmers at the beginning to do so much of the work, it makes sense that we need to be able to pay them a fair price so that they can make a living.

I think that it's also just important for consumers to understand that coffee is a complex thing and it's not just fuel in the morning—it's okay if you drink it for fuel or you drink it just to have a caffeine boost, but also it is something that is just more than that. [I’d want people to] understand its nuance a little bit.

Ashley: I feel like you folks are doing this really important and intricate work because you're tackling a really big issue in a broad sense, but also doing it in really, really specific ways and on a multi-faceted level.

I wonder, since you're in this work, do you think that in the next five years, people are going to be trying to catch up? We seem to know that there are problems with the supply chain of coffee. We know that climate change is an issue. We know that the age of farmers is an issue. It doesn't feel like enough roasters think it’s as imminent as it is. What do you think the next five years will look like?

Tim: Well, if not a lot changes that average age is going to creep up past 60. I know the climate change thing. That's so multifaceted and complex. I hesitate to even comment. I'm not an expert in that area, but it's…

Ashley: Let's just focus on age.

Tim: I agree with you. There are not enough. I feel like this is an under-talked-about issue for sure. It is relative to its importance and significance at origin. I do hope yes, that other roasters will catch up because I think it will become a bigger deal, and it could take five years to just cross that threshold into a more mainstream understanding of it. I hope it doesn’t take that long, but it might.

Ashley: I feel like, I mean—I don't know, obviously it's hard to predict the future and all you can do is really try to work to make it better, which kind of seems like what you folks are doing.

Frankie: I mean, that's our hope, is that what we're doing makes a difference and that we can actually raise awareness and be like, “Hey guys, this is a big deal. This is actually a big deal. And we would like you to join our mission and help us out.”

Tim: And to be honest with you, we should get props to one of our main partners in this—Trade, the copy subscription company.

They're a huge source of volume for us, for Sparrows, but Joven as well. That's one thing we can do. We're not really putting our full resources into Joven, into marketing. We've been focused on some other things. We've been putting the message out there, but there's more we can do on the digital marketing side. In 2022, we're planning to push that a little bit harder on our end.

Ashley: If somebody was listening to this and they were like, “Yeah, I'm going to go buy some Joven coffee right now,” where would be a good place for them to start on your menu?

Frankie: You can go find all our offerings at jovencoffee.com. You can also follow me on Instagram at @kidqgrader, or there is a @jovencoffee on Instagram.

Ashley: What's your favorite coffee right now?

Frankie: We're about to launch a coffee from Guatemala and it's with Coffee Kids. It's delicious and I'm very excited about it. That's my favorite one right now because it's our new one and it's a nice, balanced coffee, a nice everyday drinker. I'm excited about that.

Tim: We just got our annual shipment of our Ethiopia Dimtu Tero and that's on the Sparrow side and it's tasting ridiculous. So that's been my jam lately.

Ashley: Thank you both for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Tim: It's been great. Thank you.

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Today, I’m chatting with Jose Uechi, co-founder of Compadre, a coffee brand based in Peru. Jose—or Pepe, as he goes by—is an industrial designer by trade, and got into coffee because of his friend, Juan Pablo. Juan Pablo invented a solar roaster, a machine that could roast coffee without electricity. Initially, Compadre’s founders worked to get these roasters into the hands of farmers. They learned that farmers were only paid a few dollars per kilo of coffee, while roasters could fetch double, triple, or even quadruple that amount. Their solar-powered roasters were meant to shift some of that value down the supply chain by empowering farmers to roast and sell their own coffees.

A few years later, and Compadre is still working on raising wages for farmers—albeit in a slightly different way. In this episode, we talk about the shifts and pivots that Pepe and his team have made as they got deeper into the economics of coffee-buying and -selling. The broad goal of Compadre is still the same—to shift value down to farmers—but it does so now by removing barriers that farmers face (like unpredictable weather conditions) and building a brand that connects farmers to consumers.

I was introduced to Pepe and Compadre through Ana Sofía Narváez, who did a takeover episode of the podcast this past June, and it’s clear why she connected us: Compadre is a rare company that has been honest about how much its brand has shifted, and Pepe speaks to a lot of their early ideas about coffee and the needs of farmers. Rarely do people admit they’re wrong or that they’ve misunderstood something, but Pepe’s goal has always remained the same—to serve farmers first—and that’s involved a lot of honest reflection and a willingness to learn, change, and do better. Here’s Pepe:

Ashley: Pepe, I was hoping you could start by introducing yourself.

Pepe: Okay. I'm Pepe. I’m from Peru. I've been working in coffee since 2015, 2014. We started more with the technological part related to coffee, more related to the roasting.

Ashley: Can you tell me a little bit about coffee in Peru? I know that's a very big question, but when someone asks you, “What is coffee like there?” what do you say to them?

Pepe: I would say it's complex. It's diverse. Those would be the main things I would say.

You can find great coffees, people working really, really well. In the consuming part—here in the cities and also in the producing areas—consumption is growing and you can find people working really well, but you can also find the other side, right? People not doing a very good job, people that have a lot of work to do.

Ashley: Are you drinking coffee right now?

Pepe: Actually I am. I'm drinking a coffee coming from the central jungle that a friend from a cooperative gave me. It's a natural Bourbon; it's very sweet. It's very sweet, very fruity. I really like this coffee. You can find many profiles, different profiles here, whether if it's coming from the central jungle, the north or the south—we have those three main producing areas.

Ashley: People always want to classify a country as one way or another. Like, “Coffee from this country tastes like this, and coffee from this country tastes like that.” Even myself, I found myself wanting to ask you that question: What does coffee from Peru taste like? And I was like, “No, there are microclimates, there's diversity,” like you were saying.

I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about Compadre, which is the company that you co-founded. How would you describe what Compadre does?

Pepe: Compadre is a brand of roasted coffee. We work with specialty coffee and we started actually, as I was saying, as a tech company who started developing technology to process coffee, to roast coffee, and to roast it in a sustainable way using solar energy. And that's how we started.

That was in 2015 when we started operations. Our model at the beginning was to build these machines and to try to sell these machines to farmers so they can process their own green coffee, their own parchment coffee, and they can add some value and they can sell roasted coffee—because, at the beginning we knew nothing about coffee. We started with this technological part.

Ashley: I want to go backwards on that because you mentioned that you didn't know anything about coffee when you first started.

So let's go back to when you first started Compadre: What drove you to start this company? Who were you folks before this started?

Pepe: So I have a friend—he's a mechanical engineer. He did a project, a research project in university for his undergraduate thesis. He built, together with other engineers and designers, a machine that could roast coffee on it with some mirrors and sunlight. So that was his project.

Some years later I was doing other kinds of projects with this friend—his name is Juan Pablo—and we were traveling through the jungle, we were doing projects with native communities, with schools. We loved working in the jungle, the Peruvian jungle has a special vibe for me. And we kind of fell in love with that.

We decided we wanted to work with [those communities], and we encouraged this friend to make something with the solar roaster and to have impact within these communities—a lot of these communities were coffee or cacao communities.

That's how we encourage him to present this project for a contest here. For this contest, he needed some partners. He told me and another friend, Fiorella, who is an anthropologist—[Juan Pablo] is a mechanical engineer and I'm an industrial designer. He told us, “Okay. We need a team. I need a team to present my project for these contests. Can you be part of the team?”

By that time, we had another friend who had a PhD in solar-concentrated energy. So we had a lot of chances to win with our project and we presented it and we won. We got some funding to start the project, to start developing the first and to start the pilot with one of the farmers we found at the beginning. That's how we started.

Ashley: That's so cool. I love that. This was just a project that Juan Pablo had designed years ago, it seems, and you found a new application for it. Was it obvious? At what point did it become clear that this could be a project—the solar roaster—that could impact farmers?

Pepe: Since the beginning, we tried to look to find what would be the impact of this. As we knew nothing about coffee, we only saw, “Okay, so how much [money] are farmers receiving here for their parchment coffee?”

If you go to origin, if you had asked a farmer at that moment what the price of coffee was, it was less than $2 per kilogram of coffee. We found that you can find roasted coffee for around $10, $8. So we said, “Okay. So if the farmer can roast the coffee, he can keep that $8 in his pocket, right?” That's the impact—that was our naive value proposition at the beginning.

But then we start working. We soon realized how the value chain works and what was the main problem, right? That it was the distance, the huge distance between the farmers and the final consumers. That's when we said, “Okay, we have to build a brand so we can commercialize this coffee with this story and we can ensure good prices for the farmer.”

Ashley: It's interesting that you were able to look at the value chain and see that immediate gap, because I don't think that's necessarily—it's obvious, but not, you know what I mean? That like, “Oh, if the farmer is selling his coffee for $2 a pound and the roaster is selling it for $10 per pound, let's transfer that value over to the farmer by giving them the power to roast green coffee.”

Which is really interesting, especially because you guys didn't have a background in coffee at all. So being able to identify that seems really powerful, but like you said, it was—I'm not going to call it naive, but you called it naive. But at what point did you realize that this wasn't going to be enough? You mentioned that you started to learn more about the value chain, what were you learning that told you, “Oh, this isn't going to be enough to change this.”

Pepe: It was when we started.

When we [gave a farmer] the first machine and we had a meeting with different farmers, different comparatives, different actors related to coffee, we showed it and they started asking questions. Everyone said, “Okay, so cool. That's so creative. So innovative,” but nobody really wanted it. We started asking, “Okay, why?”

We started asking questions, we sort of realized, “How are they going to [use this when they’re] isolated?” We were in Cusco, it’s in the south of Peru, and we said, “Okay, we're really far from the final consumer. How are they going to get there?”

We said, “We live in Lima. That’s the main market, so we'll have to commercialize this coffee there. They will have to send the coffee, they will have to produce a coffee and they will have to send it to us in Lima and we will have to sell it.” That was the first change in our model.

Ashley: Now that I'm thinking about it, I don't know if it was this simple, but it sounds like the initial idea you had was, “We have this solar roaster, farmers can have access to it because the infrastructure to operate the solar roaster is minimal, and we're going to be able to transfer value over to the farmers by giving them these roasters.” But there was no infrastructure on how that coffee was actually going to physically get to consumers. Is that right?

Pepe: I mean, it's the infrastructure, but it's also the knowledge, right? You need to operate a company to sell coffee to find a consumer. It's related to marketing related to finance related to a lot of things … relationships with other brands or distributors…

So it was a lot of work that the farmer—I mean, the farmer already has a lot of work on the farm, so it was a little bit too much.

Our next model was like, “Okay, we'll sell the coffee for the farmers in our impact model, we pay good prices—between 20 to 70% more than the market price was paying, depending on the quality we will find in the community. And then we’ll install a solar facility where people from the community, the farmers that sold the coffee to us, they could go there and they would work in sorting the coffee, the classification, and the roasting—and they would get paid for that.” That was our second model.

Ashley: Interesting. So there was still opportunity for farmers to roast their coffee, but there was an added level of infrastructure where Compadre would help sell the coffee and market the coffee. Is that right?

Pepe: Yes. And we were focusing on that.

Then we pivoted. When we had that model, we started growing the commercial part and we saw that the capacity of the technology was not enough.

So we said, “Okay, what do we do? Shall we try to roast coffee with a regular gas roaster? Or do we just stay with our solar-roasted coffee?” We thought if we want to make an impact for the farmers, if we want to buy coffee at good prices from more farmers for the community, we have to sell more coffee. That's when we started doing this hybrid production with solar and gas production.

Ashley: Did you have to rethink the way that you thought about sustainability at that point? Because I can imagine, going back to that presentation that Juan Pablo is grabbing you and grabbing all your partners—part of what made that really exciting is that you have the solar-powered roaster, that it doesn't need electricity, but then as you start to work with farmers and realize, “Oh, the things we need are way bigger, we have to think about sustainability differently.” Was that a conversation that you folks were having?

Pepe: Yeah. We were having a lot of these conversations.

It was mainly when it got to the point where we said, “Okay, are we going to roast coffee with the sun? Or we are going to roast coffee with the regular gas roaster?”

I said, “Let's sit together and let's define what are our main values or our main goals. Are we Compadre because we roast coffee with the sun, or are we Compadre because we want to make a change and we want to make a positive impact for the farmer?

We said, “The farmer is first.” That's the first thing. The first priority. If we can do things with solar energy, that would be amazing. But if we cannot do it, we still have to make an impact. We still have to keep working towards a future where we can be more sustainable, in the energy part or in the production part. That was second. [Across both fields] should be quality—that should be always there too. That's how we define our operations. And that's how we started planning ahead.

Ashley: It seems like in six years of operating a business that has drastically changed over time, you have learned so much about how value is created in the coffee industry.

Pepe: Yes. It's been a wild journey. We have learned a lot. Something good we’ve done, I would say since the beginning, was that we tried to spend a lot of time—most of the time—in the farms, right next to the farmer, and tried to understand how things were working over there.

From the city, you're going to see a lot of initiatives, a lot of certifications, a lot of programs, but what is really happening in the farm where you're supposed to see the impact—and then you go there and there are not many examples that are really working or working the way they should. It was good for us to travel a lot and try to understand how [these programs] were working and how we want to be part of that change.

I mean, it's so complicated. That's why we've been changing a lot because we were testing many things, but we’re still thinking, “What's the best way?” We are still trying different things right now with other projects, different projects.

Ashley: Are there any lessons or experiences that you had on coffee farms that you particularly remember or were exceptionally mind-changing for you?

Pepe: I'm sure I have many. You can pick the topic and I'll tell you a story if you want.

Just to give an example: We wanted farmers to sell their own coffee, the roasted coffee at some point, but when we started asking farmers how they used to move their [green] coffee from their farm to sell it—they would sell it in the closest city—some of them would take their coffee bags, like 60 kilograms of coffee in their shoulders. They would walk between five to eight hours just to sell one bag of coffee.

At least 10 years ago, most farmers would do that. You can still find some farms that are very high up and you cannot find roads and they have to just carry the coffee bags on their shoulders. They have to do all that work just to get to the closest city, to sell [their coffee] as parchment coffee, or to drink coffee. How would they even try to sell roasted coffee? It was crazy.

Ashley: One of the things that your website mentions is that you focus on two principles: on technology and Indigenous communities. I was wondering why Indigenous communities, why was that a specific goal that you wanted to focus on?

Pepe: We have a special—I don't know how to say, like feeling with Indigenous communities. We started our trips to the jungle working with Indigenous communities—Asháninka was the name of theseIndigenous people.

They’re not the only kind of community we work with. Right now, we’re working with different farmers that are working on organic production, that have world-quality coffee, above 82 points a cup, and that are small coffee farmers.

We try to focus more on the smaller or medium-sized coffee farmers. If it's from an Indigenous community, even better, because we're trying to encourage them to keep their jobs in their communities, where they live. Because they have such a strong culture in their own communities.

We have spent so much time there and we find this special way of living in harmony with nature, in harmony with them working together, that we feel it's something that should be kept alive. We've also seen that a lot of these young people from these communities have to go to the nearest city to find another job and have more income. So it's possible to encourage them to stay, because they want to stay, but they just don't have the opportunity to. So if we can encourage that, that would be awesome.

Ashley: It sounds like you're saying that in the remote communities that you go to, there is a very strong Indigenous culture and that's being threatened by people leaving because they have to get job opportunities. So the work that you're trying to do is to preserve people's ability to stay within their communities and to essentially let their culture thrive in those communities.

Pepe: Exactly. Yeah. That a huge goal. Of course, we cannot do it by ourselves, but if we can help a little bit with that, that would be awesome.

Ashley: Is there a specific reason why you want to focus on Indigenous communities in particular? I know that you've mentioned that that's not the only people that you work with, but did you realize that Indigenous communities in particular were being threatened or were losing some of their access to their own culture because they couldn't sustain on what was being produced in their own communities?

Pepe: Indigenous communities have kind of special values or rules on how to live or how to protect their land or how to protect their own people, their own forest, that I think it's something we have to support. Because it's a good way of living. Of course, it's not a rule. I'm being general, but it's sometimes a pattern you can see in native communities. For us, it has a lot of value.

Ashley: That totally makes sense.

Let's talk a little bit about what Compadre’s current iteration is looking like, because as you mentioned, you've had a lot of iterations, which I think is really unique for a company—not necessarily to have a lot of iterations, I think that that happens to a lot of companies, but I think it's unique that you're very upfront about it, because that says to me that you're willing to listen to farmers. As you mentioned, traveling to different farmers in different communities, it seems like a lot of the solutions that you've generated have come from those conversations.

Pepe: Yes. There's this—and actually, as we are part of many parts of the value chain, we can also have a bigger picture on how things are working and what things should be done.

Right now what we are doing—I mean, after the pandemic or during the pandemic, it was so difficult for us to keep operations in the jungle with the farmers because most of the coordinations we did by being there. The communication, the technological part, they are not used to coordinating if they don't see you, so it was kind of complicated to keep that model.

So we had to find a partner in one of the cities in the jungle, a specialist. He's also a Q grader, he's a roaster, he's a specialist in coffee. So we partnered with him and he would be the one who visited the farms, the one who would talk to the farmers, he was the one that started projects. And we focused more on the quality part. He would go to the farms and make suggestions.

We started doing a project with a couple of farmers, trying different kinds of fermentation [during processing]. So he had all the tools necessary to make sure [he could measure] temperature, Brix, and then he would cup those coffees and would try to choose the right fermentation process for each coffee.

We would support these farmers with infrastructure, meaning for the drying process, solar dryers. We sold a couple of solar dryers—one of them a conventional solar dryer and another, it was with a new development we did to improve the drying process. We saw that one of the biggest problems [for farmers] was the drying process.

Ashley: Can you talk a little bit about that? Just for people who maybe don't even know what the drying process is for coffee—how are you seeing it? What does that look like for farmers?

Pepe: After the farmers pick the coffee, depulp or ferment the coffee and wash it, they have to put it into a dryer or they have to dry it. They have to go from, I dunno, 55%, 45% humidity, to around 10 to 12% humidity, but they have to do it in a proper way, in a consistent way, so they can reach water activity under 0.7—0.6 would be better. You need consistency for that.

If you are doing, for example, naturals or the pulp natural process, it's super important that the first days you have consistency in the drying process. And of course, the better coffees, the best coffees, you find them above 1,500 meters above sea level. And in some areas, above that altitude it’s very humid and the temperatures are quite low during the night. So you lose a lot of consistency in the drying process because you lose humidity.

And then, if it rains one day, the humidity goes up. So it's so chaotic. Sometimes farmers with great coffees, they have to just take their own coffee and put it in a regular mechanical roaster and they lose quality—or as it happened to one of our farmers, he wanted to do naturals last year, he did great naturals. And this year he's pulled all his naturals because when he harvested, the weather was really bad. He had four very humid days. And the naturals, they got spoiled.

Ashley: I think this is a really key thing. I just want to stop for a minute just because I want to make sure that people understand how important it is that the weather affects how coffee taste.

I think that that's taken for granted. I think people assume—most of the people who listen to this podcast are coffee people. I think a lot of people know this intuitively or at least have some experience with this, but lately more people who don't know coffee very well have been listening. So I just want to make sure that people understand that like, if it rains too early, your coffee can be messed up. Drying, especially naturally processed coffee where the cherry stays around the coffee bean, can be really volatile. Because that could take anywhere from one to three weeks to dry. So you really need to have consistent temperatures to make sure that those coffees dry, not only correctly, but consistently, as you were saying, that one cherry isn't at 40% moisture and then the other one's 10% moisture.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there, but I wanted to make sure that that was super clear.

Pepe: Yes, yes. Seems easy, the drying process.

Ashley: It seems easy!

Pepe: At the beginning, it seems easy, right? When you study the whole value chain, the whole process, you say, “Okay, the drying process looks like the easiest process.” But it's not because you have different conditions, weather conditions that are key in order to keep a consistent drying process. And if you lack good weather at that point, you can spoil all the great work you did before—in the harvesting, in the fermentation, for example.

Ashley: So it seems like if we zoom outward a little bit on Compadre’s mission, the mission for you folks is to create positive impact for farmers and to really think about sustainability, not necessarily as environmental impact, even though that's important, but to think about sustainability as social impact, is that right?

Pepe: Yes. As a social entrepreneurship, we've seen that sustainability for us should be a balance, right? Because at some point we need to work more in the social part. At some point when we have the resources, we will work more on the technological parts so we can [pay more attention to] sustainability on the production side and on the energy side. And at some point we will have to say, “Okay, we have to reduce costs and we have to focus more on selling coffee. Otherwise we will die as a company and we will stop all the impact we've been building so far.”

It's always been, through all these years, it's been a balance. It's been a decision-making process on which part of the sustainability [equation] we have to focus on now.

Ashley: Right. Which must be really hard because there's so many things, especially as you get more and more involved in the coffee roasting side, or the coffee production side of things—more things come up.

Because I'm sure before you started Compadre, you weren't thinking about the drying process—that wasn't part of your business model—but now that you're more involved in the value chain, you're like, “Oh, this is actually a really key, pivotal part.”

What I think is interesting about focusing on the drying of coffee is that it really focuses specifically on the farmers. A lot of coffee—I'm not sure if this is always true in Peru, because I know in different countries it can kind of depend—but is most of the drying done on the farm?

Pepe: Yes.

Ashley: So a lot of that impact that you're focusing on is directly focusing on farmers, giving them tools specifically.

Pepe: Exactly. Exactly, yes. I think one of the good things we've always had is that our purpose is clear, right? So it doesn't matter how much our model pivots or changes at the end. We try to do something better for the farmer, for the quality or for the actors in the value chain that are working properly.

So I don't know. That's why we changed the way we're working and now we are focusing on the drying process, but it's still trying to impact the farmer. A lot of factors would be—[there would be lots of benefits from a good drying process], but the farmer would be one of the main beneficiaries of this.

Ashley: I know that this is a big question, so feel free to take it in whatever direction you want, but what do you think is your biggest success so far?

Pepe: To be alive? Yeah. I remember when we started in the incubation program, when we started Compadre, because we started after we won this contest and we enter this incubation program. There were five other projects. And the director said, “Okay, next year, or maybe in two years, only one of you will be alive.”

Ashley: Oh, wow.

Pepe: The other four will die. And here we are.

Ashley: I don't want to out the other companies, but did the other ones not make it? Do you know?

Pepe: Many reasons, many different reasons.

Ashley: We don't need to know why, but are you the one company that stayed alive out of that whole group?

Pepe: Yeah. That's what I'm trying to say. We are the one company still alive.

Ashley: That's an accomplishment. That's huge.

Pepe: Yeah.

Ashley: What do you think has kept you folks alive?

Pepe: I would say our commitment. Our team is super important. Whenever you have these kind of projects—because at some point you are so disappointed by the results and to have a partner that levels you up, brings you up. Who says, “Okay, we're still doing these things, we've done all this much and we can still do it.” And then maybe, I don't know, some months later he's the partner that’s down, and you have to be the one trying to encourage the team to keep up the good work we’re doing.

Ashley: Yeah. That can be really hard.

Pepe: Another thing is that we are not afraid to adapt to different things, to different models, to different ways of work.

Ashley: It seems like you folks are always learning and you're always taking in knowledge and improving on what you've learned.

Pepe: Yeah. Actually at some point, when we said, “Okay, we are not a tech company anymore. We are more like a coffee company. Some of us should be experts in coffee.” That's why I did a Masters in Coffee Economics and Science with Illy—initially with Ana Sofia, that's where I met her. So we try to adapt, and now we’re a specialty coffee brand.

Ashley: So you have a goal to improve the lives of coffee farmers. I know that this is a very big goal, but what would be an ideal situation for you? When would you feel like your mission has been accomplished? What would the farmers have, or what structures would be in place, where you'd be like, “Okay, this is what we were hoping for”? Again, I know that that's a big question.

Pepe: It is. I would love to have a strong value chain, working with the same farmers I've been working with—at least 60 or 70% of the farmers we're working with would be the same farmers we've been working with since, I don't know, two or three years ago, because that's a good indicator that you are doing a good job with them.

That they are every year increasing their production or their income because they are improving their quality. And that we are also sustainable in the commercial part, that we are very stable. That we have strong relationships with our customers and that we are positioned to be the sustainable coffee brand here in Peru. And that if someone else wants to sell sustainable coffee, they would have to look at us and say, “Okay, let's try to do something similar. Let's try to have the impact they're having in order to say we are sustainable too.”

That would be the vision we have. And of course we want to close the whole experience and be closer to the final consumer. That’s the person who has to understand all of this. We want to close it with a coffee shop, with a cafeteria. That hopefully will happen soon.

Ashley: I think it's interesting when you have a company that focuses on social entrepreneurship, because logically at some point your work may never be done, but the goal is almost for your work to be done.

The goal is that you don't need Compadre anymore, or you do, but you don't need it to be as active in improving farmers' lives because that's already been done. The value chain is “fixed.” Even though, like we were saying, that's a huge goal and maybe won't happen overnight or won't happen in six months, but do you think about that? Do you think about the world that you'd create that doesn't need you anymore?

Pepe: I mean, this question it so interesting because a lot of times I've questioned myself and it's like, “Okay, how big can we be? How many farmers can we impact at some point, right, by being just one brand?” Because we are, as a social entrepreneurship, we are competing against huge companies that have aids in the market. Right. And they have super strong value chains.

So how big can we be? How many farmers can we impact? And we see the projections and it's like, “Okay, we can, I don't know, impact 50 farmers next year, maybe 70 in two years,” but it's still in a universe of 200,000 coffee farmers in Peru. It's very little, right?

So if I'm looking for impact, should I be doing this? Or should I be working in a huge NGO or in another big company trying to push this next sustainability … but I think something very important is the story you can create in your own company, in your own value chain, and that you can inspire other people, other companies, other people working in huge companies to start doing things similar to what you are doing.

If we can show that it's possible to be sustainable, to be a business and to be sustainable and responsible with the environment, with the farmer, and that we can push technology and creativity—if we demonstrate that that's possible, I would say that's a huge goal that we can reach.

Ashley: It's really a story of optimism, in a way.

Pepe: Yes, exactly. And it's something that our society needs a lot in these times. Right?

Ashley: Well, Pepe, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Pepe: No, thanks for the invitation, Ashley, and congratulations for the great work you are doing.

Ashley: Congratulations on the great work you're doing.

Pepe: Thank you very much.

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My guest on today’s podcast episode is Neichelle Guidry, a college administrator and the founder of Black Girl Black Coffee. The brand began as an Instagram account, as a way for Neichelle to document her journey through coffee, and her passion for the subject, during the upheaval of the pandemic. Since then, it’s evolved into a coffee brand that reclaims the Black history of coffee.

I was drawn to Neichelle because she’s a storyteller. As she describes her journey in coffee, she reflects on the meaningful experiences that have shaped her, and administers important life lessons she’s learned along the way. That means there’s no way to reduce this conversation down to a few bullet points or a singular theme—Neichelle shares so much of her personal relationship to coffee that it’d be a disservice to boil it all down to a few talking points.

In that specificity are universal ideas that I hope you can take to heart—about staying inspired, filling your cup, and giving yourself permission to seek joy in the things you love—that will hopefully leave you feeling uplifted and inspired after listening. Here’s Neichelle:

Ashley: Just to start, could you introduce yourself by saying your full name and what you do?

Neichelle: Sure. My name is Neichelle Guidry. I am a college administrator and I'm also the creator of Black Girl Black Coffee.

Ashley: What are some of your earliest memories of coffee growing up?

Neichelle: My earliest memories … generally speaking, my father would have coffee most mornings. We had a white Mr. Coffee automatic coffee pot in our kitchen that he would fill with Folgers from a blue can religiously.

That was kind of a daily memory, but my most formative coffee memories happened in my grandmother's house, my paternal grandmother's house. And I shared this story in my Glitter Cat video last year about how my grandmother would brew her coffee on her stove.

She would always put PET Evaporated Milk in her coffee, and she would serve her coffee in the most beautiful, very dainty, floral cup-and-saucer sets. Coffee in her house in Beaumont, Texas was a very communal activity. She would always have people coming by from her neighborhood for her coffee. And hers, I guess, was kind of like an unofficial gossip and coffee spot. Hearing the way grown Black women talk around coffee tables was such a fascinating thing for me as a child.

Ashley: What did that evoke for you as a child? What did you think as you saw people sitting around and drinking coffee?

Neichelle: Mostly that I wanted to be a part of the conversation. I think of myself as a child, sometimes my memory of myself is very deeply curious, always wanting to be a part of things, but also very shy. If I ever had a chance to meet my younger self again, I would tell her, “Just go, just get in there. Get in that grown woman talk and ask the question you want to know.”

Yeah. So just the feeling of wanting to be a part of it. I drank her coffee and at the time of course I could not have imagined it without that PET evaporated milk because it made it creamy. It gave it sort of a medium, heavy-like body, and it made it sweet. It was like a dessert, the way she prepared her coffee, and just wonderful.

Ashley: What was your relationship to coffee as you grew up, or as you started to maybe be part of those conversations at the table as you grew up?

Neichelle: I don't think that coffee became a part of my life until later. I think like many college students, when you're trying to pummel your way through an all-nighter, you think, “Let's go get coffee.”

We had a little French press that we would use in my college dorm. You know, making some grocery store coffee to help us get through the night. So it really wasn't until my adulthood, like young adulthood, late 20s, that coffee started to factor pretty prominently into my life. That is when I took my first trip to Ethiopia.

Actually—let me go back a little bit further than that. The first trip was in 2016 and in 2010, 2008, I used to live in Berkeley, California. This is when I was in graduate school, and I was working at a church in downtown Berkeley, and the church sexton was a first-generation immigrant from Ethiopia—and he and his family took me in for that summer that I lived there.

In between meetings at the church and in the evenings, if I was done working late, they would have me in their home and they would feed me the most delicious meals and we'd watch movies, we'd hang out on the couch. We would just talk, just experiencing really, really deep community.

They introduced me to the Ethiopian buna ceremony because it was a sign, first and foremost, of hospitality—anytime they had a guest, coffee was going to happen. His wife would prepare coffee, from the rinsing of the green coffee to the roasting over the open flame to the grinding with the mortar and pestle to the preparation, the brewing and the jebena. And I had never had anything so delicious in my life.

That summer, it is safe to say, I spent probably about 80% of my time just buzzed and coffee drunk from the delicious coffee that Ahmada and his wife would prepare in their home for me. Their introduction of Habesha food cultures and coffee cultures was exactly what inspired me to take my first trip to Ethiopia several years later.

Ashley: I love that you explained the ritual of the Ethiopian coffee ceremony because I think that's something that probably a lot of people have heard of, but maybe haven't experienced for themselves, which is incredible that that was, I guess, your second introduction to coffee in a way—later in your adulthood. So you had this experience, you lived with this family for a while. What inspired you to go to Ethiopia later?

Neichelle: It was actually a big life change that inspired me to go to Ethiopia. I had just gotten divorced and I was in this space of like, “Why wait?” You know?

It was something that I wanted to do ever since that time, ever since being in their home. At that time—it was 2016, so what is that? Like, eight years later? Eight years and a world apart from that experience. I just was in a mindset of, “Everything that I want to do, I'm doing it. And I'm going to give myself all the joy that I have not experienced for so long.”

That was at the top of the list, of the list of things I wanted to do. So I saved my money. I invited my two best friends. We went for my birthday, which coincided with the Ethiopian Orthodox church celebration of Timkat. So we went and did the whole festivities around that, had some great foods, some great coffee, made some great friends. It was an incredible time.

Ashley: I wrote down the phrase, “Give yourself all the joy,” which I think might be a theme that comes up throughout this conversation.

I also want to make sure that we're telling the story linearly so we can follow along, which I love that you're giving me years—I’m even writing it down on a timeline like, “Okay, 2008, this happened. 2016, this happens.”

So you come back from Ethiopia: How do you take the experiences that you had in Ethiopia and start to explore coffee more?

Neichelle: Around that time I was still in graduate school. I think, again, coffee was just sort of this thing that I am turning to help me power through things. I remember I did find a place in Chicago, which is where I was living at the time, where I could experience buna. But that became a very rare experience when I got back because I just got back to my life—you know, school and work and everything.

But I was always very captivated by the memory of the way that it tasted. I came back home from that trip with three or four bags of coffee from a pretty, I guess, prominent coffee roastery in Ethiopia called Tomoca Cafe. I came home with a jebena as well.

I went and got a blade grinder to grind up my Tomoca beans and would play around with the jebena on my stove. That was how I brewed my coffee for at least a year or so afterwards. I was making my coffee with the jebena on my stove in Chicago. My next step in the coffee journey, though, was buying a Nespresso machine.

Ashley: I love it. You laugh about it now.

Neichelle: And I love the Nespresso machine! I actually still have that machine because sometimes I just need something to go. I need to make something quickly. That was the next step.

I bought the set that had the espresso machine and the frother that stood up right next to it and brought all the capsules and did all of that. I bought this mini machine to where I could actually take it places with me. So when I got to the point in school where I was writing my dissertation, that espresso machine actually made it into the room where I was writing my dissertation. When I was up all night, all day researching, writing, I was also drinking a lot of espresso from that Nespresso machine.

I would say the journey would have to fast forward at that point to quarantine, which really shifted things coffee-wise.

Ashley: You mentioned that your coffee story—even though you have all these experiences beforehand—that your coffee story is really a story of quarantine. So I was wondering if you could talk about what happened to you during quarantine that inspired you to think more about how coffee factors into your life?

Neichelle: Just practically speaking, as the story goes, I was on Zoom one day for work and I was on my second cup of coffee for the day and I had just finished brewing this cup of coffee on a Bodum wire filter and little carafe set that I got. But I had had the same coffee earlier that day on the French press. And I was just so captivated.

I remember sitting on Zoom and I was like, “How does this taste so different? Literally, this is the same coffee.” I think it was just that moment that I was like something, you know, there's probably something to this.

That night I was on YouTube watching James Hoffmann all night and definitely developed a little coffee crush on James Hoffmann. Oh my God.

Ashley: This is a James Hoffmann safe space.

Neichelle: Thank you.

I was just literally like, “This man is brilliant. His accent, his little red glasses, his haircut…” Ah! Thank you.

It was just a rabbit hole from there—tasting a singular coffee with such flavor nuances on two different brewing devices or brewing methods. It was just really intriguing to me.

From there, the next thing you know, I'm ordering V60s and paper filters and I'm ordering a food-grade scale for my kitchen and I'm just watching all these YouTube videos. That's when I decided to start the Instagram account because I wanted to document it. I obviously had time on my hands, like many of us did, and I just thought this would be really cool, to remember this as a part of this pandemic. I didn't know what was going to unfold that year, but I knew I wanted to document how I took in that experience of living through a global pandemic. And that is how that Instagram account was born.

Ashley: I think that's really important that you mentioned the importance of documentation, because I think when you look at something like Instagram or social media, there's this pressure to just create content, but I think it can be as simple as taking a moment to take a photo of what you're doing to remember that moment. It seems like that was a big driver for you—trying to remember these experiences that you were having.

Neichelle: Yeah. I mean, I was scared, you know, scared AF, right? Of what was happening in the world. When we’ve never seen anything like this and it was really scary and I felt like my survival in that season, emotionally, was really going to depend on how I framed that time. And that's kind of what I wanted to do with that account.

I want to document something fascinating. I want to document something beautiful. I want to document a moment in my life where I'm a novice again and make it something that I can remember. I didn't start intending for it to become a coffee brand. I just wanted to document how I was getting through a pandemic through coffee.

Ashley: I didn't have this context when I first looked at your website and your social media account and knowing this—now I'm going to have to go backwards and look through that lens, because there's something so wildly positive about that answer, but at the same time, contending with a very potentially negative time where we're all at home, we're all not sure what's happening. It's scary. So like, how do we find meaning in the spaces around us?

Neichelle: Yes.

Ashley: It seems like that's something that you're naturally inclined to do. You're naturally inclined to tell stories and find meaning in the experiences that you have.

One of the big experiences that you had, one of the reasons that our paths have crossed, is that you did a competition called Glitter Cat, which the year that you were part of it, it was all online because of the pandemic. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about this coffee competition that you did and how you even decided to do it?

Neichelle: I think that was a really pivotal moment for me. And you know more than you're putting on because you helped us select my application [laughs].

Ashley: I did, that’s true.

Neichelle: But you know, I just remember kind of thinking, “Well, why not? Why not?”

I believe at the time, I made a connection with Erica Jackson, who's like my coffee bestie, the most amazing person ever. I feel like she was instrumental in me deciding to submit an application for it, and she's just very encouraging, like, “You can do it.”

Ashley: Because at this point you're making coffee at home, but you're not necessarily working in coffee.

Neichelle: I’m not a coffee professional, exactly! That was actually my static. My static was like, “Shouldn't this be reserved for people who know what they're doing? Or who have invested all this time, gaining all this coffee proficiency?” But again, I just feel like one of the things I never want to do is I don't want to foreclose on any opportunity for me.

I'm going to always leave the “no” to someone else to tell me. I don't want to eliminate myself from things. And so in that spirit, I just submitted an application and yes, I guess the rest is history.

I will never forget that experience because, here I am, a lifelong coffee drinker, someone who is at this really important juncture of embracing this lifelong passion and interest of mine, and finally exploring it deeper. This opportunity met me with workshops and with mentoring and—oh, gosh, I'll just never forget Chelsey [Walker-Watson] from Atlas [Coffee Importers] spending an hour or two on Zoom, coaching me on my brewing.

I just felt so floored that Eric and Veronica [founders of Glitter Cat] created such a generous thing. There was just so much generosity involved, there's all this equipment that was just donated to us, and all this training and all this mentorship.

I just felt like if this was so freely given, I just am going to embrace it, everything that I can learn, I'm gonna learn it and I'm going to dive really deeply into it. And in the end…

Ashley: In the end, you won!

Neichelle: Yeah. I won. Winning was really amazing, and I thought that was a really cool experience, but more importantly, I feel like it introduced me to an amazing coffee community through Glitter Cat, but also broader than Glitter Cat. In some sense, like I said to you earlier, it was a green light, like, “Do this, do this, do coffee, do something in coffee, bring your passion to life.”

Ashley: Was that always intuitive? Or do you think that winning the competition and the response that you got afterwards helped interpret that green light?

Neichelle: Yeah. I think winning and the response was certainly affirmation and I want to just also say—I've been sitting with this question of like, “And if you didn't win, what would that have meant to you, Neichelle?” And I think that it probably would have still meant “do it,” because I enjoyed it.

I think part of what this is helping me to undo is that everything that we do in life has to a) Be monetized, b) Has to lead to some accolade. There are some things that at least for me, there are things I want to do just for the sake of, I just like it. I enjoy it. I love it so much. And I want to share it with whoever will share it with me and coffee is that for me.

Ashley: I like that distinction that you made: That we as a society sometimes tend to get caught up in winning something or being named something or maybe just even producing things for the sake of producing things. But it's okay to just like something for the sake of liking it.

It's okay to pursue coffee just because you like it. You're right—you totally didn't have to win. And I like that you asked that question, because I like imagining the hundred different ways my life could go—like if this didn't happen or that didn't happen, then there are certain things that I wonder if I would have done or wouldn't have done if certain things hadn't happened. I like that you answered that question for yourself.

Neichelle: Yeah. I think my coffee story is a story of being multi-vocational. I think another part of the reason why I gravitated to coffee is because my work life is intense and it's a lot. It's a lot of pressure, and I just really needed a creative outlet. I needed an outlet where I cannot just be under the same microscopes and under the same pressure where I could just bring my heart in a different kind of way, and do it in a way that is deeply just artful and lovingly curated and crafted.

Coffee is also that for me, so there's a story behind everything in Black Girl Black Coffee. I do really feel like there's a little bit of me in all of it.

Ashley: How do you stay inspired?

Neichelle: I love to read, I love listening to music. I'm very, very big on African-American art forms. So Black literature, Black music, Black visual arts, Black poetry—there's something very inspiring about all of it for me. So at least once daily I'm reading something, even if it's just a poem, I get poems into my inbox in the morning. I'm subscribed to several Substack publications where amazing, beautiful writers are laying their hearts bare and it's coming directly to my inbox.

I have all kinds of Spotify playlists for whatever mood I'm in. I try to immerse myself at least in small ways daily in things that don't have anything to do with my job. It’s really important to me.

Ashley: It does seem like you're the type of person who acknowledges the importance of staying inspired and finding ways to connect to community. Like trying lots of coffees or staying engaged and seeing what other people are doing. It seems like you're someone who's really good at kind of replenishing your pot.

Neichelle: Yeah. I am, and I feel like part of me has learned that it's just not possible to do anything if you're running on empty. I know what it feels like to be burned out and I've experienced that. And I still experience that, and I think just doing little things daily to try to stay inspired is just a great way to navigate that.

Ashley: Something that I think is really important for Black Girl Black Coffee is that it is very much about you. It's very personal, but it's also very universal.

I wonder if that's a parallel that you see in your coffee brand or your Instagram Stories or the way that you share information. How do you create an identity that feels like, “This is true to me, and this is something that I want to share with myself, but at the same time, as a way for me to connect with other people and find the universalities that connect all of us?” I know that's a big question, but…

Neichelle: It is big. I love the question though. I feel like I want to answer it, but I want to ask you a question first, because I really appreciate this insight. I've never asked—how does this come across? And so it's really interesting to me to hear that it comes across with some universalism. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Ashley: Yeah. When I first decide I want to interview someone, I try to, not necessarily learn about them by reading articles, even though I do that, but try to evoke, “What does their work make me feel?”

And there's something about your Instagram presence that makes me feel like this is so much about you, because you're so present in it. It's usually you sharing something that you really love. It isn't just about like, “This is coffee and I'm trying to sell coffee. I feel really passionate [about this].” The passion really comes across in this really authentic way.

Then, as I was going through your website, it felt like you were able to identify parts of your story that were clearly demonstrative of where you are in your coffee journey now. It feels like you reflect a lot backwards.

Like you said, “I took this trip to Ethiopia and this changed me. I lived with a family who introduced me to the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and this changed me.” And that's not always intuitive. I don't think that we always are taught to look backwards and make connections. And that's the most exciting thing for me.

I think that's maybe where I see your presence kind of speaking to me. So maybe the way that I'm interpreting it is a very personal one for myself, because I find the power of connection and tracing back where an origin story starts for me. Like, “How did I get into this?” Or like, “Why is this important to me?” So I think that that's where I see that for you.

Neichelle: That’s so encouraging. I really appreciate that because I think, for all intents and purposes, Black Girl Black Coffee is, at least the Instagram page, I'm still documenting a journey.

I don't feel like it's just a brand and I don't feel like it's just me trying to sell you my coffee now. I feel like in many ways, I'm still sharing how I'm growing as a coffee person. And so it is very personal. I follow a lot of coffee accounts and there's some coffee accounts that I really, really love that do things very differently, but there's a handful of coffee accounts that I don't follow because I feel they're devoid of a story.

Coffee has already been stripped away from its home, it's already been colonized. I think that there's just some, some spaces, some brands that are just further reiterating the disparities in the coffee supply chain, in the coffee industry. And I'm really, really interested in coffee as a personal thing.

I love following coffee accounts where you can see people's faces and where everything is not so pristine and so perfect and it's like not highly produced Instagram Reels, because it reminds me that there's a person behind this account that loves coffee. I feel like that's the category that I want to fall in.

So yeah, it is personal and I feel grateful that that comes across. And even now, with the coffee, with Be The Light, and the brand Black Girl Black Coffee, I want to show how people—like, I repost customer photos of their coffee or customers with their coffee. I love things like that because it reminds me that, while it's about me as the person that started it, it's also bigger than me, right? Brewing a new community. It's also bigger than me. And so I really appreciate that.

Ashley: Right. I'm glad that you were able to identify both of those ends, because I think that sometimes it can seem like it's mutually exclusive, like it's either about you or it's about your customers and the people you connect with. But I actually think that the more you center yourself—and I don't mean this in a selfish way, but more like the passion comes from me, the ideas come from me, I have to listen to them and I have to think like, “What do I like that I think others will love too?”—is really, I think the impetus for really authentic coffee brands.

Like you were saying, there are some coffee brands, and maybe just a symptom of capitalism, where it feels like the message is, “Buy this coffee.” But when I look at what you're doing, it's like, “I am excited about this thing and I want you to have it. I want you to experience this too.”

Neichelle: I think that's definitely the sentiment at the heart of it all. So I'm really happy it comes across.

Ashley: You've mentioned the coffee blend Be The Light that you formulated. I was wondering if you could tell me the story behind that.

Neichelle: Yeah. So Be The Light is actually a single origin. It's from Burundi. I wanted to start with Burundi for Black Girl Black Coffee because it's my favorite origin. Anytime I've had coffee from Burundi, I'm just like, “Oh, give me more, give me more, give me more.”

The story behind it is Phyllis Johnson from BD Imports has been sort of mentoring me through the establishment of my brand. I worked with her to source this coffee that was produced by an amazing Black woman who's no stranger, and her name's very familiar in the specialty coffee world—Angele Ciza in Burundi, who has such a fascinating story: grew up in Burundi on a coffee farm, and as she grew up, got educated, got a job working in exporting goods in Burundi, and came to a crossroads where she decided to bring all of that expertise to bear on her roots in coffee and acquired a farm and now owns the coffee, owns the washing station, and also exports.

And she's the only woman in Burundi that has all of this ownership and power over her goods and has utilized her position and her power to empower more women in Burundi in coffee. And I just love her story. So when we purchased the green coffee from Phyllis, she sent all this material back—videos about Angele and biographies. And this woman is just absolutely incredible. I mean, she's a force.

And I think she also walks in a profound sense of her forcefulness and moves with a keen sense of, “How can I help bring some other women with me?”

That's a story I wanted to share. And that's a story that I feel I can really get behind. I named the coffee Be The Light because it's full of citrusy notes that are balanced by the chocolatey notes. When I first sampled it, I said, “It tastes like a sunrise.” It reminded me of this trope of being the light, being the light in whatever situation, in whatever space—you're bringing the light, being the light. So yeah, that's the story of Be The Light.

Ashley: It feels like, just at the end, just when you were explaining Be The Light and bringing the light, it feels like that's a metaphor for your coffee journey.

Neichelle: It can be, it can be, there's definitely resonance.

Ashley: Even writing down some of the things that you've said. Some of this was said obviously during the podcast, some of this was said off-air before we started recording. But one of the things that you've mentioned is constantly being inspired and replenishing your cup, how you're trained as a womanist to not erase yourself …and it just seems like if I had to think of a visual metaphor for you—I don't know why this is coming into my head—but I'm thinking of you walking into a room and it being not necessarily dark, but I can just see like light radiating off of you.

Which is funny—I often mix metaphors in my head sometimes. I don't know. You kind of saying that sometimes you have to bring the light and be the light … just reminded me of the way that you seem to approach coffee.

Neichelle: Yeah. I actually do struggle sometimes now with continuing to do specifically the Instagram page just from a space of total authenticity, because I think there is some there's some pressure of like, “Oh, it's a brand now, should I change how I do social media?” It's tempting, but yeah, no, I don't think so.

Because when I start to make that switch, I start overthinking it, I start overthinking what I put on my page when I'm like, “You have something in your life every single day that has to do with coffee. You don't have to overthink this, Neichelle. Just show your journey the same way you always have.” I just think I'm attracted to authentic people. I'm attracted to brands that lead and tell stories from the heart.

There's some people on Instagram where I'm just like, “Thank you for reminding me of how basic this really is.” It doesn't have to be complicated. Steve from The Coffee Enthusiast, he's one of my closest coffee friends and his Instagram page, it's just got heart, he's showing himself roasting coffee and traveling and having coffee with his family.

And Erica has pages full of coffee reviews because she has an incredible palate and people pay Erica to taste their coffee. And I'm like, “You better do your thing.” I love, love, love, just following people who are documenting the dailiness of their coffee lives. And I want it. That's the kind of person, that's the kind of space I want mine to be as well.

Ashley: I know that we've talked a lot about this throughout the podcast, but one of the most exciting things about talking to you, for me, is how much of a storyteller you are and how much stories seem to factor into your life. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the role of storytelling for you?

Neichelle: I feel like stories are just such a common denominator across so many different lines of distinction and difference—who doesn't love a good story?

I feel stories are such powerful vehicles for values, for beliefs, for truths, whether they're personal truths or communal truths or universal truths. You can do so much more with a story than you can with a law, you know? Stories are just very powerful for speaking to the heart.

One of the first stories that I shared on Black Girl Black Coffee has actually been the impetus for what I'm doing now, and that's the story of Rose Nicaud who was the formerly enslaved woman who purchased her freedom from her slave owner by selling coffee in New Orleans. And if you're in New Orleans and you're Black and you love coffee, maybe you've heard her name.

When I told that story on my page, there was this massive response because, like many Black women across industries and across time, her name and her significance have been erased. But what an incredible story that this woman utilized the law of manumission to sell coffee in front of a cathedral on Sundays. And by doing that, she gained so much economic strength, personal economic strength, that she was able to purchase her freedom and be a free Black woman in the antebellum South, and went on to start the first permanent coffee cart in the French market and went on to establish her cart in the same place where Café du Monde now stands.

Café du Monde has global name recognition, but this woman, this Black woman whose concept is at the heart of it, at the root of it, you scarcely hear her name.

That is a huge driver for me, that's a powerful story. In fact there's a Reel coming out today or tomorrow about the Black Girl Black Coffee logo and the rose in the axis of the logo is an homage to Rose Nicaud. Because here's this Black woman who created this incredible coffee recipe that made her so famous that she made so much money that she bought her freedom. Now that's amazing—and then went on to empower more les vendeuses—free Black women—to establish their own food and hospitality businesses in order to buy their freedom in New Orleans.

Ashley: That's incredible.

Neichelle: And coffee is a way to share these stories.

Ashley: Is there anything that you'd want people listening to this to know about you?

Neichelle: To know about me? Yeah, I just—I'm real. I'm a real one. Whenever I post anything, whenever I'm thinking of the next coffee that I'm going to sell, my heart is in it. If there's a season where I'm not posting as much, it's because I'm working on something and I don't want my content to feel automated. I'm real. I feel like I want to bring my heart to what I do.

Ashley: I think you absolutely do. I am so honored and touched that you took time to talk to me because I feel like you brought so much to this conversation. So thank you for taking this time to chat with me.

Neichelle: Thanks for the invitation to be on your podcast, Ashley. I really appreciate it.

Photo by @ericajsimmons

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My guest today is Sierra Yeo, founder of the Kore Directive and the coffee specialist for Alpro, a U.K. company that makes plant-based products. I’ve known of Sierra for a long time, and talking to her revealed something that I didn’t think I could have overlooked—that there’s a lot of pain and anger fueling some of the most positive and uplifting people that you know.

Sierra talks about the eight years it took her to navigate her career. That’s an important number to remember as you listen: There’s discussion of her work with Alpro and the future of plant milk, but this conversation boils down to the sadness you sometimes forget you feel. The sadness I forget I feel.

Truth be told, I didn’t realize it until I listened back to this episode. There I was at my desk, transcribing, and I reached a point where I sat back and thought, “Whoa—these are two very vulnerable people.”

Every time I write something, or I post on Instagram, or even when I reflect on my own past experiences and issues with bosses, co-workers, customers … there’s always a moment where I doubt myself. I ask myself a question similar to the ones Sierra asks in this episode: “Is this real? Or am I imagining it? Did I take something the wrong way on purpose? Did my boss really do that thing that I now feel so angry about?”

These moments of doubt don’t always make it beyond my brain, but we really lean into that feeling in this episode. I hope listening to it validates the imperfect path we all take to find our voices and stand up for ourselves. Here’s Sierra.

Ashley: We're here. We're live.

Sierra: Woohoo!

Ashley: We did it. Sierra, could I have you introduce yourself by stating your full name and what you do?

Sierra: Yeah, sure. Hi, my name is Sierra Yeo. I am the coffee specialist for Alpro U.K., which is a plant-based products company, and we've been in the business for 40 years now, I think maybe going 41—so a long time!

In whatever time I have left, I am a cat mom first and foremost. I'm also the founder of the Kore Directive, which is a diversity, equity, and inclusivity organization in the coffee industry here in the U.K. I am also a freelance writer for coffee magazines all over the world and a Q grader as well.

Ashley: What a resume! I feel like if I had a job to offer you, I'd just give it to you right now.

Sierra: Please give me a job. I want to live in the States—I say this all the time. I have such an affinity for the States, for New York. I used to live there a little bit when I was younger—in the States, not in New York, but I love New York.

I visited a couple times and just thought, “Wow, the coffee scene there is incredible.” I keep in contact with a lot of friends from the States and the coffee world as well, and just think, “Oh man, in another life, in another life…”

Ashley: You still have time!

Sierra: There's time, I know. People mistake me for American anyway because I have this weird hybrid accent.

Ashley: Yeah, tell me a little bit about your background. Let's start specifically in coffee. How did you get involved in coffee, and what were some of your first memories of coffee?

Sierra: Oh my gosh. I mean, everyone has to pay the bills and I think that's kind of how it started.

I was at university. I was born in Singapore, but then I flew to the United Kingdom for university. I studied linguistics and I needed a part-time job to pay the rent. I think I started out in a dinky little deli-cafe-bar-type thing—you know, one of the sandwich counters and stuff.

I wasn't allowed on the machine because I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Then one day the barista needed a cover because she needed to go to the toilet. I was like, “All right, I guess I won't set the shop on fire.” I didn't. And then that was pretty much the start of my love affair with coffee.

I worked my way up into more specialty coffee shops. That was really when specialty started taking off anyway [in London]. I would probably say six or five years ago. And it's just been full steam ahead ever since.

So then I got moved up into managerial roles and so on and so forth. One really notable gig was when I managed an Internal Affairs cafe at Facebook, in the Facebook headquarters in London, in Oxford Circus. So that was super fun.

But then this gig at Alpro came up and I was like, “I'd love to stay behind the bar, but there's also more to discover.” I thought the plant-based world was a really interesting segue and a really interesting tangent to go into. That's how I am where I am at the moment, which I'm loving.

Ashley: That's a really amazing trajectory. I love that you mentioned the idea of having a challenge or doing something new—but at the same time, when I think about milk, especially in the coffee industry, sometimes I tell people that I touch coffee maybe 10% of the time. And I touch milk about 90% of the time.

It's funny how little I know about milk relative to coffee. I could spout facts and facts and facts about coffee, but sometimes when I'm talking about milk, I'm like, “Oh, my knowledge is actually incomplete.”

We're definitely gonna talk a lot more about milk and plant-based milk specifically. But I was wondering if you could set the scene a little bit for coffee in London, because I think when you said that the specialty coffee scene boomed five or six years ago, that might be surprising for people to hear.

Sierra: In London the scene really peaked, or really started around 10, 15 years ago.

So you had your little independent cafes opened up by—a notable example is Prufrock, which is in Chancery Lane in London. I used to work there for maybe six to eight months, and that was opened by Gwilym Davies and Jeremy Challender, both of whom have a lot of accolades to their name. I think Gwilym was a world champion at one point.

You have people who were interested in the scene—a very small niche scene, but people were interested and it's a far cry from where we are today, where you couldn't round another corner in London without stumbling on a new gem, and I think that's just so wonderful because I think coffee is super accessible. It's an accessible luxury. And I'm not just talking specialty, but commercial as well.

It's such an affordable luxury that I think people find it very hard to step away from that. For example, during the pandemic, we saw that people weren't able to give up their coffee shops and were really mourning the loss of their local cafes.

Ashley: Absolutely.

Sierra: I definitely think that when I think of the scene in London, that's what I think of—it’s very saturated, it's very vibrant. People are constantly innovating and coming up with new concepts, new ideas, new places, new ways to showcase coffee. And I just think that's amazing. That's kind of what my world is like: being able to visit all these cafés is part of my role; as part of my day-to-day it’s just such a joy.

I do think that more and more people don't have to seek the route that these guys in the past had to where it was like, “Oh, if you're only super passionate about it, if you've competed to a certain level, then you're allowed to open a coffee shop.” I think now people are taking it upon themselves to say how, “Oh my gosh, I actually really liked this product. I'm very passionate about it.”

There's tons of resources available online, in person, different courses, different programs that you can get certified on. And then saying, “Oh, I want to take my passion to the next level and basically expand the scene.” That's kind of how I think the London scene specifically has bloomed, but also in other pockets in the United Kingdom—like Manchester is one of my favorite coffee cities ever. I lived and worked there for a little bit, so it's always got a special place in my heart, but Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Brighton … all of these places have very happening coffee scenes and they're doing such a great job as well.

Ashley: That's really cool. I love the idea that the growth of specialty coffee isn't about saturation, but it's more about accessibility and people saying, “This is a thing I really like, I want to enter it.”

I think it's easy to be negative when things get really popular. I think it's easy to be like, “Well, this was cool once.” And I think that the coffee industry especially has been guilty of that in the past—I think you've even mentioned it. Yeah, I'm sure.

But it's really interesting to see you reflect on it as a good thing. It's good that more people are able to enter the industry. It's good that more people are able to see their passion reflected in other coffee shops. It's good that there's not just one way to enter the field that you can say, “Hey, I didn't have to win a barista competition to open up my shop.”

Sierra: But that was one of the biggest myths. And I think that's why I'm so passionate about my work with the Kore. That was one of the myths that I found so often debunked in my time as a barista. Because I think I hit a point in my career where I was struggling to get anywhere. And I was like, “Well, I know I'm good at what I do as a barista. I don't really have any desire to be a manager because I'm terrible at it. But I could probably move into a roastery, but I also don't really want to roast.”

There seemed to be like, at least at the time for me, there seemed to be this mythical career ladder where you would go from front-of-house to barista to senior barista to head barista to manager to getting your foot in the door of a roastery, you'd be a production assistant, and then you work your way up to roasting…

I was like, “Who do I know physically who has done that?” And the answer was a whopping zilch—I didn't really know anyone who had fit that mold. A lot of the people that I look up to today who have astounding careers in coffee didn't work that way and they didn't work their way up that way.

That was one of the things that I found so key to debunk with my work with the Kore. A lot of the small business owners that we have as part of our community, a lot of the smaller roasters that we have as part of our community, all kind of started out just liking the product and being like, “Okay, well I'm not in this certified cool club. How do I make my way in this world?”

That was and is the community that we provide, we say, “Well, come and join us. We don't really know what we're doing either. We'll figure it out.”

Ashley: So I know you've talked a little bit about the Kore Directive and some of the reasoning behind why it was founded and what the organization does. But I was wondering if we could step back a little bit and talk about when the organization was founded, its principles—if you could give that the elevator pitch.

Sierra: Oh my gosh. It's funny cause this elevator pitch changes all the time.

Ashley: I’m ready for it. I'm ready for it to be different even when I release this episode later.

Sierra: I think partially it's also down to my personal growth. The way it started out was I was super salty. [Laughs] I was super salty after—

Ashley: That’s how Boss Barista was founded, so don’t worry.

Sierra: I feel like it was good that you and I channeled our anger into something positive. I honestly do say to so many people that the Kore saved my life, but it basically started when I left a really toxic place of work and had experienced all sorts of things from managerial bullying to racist incidents to just a really toxic work culture.

People were burning out left, right, center. People were leaving—all the classic [signs], I'm sure you know this, Ashley—so all of that stuff, and then I just felt gaslit to high heaven because I was like, “Surely I can't be the only person finding this an issue.” At the end of the day I was saying to myself, “You need to take the step for yourself and step away from this job. It doesn't matter that you need to pay the bills. You need to find a way to pay the bills in a different way. It just needs to be done.”

So that happened. I sank into a major depressive episode for something like six months after that because I was so angry. I'm sure you felt that way, but I felt so angry and disillusioned and disenchanted and thought, “There's gotta be more than this.” I don't want to give up a whole career in coffee just because this has happened, but by God I was close.

In time, I started to talk to some more people and explain my situation. I was in between jobs at the time and started talking to more women and saying, “This is what I've experienced.”

They were like, “Oh, okay, well that's not new. I've experienced that too.”

And I was like, “…Okay.”

So after the first two women I spoke to, I was like, maybe that's a coincidence. Maybe after like the sixth or seventh woman I spoke to, I was like, “This is a thing, it's a thing.” That was the impetus for it.

I wanted to create something, anything—a space, an organization, I dunno? A web server, a blog—whatever. I wanted to create a space where we can collectively acknowledge that this is not fair to women specifically. Then that broadened after our first—I think we did a launch party in November of 2018. It was a soft launch. We wanted to see if anyone was interested in feminism and then holy crap, 60 people turned up and I was like, “Whoa, okay, this has got traction. This has got legs.”

Then we did our official launch launch party in January of 2019. That was also equally well-attended.

From that point on, I think people started being sold on the idea that we were around. We were around to stay. Gradually we worked our way into magazines, I tried to tap in as many of my connections as possible to spread the word. We started running events and that was how we had started out: running events based around accessibility, equity, inclusivity, and to try and get as many people as possible attending that were not—and I use this a touch ironically—but not “the norm.”

We wanted to get as many women, as many people of color, as many marginalized folks down to our events as possible. I think the general vibe that I've had from each of our events is if you have any questions, ask. There are no stupid questions.

So we've run the gamut of events from a grinder maintenance workshop, an espresso machine maintenance workshop for women. We've run a, “Bring Your Own Regular” cupping. So every barista that attended had to bring two of their regular customers to learn more about coffee. That was really cute.

We ran an alternative flavor wheel cupping where I think I chopped up something like 67 different fruits that weren't Eurocentric. I got to taste fruits from my home. People were like, “Whoa, I've never tasted jackfruit that wasn't in a vegan steak.” And I'm like, “Yeah, jackfruit’s a fruit!” So that was brilliant.

I think the general theme that runs through what we do is to make coffee as welcoming as possible.

Ashley: When you're talking about these events where—just going back to the flavor wheel, because in general for coffee, there's this flavor wheel … I guess I'm describing a flavor wheel by describing it as a flavor wheel, which is ridiculous, but there's a whole sector of different flavors that you can taste in coffee. It’s a reference point that a lot of coffee tasters, Q graders like you, are used to to describe coffee, but it is very Eurocentric.

There are a lot of fruits that are not represented on the flavor wheel. So even just opening up the door for people to say like, “Hey, this is a tool that we use. However, it's very Eurocentric, let's expand that outward and see what happens,” is really interesting. I'm also really struck just because—and I share this with you—by how many things are started in anger.

It's both a little bit funny and not because it's something you can reflect on and say, “Oh yeah, that's right. I was really angry when I started this thing,” but it's something when you go back on, you say, “Well, why was I angry? And how many people also feel the same anger that I do?”

Like you were hinting at, there's so much gaslighting that goes with these feelings of anger and disenchantment of like, “Am I the only person who feels this way? Do other people feel this way? I can't connect with other people to know if they feel this way because it's very taboo to talk about these things at work.” So I appreciate the fact that you were able to take some of that anger and almost—not necessarily push past it, because that anger is very valid and a lot of people feel it—but able to find a way to express it outwardly so that other people could identify with it, which is so hard because we are not set up to acknowledge unfairness with others because we never really get the chance to talk about it at work. Does that make sense?

Sierra: Oh my God. Perfect sense. It's almost cathartic to hear you say it, and one thing that I think we both feel, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's such a painful part of our personal histories to talk about.

I still think back to times when I was working at this place or even previous places—it wasn't just localized to a single coffee shop—and these are deeply painful, deeply personal histories. I just remember thinking, and I don't know if you've ever felt that way, but just thinking, “Am I attention-seeking for wanting to make this a bigger deal than it is?”

A lot of that is conditioning as a cisgender woman, a lot of it is conditioning to not be loud, to not make a fuss and so on and so forth that we've been exposed to since we were kids.

So definitely stepping up and starting the Kore is kind of like my big fk you to the whole system. It’s my big fk you not just to the patriarchy, but to white professionalism in general, because you can absolutely be professional and also be f*g angry. They're not mutually exclusive.

I think that that's been a big part of my personal work ethos. I won't speak for the whole of the Kore, but for Sierra that's definitely an energy that I bring to my work. Even now, if I'm not happy, I express myself. People have to make those TikToks where you have to decode professional language on emails. And I'm just like, “No way. I’ll use as many exclamation marks as I want to.” I tell people when I'm not happy about something, or I tell you when I am happy about something.

There’s this myth that we’re contributing to, I feel, that this disempowers people of color, especially when we don't end up speaking the language of white professionalism. So I absolutely go into all of my spaces of work as honest as possible, as tactical as possible when I need to be, and then if I do need to state the truth, I don't shy away from that.

I think that's the kind of energy that I'd love to see more of, if that makes sense. Because sometimes you do feel like a bit of a weirdo when you're expressing yourself. I think that was the one big takeaway, not just from the Kore and just being empowered by creating this organization, but also for myself and saying, “Okay, there are things that I will not stand by. And one of those things is not being honest. Not being honest to my employers, not being honest to myself.” It’s a two-way street, I suppose.

Ashley: Right. It's difficult though, because I feel like … I don't know. I feel like as I've gotten older—and I've hit like a weird part of my career. Right now I'm doing only freelance work and I'm still trying to contemplate if I can ever work for somebody else ever again because I feel like so much of what you've said does resonate with me.

There are things that I feel like I will not do anymore. I try not to do anymore. And yet I still fall into these traps of repeating some mistakes. I have this podcast, I write about these things, but if I'm still struggling with them, then what does that mean for other people? I think that there's a good lesson in what you've said: of being an example and saying f**k you to white professionalism. And I'm going to do the best that I can to do that.

But at the same time, that is hard work. It often can be met with resistance or [you’re treated] like you're the problem. One of the reasons I left my last job was that my boss would continuously tell me that I was the only person who had problems with things. And I was like, “What is this? Am I the problem? Am I the only one?”

I don't know, but like I said, there's so much gaslighting that's involved in trying to change the rhetoric around how work works essentially. It's really, really difficult. And I think it's not linear either—I just wanted to make sure that we emphasize that, because I think it's really easy to listen to this podcast or listen to you talk and be like, wow, this sounds really easy and it's not.

For me—for Ashley—it's one step forward, two steps back. Or sometimes it's two steps forward, one step back, or eight steps forward, 20 steps back. It takes a lot. And I think it's okay for that imperfection to exist, too. I feel like I need to acknowledge it.

Sierra: I definitely want to caveat what I've said because I'm just like, “Oh my gosh, that's like oozing privilege.” And I definitely do want to…

Ashley: It's not, I want to be clear on that. It's just that I think—everything's contextual. I think it's easy to listen to this and be like, “Cool, she's got it all figured out,” but that's not what you're saying at all, but I think it's easy to take that. You know what I mean?

Sierra: Yeah. I think to contextualize a little bit more—and I will be completely honest: The job that I currently have is the first job where I felt safe enough to dissent. I read this on a thread somewhere or something, on Instagram, on Twitter, but basically it was talking about diversity, equity, and inclusivity.

It said that diversity is an easy tick, like a tick box exercise. You could amass any number of people in the room that come from diverse backgrounds of any sort and call that diversity. But if that's as far as [you go], that’s shallow marketing.

Inclusivity is being able to have any of these people dissent safely. That really stuck with me where I said, “Oh s**t, that's what I'm feeling in my current job.” So I can be different and I can be honest and that might not be everyone's vibe, but it doesn't mean that I am in a place where I am in fear of losing my job for it. Does that make sense?

Ashley: That totally makes sense. And that's a really good point. I'm glad that you pointed that out, because I think you're absolutely right. It's easy to be like, “We're a diverse place—look at our staff,” but if no one actually feels safe enough to dissent, then it doesn't mean anything.

It's checking a box, it's saying, “Look at this! Cool! We did it, and we're done,” versus “This is an evolution. This is a process.” It involves listening to a lot of people and admitting that you're not right sometimes, and that's okay.

Sierra: The one thing as well, this is kind of a shout-out to Sierra from the past, and I suppose Ashley from the past as well, where I had to go through so many jobs where that doesn't happen and I absolutely do acknowledge that there are jobs in which people cannot dissent safely even today, even still.

Dissenting isn't necessarily as straightforward as we would like it to be. And certainly not as equitable as we'd like it to be, but I do honestly think—and I'm going to round this bit off with an anecdote that I had that I really wanted to share at our trade show [London Coffee Festival] but I didn't. So I'm going to share it here.

I was meant to be hosting a panel called “Seats at the Table,” and this was a diversity, equity, and inclusivity talk specifically for the coffee industry. What I didn't manage to mention at the time was that early this year when the Atlanta shootings [had happened] and there was a case against a couple of missing women in the country, in the United Kingdom where their bodies had turned up, I think, a couple of weeks later…

So there was just a really intense week during International Women's Day in early March. And what happened during that time was that I got racially harassed. Again, it's not new. It happened a lot when COVID first started, obviously being of Southeast Asian descent, I kind of knew that was going to happen. I got racially harassed in March and just broke down on the street and was like, “Oh my God, this is terrible.”

I went home—and this [happened] on a sales call. This was during work hours. So I went home and I shared it with a couple of close colleagues. And that was really the bridge where I thought, “Oh my gosh, I feel safe enough to share this with colleagues and not have them be like, ‘Are you sure you weren’t just making stuff up or imagining things or whatever? Are you sure was as bad as you said?’” There was none of that.

People were like, “Oh my God, this is terrible. I'm really sorry this has happened to you.” And then gradually we escalated that through the business and what truly gave me closure was the business coming back and saying, “All right, we hear you, let's implement a protocol to make sure that yourself and your team, your field sales team, are safe moving forward and for you to be able to report any sort of these instances if they do happen again.”

It was such a little, but also big thing, because I spoke about this with my team who have also had a couple of people that also had harassment incidences. And we said, “Wow, this is the first time we've been in a company that a) believes us and b) is doing something about it.”

I was just kind of processing that for about a week after and thinking, “This took eight years. This took a career of eight years for me to find a company where I finally felt safe enough to be like, ‘Wow, they're listening. And they hear me.’”

I suppose my point is, especially for listening to the podcast, to say please don't give up hope. I know that there are a lot of structural difficulties when it comes to, for example, HR. I think a lot of smaller coffee company companies can't afford HR or haven't even considered HR, et cetera, but it is possible to have a career in coffee and not feel like you're burning a candle at both ends. So yeah, that was my point and a really wholesome point to end on, you know?

Ashley: I think it's important for people to listen to stories like this for proof, almost, for both reasons: for the reason that you just ended on—that there is hope and there is a light hopefully at the end of the tunnel and things can get better, but at the same time for people who maybe enter their careers and never have to think about these things, who don't even have to think about the fundamentals. They're like, “Oh, I know that I will be safe at work. I know that I will be listened to at work. I know that my complaints will be handled or at least my basic safety will never be challenged.”

For you to come on the other end and say, “It took me eight years to find a place where I could even just establish that baseline.” And thinking critically about where are people at in their careers. Sometimes I even think about my own career. I'm like, not old. I'm 34. But sometimes I'm like, “Well, shoot, I wish I could be further along, but this happened and this happened and this happened…” and I have to remind myself that I had to establish a lot of safety and feeling listened to at work to even feel like I could advance or get anywhere.

That comes back to that anger issue too. It makes me really angry. It makes me really angry that I couldn't just establish a career and establish a safety net for myself. But that's neither here nor there. I mean, it is here and there, but it's a little bit off point.

Before we start to wrap things up, I want to ask you a little bit about your work at Alpro. As baristas, we touch milks so much more often than we do probably coffee in a way because we steam so much milk. We make so many milk-based beverages.

I'd say at my very last barista shift I probably steamed more plant milk than I did cow milk.

Sierra: No way!

Ashley: Probably at least 50/50 at this point. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the things that are on your mind in terms of plant milk and really thinking about sustainability, not just as an environmental concern, but as a social concern.

Sierra: Absolutely. I think it's so interesting because so many of these social justice movements kind of happened in the last year or so, and people are really opening up their eyes to the fact that our planet is in dire straits and we definitely need to start doing something about it. In fact, we should have been doing something yesterday.

With regards to plant-based products it's definitely something that I didn't envision myself doing, but then when I did, I was like, “Oh wow, there's a demand for it.” And it’s growing exponentially at that. It's just almost like, why haven't we considered it sooner?

I talked to a lot of people in my line of work who have switched over to what we at Alpro call “a flexitarian diet.” So you're basically favoring more plant-based stuff, you won't rule out meat necessarily, but when you do consider meat it's more ethically sourced—you're just a little bit more conscious about how you’re consuming it, but then mostly it's plant-based.

Obviously we cater to people with vegetarian diets and vegan diets as well. And that's kind of where the big driver is where people, I think, in lockdown weren't able to get their hands on dairy and then thought, “You know what? Now’s as good a time as any to start experimenting with my diet.” And then a lot of them didn't switch back from plant-based after that, which I think is amazing.

I think a lot of discussions are happening which will likely propel plant-based more into the coffee spotlight. I think, with regards to ingredients, that's just so interesting because I think soya has always been around. It’s been around for the longest time. Back in the day, I don't know if you remember this from when you used to drink soya, Ashley, if you ever did, but back in the day it was just curdle heaven.

We didn't know what stabilizes were. We didn't know what acidity regulators were. We didn't know what hydrocolloids were. Soya, and most plant-based milks in general at the time—I would probably say 10, 15 years ago—were not engineered to work with coffee. And if they were, it was just an afterthought. So people would just be like, “Do you have anything that isn’t milk? Oh, okay, cool, I'll take soya.” It's a little bit different now.

But then deforestation was a big topic. And with Alpro, we source 60% of our soya locally in Europe—Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Germany—and then we source the other 40% of the soya from Canada by boat. So we definitely don't touch any deforestation areas, particularly in the Amazon. So that's really good.

Next up we have almonds. Almonds are a little bit of an interesting one. I don't know if you've had similar discussions, obviously, because California is such a big producer of almonds. But for Alpro, we source our almonds from the Mediterranean with natural rainfall. So we try not to irrigate artificially. We also try to protect the ecosystem, particularly the bee ecosystem surrounding these almond groves, which I think is brilliant.

With almond, it's a little bit more interesting because there's so many different flavor profiles. I think some people prefer a more marzipan flavor profile, or some people prefer completely unsweetened and so on and so forth.

That actually brings me to a very interesting segue. A lot of people don't realize, I think, there's always this standard where a plant-based milk has to aspire to dairy's performance level. I don't know if that's a) possible—we haven't found the technology to do that yet, or someone would have already done it. But also b) I don't know if that's necessarily something we want to aim for, because they're just completely different products, they're completely different occasions with their own flavor profiles.

As coffee professionals, as sensory professionals, I don't know if it's a helpful paradigm to hold ourselves to—to try to limit plant-based products by saying that they should resemble dairy. I think that there's aspects that could resemble dairy. I think for example, mouthfeel and creaminess are two quite important things that we look out for, neutrality, and so on and so forth.

The way that I approach it in my work at Alpro is more of like a bartender or mixology point of view, where it's like, “Okay, these are all different ingredients that taste completely different from each other. How about we figure out how to pair them with coffees to best complement whatever's happening in the cup?” Surely that makes more sense as opposed to saying, “Oh, let's rank these ingredients in order of how neutral they taste,” because that doesn't make any sense to me.

Ashley: It seems really interesting that we haven't approached plant-based milks in that way. I've fallen down the rabbit hole with plant-based milks a little bit, and milk proteins are so unique and they only exist in milk and they perform the way that they do because they’re milk. So the fact that we are trying to mimic this thing seems technologically, maybe impossible—maybe later it will be possible.

In a way the coffee industry sort of shot itself in the foot when it comes to plant-based milks, because we did offer it as an alternative.

Sierra: Exactly.

Ashley: “You can't have dairy, we have this other thing,” versus “We have these two things that are both really excellent. They taste different, and this is how they taste different.”

And I wonder, as plant-based milks become more popular, do you think that will start to shift? I still think that we're in a little bit of a conundrum when it comes to plant milks where we still treat them as the alternative—and perhaps even picking the alternative has become cool or trendy or interesting. But it's not that we have posited these two things as different. We still posit them as alternatives.

I'm thinking about amaros (amari), for example, those bitter liquors. All of those amari fall into the category of amaro, but they all taste different and you can build drinks with all of them.

I'm trying to think of a drink that's amaro-based and I can't think of any, but if you switch out the amaro, the drink is going to taste different, but you still fundamentally have the same sort of drink. You can still have a latte with almond milk versus cow milk. They're going to taste different, but they're still fundamentally the same drink. How do we think about things that go with them that will highlight all the flavors inside of them?

Sierra: Also who decided that dairy was the standard of excellence and taste?

Ashley: It's Eurocentrism.

Sierra: Well, there you go.

It really behooves us to start questioning these norms. And I think that that is happening. It's so interesting that you bring up the molecular composition of dairy because a lot of what makes plant-based products perform in coffee today is a blend of protein, of some sort of plant-based lipids and acidity regulators, stabilizers, some sugar as well really helps.

So when people, for example, ask me for unsweetened almond milk, I'm like, “You do know that that's totally not going to work in coffee, by the way. It just doesn't work. We haven't broken that frontier yet.”

That's definitely something to consider with oat and coconut as well—I think coconut gets a really negative rep and that's something that we've been trying to change at Alpro recently, because coconut, a lot of people tend to say, “It overwhelms the flavor profile of the coffee.”

I'm like, “You do realize that there were big, boozy, natural coffees that will be able to hold their own with coconut and will create probably a banging drink?” I think as an industry, we need to stop restricting ourselves, to get up out of our own way, and really think about exploring different possibilities.

Ashley: Is there anything that you'd want people to know about? I feel like we covered a lot of different topics, but very, very quickly. So is there anything that you would want people to know about you or about your work at Alpro or about The Kore that we didn't cover?

Sierra: I would probably say for people—I would love for people to do their research.

I think when it comes to things that you don't know much about—whether or not it's social justice movements or it's about equity, equality, diversity, et cetera … and then also when it comes to plant-based choices in your life.

If you want to pursue a new ingredient or if you want to try something out from a new brand because we're seeing so much competition in that market at the moment—and that competition is good, it's a good thing—but I definitely say try to be as discerning as possible with your choices, with what you support. Particularly with these products, find out where they're sourced, try to find out more about the supply chain of the ingredient, if you can … the credentials of the company, whether or not they're B-Corp certified, for example. It's just access to information and making sure that you are making as informed a choice as possible.

Ashley: Sierra, thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate it.

Sierra: No, man, this is great. This is so wonderful. I've been such a fan of your podcast for the longest time and the work that you do, and this was such an honor.

This Boss Barista episode is brought to you by Urnex.

One of Urnex’s latest advances is a range of environmentally friendly cleaners called Biocaf. Biocaf products are made entirely from plant- and mineral-based ingredients and are fully biodegradable. They're available for both commercial and household coffee equipment.

Urnex is also partnering with coffee pros—like me!—to highlight some of the best sustainability efforts in the industry with the Biocaf Sustainability Series. You can read my most recent piece on Onyx Coffee Labs’ switch to oat milk in their latest café, and learn more about Biocaf here. And be sure to read the dozens of pieces focusing on sustainability in coffee and beyond.

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Rachel Faller is one of the co-founders of tonlé, a zero-waste clothing company that believes in promoting equal value across the supply chain. Like coffee, most of the clothing we wear goes through hundreds of hands and relies on a system of manufacture and exchange that is a relic of colonialism.

In this episode, Rachel explains some of the parallels between how coffee is bought and sold and how clothes are made. We talk about who gains and who loses in a world that relies on fast fashion: the production of cheap clothing with quick turnaround times for garment factories.

Former guests have talked about the idea of risk in a global supply stream. When an item has to go through so many hands to get from Point A to Point B, how can risk be shared responsibly? Oftentimes, it’s not. In coffee, a lot of the risk lands on farmers, whose profits fluctuate based on what roasters are willing to pay, even though roasters have a vested interest in keeping the coffee industry going. In fast fashion, the risk shifts to factory workers, who deal with designers who might cancel orders if they’re not doing well in stores, or fluctuate their requests. Those factors mean anticipating labor needs can be tricky.

I know it might seem strange to talk fashion on a coffee and food podcast, but the parallels between the two industries show how systems meant to benefit those in power aren’t accidents. The same systems show up over and over across industries where there are huge profits to be made at the expense of others’ labor. Here’s Rachel.

Ashley: To kick things off: Could you introduce yourself?

Rachel: Sure. My name is Rachel Faller and I'm one of the co-creators of tonlé.

Ashley: How did tonlé begin? What's the story of tonlé?

Rachel: In 2008, I had the opportunity to go to Cambodia on a Fulbright fellowship and learn about traditional textiles from craftspeople who were working there, primarily through fair trade organizations using fair trade as in capital “F” and “T,” and also “fair trade” in quotes. [At the time], fair trade was really starting to become more of a thing in fashion.

I had just started to learn about fair trade and I was interested in how it could be a solution to some of fashion's problems. Having graduated from a textile program, I knew that there were a lot of problems in the fashion industry, but I didn't really know—I wasn't really seeing any solutions at that time. And so I wanted to go and learn from makers directly about what was working for them and what wasn't working for them in this movement and in their businesses, and learn about the traditional crafts that they were making.

I got to do this year of research and really hands-on experience working and learning from craftspeople, which was really incredible. I was extremely privileged to be able to do that and to have that opportunity. But what I kind of saw is—at the same time that I moved to Cambodia in 2008, the Recession happened, and that really dramatically impacted the sales of a lot of these makers.

There was also at that time—2008 and the Recession really led to the rise of fast fashion. Companies started to realize that they could sell more and more products at cheaper prices, so it really accelerated the pace of fast fashion.

Cambodia is also a country where a lot of fast fashion is produced, so I saw how that was affecting people firsthand. The price for fairly made textiles was essentially going down while the production of fast fashion was ramping up.

I saw both extremes in Cambodia, where you saw the impact of these huge fast fashion companies through their manufacturers in Cambodia on the environment, as well as on the workers and also how some of these groups that were striving to be fair trade and to produce things in a better way were also struggling because the market for fair trade was kind of considered luxury. They were also struggling at the same time.

On a very personal note, I was also having a hard time finding clothes that I really wanted to wear and felt comfortable wearing after seeing all of this. Even within the small markets in Cambodia, there were a lot of products that were handmade and very beautiful, but not really clothes that you could wear on a daily basis.

Then you also had these massive markets for castoffs from the larger garment factories—a lot of things that had failed quality control or were overstocked. That was flooding the markets. On a personal note, I was like, “I don't feel good wearing most of the clothes that are available out there for me.”

Ashley: How did these observations—what you were seeing in the fashion industry—translate to starting a clothing company?

Rachel: There were a group of people through one of the nonprofits that I was partnering with who said, “Hey, we want to start this business. But we don't really know how to—can you help us?”

So we kind of did an exchange of knowledge and that led organically to starting the first iteration of the business. And eventually it became clear—my goal was to basically help this group of women start this business and then my goal was always to leave and let them take over the business and let it keep going from there.

But there was a bit of a conundrum with the market in Cambodia where there was this market for higher-end products to sell to tourists and expats, but the problem with the market in Cambodia is that a lot of the products that were sold locally to the people in Cambodia were also being made under unfair conditions.

In the tailoring workshops, there's an exploitive culture where within Cambodia, families sort of work together and maybe the head tailor gets paid, but everybody else gets free room and board—they might not actually get paid or they send money home. That's kind of the system: It's family tailoring workshops that rely on unfair pay structures.

So it was a bit of an organic process and a lot of evolution in conversation with the team that we developed, and the needs of people changed as we grew as well. So there were a lot of ups and downs, but essentially I ended up staying in Cambodia for seven years working directly with makers to grow this business.

We started out working on a per-piece model with people working from home. And then we moved to having a production facility where people work in the facility and get paid. Then we moved to a salary model, then we moved to a combined model where people are paid a per-piece rate, plus a base salary. So they can earn more depending on their output, but within a set number of hours so there's no overtime hours and stuff that you see in the factories.

Ashley: Since this is a podcast that talks to coffee folks, it might be helpful to explain how tonlé is structured or operates differently from the traditional fashion business model, if there is one?

Rachel: So there have been a lot of changes, a lot of evolution, but we’re constantly in conversation and in consultation with our team in Cambodia, and really centering them as the decision-makers in terms of what we're doing with the business and what they want and what's best for them.

So it’s very different than a traditional fashion brand. The way that works is the designer says, or a brand says, “Hey, what do we want to produce? What's going to be good for the market? Let's go out and find a facility to produce that.” It’s usually multiple facilities around the world. You end up with these long and convoluted supply chains where the product and the customer is prioritized rather than the people who make the products being the center.

The way that we've developed our business has been much more with the makers at the center and always asking you the question, “What is good for the makers?” We ask, “How do we develop products that are first and foremost good for the people who make them, and then secondarily are going to be sellable and good for our customers as well?” It's kind of backwards in the traditional fashion sense, but that's what we do.

Ashley: I think that's amazing how you laid everything out. I think initially someone might listen to this episode and think, “What does a clothing company have to do with coffee?” But you hit on so many themes that come up in coffee, and we're going to talk about a lot more of them as we go on through this conversation.

I want to lay some foundation just for folks who maybe don't know a lot about what the fashion industry looks like or what fast fashion is. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that moment in 2008 when fast fashion became more of a thing, and what that actually means and what that looks like from a supply chain standpoint.

Rachel: Yes, yes. So this is really important because I think a lot of people don't understand what fast fashion is. It's a very specific term that's become very broadly used.

Traditionally in the fashion industry—so pre-2008 and pre-fast fashion—you would have a pretty long lead time before a product got to market. So designers would take about somewhere between three to six months to develop their collections and produce really high-quality samples and do all the fit testing, fabric testing …everything that goes into making a really beautiful prototype.

Then they would present those prototypes to buyers, like department stores and boutiques and so forth. Those buyers would then place orders based on the prototypes. Then the designers could go to the factories or their suppliers and say, “Hey, we have an order from a buyer for this many products.”

Then the factory would have three to six months to produce that order based on an actual production order from a buyer that was going to buy that item, based on a prototype that's really well-made and really well designed. Then the factory would produce it and then it would get sent directly to the stores. Then the stores would have probably another three to six months to sell it.

That whole process is somewhere between 12 and 18 months. So a year to a year and a half, that was how the fashion industry used to work. That's why you have runway [shows] that happened six months in advance.

Ashley: That explains seasonal displays, like, “This is this season’s styles,” or whatever that looks like.

Rachel: That has been denigrated, but it's actually [a] really important [system] to produce in a more ethical and sustainable manner. I know that sounds really backwards, but let me explain to contrast the situation that we're in now.

So fast fashion is where these businesses can be vertically integrated. They can actually take product from design to market in less than a month. The way that they do that is they essentially don't make prototypes. They don't make samples, they don't develop their products in any way.

They're just sending some kind of sketch directly to the factory and they say, “Okay, produce 10,000.” And then the factory sends back the 10,000 that have not been sampled, that have not been tested, that have not been prototyped.

They immediately put them in the store and they test those 10,000 items and see how fast they sell. If they sell well, maybe the brand will order more. There's a lot of data analytics and stuff that goes into this. But essentially, as you can imagine, that results in more waste, more overproduction.

We’re getting to this micro-season thing which we have now, where stores are expected to have new products on the shelf every week instead of collections every six months. I'm not saying 2008 started that, but it sort of jump-started it.

This whole thing means that [companies] are shifting the risk onto the factories and onto the suppliers, because in order to get something from design-to-market in a month, when the process used to take 18 months, the factories basically have to pre-order fabric. They have to pay all these upfront costs.

They also have to take on the risk of having—let's say a factory has 1,000 workers. So that capacity is a risk, right? They need to pay their salaries no matter what. And this is true of tonlé as well. The factory needs to pay their solid salaries, no matter what, whereas the brand only pays for the products that they ordered.

If one month they get an order that they need 1,500 people to work on, well, they're going to outsource to a subcontractor. If the next month they get an order for only 500, that's only 500 of their workers they need to make [things]. Then they've got all this spare capacity.

The factories essentially have to take on all that risk of the capacity of the labor. They also have to take on the risk of buying the raw materials upfront, which means that they're going to over-order their raw materials, so that if a brand comes in to place an order and they say, “We want this really fast turnaround time,” they can do that.

Ashley: It seems like there's a lot of problems with that model.

So first and foremost, you used probably my favorite word right now, which is risk—a lot of the risk in fast fashion seems to be distributed to factories. Is that right?

Rachel: Yup. I think really emphasizing that these are formerly colonized countries or continue to be colonized countries. This is 100% a legacy of colonialism. It's not coincidental at all that all of these countries were colonized and now continue to be colonized by this extremely exploitative system where we—primarily in North America and Europe—can outsource the labor. But these companies, which are again, mostly owned by white Europeans and American men, are essentially making huge amounts of profit while not having any of the risks.

Ashley: Exactly. Their profits are not affected at all. They're still making money while transferring the risk of fast fashion to formerly colonized—and truthfully, like you said—[they continue to be] colonized countries.

Rachel: Yes. A lot of that infrastructure was literally set up under colonialism. It's just really mind-blowing. I mean, if you think about India, for example, a lot of the garment industry was built under colonialism and now [companies] are like, “Oh look, we can just kind of continue using this.”

Ashley: Right, right. There's no talk of what reforming an entire system looks like. Especially when it's set up under a system that was meant to exploit people.

But then it seems like there's this secondary issue of sustainability from an environmental standpoint and from a consumerist standpoint, where fast fashion encourages people to buy things and continue to look for new trends and fashion—probably more often than they would normally—to encourage continued spending. And that's where you get the environmental waste as well, like, “We need this product to be produced really quickly. The waste of it is inconsequential at this point.”

Rachel: Yeah. And it's partly inconsequential because the brands and the customers who, again, are in those Global North countries, are never having to see it, right?

I lived in Cambodia for seven years. I literally saw this waste piling up. I mean—yeah, there's so much we can say, but essentially those negative environmental outputs are being shifted onto these countries as well and it’s not only in terms of the literal waste, but the cut waste that we see.

tonlé uses scraps that come from the garment industry. I forgot to mention that earlier, but we actually get this waste literally from these huge companies via their factories, because the factories have all this excess fabric. Some of it is still on the roll, so it's perfectly good, but they just had to order extra because they didn't know the brands were inconsistent with their projections.

That's another part of the risk: that they're having to invest in all these raw materials. Brands will not give them clear orders or productions until the last minute.

Then there's also cut waste. There's things that fail quality control because of course, if workers are trying to produce so fast, their quality is not going to be great. So things are not going to be produced as well. So there's lots of extra waste [that] has increased exponentially.

I would say that the percentage of waste as compared to the products being produced has increased. The number of garments that are being produced has increased. I think, and I'd have to check this statistic, but it's something like since 2010, the number of garments being produced every year has more than doubled.

Then if you think about waste as a percentage of that, the waste has more than doubled as well because the waste as a percentage is higher.

I mean, it's pretty unbelievable. Our team goes to these warehouses in Phnom Penh where the scraps are collected by these informal recycling streams, they go and they get waste from the garment industry, from these big factories. Factories have to get rid of them sort of on the sly, because the brands don't want their sort of trademarked materials to get out and be made into something else.

But the brands also kind of look the other way because they know that they're not buying the raw materials and they're not investing in those. So they can't really say anything. So our team members go to these warehouses where all this stuff is collected and resold, and then we can pick out what we want, but I see all kinds of things there. I see garments that are half-made. I've seen bales of fabric with brands’ names on them. It's pretty wild. I'll have to show you a video or something.

Ashley: One of the first images that I saw when I went to your website was a picture of stacks and stacks and stacks of garments. I assume that that's what traditional factories would call waste?

Rachel: Yes, exactly.

I want to just really emphasize that there is a tendency to villainize the factories in this situation. Even with this concept, and I know we’re going to talk more about transparency, one of the problems with talking about transparency is it lets the brand say—and I want to credit my friend Kim here, she worked with tonlé in the past and she now has her own podcast called Manufactured, which is really fantastic. She talks a lot about the distribution of risk and reward and why that needs to be re-analyzed.

She and I had a lot of conversations about transparency and how it allows the brands to basically say, “The problem is transparency. The factories are trying to hide things from us,” and this kind of, “OK, we’re going to put the blame on the factory. When in reality, we made the factory take all that risk and we're not paying high enough prices and we're not giving fair projections.”

So the factory is taking on all the risk, meanwhile, we're kind of saying, “Oh, the issue is these bad factory managers are exploiting their workers and throwing away all of this waste.”

I just want to really reemphasize the fact that these brands—it's very convenient for them to be able to make all the profit, but take none of this responsibility when something goes wrong.

Ashley: It's this idea of transparency, but without thinking of the intersection of transparency and power.

Rachel: And accountability, right? It's like transparency, but no accountability when you're really the one that isn't providing the infrastructure and the money to make these changes.

Ashley: It seems totally viable for a lot of these companies to very well do so. Especially these huge fast fashion companies that, as you mentioned, there's no risk to their profits. They're just transferring that risk over to factories.

Rachel: Right. And the way that works essentially is again, brands pay for products that are made. They pay for the final goods, right? Sometimes they don't even pay for them until 60 or 90 days after they've already got those items on their shelves. So if they aren't selling those items for any reason, they can basically find something in their contracts that allows them to get out of paying for those items.

Ashley: That happens in coffee as well. I think that that's why this is such an interesting conversation to have because there's so many parallels in the way that items that come from one place and are consumed in another place are treated because of colonialism. Colonialism is the house that builds all of this.

Rachel: Yeah. I agree. 100%.

Ashley: So let's talk about tonlé and how you’re at least, in a small way, trying to build a more ethical structure. Something that I really appreciate about your website is number one: you don't use the word “disrupt,” which I hate.

But number two, you also admit your own mistakes. And you talk about that. You talk a lot about honesty and how you're not necessarily this big company who's trying to shake things up—I mean, you're trying to shake things up to the extent that you can— but you're saying like, “This is our company and this is what we can do.”

So I was wondering if you can talk about some of the tenets of tonlé that are attempting to at least chisel away at some of these colonial structures.

Rachel: I think, just going back to my experiences—when I first moved to Cambodia, I, and again, this was in conversation with our makers, but mostly my first goal was, “Let's provide jobs for people that are safe and comfortable and different than what's happening in fashion at large.”

There is this culture of aid and white saviorism that is also a continuation of colonialism and this idea that, myself as a white person, not only a white person, but a person from North America who's had access to a good education and a lot of privileges—that I have benefited from this colonialism very directly through the riches of my culture that have been enriched through this extraction and this exploitation.

To to Cambodia and then saying, “I'm going to help people,” but not acknowledging that the very poverty that I was seeing was actually caused by my own culture's history of extraction…

Ashley: I see what you’re saying. I think that's hard to reframe sometimes because you're totally right. The way that so many companies in the Global North and in Western countries portray themselves is this very like, “We are saving the world, we're saving these parts of the world that are being affected,” but there has to be a point where we say, “We caused these problems.”

It's something that I'm starting to see people talk about more in Central and South America, where in the United States, where we were refusing refugees, we caused political upheaval and disruption and instability in Central America, flat-out.

I think that that's an important framing to talk about with tonlé because it's not about like, “Oh, we're going to—again, using those buzzwords—we're going to go disrupt the fashion supply industry because these are all the problems.” It's saying we caused these problems. We need to fix it.

Rachel: Yeah. That's exactly what I'm trying to say. Fair trade—we could get into it—has a lot of problems. There's a lot of neocolonialism in fair trade.

If we wanted to make trade truly fair, there have to be reparations. I don't want to say one brand can do this on their own, and that's why I don't call our work reparations. But there does need to be systemic reparations before things can get better because, for a country like Cambodia that is so resource-rich, for example, and culturally rich, but there's been so much extraction for so long that it would be really hard for people to start their own, whole new infrastructure of thriving businesses because there has been this long history of extraction.

There has to be a giving back. One thing I've been thinking about a lot are the words “giving back.” I'm like, “Yeah, we do need to give it back. We need to give it all back.”

Ashley: Right, we took it.

Rachel: I think that giving back is often framed in a very white savior way, but if we actually acknowledged that giving back means literally, “No, I took this, I need to give it back,” and really sit with that and really think about what that means and how are all the ways in which we’ve benefited from this long history of extraction.

Again, no one company can solve that, but what we're trying to do—and this is my journey—but going from saying, “Oh, I just, I come to Cambodia, I'm seeing all this sadness and this poverty, and I want to help, and I want to do something about it,” but then having that realization, living there and seeing that ongoing impact of neocolonialism in the garment industry and in the aid industry and saying, “No, I'm actually part of these problems. I'm actually part of why these problems are happening. And if anything, the best I can do is to reduce my harm and try to return and redistribute some of that wealth that's been taken away.”

A big part of that is a fairer distribution. Again, I want to emphasize that not one company can do this by themselves. You have to be in a systemic thought pattern where we have to have collaborators and we work to create better systems at the same time, thinking within our business, how can we have a fair distribution of risk and rewards so that more money can be returned to people who had created that wealth.

Ashley: I think that's a really interesting point, what you said about reducing harm, because I think when you talk about companies that have connections to colonialism, or are the product of colonialism, there's a lot of talk of doing good, but there's not a lot of talk of reducing harm, because that feels bad, because that's a negative.

Rachel: To acknowledge that you created harm.

Ashley: And you need to reduce that harm!

Because it's easy to paint it the other way around. It's easy to say, “Oh, we're doing good work.” It's easy to see upward projections or it's easy to see impact that's benefiting people as good, but it's like—no, you [need] to reduce harm because you fucked it up to start.

I want to talk a little bit about how tonlé at least attempts to reduce harm. One of the things that I was really interested in when I was on your website was how you talk about the supply stream.

Maybe this is a weak visual—sometimes when I'm reading things, I try to visualize them. But when I think about a traditional supply stream, it seems like a linear—it seems like a graph that's going up and it starts with makers at the very bottom and then ends with CEOs or people who own the means of production or own power often ending up with the most resources. It seems like, in some way, you're trying to make that a circle. I was wondering what that looks like.

Rachel: That's what we're trying to go for. I believe that in the business models of the future, we need to be thinking—and the systems of the future beyond just business models, because I think there's also a tendency, I think right now there's an emphasis on businesses are gonna do everything and that's not a good way to think about it.

I think in the business models of the future, first of all, they need to be something that benefits everyone. And we need to be thinking about building our businesses in a way where everybody can thrive and benefit and cooperate to build something that actually does center the benefit of everybody involved. That includes the customers, that includes the owners, that includes the investors, but it also has to include the people who make the products because the people who make your products should be core to your business and [you should be] treating them well and making sure that they're benefiting—that should be your highest priority, because they're making the very thing that you are selling.

That seems very fundamental to me, but it's so opposite of what the traditional fashion industry looks like insofar as that, in the traditional fashion industry, the people who make products are actually not even included in the businesses.

At the beginning of the pandemic, when a lot of retailers were having shut-downs, they just canceled their orders to their suppliers. In some cases, a lot of those products were already produced or even already shipped. The brands just said, “No, we're not going to pay.”

A lot of people from the outside are like, “How can they do that? How can they not pay their workers who made their products?” And the fundamental problem is that those workers are not even considered an important part of those businesses, which is kind of mind-blowing when you think about it.

Ashley: That’s a common theme in a lot of businesses—the idea that the people who make the thing that is valuable are the most disposable. And that's very true in coffee as well, on both ends of the supply stream. I don't think we talk about the producing end as much in terms of disposability, but certainly for baristas, we treat them as disposable.

Rachel: Yeah. [We treat] commodified knowledge or creativity as more valuable than labor, or more valuable than the skills that it takes to create a high-quality product or the skills that it takes to farm a high-quality product.

You see this really in tech—their whole goal is to outsource all of their production of anything physical and to consolidate the knowledge and the creativity as the value. You see that to a certain extent in the fashion industry as well, where brands and patents are more valuable and even technologies are more valuable than the labor that goes into a product.

And not only the labor—I want to emphasize that it takes a lot of skill to make a high-quality product in fashion. There's a reason that robots don't make garments, because they’re hard to make. It's very hard to make a good garment—weaving and dying and all of these things. These things take a lot of skill and we don't value that anymore.

I think a big part of this again goes back to colonialism, because Europe was not resource-rich. So they went to all these other countries to extract the resources and made their value the “supposed knowledge” that they had—through religion and writing and language and history. They quantified that as their value.

I mean, this is a little esoteric, but it's kind of led to this idea that there's this knowledge class of creative people who, even to the point, in the art world, the highest-valued artists don't even make their products and have workers who make their things that get paid far less than they do for coming up with the idea.

Ashley: Something that you said that was really interesting is the need to build businesses that take care of everybody. I think it's really easy for people to almost default on how the system works as an excuse to not pay people.

So I was actually just reading this Facebook chain that a friend of mine who's a chef started, and it was all about how restaurants can't afford to pay chefs or cooks more money. And while that is true—because the restaurant industry is deeply, deeply flawed—I just thought how interesting it was that this person was able to justify the lack of high wages as just a problem that we have to deal with.

Like, “Oh, but I still deserve to have a business. I still deserve to run a restaurant and make money at the exploitation of others.” And I think that that's probably true in a lot of industries, including the fashion industry.

Rachel: Totally. That really resonates with me because I sort of had this realization probably a few years back where I felt some of those things. Where I'm like, “I have to conform to some of these things that I don't like about the industry in order to survive so I can keep paying people…” and so forth.

I can't put my finger on exactly what, but I think what I realized is that for me, I have no interest in running a business that isn't 100% true to my values. I would rather run no business at all, or a smaller business, a smaller version of this business, than to compromise on some of these very important things. If our goal is to create this more fair microsystem within the system, I want to do that 100%, even if that means being—most of the time, it doesn't mean closing down, it just means being much smaller.

I would rather do that 100% on the smallest scale than to grow really big and have to compromise. A lot of that pressure is actually coming from not just sustaining as you are, but there's a pressure to grow. I think usually when you have to grow, that's where these compromises start coming in.

A lot of that pressure does come from investors now. I have seen a lot of so-called sustainable fashion companies, when they raise money, they end up compromising because eventually those investors are going to be like, “Well, now I'm not happy with 20% profit anymore. I want you to make 25% profit. Now I want you to make 30% profit.” So how do you come up with that profit?

Then you end up squeezing things or you have to grow in some unsustainable way. I think the pressure is often not just about making a decent amount of money, but making a lot of money and who gets to consolidate that wealth.

I think for me, I realized I would much rather stay a bit smaller and just be more authentic to what we do than to grow and compromise, because that would be, I don't know, that would just be a fundamentally—I don't want to run a business like that. So why would I do that? I'd rather close.

Ashley: Right, and I think that's okay. That's something that I think when people talk about owning businesses, that's failure, but it's not.

I actually had somebody on my show maybe two years ago (David Hu), he ran a coffee shop in New Jersey, and it ran for a couple of years and then he shut down and we talked about that. We talked about what success was and what failure was. And he was like, “No, I succeeded. I ran the coffee shop I wanted to run. I paid baristas well. They knew their schedules ahead of time. I didn't devalue their work. I closed because I ran out of money, but I didn’t fail.”

I think this is really a framework because on the converse, what you were talking about—and especially because you're in San Francisco, you're in the epicenter of VC funding and venture capital is coming in and demanding, “Okay, we've made 20% returns this year. I want 25% this year. I want 30% this year.” It's embedded in our system that we are expected to grow constantly.

Rachel: Just on that: With the “impact” or “do good” space, I think there's also this added pressure to grow your impact.

I've talked to a lot of investors and we've actually raised some money, but luckily we've been able to raise it in a way that's very values-aligned—that could be another conversation. There's a lot of people, investors, who are trying to get into the impact space now and be like, “Oh, well now we're an impact investor, but we want you to make the same amount of profit. And also we want you to impact the lives of a million people.”

I've actually been passed up for funding versus other businesses that I knew they were deciding to make those compromises where it's like, “Oh, I want to be able to employ 1,000 people, but their lives are only going to be marginally better, they're going to get 10% more wages instead of having a very radically different business model.”

So compromising supposedly for incremental quote unquote “impact” versus radically reforming the system—because I think if you want to radically reform the system and really challenge those norms, you can't take traditional investment capital. It's just fundamentally not aligned, in my opinion. But people think they need money and they want to grow. So they decide to make those compromises. But I don't know.

Ashley: It’s tricky and it's weird because a lot of it involves almost deprogramming your brain a little bit. And I can see where say, “Oh, we hired 1,000 people” feels really good, but like you mentioned, if the impact is really minimal, would that impact be better served by fundamentally changing the lives of a few people in a really radical way as opposed to being able to put in your pitch deck, “Look at all the people we've helped.”

That's what that feels like. It feels like I'm going to put a pitch deck together and put these numbers together.

Rachel: And it's kind of disingenuous because it's like, people can already get jobs in Cambodia for 10% more money. Just because you went and created all these jobs, I don't know. It's just weird. It's like, “Oh, you're responsible for employing these people, but it's kind of taking away their agency.”

But I think the impact of tonlé, one thing I realized is that for me, I really want to create a business model that challenges the norms. I don't want to just be like, “Oh, look, I employ these people. Great. I'm good.” I want to create a model that people can look to and that can really challenge those norms and say, “Look, it's possible to do this and that we can really rethink and question these structures.” And like you say, do things that businesses don't do, like being open and transparent about our mistakes, being honest about the challenges and the compromises that we do have to make sometimes, and why we made those choices.

Businesses typically don't do that, right? And I'm not saying, “Oh, look, we're so good, blah, blah, blah …” But our customers are coming to us and saying, “This is so refreshing, and I wish more people did this.” And for me, that's worth it. That we can set a standard, that there is this different way of doing things.

No, it's not going to be perfect. We are living in a terrible system and we're all participating in different ways, but it's about choosing how you participate and then being transparent about how you've chosen to participate. I would rather know I'm participating in all these terrible things. I would rather pick the least bad one and then just be like, look, this is the choice I had to make. And here's why, you know what I mean?

Ashley: I see what you're saying. That's something I’ve thought about too, is that it can be really easy to see a problem like exploitation and colonialism and how the supply stream works and think this is too overwhelming. There's too much, but it is OK to choose a part that you can tackle.

I want to talk a little bit about one of the things that I think is really interesting that tonlé does—thinking about that circular supply stream is that customers are very much involved in that process. Something that I think is really compelling about the way that your business works is that the final point of sale—the customer now has the thing that they have bought and it is done, and that's the end of it—is not the end for tonlé.

There's a resale market. You talk about aftercare, how to take care of your items so that they actually last a long time. You also have this acknowledgement that the customer isn't necessarily always right. So I was wondering how you think about your customers—and not to say that you're not grateful for them, or anything like that, but customers are equal to employees. You can't treat customers as more valuable. They're just not.

Rachel: I think that this concept that the customer is always—the way that often manifests in the kind of fair trade fashion world is through also white saviorism.

It’s like, “Oh, buy this handbag and save a woman from sex slavery. Buy this and save poor people in Africa.” That is super disempowering, obviously. But it's this very white savior mentality and this very colonialist way of looking at it. It’s like, “Oh, the fashion industry is bad, but you can buy fair trade and you can save people.” That leads into the founder narrative that we were just talking about of like, “Oh, go to Cambodia and save people through providing these jobs.”

Well, you're not providing jobs. People have a contract to work with you and you've mutually decided to work together to make something and to sell something. I used to, but I've changed this, I don't say I'm providing jobs for people. I employ people. They choose to come work at tonlé, right? They always have the agency to leave as well.

People keep choosing to work at tonlé every day because it's good for them. And it's good for us. It's a mutually beneficial agreement. At the point at which it's no longer good for them, I hope that they find something else that they like better. The same is true with our customers, the way that I see our customers and the way that we've tried to articulate this is that the relationship of a person who buys a product to the person who makes it is a mutually beneficial agreement.

You get a beautiful, handmade product that has a lot of integrity and labor and skill put into it and they get paid fairly for their labor and skill and design. That's a mutually beneficial agreement and it should be seen as such.

So when you're a customer buying from a company that's trying to produce things in a fair way, yes, you're supporting their work, but equally you're getting something out of that.

Ashley: I also appreciate that you talked about the use of language because that's something that I've been trying to think about, even in the job market—the idea of how power works.

“I'm providing a job, I'm giving you a job.” No, no, no, no, no, no. We live in a capitalist system where we have to work. Jobs are there, you can employ people because that's what the relationship is, but to acknowledge that this is the system under which we work versus this paternalistic, “This is the thing I'm giving you,” is really, really interesting. And something I want to explore more of in the coming months.

Just to start to wrap up our conversation, just because we're going a little bit longer than some of the normal episodes that we do, I was wondering if you could talk about what you want people to know about tonlé.

Rachel: Oh, that's a hard one. I would say the most important thing to me about tonlé, or that I want people to really understand, is how different it is that we do our own production.

Our production, our sales, our design, all working in tandem seems very fundamental, but it's very radically different than what's going on in the traditional industry. When we talk about, “Oh, Nike makes this shoe,” or, “H&M makes this T-shirt,” it's not correct.

Nike doesn't make anything. H&M doesn't make anything. They don't own factories. They don't operate manufacturing facilities, they don't grow the cotton. You know? I want to really emphasize that I think the first thing that really needs to happen to change these systems is that I want customers and people who are new to the industry to understand that there is this major disconnect between where value is placed—and it’s not on the production.

And I think we need to recenter the people who are producing our goods, and that includes factory owners. That includes the people who are running production, because they are the experts in making products. Usually when we talk about sustainability, when we talk about brands, if you go to a sustainability conference, you will just see the leaders of all these sustainability departments at brands, but they're not the experts in sustainability. They're not doing the sustainability work. The sustainability work is being done by the factories and the workers, and even the factory owners. They're the experts, yet they're rarely involved in these conversations.

One of the things I'm most proud of with tonlé is that within our business, that's all very integrated and we have people running production who also do production. We have people working on designs who also are involved in the production of the garments. So that is all designed as a system to work that way.

In thinking about language and thinking about how we reframe this—we need to analyze that and analyze how we talk about these brands and the long-term implications of that.

Ashley: Rachel, thank you so much for joining me. This has been a really fun conversation and I think it might be easy to be like, “Oh, how does fashion relate to coffee?” But there are so many themes that translate to both industries. And I really thank you for going in depth with me.

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Before coffee, Nigel Price had a career in finance, working for a firm in Downtown Manhattan. But eventually, he decided he’d had enough—and he turned to cafes as a way to break away from the life he’d built and the trajectory he no longer wanted to be on. Over a decade later, Nigel credits coffee as the beginning of his second life, giving him a chance to create connections and bond with people in a way that his prior life in finance hadn’t.

Nigel spent 11 years learning about coffee before he opened the first iteration of Drip Coffee Makers, a duo of coffee shops in Brooklyn that began its life as a coffee cart serving pour-over coffee. In most coffee shops, pour-overs can be a chore—they’re time-intensive, and can take you out of the flow of service. At Drip, pour-overs are designed to be a focal point, a place for customers to talk to baristas and learn more about what they’re drinking.

Nigel opened his first Bushwick location just two months before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down most of the surrounding businesses, and that ended up transforming his new space. As one of the only coffee shops in the neighborhood that was open, Drip became a respite for locals during the pandemic’s darkest days, and Nigel noticed that people were ready, even eager, to sit, wait, and talk over a slow cup of coffee.

Ashley: Nigel, I was wondering if you could tell me about growing up with coffee. Did you drink coffee as a kid or did you see others in your life drinking coffee?

Nigel: I don't even know if you can legally call what my mom would make as coffee. But I do know it tasted super good. She had one of these old-school percolators and she would put this pre-ground, freeze-dried stuff in it, but it was loaded up with so much milk and sugar. And for years I thought that's what coffee was, until high school and college.

Then I see people drinking straight black coffee from a bodega, from a Starbucks or something like that. And I'm like, “This stuff is horrible. How can you drink this?”

Fun fact: Before [the idea of Drip Coffee was to serve coffee], it was supposed to be a tea shop, because I just never drank coffee. I just never drank coffee.

Ashley: When did you decide that a coffee shop was the way that you wanted to go instead of the tea shop?

Nigel: Really quickly. After shopping my business plan around, people thought it was ridiculous to try to open a tea shop and not offer any coffee. In hindsight it’s like, “Duh,” but at the time—and I drank a lot of coffee [at this point]—it just didn't make sense if you are going to be a premium tea shop to even serve coffee. To have coffee in a tea shop, a lot of the teas will pick up the scents or would pick up on the coffee notes and it would get imparted onto the leaves.

So I was like, that just doesn't make sense, but the more I looked into it—and then, at the time there was a ton of, well, not a ton, but a handful of tea shops in New York I would go visit and the next time I would go visit, they'd be closed.

Ashley: So your proof was there?

Nigel: Exactly. Unfortunately if you call something a tea shop people just will not go, so I moved into coffee. Like how I approach a lot of things, I really drill down and I have to go through the whole process of learning and different processes and tasting. And the more I tasted, the more I realized that coffee is just as complex, if not more, than rare, fine teas.

I was just really lucky to work with serious coffee professionals and people who were trying to make a career out of coffee as opposed to this is just a job in a coffee shop that they have.

Ashley: Right. Let's step backwards a little bit, because we were talking about the idea that you had initially to open a tea shop, and then you kind of backtracked and decided that you were going to do coffee, but before this was even an idea in your head, you worked in banking and finance.

I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your, I guess let's call it your past life in that industry…

Nigel: Yes, past life.

Ashley: Yeah, let's call it a past life. I know that I like to look at my life—which is a little silly—as almost two chapters, and it's pre- and post-coffee. It's not even really about coffee itself, but it's just about me as a person, which I know that we're going to dig into. So I was wondering if you could tell me about that. Tell me about Nigel's life before coffee.

Nigel: Nigel was a totally different person, as I alluded to earlier. A lot of, I guess you would call it, where I am now in terms of the way I thought about life and the way I thought about relationships and just people in general was so skewed.

I really attribute that to where I worked and the school that I went to. [To say that] a lot of people were antisocial would be an understatement. They were just very not empathetic towards people's feelings or what other people's needs were. Even their approach to business—it was never from the perspective of the consumer or the workers. It was almost always from the perspective of dollars and cents and profitability.

I guess a lot of that got imparted on me because I felt like, “This is how I need to conduct myself if I'm going to work with these people, if I'm going to work in this industry.”

I think the struggle I had with not liking my job—because quite frankly, the money was great—but I just was not happy. I didn't know what it was, but I knew something was missing. If you dread going to work as much as I did, it has to be something else. It wasn't until I started asking those kinds of tough questions. And then I realized that I'm going to have to find an alternate course. It can't just all be about money, which my sole purpose for studying finance and studying economics was because, in my mind, what's more important than making money, you know?

Ashley: Right. And it seems like that perspective was totally normalized for you in the banking world and in the educational systems that you were in.

Nigel: Exactly.

Ashley: I was going to ask: What prompted you to even start asking those questions of yourself? I have to imagine that that's hard to challenge—essentially challenge your entire worldview.

Nigel: I don't think it was one specific instance. It would be like, after work, everybody would go for drinks and for the most part, everybody on the outside looked like they were extremely happy and they were enjoying themselves, but I absolutely hated it. I just did not enjoy that.

I got to a point where I just didn't enjoy it, but it was one of those things I had to do because you don't want to be the weird guy that doesn't hang out with everybody else. It wasn't one specific thing. It was a combination of a lot of different instances. Also, this is over the span of more than a decade of being in situations and sitting down with people that I just didn't enjoy being around.

I had a manager I worked with for six years. I worked at Chase and then they merged with J.P. Morgan and became JPMorgan Chase. And I moved over with him. We were together for my entire tenure at J.P. Morgan. And I didn't know one single thing about his life.

Like he would come in after the weekend and he would say, “Hey, how was your weekend?” “Good.” I’d say, “Oh, how was your weekend?” “Good.” We would never have any serious, in-depth conversations about anything other than the work.

Ashley: That’s so unsettling.

Nigel: I know I keep saying this over and over, but the Nigel that was in university and coming out of college and in a lot of these training positions that I had, that was perfectly OK in my mind. I was perfectly OK. I don't need to get to know you, I'm here to do a job. I'm here to make money and that's it.

But a part of me got to a point where I was like, “I cannot work or be around people that I'm not connected to or I don’t have a genuine connection with.”

Ashley: Was it obvious that opening your own business would be the way to solve that problem? It's an interesting jump to me. I wonder how you went from, “I need to get out of this,” to, “This is the thing I'm going to do next.”

Nigel: It wasn't until working in cafe settings for other people. I kind of always knew I was going to do my own thing. Initially, it was supposed to only take maybe six months—that sounds super arrogant now. I was like, “Oh, for a couple months, I'll work at some coffee shops. And then I'll just open my own [cafe], do my own thing.”

But it was working in cafes. The people I worked with, a lot of the guests that would come into a lot of these places, I would just listen to people and we would have in-depth conversations. And some of these people, I didn't even know their names. But we would talk about life, spirituality, what you actually want to do with your life, not what you do for a living or what you do to make money, but what do you want to do with your life?

These were questions that I just never pondered myself. So it was very interesting to hear people—and unfortunately, a lot of these people were young, a lot younger than I was—but they already were in that mind space.

Ashley: I like that you articulated that, because I felt some of that same anxiety too, when I first started working in coffee, honestly. I had a very similar experience to you where I define my life in kind of these two phases of, “This was my career before and now I work in coffee.”

I remember—I don't know if this is the right analogy for it, or if this is the right way to describe it—but I feel like I remember so much more of my life in the last 10 years than I ever did of the 20-something before that, because it feels like I'm actually living it.

I am physically in a space and I'm interacting with what's around me versus—

Nigel: Going through the motions.

Ashley: Exactly! Or almost being out of body in a way that’s like, “Who's that person doing those things?” That's not me, but it is. And I remember being almost mad about it? Being like, “What took me so long to get here?” Did you feel that at all?

Nigel: Not only did I feel that, but I don't get upset about it because I just think about the amount of people in this world currently who don't even realize that there’s another place to be. They haven't even come to the realization.

Sometimes I cringe thinking about, “Wow, what if I never took that leap of faith and said, ‘You know what? I'm just going to do something else.’”

It's not like I had a ton of money to rest on—which is another regret. I kind of wish I did a better job of saving money or maybe just sticking it out for a few more years so I can actually save some money because I had no idea how financially burdensome it can be trying to work in coffee shops where you're really not being paid a ton of money, and you're still trying to save money and pay bills.

Ashley: Tell me about that first coffee shop job that you got. What do you think were some of the biggest shocks or realizations that you had in that first job?

Nigel: I would have to reiterate what I mentioned earlier: the actual connections with people. I still feel like, even at that point, I was apprehensive about dealing with people one-on-one and having these [conversations] because in my head, I'm like, “Hey, I'm just going to make you this coffee. You’re gonna pay for it, and then you're going to leave. And then I'm going to play with this espresso machine and I'm going to learn what I need to learn so that one day I could open my own coffee shop.”

But I do feel like, with the exception of one or two bad managers, every place I've worked, even if the shop itself wasn't run really well, I learned a lot about what to do and what not to do. I never felt like I was wasting my time.

There were a few times where I actually would be working at two different shops at once. But I was never beat down or like I was carrying some burden because I approached it from the perspective of, “I need to learn this. I need to get this.”

Again, like I mentioned, I worked with some people that, to this day, if they left to go start green buying or roasting or even if they're still baristas, they're still actual coffee professionals. I owe a lot of my career to some of these people.

Ashley: You mentioned that you thought it would take you six months to learn all you needed to know before opening a coffee shop. How long did it actually take you, or how long did you work in shops before you took the leap to open your own space?

Nigel: It took more like six or seven years. Unfortunately, I wasn't necessarily ready financially. So I ended up sticking it out for another four or five years. So we're talking like 11, 12 years after leaving corporate and finally…

Ashley: Finally deciding to take the next step.

Nigel: And honestly, it probably would have taken a little longer. I kinda got lucky because my last main job was in a hotel. It was a union job. They paid almost 30+ dollars an hour, plus tips and benefits and everything like that. So if I didn't have that job and I was still trying to put it together little by little with two or three different barista jobs, I probably wouldn't have been able to open at all.

Ashley: At what point did you decide that you felt—maybe not ready, ready is probably not the right word—but what was the moment where you were like, “OK, I'm going to try to do this thing on my own. I'm going to go ahead and try the thing that I set myself up to do almost a decade ago?”

Nigel: I think the main catalyst was a lot of those positions were being eliminated. A lot of these hotels, specifically for unions, they were trying to—there’s really no nice way to say it, but they were trying to kick these union, pension guys out of their jobs.

It got to a point where they said, “Well, we can put you in this pool and we'll try to find you another position at another hotel,” or they would pay a certain amount, depending on how many years you were in the union. You basically take a package and you leave.

I was like, “You know what? I think this is it.”

Ashley: Why a cart first?

Nigel: The cart? I think I just wanted to prove the concept.

I wanted to see if people would gravitate towards just pour-over coffee. If people had a problem waiting three, four minutes, sometimes five minutes for a cup of coffee and if there was an appetite for it.

I think if it wasn't for that cart, if I just went right to opening the shop, I don't know if people would have really understood what I was trying to do. I think I would have just been another coffee shop with some pour-over drippers in it. I think the cart made it where I'm putting my flag in the sand and I'm saying, “This is what Drip stands for.” And luckily it worked.

Ashley: I was thinking about what you said earlier, about having this idea to open a coffee shop and then you were going to work in a coffee shop for six months, obviously that extended to 10 years. Then you opened the cart and I'm wondering—so you have almost these three distinct phases of what Drip Coffee could have looked like in your brain.

You had the first iteration back when you were thinking about leaving your finance job.

You had the second iteration right before you opened the cart.

And then the third iteration, I'm imagining, is the transition from the cart to a physical space. How has your business plan or your vision changed over time?

Nigel: I wish I could say I had this grand master plan, but I just know, especially in the last four, five, six years of working in coffee, I had like my “nine to five,” which was the hotel, but I always moonlighted because there was a ton of really, really cool specialty shops in the city that I wanted to work at. A lot of them were Stumptown accounts and Counter Culture accounts. But a couple of them were independent shops and I just really loved what they were doing.

What I took away from a lot of these shops was they would offer pour-overs, but it was always an afterthought. It was almost one of those things where if you were a barista and you were on bar all day and someone wanted a pour-over, you would immediately get angry because now you have to break your flow to make this pour-over.

That's when it dawned on me. I was like, “But that's the best way to have a cup of coffee.” Instead of building a shop around just the espresso machine, you can build a shop around pour-overs where it doesn't necessarily break the workflow for the barista on bar.

Ashley: You just saying a customer comes in and orders a pour-over harkens in me a feeling that I thought I didn't have any more, but I'm like, “Oh my God, why'd you order a pour-over???? There are seven people behind you! What's going on?”

Nigel: Exactly. Another thing is I could easily be that person in line because I just really love pour-overs, but I almost always would never get what I wanted because knowing what that barista's going through, I just wouldn't order it. And I was like, “I think it would be cool if I integrated pour-overs into the service.”

Ashley: Right. Which is something that is so great, especially because we were both mentioning, we've both been baristas. We both have been the barista who gets that order for a pour-over which interrupts service.

But you've also been the barista who, on your Saturday off—Who am I kidding? Saturday is not your day off—your Tuesday off, you go to another coffee shop to go visit your friend. And you're like, “I'm not ordering a pour-over. I don’t want to fk with their st,” but that's actually the thing that you want. It's really cool to take a step backwards and say, “How do I design a system where this is front and center versus this is a throwaway thought on a menu?”

Nigel: Exactly.

Ashley: You've worked in New York coffee for over a decade. I worked in New York coffee around the 2010 era. I think that you've seen the shifts in coffee and the way that New York coffee shops have approached trends in general—in the early 2010s, pour-overs were a really big deal.

Then towards the end of my tenure in New York, it was like we were trying to eliminate them. We were like, “It's all about batch brew. It's all about fast efficiency.” As you worked in coffee and saw these different things come and go, what were you excited about? What were you bummed about? Because it feels like we never, we just never really incorporated pour-overs [well].

Nigel: Never, never. And I think like you mentioned, that's when I started realizing that I'm going to try to build a model around the pour-overs. I still didn't really have a clear, concise way in which I was going to do it— I really still don't know—but I knew that was going to be my niche, so to speak.

Once a lot of these shops started going, “Well, yeah, you can get really good quality with batch brew too,” I immediately pushed back on that because typically it was a lot of these people who were coffee geniuses, but I also realized that they were now coffee shop owners and they are trying to think of ways to streamline business. Or they're trying to think of ways to not necessarily have three people on because they’re thinking about labor costs.

I've had owners say things like, “If he's doing this pour-over, how is he going to empty the trash, or how's he going to wipe the tables, or how's he going to do dishes?” In the back of my head, I'm like, “It's a coffee shop. You hired well-trained, quality baristas to make coffee, not to wipe tables down, not to do the dishes. So if I'm paying you to make coffee, I want to create an environment, a situation where you really don't lose focus on anything. Your main focus is the coffee.”

I'm lucky enough to have people who want to work as coffee professionals. This is not just, “I need a job while I do X,” or “I need a job while I do Y.” The people that work with me now love coffee to the point where they bring in their own coffee. They bring in their own equipment. They're trying things that even when the shop closes, they sometimes all meet up there.

It became exactly what I envisioned it to be, which is a space for people who want to learn more about coffee, a place for them to feel comfortable about it, but it’s not unapproachable to the layman or unapproachable to the person who doesn't know much. They may make a French press or make a pour-over at home, but they want to learn more about it.

Ashley: I love that because I feel like for so long, and I know that I've especially felt this in my coffee career, there were times where I felt like liking coffee wasn't cool. To nerd out on coffee was not encouraged sometimes.

I feel like I started my career as that barista who would bring in their own coffees and [say], “Let's try this, let's do that.” But then there was a time where I felt like, “Oh, this is not a thing that I should care about. I should care about efficiency. I should care about just making money.”

I have to imagine for someone whose background was in finance, that had to be an interesting dichotomy to balance. How do you make a profitable business, a responsible business, but at the same time, something that feels true to what you want? You're like, I want to invest in pour-overs, I care about pour-over coffee. How do I make this work?

Nigel: Therein lies the dilemma. Ultimately, like you said, if you're not making money, if you’re not profitable, you're not going to be in business long.

I think I was telling somebody just this morning, the first buildout for the location in Bushwick, I built a space out so that it can quickly [be disassembled], like if I had to close the shop, it would literally take a day to disassemble everything and just walk away. I was not planning on the long-term.

I'm just now talking to the individuals who built out my second location about going back to Bushwick and doing a proper build-out because—OK, it's working, we’re going to be in business for a while, so I should probably set things up correctly. But I had no idea if it was going to work at all, but I did know that I'm either going to do it right or I'm not going to do it at all.

Ashley: It seems like you were very concept-driven. You knew what your concept was going to be and you designed the space to address that.

I was looking at pictures of Drip Coffee Makers before we hopped on and I was like, “Oh, you can see the pour-overs. They're right there. They're in front and they are facing the customer. Therefore, as a barista, I do not have to turn my back and go make a pour-over,” which was the setup that a lot of the cafes that I worked at versus other cafes where—this was actually a really ingenious move—the espresso machine was right next to the register.

So if I was steaming milk, I could ring up a customer and I was like, “Oh, well, this makes sense for an espresso-forward cafe,” but I've worked in a hundred cafes where the pour-over bar is somewhere else. Which doesn't make sense if you want to invest in pour-overs—if you want people to celebrate it or see it or be excited about it.

Nigel: It was a lot of trial and error, even, even something as simple as dialing in coffees, having them pre-dosed.

I wanted to get it down to three minutes, three-and-a-half minutes. I didn't want it to be longer than the time it takes to make a latte. Because in my head I was like, “If you can get people used to waiting three minutes for an espresso with steam milk, then if they really enjoy pour-overs, they'll wait two to three minutes, three-and-a-half minutes for the pour-over.”

Ashley: Right. And it takes that intentional type of thought. “Oh, this is a timed event. People might not be used to waiting a certain amount of time, but maybe they're used to waiting, like you said, three-and-a-half minutes for a latte. So how can I make those two experiences—one that people are familiar with, one that people maybe aren't as familiar with—as easy to understand as possible?

Nigel: Exactly. And after spending a summer with that cart, and noticing that people had no problem waiting, because they know what you do and they know you're doing something special, they know this is not generic, that is away from what they typically would get in the coffee shop—the waiting part becomes a part of the show.

Ashley: Right, especially because you're facing them. So you can talk about what you're brewing. You can discuss whatever's happening in the day.

I was reading that article that you were interviewed for in Taste, and something you said that really resonated was about value and how value is created. You're literally, through the physical choices that you make or the way that you're talking about coffee, creating value, and people will buy into that as long as you create that option for them to buy into it.

One thing that is kind of miraculous in the face of all of this is that you opened your brick-and-mortar location two months before COVID hit.

Nigel: (laughs) Yeah.

Ashley: So what was that experience like for you? Did you stay open throughout the pandemic?

Nigel: I stayed open throughout. It's funny, because I would always jokingly say when I first opened, I put on the front door: Every day, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.

Throughout the pandemic, I couldn't hire anybody. I think legally in New York you couldn't make somebody come to work, but you can keep your business open if you were the owner. So the only way I could stay open was if I was the only one working.

People would come in and they’d be like, “Hey, nobody would be mad at you if you closed a little early, if you left a little early or if you didn't open every day,” and I'm like, “I already put it on the door. I gotta show up.”

A lot of things happened that I feel, I guess it was good karma or just good timing, or like all the stars were aligned. That location is maybe two or three blocks from the train station, but it's around the corner on a pretty residential block. That's probably why I got such a good deal on the rent.

Initially, going back to my quick escape in case the brick-and-mortar didn't work, I was like, “I'll be on the sleepy block. It won't be too busy.” To me, this was supposed to be the next step up from the cart where I'm just going to keep proving this concept to see if it actually works. But because we were on a residential block, when the mandate came down and people stopped going to the office, I had a captive audience. I had a two-, three-, four-block radius of people who needed to get out of the house.

There was literally nothing else, nothing else opened. There was a juice bar that served coffee, but no one went there for the coffee. I think people needed an outlet. They needed to take a walk. And I didn't realize how much I needed [the coffee shop] until after things started to settle down and opened back up a bit.

I wasn't in the shops as much as I was before. I would still wake up in the morning. I would still go to the shop and I would sit around and talk to people as they came in. I thank God for it because I really believed that during COVID, in its peak, I got to ignore it because I was completely inundated with keeping the doors open and keeping the lights on at the shop. By the time I got home, I was too exhausted to really pour over the news like a lot of people did. Just thinking of the death toll and the amount of people who were losing their livelihoods and their jobs and family members … when I think back on it now, I could easily see somebody can slip into a super dark place.

Ashley: One thing that I have to imagine the pandemic proved to you, and maybe you knew it just based on your dedication to pour-over coffee, or maybe this came afterwards, but I have to imagine that the power of connection and the power of connecting over a cup of coffee really became crystal-clear to you. Tell me about that experience, about what it was like to serve coffee to people during a time when a lot of people couldn't connect with most other people.

Nigel: Like I alluded to earlier, coffee was probably the reason why they started coming, but it was so obvious that people needed to connect on a physical level with other human beings.

I spent so much more time talking and counseling people and not necessarily telling them what they need to do, but just giving my opinion on what they could do or what they should do if they needed X, Y, Z…

I was able to talk myself out of despair because I had this extended family of people that I had to show up for. As difficult as it sounds, looking back on it now, I think it would be difficult for me to now start that up again, but I can't remember one morning where I had difficulty getting up out of bed to get to work. I felt obligated. I have to be there for these people.

Anytime I speak about it, I start getting emotional because, going back to old Nigel in the past life, just to see what type of person I am now is amazing.

Ashley: I think it's really special to get that opportunity to almost live two separate lives. Like you were saying earlier, I don't think a lot of people get to experience that. So to see your life in these two very different planes is—I don't know.

I have that same thought a lot of, “What would have happened to me if I had never quit teaching? If I had accepted this was going to be the path that my life was going, if I didn't get to know me?” I think about that a lot too, and I think about it, especially in these moments of testing the choices that you've made or testing the limits of your potential. I don't know…

I totally get where you're coming from, and I'm really happy that other people have experienced this because it's just really cool. Sometimes it's scary, but it's really cool.

I was wondering too—this is a little more tactical versus emotional—but do you think that these last 18 months have proven the value of pour-over coffee to people? I can imagine now that people are so excited to get something special at a place that they’re like, “Yeah, I'll wait four minutes for a pour-over. Cool, great!”

Nigel: Right. And it's an affordable luxury; it’s one of those things where it's not like a fancy dinner. It's a fancy cup of coffee.

The team that I have of coffee professionals, people look forward to coming and seeing these guys the same way they look forward to come to see me. I spent all morning at the shop and I've spoken to people who were given a sign to go meet someone.

For example, one of the baristas would say, “Hey, I know somebody who's selling cameras, if you want to start taking pictures,” or, “Oh, I know someone who plays a guitar and they're looking for someone to play a gig.” The coffee shop didn’t lose its actual purpose, which is for people to meet and connect. But to have them connect around really, really good coffee, to me, is important. It’s tantamount. It's nice to have a good space, but it's also even better if you are getting what you paid for.

Ashley: Is there anything that you'd want people to know about you listening to this episode?

Nigel: Nothing in particular, just that I’m somebody who found what they love doing—and as corny as it sounds, that should be everybody's goal in life, no matter what that thing is.

One of my guests started making jewelry during quarantine and she would come in and she would joke about it: “It's just something I need to do to take my mind off of what's going on around me.”

Within six, seven, eight months, she has this ridiculously crazy big following on Etsy and she made a business out of it. And this is just from finding something you enjoy doing and just pursuing it with a passion. I always feel like the money or the success will come as long as you chase your passion.

Ashley: Nigel, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Nigel: Well, thank you. I appreciate you asking and I apologize for the rain. It started raining again.

Ashley: It's like it came in at the perfect time.

This Boss Barista episode is brought to you by Urnex.

One of Urnex’s latest advances is a range of environmentally friendly cleaners called Biocaf. Biocaf products are made entirely from plant- and mineral-based ingredients and are fully biodegradable. They're available for both commercial and household coffee equipment.

Urnex is also partnering with coffee pros—like me!—to highlight some of the best sustainability efforts in the industry with the Biocaf Sustainability Series. You can read my most recent piece on Onyx Coffee Labs’ switch to oat milk in their latest café, and learn more about Biocaf here. And be sure to read the dozens of pieces focusing on sustainability in coffee and beyond.

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We’re re-airing an episode form June of 2020 with Erica Chadé (you may hear them referred to as Erica Jackson in the episode). Erica talks all about intention, getting to know yourself and offers some wonderful tidbits about slowing down and how working in service can offer moments of presence.

Also, we have shirts available now! Here are photos of Erica wearing them—order yours now.

There are a lot of reasons I continue to do Boss Barista, especially as the show has evolved and changed. One of the reasons is to connect with people I wouldn't have met otherwise. There are at least a handful of folks I know and consider my friends because of the show—people I've become closer with through interviews, through sitting down and having a really focused conversation.

Doing this show has also made me a better listener—I’m still learning how to listen, but I also listen for other listeners. That’s a little silly, I know, but I’ve learned a lot about how people listen by doing this show. It’s the moments where I hear others give people space to explore ideas, or repeat a question to make sure they really understand it.

And I noticed all these things when I listened to another podcast featuring today's guest, Erica Chadé. Erica is a barista, originally from Birmingham, Alabama but currently based in Charleston, South Carolina, and she was recently a guest on a show called Nicole's Hen House and their perspectives on identity and getting to know oneself really intrigued me.

In this episode, we talk about Erica's journey into the world of coffee, but we also delve deep into how we communicate and how we remain present in our own lives. A lot of these themes are mimicked in our coffee work—being a good service worker requires being present, and many of us are drawn to coffee because of the potential to build community and make connections with others. I think, more than anything, this episode is an encouragement to remain present in your own life and notice what's happening around you. Here's Erica.

Ashley: Erica, could you introduce yourself for everybody?

Erica: Yeah. I'm Erica Jackson. And is that it, or did you want me to say where I work or…

Ashley: You can say whatever you want.

Erica: Oh yeah. I'm Erica Jackson.

Ashley: I'm always really touched when people reach out to me or engage with me on social media, and I feel like you and I have actually engaged a lot on social media. I was telling you before we started recording that one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation was a little bit selfish on my end: I really wanted to get to know you better because you and I exchanged messages or we see something on each other's social media and we’re like, “That's cool,” or “that's interesting.”

I was wondering if you can take us back to the moment right before you started making coffee—what did your life look like before you decided this is the thing I'm going to do?

Erica: Yeah, sure. Well, I want to say that the feeling is totally mutual of wanting to know you more. I feel like we kinda know each other in a weird way through social media, but it's great to have a conversation with you.

Life just before coffee? So I had graduated from grad school. I was studying occupational therapy and I was trying to decide what I wanted to do career wise. I was living in an apartment downtown Birmingham and in this transitional phase.

Ashley: What brought you to coffee?

Erica: That's really interesting. I actually had a lot of interest.

Okay, so I had a classmate in occupational therapy school. Her name was Kelsey and she found a roastery and had bought coffee from the roastery and she shared it with me and she was like, “You should go to this roastery and check it out and support these people because they're doing some really great things.”

By the time I got around to finding that roastery, it had opened a cafe and I really loved the atmosphere. I think this is a feeling that people can sometimes get when they walk into cafes that's intangible. It's like, “Wow, I really, really dig this place. I really like this place. I can't quite put a finger on it, but there's something special about this place.”

And that's how I felt when I walked into that cafe—and that was actually Seeds [Coffee]. I ended up volunteering for Seeds, I don't know if many people know this, but Seeds is a non-profit. So I volunteered for Seeds. I had a lot of fun. I was actually in their first group for volunteer training.

So I volunteered and then I went back to school and then, like I said, I got out of school and then I was really, really interested in tea and I went to India. I visited a tea garden, visited a tea factory, had the most exquisite cup of tea I've ever had in my life. I thought I was going to help my friends start their tea business, but I ended up back in coffee.

Those are kind of my beginnings of coffee, just being in awe of the atmosphere of the cafe and having fun, learning something new and just being fascinated with those parts of coffee before actually getting into some of the more nuanced parts of brewing and all of that.

Ashley: What was your relationship to coffee like before that?

Erica: Before I started volunteering?

Ashley: Yeah. Did you drink coffee at all or was it like a sudden moment of like, “Oh my gosh, this world?”

Erica: No, I didn't drink coffee. My mom drank coffee a lot, so it was around in our home, but I actually was a tea drinker. I still am a tea drinker. So no, I didn't really drink coffee before I got into it.

Ashley: I love those moments of something ineffable happening, something that you can't describe where you're like, “This is the place that I want to be.” Have you ever been able to look back on that moment and figure out like more of what that feeling was, that intangible feeling?

Erica: Hmm. I think what that feeling is for me is spiritual and I think that's linked to the ritual of coffee, which I don't think we talk about a lot in our cafes.

I think it's the ritual and people being centered and fixated on a ritual of someone preparing them coffee and then preparing to drink that coffee. Then the conversation and the being that happens as you're drinking coffee. I would say it's a ritual. It's spiritual.

Ashley: That's really cool. I just listened to an episode of the CxffeeBlack podcast and he just did this whole episode with a guy who talked about the ritual of Ethiopian coffee and just telling people to slow down and the way that we consume coffee in America is almost the exact opposite of that—it's fuel or it's a thing that you get before the workday or something like that. It's really cool that the thing that drew you was that ritual.

How did your coffee career progress from the moment of, “Oh, this is an industry I want to at least kind of work in,” into, “Oh, this is the thing that I want to do?”

Erica: That's a great question. So I actually didn't make coffee my thing until about two and a half years ago. I got into coffee and I was still questioning, “Is this what I want to do with my time? I do like this, I enjoy it. But is this what I want to do longterm?”

There were two people that I worked with that I would say really facilitated that shift for me. So one of those people was Jeff Healey and he told me—he, as a white man told me that coffee was a part of my heritage as a Black person. And that was really, really formative. I was like, “Wow, like I never thought about it that way.”

Coffee originates in Africa and I'm African-American, I don't know my African roots, but I did originate from there. That's when I started thinking, yes, it's really important for Black and brown people to be on this side of coffee and its consumption and its preparation. So that made me feel like I should really be a part of coffee.

Another person that was really influential was Blake Nail. When he got hired at Seeds, it was a very interesting time in that company because he came in with a lot of enthusiasm about coffee. Seeds, being a nonprofit, there's a lot of moving parts that are really beautiful and really important, but he was just really passionate about coffee and he really drew me into that.

He's actually how I got into coffee competitions—and why I know you and other people in the industry, he got me out of that Birmingham bubble and into the industry. I would say like having ownership of coffee in a way, maybe it's like a social ownership, and having awareness of the industry and other people in the industry that I can learn from that really catapulted me into a coffee career.

Ashley: Those are two really powerful moments—obviously for you specifically—but I think reflecting in general for people who are maybe still trying to find their footing in coffee or understand what the industry looks like, because the fact that you mentioned you could be working in a coffee shop and not really know what the industry at large looks like…

It's what I sit up at night thinking about, especially now living through a global pandemic obviously. I think about a lot of the baristas who maybe don't have access to the industry at large and how transformative that can be, but also being able to tie coffee to your personal identities is so absolutely powerful. It's something that I struggle with being Cuban: something that I'm actually trying to figure out is coffee grown in Cuba? It is, but I have never been able to get my hands on it.

It's really interesting finding those parallels in identity that are so powerful. I'm just so touched by the stories that you shared.

Erica: Yeah. I just think that those two things are really important and that's very insightful for you to bring up with our current situation. If I was a barista that didn't know about the industry and I didn't have my job and I wasn't connected to other people or other places where I could eventually get another job, that sounds like a really, really hard situation to be in. I didn't even think about that. So thanks for bringing up.

Ashley: No, thank you for inspiring the conversation to go in that direction.

I'm wondering about other transformative moments. We were talking about this a little bit earlier but I feel like you're someone who really pays attention and can make really big connections. So I was wondering if there are other moments in your coffee career that have felt really, really impactful or really important to the development of your career?

Erica: I think my experience on the tea farm, actually. It's a parallel industry and I think that roots and grounds me. Even though that was before I fell in love with coffee, I always think about that experience.

I think that propels me to keep looking at the world differently because on that trip, I got to meet some of the people who were picking the tea and I got to go into their homes and have conversation with them. That just that humanizes—we just see a lot of things in America as products. I have this experience where I've met someone who's working really, really hard to get this from point A to point B.

I would say that was really formative. I'm trying to think of some other “aha” moments.

Ashley: They don't have to be big “aha” moments and sometimes they're just not there.

I'm having a little bit of an “aha” moment, but again, I was telling you about this before we started recording. I really wanted to set the mood by having your bag of coffee here. I was wondering if you could talk us through that a little bit because I want people to be able to picture this too in their minds. You have a coffee that has your name, your face on it.

Erica: Yeah, that's a really big honor. I took this random selfie one day and that is a picture that the coffee bag is based off on in, in that picture. Also on the label I'm wearing a purple bandana and it's actually The Chocolate Barista.

There's no words to describe seeing your face in different shops and in different places, in a well-known shop in your hometown. It's really cool. It's really amazing to have a Black woman on a coffee bag. I mean, you just don't see that anywhere.

Ashley: Totally. How did this happen? What was the conversation like? Did one of the owners of Seeds just come up to you and were like, “We're gonna put your face on a bag?”

Erica: My friend Jonathan, we were coworkers at the time, he was my manager and he's a really, really talented artist. He's the one who designed the label. So it was his idea.

We were trying to think of specific branding for—[the coffee] is called Iron Fist. We were trying to think of what do we want to put on the bag?

He was throwing out ideas and he's like, “Erica, I have this one idea where you’re a cartoon and this is what you're doing.” And he told me his whole like vision.

I was like, “Oh, that's a cool idea. That's a fun idea.” I literally thought it was one idea of many ideas. Then he showed me the mock-up I was blown away and I was like, “Oh, you actually drew this it's actually a thing.” And it turned out it was the idea.

So it was a very big surprise. So yeah, that's how it came to be. He just had this vision and he drew it and there it is.

Ashley: As you were saying before, the power of seeing a Black woman on a bag of coffee, and as you mentioned, it was the main espresso blend for Seeds and seeing it all throughout Birmingham or at other wholesale accounts must be just so incredibly powerful. But also I would imagine, a little bit like, “Oh s**t, that’s me. That's me right there.”

Erica: Yeah. It is really powerful. I love it. I love it so much.

Ashley: The name Iron Fist: was that the name of the blend specifically, or was that something that you folks collaborated on that was meant to encompass a part of your identity?

Erica: It's actually a part of Birmingham's identity. So Birmingham was an industrial city and it created steel—it had really big steel mills and part of that is iron ore. So this is a homage to the iron industry and the steel industry and all of that. So Iron Fist is actually honoring Birmingham.

Ashley: But you’ve also kind of taken it to be part of your identity too—I mean, maybe I'm extrapolating a little bit but it's your Instagram handle. I wonder how do you see that interweaving into how you view yourself or how that is expressed in your identity?

Erica: Well, it started off as a joke because my friends—I'm just a big personality. So my friends are like—I just feel I had become a character, but they're like, “Yeah, you're Lady Iron Fist.” We just laughed about it. It was just a joke.

Then my friend Chandler—he still works for Seeds—Chandler was like, “Yeah, you should make that your Instagram handle.” His Instagram handle is @latteartcan, by the way. But he's like, “You should make that your Instagram handle.” And I was like, “Okay, cool. I'll do it.”

So I did, I think it is more as a joke now. I think that it does encapsulate me because I was born in Birmingham and I'm actually pretty intense. And I think it's important for women to to self-actualize and come into their power. That's what I've been trying to do.

So yeah—and I love cartoons, so it’s a part of me. Not that I think strength is like purely physical, but there is also something about a portrayal, even if it's just like a portrayal in that actual real life, but a portrayal of an image of a woman that strong and a woman that will stand up for herself and a woman that knows her worth. You know?

Ashley: You mentioned self-actualizing your power. What does that look like for you? Because I imagine that that process isn't always linear, right?

Erica: Yeah, it takes a lot of reflection I would say. It's really hard to look inward and to hold yourself accountable for your actions—even hold yourself accountable for your thoughts, because thoughts lead to actions. Not that you can control them, but just recognizing them.

I think it begins by starting inward in holding—at least for me, that's been the processes—looking inward, evaluating my thoughts, evaluating my speech looking at the way that, like I enter a room or that other people enter a room.

Just taking note of when I say something or when I do something, how the room is being affected, or how other people are being affected, because we all have influence. We all are affecting each other's lives, whether we want to be or not. I think self-actualization, part of it is just taking stock of literally how your actions affect other people and affect spaces.

Ashley: You're someone who pays a lot of attention. I know that I've mentioned this to you before. Have you always been that type of person? Have you always been someone who's acutely aware of their surroundings? Or do you think that that's something that's maybe come later in your life?

I know for me I feel like I'm someone who likewise pays attention. That's one of the reasons I think that I'm very drawn to you. I don't think I was always that person, like by no means I was a stupid idiot until I was like 24.

Erica: I think I've always been this way and I've actually tried to reflect on that in the past couple of weeks and figure out why. I wonder if it's a middle child skill…

Ashley: I'm all about birth order.

Erica: Yeah. So I'm middle-ish. I have three sisters and I’m the third of four, so I think from a young age I just had to observe, “This is what my older sisters are doing and this is what my mom is doing and this is what I'm doing and my younger sister,” but we're all connected somehow.

There's actually a really big age gap between me and my older siblings. I have a sibling that's 12 years older than me and a sibling that's 11 years older than me. Then the next sister is just 11 months apart from me, not even a whole year.

Ashley: Oh, wow.

Erica: We were born in the same year. So I wonder if it's from just trying to bridge age gaps between me and my siblings and that's maybe the start of my observation…

I'm [also] a very physical person and what I mean by that is it kind of goes back to what I was saying about observing the way that you take up space or a observing way that your voice or your body language affects a room or affects other people.

I've always been aware of that and I think I'm just like a physical person—in the Enneagram, they break it up by body, heart and what's the other one….gosh, and there's another one, but I'm definitely like in the body category.

Ashley: I love talking about birth order because I love all of it. I love astrology. I love Enneagrams. I love Myers-Briggs, but I do think that probably more than anything, the person that I am is because of my birth order.

I'm an eldest child through and through. My sisters—it's interesting that you mentioned the age gap because my sisters are eight and nine years younger than I am. So I definitely lived in this world very separate from them for a long time, because our experience is completely different when I was 18, they were nine and ten.

I think so much of this insularity that I lived with for a majority of my life comes from that fact that like I was essentially an only child in certain ways. Then when I started working in service it forced me to interact with people in a way that I never had to.

So I think for me, that's why I'm interested in knowing if people are always inquisitive or always in tune with the world around them, because I owe that all to service. I owe that all to working in coffee. What do you think about coffee or about working in coffee that really speaks to you as a person?

Erica: I'll go back to spirituality. So another thing that my friend Jeff told me that was really formative was that providing a beverage to someone is also a spiritual service. The exchange of energy that takes place in that moment of me preparing a coffee for someone and then giving it to them that really attracts me and keeps me—I just love to make coffee for people.

Hopefully they will enjoy it and if they don't enjoy it, I want to know why they didn't so that I can make it better next time. Spiritual interactions with people, for sure is really important to me, whether I'm aware in that moment or the other person is aware in that moment of it being a spiritual experience.

Maybe it's not even that for them, but I always see it as a spiritual exchange. I really like all the smells and sounds and just like being able to use my senses. And again, I think that goes to me being grounded in my body, being a physical person. God, being a barista is a lot of work, being a barista is taxing sometimes. But the other thing that draws me to coffee is being able to move my body and use my body in a meaningful way. And while I'm doing that, I'm having this really awesome sensory experience at the same time.

Ashley: Yeah, that totally makes sense. I can imagine that the actual physicality of being behind the bar and serving people was really, really gratifying, but at the same time and something that I think is really powerful is that you seem to be really interested in those moments of exchange—of, “I am giving you a thing that I've made.” And that requires a lot of presence.

I know that for me sometimes, I kind of have to like zone out and I feel the best shifts for me are those ones that go by really, really fast and you're just like, “Wait, where did nine hours go?”

I feel like you're speaking to the opposite moments. The moment where you’re like, “Look at this thing that I've made for you. And this is a moment of connection, even if we don't know each other.”

Erica: Yeah, I do. I have a love/hate relationship with rushes at a cafe.

I love challenges, so that active, “All right, we have to get out these drinks and we have to get them out really fast and they need to be well done.” I love that feeling of doing that really well. Sometimes I don't and I get to take apart why I didn't. I love rushes because of the challenge, but I hate rushes because they lack intimacy to me.

In that moment I just have to get drinks or whatever out as fast as I can and try to still make eye contact with the person or thank then but it's a rushed exchange at that point. I would much, much rather be aware of the flow of the cafe, the literal flow of people in and out of the cafe and how they're experiencing it and how they're experiencing other people in the cafe.

I would rather be able to slow down and notice all those things and give someone their coffee and have time to talk about it with them or talk about something else that they want to share.

I know this is a can be really hard for a baristas—the emotional labor of it. I think boundaries can be crossed and sometimes people will treat their barista like their therapist. I think for everyone who is fine with that time being taken and who wants to take time to have a conversation with the customers, I want all of that space. I would love for that to just be a consistent thing in cafes.

So yeah, you're right. I'm speaking to like the slow moments.

Ashley: Those are still really beautiful moments. I think about those, even though I'm definitely a person who finds a lot of gratification from crushing a rush. That's really exciting for me, but the moments I remember, the moments that I go back to are the slow moments, are the moments where I took a moment…

The moment I took a moment? That was silly, but the moment that I was able to pause and see what was happening around me, I think are the most gratifying. So it's interesting to kind of think of those two moments, because they are part and parcel with being a barista. And you can get gratification out of both.

Erica: Totally.

Ashley: What does the future look like for you in coffee? What would you like to be doing in the next year, two years?

Erica: I would love to get back into a space where I can use more of my skills at my current job. My role is to be a really good barista and I can do that, but like you've been saying throughout this podcast, I usually am looking at big picture.

I'm in a frustrating place of like, I can't affect the big picture. I can't even speak into the big picture. So I would want to get back into a role where I can have an effect on the big picture of what's going on. That's the thing that comes to mind. I don't really have a specific job or job description I think right now, but I would love to just be able to have a more holistic approach to my work.

Ashley: I do love that you focused on the big picture as opposed to a specific job, because I don't know that we train ourselves to think about the conditions that make us happy versus the linear thing that makes us happy.

I'm not sure if I have the right language for that, but as as I get older, I think about less about “this is the job I want to do” versus “this is the environment I want to be around, and these are the skills I want to utilize.”

Thinking about what's your dream job is not as important to me as much as I want to utilize my ability to think big. I want to utilize my ability to be quick on my feet. Those things matter to me a lot more. So it's really cool to hear you talk about like, “I'm good at these things, and these are the things that I care about. How do I work backwards as opposed to that's the job I want?”

Erica: I think I got spoiled in a previous job where I got—he position didn't exist before I took it on. So I got to shape it and make it what it was going to be. Now, I give myself this permission to say “these are the things that I want to do.” I just need to meet the right people, get in the right space to do that. I don't need a title to do that. I do you want to be paid to do that work.

Ashley: Yes, definitely.

Erica: The title is not very important. But my actual work is really important to me.

Ashley: One of conversations I think about a lot in my coffee career is when I was working with this wonderful person, her name is Rachel. We were talking about the things that we're good at. I mentioned to her that I was like, “I think I'm good at this. And I'm good at that.” I kind of named some things. I was like, “I don't think I'm good at this other thing.”

I asked her, “What do you think you're good at?” And she was like, “I don't know.”

I was like, “That sucks. How has no one ever told you?” Not to say that you discover what you're good at through people affirming yes or no. But what I love about this conversation is that I don't think a lot of people are trained to think that way.

I hope that this conversation leads people to think like, “Who am I as a person? And what am I good at? Or what do I enjoy?” As opposed to like, “What jobs do I want?”

I don't know. I'm still forming these thoughts, but what I love about talking to you is that it feels like you think very critically—like, this is who I am, and this is the way that I'm going to move around the world and obviously learn and keep engaging. But at the same time, what's important to me is to honor like the person that I am.

Erica: What you're saying goes back to those concepts of self concept and self-actualization, and I think in my process of self-actualization, I'm just at that place of “this is who I am and this is how I'm going to exist.”

So I need to make a space, find a space to exist in that way. I do wish that more people were able to invest in that and to think about their formation and their self-concept and they're worth.

You're right. Knowing what you're good at doesn't just come from people affirming those things. But that is also important. I think that's a big part of self-concept because people can say that thing and then you can think about it and then you can either agree or disagree. But I think it's important—as much as I've been talking about looking inward—it's important to know how you are seen by other people and perceived by other people.

Again, even if it's false. I think it's important for you to have your self concept and how you want to be and who's the person that you want to be and how to get yourself there.

Ashley: I hope that people listen to this and feel empowered to have those conversations with themselves and think deeply and think inwardly.

Erica, it has been an absolute honor and pleasure for you to agree to be on the show and to talk to me, I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for stopping in. I feel silly saying that because we're not in the same place.

Erica: Yeah. Thank you for having me, Ashley, thank you for your time. I've really, really enjoyed this time. So we can have more like meaningful conversations like this.

That was Erica Chadé. A quick note—we talk a lot about their Instagram account, but you can now find them at @blkcoffee4life.

This Boss Barista episode is brought to you by Urnex.

One of Urnex’s latest advances is a range of environmentally friendly cleaners called Biocaf. Biocaf products are made entirely from plant- and mineral-based ingredients and are fully biodegradable. They're available for both commercial and household coffee equipment.

Urnex is also partnering with coffee pros—like me!—to highlight some of the best sustainability efforts in the industry with the Biocaf Sustainability Series. You can read my most recent piece on Onyx Coffee Labs’ switch to oat milk in their latest café, and learn more about Biocaf here. And be sure to read the dozens of pieces focusing on sustainability in coffee and beyond.

Hold up! You made it to the bottom of this article! Thank you so much for reading! If you could do any or all of the following things, that’d be incredibly helpful!

Click the ‘heart’ at the bottom to say you liked this article!

Consider checking out my Patreon!

Share this with a friend, on your social media, anywhere! Here’s a button for you to do so!

Get full access to B O S S B A R I S T A at bossbarista.substack.com/subscribe

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Boss Barista is a weekly newsletter and podcast series about workplace equity and employee empowerment in coffee and beyond. If you’re not already subscribed, welcome! I’m glad you found your way here. Before you go, sign up, will ya? Here’s a cute little button to make it easy:

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Let’s face it: Learning about coffee is hard. There are so many things to know, from elevation and varietals to processing and more. Technically, all those aspects do contribute to a coffee’s distinct character, but they can be very hard to perceive and identify when you’re just starting out, and difficult to explore on your own.

From the moment Suneal Pabari got into coffee, he wanted to know why others didn’t share his excitement, and he came to a pretty simple conclusion: Coffee is hard! Baristas are busy slinging drinks, and it’s not like the coffee roaster is sitting and waiting to answer your queries about why Coffee A tastes like strawberries and Coffee B tastes like milk chocolate.

Suneal wanted to learn more, and he decided to start a game. Leaderboard Coffee is a seasonal coffee experiment where participants receive 10 unlabeled bags of coffee alongside a set of guiding questions to help them deduce where each coffee is from and what makes it unique. Leaderboard doesn’t just offer the opportunity to become an at-home sleuth, but also to learn about coffee in a way that a cafe environment can’t replicate.

Folks like Suneal represent the exciting potential of consumer education in coffee, harnessing moments of surprise and joy to share knowledge and expertise. Leaderboard, as well as number of other projects Suneal has been part of, have all stemmed from his curious spirit and desire to learn more. Here’s Suneal.

Ashley: Suneal, could you start by introducing yourself?

Suneal: Yeah, absolutely. My name is Suneal Pabari. I'm the co-founder of The Roasters Pack, Leaderboard Coffee, as well as a couple of other things. I'm up here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Ashley: Suneal, what are your first memories of coffee?

Suneal: That's an awesome question. I specifically remember my first year of university. I was going to school and my sister gave me this pro tip—an elder sister pro tip. She's like, “Suneal, you need to start drinking coffee. It's going to give you extra hours of studying time. It's such a skill or a hack for being able to study more.”

And that was my first memory of coffee, and I started drinking triple triples from Tim Hortons up here in Canada.

Ashley: Wait, what is a triple triple?

Suneal: Three sugars. Three creams. Yeah.

Ashley: I thought that meant espresso shots. And I was like, “Oh no! Suneal, did you die?!?!”

Suneal: No, it's like, how can we make this Tim Hortons coffee tastes like a dessert? So I began [drinking] extra larges of those and started drinking them at 6 p.m. Helped me power through the all-nighters for my really poor studying habits.

Ashley: At what point did coffee start to become something that you were actively interested in?

Suneal: Several years later. So I had graduated and I had started working my first job after university. There was a little roaster kind of close to my house and that was my introduction to specialty coffee. I started trying some stuff that I was like, “Oh, this is different. I don't need to add three creams or three sugars to this.”

And that kind of sparked that whoa moment. I think everyone in specialty coffee sort of has this moment where you're like, “Whoa, coffee can taste like this?” I lived an hour outside of Toronto and there really wasn't much good coffee around and that was the start. It was like, “Okay, I want to see what else I can get. How else can I learn more about coffee? How else can I discover other interesting coffees around?”

That basically led me to starting my first coffee business. I probably started it a little bit too early, meaning that I wasn't really a coffee pro, but I started a subscription called The Roasters Pack.

With that, we'd send people three different coffees every month. That was my way of fulfilling this need that I had of wanting to try more coffees and learn more about coffee. I turned that into a service through a subscription to hopefully help other people solve this problem that they may or may not have been having.

Ashley: I love that that was your idea—that you were hungry to learn more about coffee and not only did you design a system where you could try more coffee, but that you could disseminate more coffee to other people. How did that first look for you? What was it like to start a business like this?

Suneal: Yeah, so, super fun, super exciting. I kind of feel bad for the first few subscribers that took that leap of faith because I wouldn't say I knew a ton about coffee. So probably the first few products or shipments were a little bit rough around the edges, but it was such a cool experience for me. Because I was able to reach out to some of the best roasters in Canada and I was able to ask them a lot of questions about coffee under the guise of being a wholesale client.

It really accelerated my learning and it was a super unique experience that I think is actually the best way to learn about coffee, but it's just not the most practical for most people.

Ashley: I just wanted to highlight this a little bit more because I was just on a phone call a couple of hours ago. I was telling you that I was on the phone at 8:30 in the morning, which is uncharacteristic for me. I would be in bed usually until like … right now.

But one of the things that this person was asking me was about my job as a freelancer, and trying to figure out different pathways in the coffee industry. And yours is a totally different pathway in coffee where maybe a barista or someone who's interested in coffee can start their own business and be their own entrepreneur in a way that feels very low-risk.

Suneal: Yeah, totally. When I started The Roasters Pack back in 2014, roasters weren't selling coffee online. That was a new concept. I think I filled this hole or this gap that was there in coffee that I think was really useful for roasters and really useful for people who wanted to learn more about coffee or wanted to try more coffees.

It was really challenging to do that back in 2014. So for myself as a coffee drinker, I solved that problem. And it turned out that there were other people around Canada that maybe didn't live in one of the hubs of Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, but also wanted to try good coffee from different craft specialty roasters. So yeah, it worked out really well. I'm super grateful for all these roasters that were patient with me when I would ask them ridiculous questions about coffee.

Ashley: What did you do after that? When I first connected with you, I think we connected in 2017 or 2018, you were doing Toronto Coffee Tours.

Suneal: Once you get into coffee, I feel like it's this rabbit hole that just sucks you in—I'm sure you can relate to this. So you start drinking specialty coffee and you're like, “Well, why don't more people know about this?”

And then you start going to local cafes and you're really impressed with some of the things that they do from all different angles, whether it's the entire culinary experience or just making really great espresso or doing really cool things like cuppings or pairings.

The local “media” here in Toronto, I didn't feel like was really giving the love some of the shops deserved. There were some under-the-radar coffee shops that were doing really amazing things in specialty coffee, but just weren't necessarily getting the love, maybe because they didn't have a ton of money to throw into making their design aesthetic great. They were just nerdy coffee people.

So I made this thing called the Craft Coffee Tour, and it was a self-guided tour of some of the best specialty coffee shops in Toronto. It was my way of being like, “Hey, if you're into coffee, this is a really cool way to try 13 different cafes around the city.”

And I kind of stepped on your toes a bit. I made little podcasts for, I think about seven or eight of the different shops, just because I know how much effort goes into making a really cool coffee drink or experience, whether that's the green buying or the roasting, or the dialing in and trying different things on the brew.

But when you go to a coffee shop, sometimes it's really busy. You don't get to hear that full story. So that was my thought behind the podcast associated with each drink was that we can finally tell the story behind all the effort that went in to making this delicious coffee that you have in front of you and get that primo experience that you maybe wouldn't get if it was a busy Monday morning service.

Ashley: I love that so much as a person who, anytime I go to a new city, I will take a walking tour. I will look for a podcast that explains the city—I actually tried to do that for Madison, where I just moved to, and I couldn’t find a podcast. But now I'm thinking, “Oh, that's a good idea. Maybe I'll do it.”

I feel like this is secretly a template for how to be your own entrepreneur.

Suneal: I will say, and I'm sure you can relate to this, but podcasting is a lot of work.

One of the biggest challenges I think with getting new people into specialty coffee is getting them over that price hurdle.

As much as we don't want to admit it, it is a challenge, right? For people, if they can go to their local coffee shop, that's serving some, I don't know, questionable coffee we'll say, for a really good price. [People can] put their three creams and three sugars in and they're happy. So how do you get them to try and take that leap of faith?

With the Craft Coffee Tour, we asked cafes to give a little bit of a discount, which doesn't feel great, but the hope was that it will grow the market.

It's kind of a chicken-and-an-egg thing. Once people try really good coffee, hopefully they'll learn to love it. You won't be able to go back. I think once you start drinking, like eating good food, if we use that as a parallel, it's really tough to go back to frozen dinners, you know?

So that was the hope. But I do know that as a project point of view, it was just really challenging to keep up with all of the coordination and the work, especially for something that we're not going to be making a ton of money on because we wanted to try and grow specialty coffee.

Ashley: I mean that's, number one, super benevolent to invest in the future of specialty coffee within your own space. I think you're absolutely right. Going back to the thing that you said about price, no matter how much we talk about how coffee is undervalued at the consumer end, it is shocking to see that a coffee might cost $4 or $5 versus what people are used to seeing in maybe not a specialty coffee shop.

It's really hard for people to differentiate—what's the difference between this and that—especially if we don't give them the tools to understand it. So I think making some sort of audio kit, which is accessible and easy, and folks being like, “Oh, I can listen to this, learn more about what I'm experiencing or what I wish to experience without bothering a barista, without being fearful that I might ask a stupid question or maybe it’s really busy and I can't ask a question.”

So that's a really interesting concept and a way to tackle that barrier between customer and coffee industry that I think is really interesting.

Suneal: I honestly think that coffee shops or coffee roasters should do that. The green buyer is not going to be able to talk to every customer, but if you're making this coffee on pourover, I think it would be really cool if a barista could say, “Hey, if you scan this QR code, you can listen to our green buyer talk about how they sourced this coffee when they were down in Costa Rica.”

These green buyers have these really cool stories, and these roasters have really cool stories, but they just don't necessarily get shared. I fully think each cafe or roaster should steal that idea and make little podcasts about each coffee.

Ashley: I love that idea. It seems like the work that you've done in general has really focused on you as a consumer trying to get other consumers excited about the things that you like and bridging that gap between people who are excited and interested about coffee and the people who have these stories, but maybe just don't know how to tell them.

Has that always been sort of your vision or goal, or do you think that vision cleared up for you as you continue to do work in this field?

Suneal: Honestly, I just think there's so much cool stuff going on in coffee. Coffee is super fascinating to me. I always ask the question: What's going on here? Why don’t other people not see this as exciting or fascinating as I do?

Then it's just like, okay, how do we break down some of those barriers to entry for coffee? So some of that might be on storytelling. That's why I focused on that for some of the projects that we do. Some of them might be about branding or accessibility, some of that might be around education.

So yeah, I dunno. I think there's just multiple ways to attack the problem of sharing how cool coffee is. But I will say that it feels like we're trending in the right direction.

I think as scary and bad as the pandemic was, I think a lot of people had to learn how to make coffee at home. I think that opened up a lot of eyes for people to be like, “Oh, I can make really good coffee at home. And oh, this coffee could taste like strawberries.” That's really exciting. So I think that there's definitely been this perception of coffee that's growing.

I think craft beer had this happen maybe 10 years ago. And wine's always had this, I think coffee is … like, it's happening, which is really exciting and cool to see.

Ashley: What made you want to start Leaderboard Coffee?

Suneal: Yeah, Leaderboard Coffee, I’m super stoked about.

I've always been a huge fan of Cup Tasters. I really like that competition as a concept, but there are some things about it that I wasn't a huge fan of. Every time I would see Cup Tasters, it would excite me, but also scare me.

It was always in the back of my mind like, “What could we change about Cup Tasters to make it more accessible, educational, less scary?” Because I know I would be quite terrified to go on stage and have to taste coffees in front of my peers. Leaderboard is a culmination of all of those things that I love about coffee, trying to combine it into one cool experience.

Ashley: Just for context: Cup Tasters is a competition where you have three cups of coffee in front of you. And it's kind of a game of “one of these things is not like the other.” You have to taste these three cups and figure out which one is the one that's different. And you do this timed in front of people. They might be cheering you on. They might not be, it depends on what the crowd is like.

Then you get evaluated right then and there. So you're right—that is petrifying to think about. I don't think I could taste a single thing when I'm in front of people and [the coffees] get progressively harder too. So you might get an origin difference like, “Oh, this is from Colombia. And the one that's different is from Ethiopia,” but you might get something that's like, “This was roasted four days ago. And this was roasted two days ago.”

Suneal: Or like this is from the neighboring farm. Good luck!

Ashley: Let's see if you can figure it out! These two people are brothers and they own farms next to each other, figure out which one's which—which is wild!

So it's really cool to take the concepts that are very interesting and applicable to education from Cup Tasters and essentially make it safe to do at home.

I'm interested by the questions that you ask—how do you design questions or design guidance? I imagine that the questions [you ask] are used to guide people to think about what they're tasting. How do you think about designing almost a whole kit that you send to people because they have to figure it out on their own a little bit.

I know that there's guidance and there's emails and things like that, but you have to think about, how does someone experience this thing when they get it at home?

Suneal: Totally. So we have the fundamental questions, our base-level questions, which is part of Section A. With each coffee we ask people: Where is it grown? We ask about the altitude, a question about the roaster, whether or not it's a decaf, what varietal, and how is it processed.

With each of those, we wanted to make sure that you don't feel like you're in the dark. We reached out to some of the smartest people that we know in coffee, and we asked them to put together coaching videos. So it kind of ties back to my experience in coffee when I was new to coffee.

Let's say I wanted to buy a Costa Rican white honey-processed coffee as a wholesale client. I could then ask that green buyer, “Hey, how does the white honey show up in the cup?” Then they’d be like, “Hey, do you taste that little bit of brown sugar in the finish? Notice how it's a little bit sweeter?” and then I'd be like, “Oh, wow. Okay, cool.” That was how I learned.

With Leaderboard, we're trying to tie the sensory question to coaching, trying to take that one-to-one experience I had and bring it to a one-to-many. So we've got some pretty amazing coaching videos. People like Tim Wendelboe, just to name-drop a bit here.

Ashley: This is the name-dropping section of the episode.

Suneal: Ben Put, former Canadian barista champ; Cole Torode, another Canadian barista champ; Sarah Ball—she won the Cup Tasters in Canada and she placed sixth in the world. A lot of really, really talented, amazing coffee professionals have put together coaching videos on different topics.

And so the goal is, if you're trying to differentiate between a washed honey and a natural, you can taste those coffees, but then you can also throw on a couple of videos diving into how to differentiate between processing and then hopefully that will guide your tasting.

The goal is we can hopefully teach people more about coffee in a guided manner. For myself, I find self-guided coffee education is pretty tricky. And so this was the hope to try and help solve that. I have a few coffee books and I love reading them, but I find it's hard unless you're pairing it with the sensory. The goal is to have the education tied directly to the sensory.

Then we also have our Section B questions, which is our way to highlight certain things in the coffee that we want to showcase. One of the things we asked a question about last season was one of these coffees was frozen in 2019—which one do you think that is?

That's just another really interesting thing about coffee. People are freezing green and then taking it out of the freezer and then roasting that coffee as a way to preserve freshness. That's a conversation that we wanted people to be aware of. We also had some really interesting anaerobic-fermentation processed coffees. That was another question: Which one of these coffees was anaerobically fermented? We’re trying to put our spotlight on some of the really cool things that are going on in coffee through the game design.

Ashley: [It’s so great that] you're making these things accessible to people, because when I think of going to a coffee shop and seeing an anaerobically fermented coffee—obviously I know what that is. Ashley, a coffee writer who's been in the business for 10 years knows what that is. But I have to imagine that Ashley, an alternate universe Ashley who never worked in coffee would be like, “What the f**k is that? What does that mean?”

So creating a way for people to learn about it, see it, is really special because I think the only way that most consumers would ever learn about it is that they were bold enough to ask a question in a coffee shop, which, like we were saying, isn't always possible or can be really, really daunting.

Suneal: I wouldn't even be surprised if some baristas too … I think to educate yourself as a barista, a lot of it really relies on whether or not you have a really good team around you or a manager who wants to take education as a priority in their coffee shop. But we all know how coffee shops are. They always feel understaffed and there's a million things to do.

So education may not necessarily be a priority, but if you want to develop yourself in your career as a barista, how do you set up these interesting tastings for yourself? Or how do you learn more about coffee on your own time? I think this hopefully can help solve some of that too, just for budding coffee professionals or people who want to learn more.

Ashley: What is the mix of people who sign up for Leaderboard? Has it been mostly baristas or consumers?

Suneal: It's actually pretty fun to see. So we've got a lot of, I would say nerdy home consumers, but then we also do have the most professional professionals: people who've won Cup Tasters in the past. To me, I think that's the beautiful thing about Leaderboard, is that every season we post the top 20 scores and the top five scores win prizes, and that could be anyone—it could be a former Cup Taster, it could be a coffee green importer, or it could just be someone at home who's super nerdy and loves tasting a lot of coffees. It allows you to compete against the best, which is kind of a fun thing to do as a competitor.

Ashley: Right. And it takes the spectacle out of it in a way. So you could taste the coffees over and over and you can kind of learn at your own pace. As a former teacher, that's something that I really like because people learn in different ways.

Suneal: Totally. Yeah. Going back to having 10 minutes on stage, that would be so terrifying. Hopefully this is an opportunity for people to even maybe try cupping, learn about cupping, practice their brewing with the coffees to figure out how to make it the most expressive. Yeah. I think there's a lot of cool things that people could do that'll help further their coffee education with Leaderboard.

Ashley: So you mentioned that you've done this in seasons, so you're on Season Three right now, I believe. Or you're prepping for Season Three.

Suneal: Yeah. We're shipping out Season Three in six days. I don't know when this podcast will go live, but July 19th is when we're shipping out Season Three and we're doing seasons every quarter.

Ashley: Oh, cool. Yeah. This probably will go live after that. I was wondering—what are some of the lessons that you've learned from season to season?

Suneal: It's been interesting. At the very end of the quiz, we ask people for feedback. It's a new concept, Leaderboard. So we want to continue to make it better. We think we're onto something, but we don't know how each person is truly experiencing this in their home. So we want to get as much feedback so that we can improve on it.

Some of the feedback that we got was, “Hey, I wish there was more room for notes.” So we included a little notepad with each box for Season Two. People have asked for more resources, so we reached out to more coaches and we got more resources on specific topics that people were asking for. Yeah.

It's honestly though, Ashley, it's been pretty crazy. I've done a few different coffee projects, but the amount of love that we're seeing in the feedback form—maybe people are just really nice—but it's super heartwarming to see how much people are loving Leaderboard.

We've gotten a lot of people say like, “Hey, this was so much fun. Please don't ever stop doing this.” Or like, “I loved it. It's super hard, but this was awesome.” I don't know. I think it's really cool to see it. It makes all the hard work that we put in on the back end worth it when we see comments like that.

Ashley: Has anyone gotten them all right?

Suneal: I think the highest score from Season Two was something like an 87. That's the thing about coffee, is coffee is pretty tricky.

Ashley: It is!

Suneal: I feel like there's been times where I've tasted Colombians and been like, “Oh, that's definitely a Kenyan.” And then you're like, “Whoa, what's going on here? Why is this Colombian tasting like a Kenyan?”

When we're designing the coffees, we try to make sure that there are coffees that fit the terroir and our expressive representations of what a coffee from that region should taste like. But there are curveballs.

We included a Chinese coffee last year. I don't know how many people have tried Chinese coffee, but by including it in the game, we feel like it really forces people to taste that coffee, to think about it. What are the sweetness characteristics? What's the acidity like? What's the body like? Hopefully that taste experience of that Chinese coffee will be one that they remember because they'd had to really think about it and really analyze that cup.

So coffee's tricky. So 87, I think, is the top score so far, but hey, you never know. We've only done two seasons. I think anything's possible.

Ashley: Do you design the box to address different levels of coffee know-how? I imagine that there are some coffees that you want to include because you want people to have some, not necessarily easy wins, but you want people to feel successful as they do this so that they're not like, “Oh, I got zero right, I feel like a jerk.” I'm sure it's never happened before. How do you think about difficulty levels when you’re designing these?

Suneal: There's a lot of coffees that we could include that are curveballs. Just with the way that interesting fermentation is becoming a thing or varietals being planted in different origins.

For us, we do want to make sure that there are some coffees that are figure-out-able, hopefully very expressive of their terroir. I think that makes for an interesting learning experience for someone who maybe isn't as nerdy, but it also does force the people who do know a lot about coffee to really stand firm with their beliefs. Can they pick a Kenyan out from 10 coffees? Can they pick a Guatemala out from 10 coffees? I think the challenge in itself is quite tricky regardless of the coffees.

I think if we tried to pick the 10 easiest coffees, I still think it would be pretty tricky.

Ashley: I agree.

Suneal: For us, we do make sure that there's, okay—we test ourselves, Grant and I, we do cuppings and we see, okay, can we figure these ones out? So we're kind of a gauge. But we want to make sure that there's coffees in there that people can figure out. Even though we say this, there's been times where Grant and I have been like, “Oh, that's definitely a Brazil.” And then when we look at the feedback, not everyone thinks it tastes as much like a Brazil as we thought. So coffee is just tricky in general.

Ashley: It's interesting to almost compile this data and see where we stand as an industry. Obviously this is never going to be a perfect sample size because it's going to be the people who subscribe to Leaderboard, but it's interesting to get that feedback and see like, “Oh, where am I calibrated? What do I think tastes like a typical Brazil versus maybe the hundred or so people I sent this box to?”

Suneal: Totally. It's still early, we've only done three seasons of this. But our goal is that hopefully we’re able to take some of that data for people and be like, “Okay, you're really good at identifying decafs, but varietals is maybe something that you should work on. So here's a couple of coaching videos that you should check out on varietals and maybe think about those next time when you're tasting,” and just try and give people that feedback loop that helps them develop their palate or their career in coffee.

Ashley: One of the things as a teacher that I think about a lot is: Do I give students a test that they can figure out? Not necessarily in a straightforward way, but does the answer tie back to the question?

I was wondering if you think about that when you think about the coffees—obviously you were saying some coffees are curveballs and they throw you for a loop, but do you try to identify one thing in them, like this [flavor note] speaks to the varietal and you could have figured this out—not could in a pedantic way—but this is the thing that ties it back to a known entity. Does that make sense?

Suneal: Totally. And that's where our resources come into play. Do we feel like we have equipped our players with enough information that they can figure this out, even if it is a tricky one?

We've reached out to a lot of people to get some really interesting videos and I'm super excited to release the Season Three videos that'll be coming out soon, just because they're really great deep dives on certain origins. And so the hope is that it may be a tough question, but the resources are there that they can taste the coffee, watch the videos, and feel more equipped to answer these questions.

Ashley: Why do you think that your businesses, the ones that you've done, the podcasting and the tours and even Leaderboard, they seem to be not necessarily solitary things—there may be a couple of other businesses that do similar things, and I'm thinking about Populace Coffee when they do their Flight of Fancy which is kind of similar, where you get four different coffees and you have to figure out and they give you guidance.

It's all very, very interestingly designed. But [these kinds of games] still seem to be far and few between. It seems like there's not a lot of investment done in this bridge between coffee folks and consumers. I wonder why you think that there's this gap between us?

Suneal: I don't know what the answer is, but my guess would be if I was a coffee roaster, my main source of income is coming through cafes. Coffee shops are where they should probably be spending their focus and their energy. I think that's where roasters have been spending their focus and their energy: making sure that they have really good training for baristas. Making sure they're checking in with their wholesale clients, making sure that everything's going well and coffee's still tasting great. And that's because 90% of their volume is going through those channels.

They need to make sure that those people are successful. Now, I think for me, I don't sell to cafes. So my focus is on the people that I do communicate with and talk with and send coffee to, which are the consumers and understanding what are they going on? What's the challenges that they're having in their day to day with their coffee?

I think that forced me to just think a little bit differently than most roasters. That being said, I know I've seen some really cool things come from roasters over this past year. I think they are starting to realize some of the stuff that I was realizing just because their focus has switched over the past year: They weren't able to spend as much time on their cafe partners because of the pandemic. They're putting a lot more effort into their consumer-facing stuff, which is cool to see. I think it's really interesting to see some of the product development stuff that's happening by roasters.

Ashley: What are you excited about?

Suneal: What am I excited about? I'm really excited for Season Three to see how people respond to it. We've added another element to the game, just to throw a little bit extra in there and change things up. We gotta keep people on their toes.

I'm really excited for cafes to reopen up in Toronto. We've been very much doing takeout and as someone who's self-employed, I'm that guy who sits in cafes. So I can't wait to do that again. I'm actually really excited to see where coffee goes over the next few years, just because I feel like there's been this exponential growth in coffee and specialty coffee, at least up here in Canada specifically. I've noticed a lot more people be interested in coffee and specialty coffee. I've noticed a lot more coffee roasters launch and I've liked it. I've noticed a lot more interesting coffees being sourced. I think that's only gonna push coffee as an industry forward. I'm really excited to see where the next few years take us.

Ashley: I think aesthetically, Leaderboard Coffee is really interesting. I'm looking at your Instagram page now, and it feels like a 1980s arcade game where you're trying to get your name up on the board. You're playing and playing and playing until you can put your three initials into the top 10 of your board. How did that come to be?

Suneal: My partner on this project, Grant, he's got a fun aesthetic that he likes to use in his project. He's actually known for putting on some of the best coffee events in Canada and that's his thing.

When I reached out to him with this idea, he put his Grant spice on it and made it this fun, ’80s arcade theme. I don't know if you've ever been to a coffee event up here in Canada, but it was likely held by Grant. He's got a really good eye for how to put together fun experiences and events. His creativity shone through there with the brand vibe.

For us, I think with the coffee competition, there's a few angles you can take. You could make it a very serious coffee competition and experience. That's what Barista Competition feels like—it's the most serious competition out there for us. We really care about accessibility and we want to make sure that people can learn and it'll feel comfortable to learn. By wrapping it all around in this fun game vibe, I think it really hits the feeling of what we're trying to create with Leaderboard.

Ashley: Where do you see Leaderboard Coffee going in the next couple of years? What does growth look like for you?

Suneal: That's a good question. For us, I feel like we're doing a really good job of getting the word out locally. We've done a good job getting Canadians involved. I don't know the exact numbers, but I'm going to guess 50 to 75% of our participants are within Canada. The rest are international, which is cool. We have about 30 different countries participating, which is kind of mind-blowing to me, to be honest—we're shipping coffee to Mexico, Scandinavia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Slovakia—it's all around the world, which is really cool for us.

We'd love to find a way to have this become more of an international competition. I think with Grant and I being in Canada, we've done a really good job of letting our local network know about what we're doing, but I'm still trying to figure out how to get the word out there to let baristas know internationally that there's this really cool coffee competition that will help you learn and you can taste some cool coffees.

With Grant grounded in very much physical events—that's his whole background—that's definitely something we've kicked around as a potential concept for us [in the future]. Can we turn this virtual competition into something in person? Maybe we bring back all the seasons’ winners and we do an in-person competition, or maybe we do a qualifier in person.

I think there's some creative ideas around there. But for now, we just want to keep working on, how do we make Leaderboard the coffee game a really cool experience? How can we make coffee education easier? And how can we make this game just a ton of fun?

Ashley: I think what's always interesting for me when I'm doing these interviews is trying to tie back the thing that someone does to the person that they are. I wonder for you, how has Leaderboard been an expression of you? How do you see yourself being reflected in this?

Suneal: That's a good question. I've always loved the idea of Cup Tasters strictly from the competition point of view, so that excites me. But coffee isn't really a competitive thing, and it feels quite subjective anyways, right? Some people might enjoy some coffees, other people might not.

But Cup Tasters is an objective thing. You can either taste it or you can't. So that's super fascinating to me. The challenges with that were, I think, very much my challenges—I would be terrified of going up on stage. I can just picture myself grabbing a spoon and my hand just trembling and all the coffee spilling out of a spoon, me trying to bring it to my mouth to taste. I would be terrified. I was like, “How can we fix that and bring that into Leaderboard?”

Education was such a key part of my coffee career, and I wanted to find a way to bring that to other people who are maybe not as deep into coffee as we might be. I think it's totally a reflection of my experience in coffee and some of the things that I enjoy personally.

It is fascinating to look at Leaderboard as a project, through that lens of being like, “How is this me?” But to be fair, I think it's an ever-evolving project, right? I had the concept, I reached out to Grant and Grant threw his Grant spice all over it. And then after Season One, we heard from all of our participants—how could we make this better?

Now it's taking their feedback and building it into the product and trying to find ways to use their input as well into the game. It started off as me and Grant, and now it's very much a thing of the people who participate because we're totally taking in their feedback, trying to figure out how we can make this project even better.

Ashley: Is there anything else you want people to know about Leaderboard or about you?

Suneal: Well, we'd love for people to participate. If you feel like trying 10 really tasty coffees and learning more about coffee, check us out on Instagram at @leaderboardcoffee. We try to make it a pretty fun experience. We have coaches, but we also have each roaster do the reveals. You get to see 10 different faces of people around the world.

We also have a pretty interesting community that's developing. So when we're doing the reveals too, it's really fun to hear how people are finding the coffees, whether they were like, “Oh, I nailed the variety on the processing, but I totally thought this was not a Kenyan. I thought it was from Uganda.” How people are interacting with the game itself, I think is really fun to witness.

I would love for more people to play and I would love to hear like what their thoughts are on the game.

Ashley: Suneal, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. I appreciate it.

Suneal: Thank you for having me. This was awesome.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Baylee Engberg is a roaster who wants you to embrace past crop coffees.

That’s still a pretty novel position—coffee is an industry that touts freshness, which means “past crop” can feel taboo. Most coffee is harvested just once each year, and it’s generally thought to be at its peak for the year following. A past crop coffee is more than a year old—the coffee that you still have on hand when the new year’s harvest comes in.

Most roasters and importers avoid large stocks of past crop coffees by making projections. Even if they’re imperfect, those estimates help such businesses put a figure on how much coffee they’ll need and consume in a year—especially if their job is to import hundreds of thousands of bags of coffee annually. But the COVID-19 pandemic has upended expected buying and consuming patterns, meaning there are more past crop coffees sitting in warehouses than ever before.

This is where an opportunity arises to change the received narrative. Just because past crop coffees are older doesn’t mean they can’t be roasted well and still drink deliciously. Does green coffee really have to be at the peak of freshness to be enjoyed? Is it sustainable to ignore past crop coffees? And don’t roasters have the power to highlight different flavors that maximize the full potential of a past crop coffee?

Baylee thinks so, and she has a lot to say about how we talk about past crop coffees. This isn’t the first time I’ve interviewed her—like some of our guests who also happen to be roasters, I interviewed her for the Matchbook Coffee podcast in 2020. She brings energy and passion to everything she dedicates time to, and this conversation is a dynamic look at how roasters can embrace past crop coffees—and why it’s essential for our industry to do so. Here’s Baylee.

Ashley: Baylee, I wanted to have you on the show for, I'm going to say three reasons. I could probably think of more as I keep going.

Number one, you're one of the most dynamic people on audio that I've ever interviewed.

Number two, I loved interviewing you the last time—we interviewed you while you were sitting on a motorcycle, which you're not now because of the heatwave in Portland.

And three, you're a person who is not afraid to share what you're thinking, which is going to make this interview really exciting. I'm also excited and nervous for our listeners who are just going to hear the two of us just go, bam, bam, bam, bam. Really fast. I was hoping you could introduce yourself to everyone really quickly.

Baylee: Hey everyone. I am Baylee Engberg. I have been in coffee for 13 years, starting as a barista. And then after seven years, I became a roaster. I sit on the leadership council for the Coffee Roasters Guild. I also run #ShesTheRoaster and I am the U.S. chapter Social Accountability Coordinator for SCA [Specialty Coffee Association].

Ashley: When I got the email from you—when we were going back and forth on like, “Let's do this interview,” I looked at your email signature and I was like, “Oh s**t, Baylee does a lot of stuff!”

Baylee: It's a lot of hats. Yeah, it's a lot.

Ashley: How'd you get into coffee?

Baylee: It was actually my first job. So it's kind of funny when people talk about how they got into coffee. I worked in a drive-thru, which is prominently a Pacific Northwest type of thing. Although we serve specialty coffee, nothing about it was measured or scientific or precise. So then from there I bounced into a cafe, learned some latte art and found myself a coffee roasting job shortly thereafter and never really looked back.

Ashley: Was that something that you were always interested in? Did you find roasting to be something that was compelling to you or did you kind of fall into it?

Baylee: I don't know. It was kind of both, I guess. So me at 16 years old, I have to go get a job. So I'm like, “Yeah, okay. I'll be a barista. That sounds like something I can manage with school and everything else.” So I do that.

I'm close with my dad and he ran a construction company, so power tools and being hands-on isn't lost on me. So when I start seeing this machine in the corners of certain cafes, it's like, “Oh, what does that do?” And then as soon as somebody opened a door for me—and honestly it involved a lot of elbows to get that door to open—I couldn't imagine not roasting.

Ashley: I love that it was almost part of growing up, touching things and trying to figure out how they work, or “How does this thing work? What does that thing do?” I can't say that I am of a similar mindset. So I really love when people share those stories and have those experiences. At what point did you decide, “Oh, this is a thing I want to do. This is the part of the coffee industry I want to occupy”?

Baylee: I mean, I think—so it all kind of stems from passion, right? We all like drinking coffee and I mean, that doesn't even need to be an industry-specific thing. But as soon as I realized that as a roaster, you're in control—I mean my favorite part of being a barista was manipulation of espresso, right?

And I think as soon as I got into roasting, I realized that I have a lot more control than I do on an espresso machine with a grinder. It's almost even better then because it's so similar to cooking and baking—and realistically like barbecuing. I feel like I can pull things out, draw things in, taper things … If anyone's a baking aficionado here, [roasting] is really in line with baking to me.

Ashley: That's really interesting. I really like that analogy. Being able to manipulate one thing and be like, “Oh, how does this work? How does this change this variable?” I would imagine, even in certain ways, a little more gratifying than baking because roasting takes what? Like 12-16 minutes?

Baylee: Yeah. It depends right now. I'm probably 10-15-minute batches on a 12-kilo.

Ashley: Killer, killer. Tell me a little bit about your career. How did you end up where you are currently?

Baylee: Wow. What a large question.

Ashley: Big question. Let's go for it.

Baylee: I'm like ... a series of terrible employers. No, I'm just kidding.

Ashley: That's the name of the game on this show, so…

Baylee: It kind of is, and I really like that that gets talked about so often now, because I've been around 13 years in specialty coffee and a lot of different facets of it and I'll say it needed to get talked about sooner. So thank you for always running that conversation.

How did I get to where I am? Wow. What a weird question, Ashley.

Ashley: Do you want me to rephrase it?

Baylee: Yeah, let's rephrase.

Ashley: Okay. So let's start where you are right now. What is your job currently?

Baylee: My day job is that I'm the head roaster at Trailhead Coffee Roasters in Portland, Oregon.

Ashley: What does that entail for you? Are you roasting every day, or are you more making profiles, helping other people roast coffee, sourcing green? What does that look like on a day-to-day basis?

Baylee: D) All the above, but definitely less. I'm the only roaster for Trailhead. So I would say it's less helping other people to roast. But I definitely do all of my volunteer work pretty much directly working with helping new roasters kind of get a balance. So yeah, I buy green coffee. I profile [coffee], I run the cuppings. I make the buying decisions. The only thing I don't think I do is send the check to be invoiced.

Ashley: That's great. I love that you were able to [state your job] through process of elimination. It's like, “This is the one thing I do not do.”

What was the journey to this point for you? Like, did you...hmm...

You're right. That is a weird question. I'm going to rephrase it again.

Baylee: It’s a good question. It's hard. It's hard to get there.

Ashley: It's hard to get there, especially because you've been in the industry for so long. So like, what were you looking for to get to the point that you're at now?

We obviously don't have to talk about specific employers or any specific experiences. I want this to be more about you and what personal fulfillment looked like for you as a roaster. What was the journey for you from starting out roasting to getting to the point you are now?

Baylee: I think from when I started roasting, because that's when everything changed, it became short-term goals. And I remember ironically, I wanted to do Matchbook [Coffee Project]. That was one of my goals.

Before I didn't feel like there was an outlet, so I couldn’t reach out and say, “Hey, I'm interested in this, pick me, pick me!” I had to do a short bio for Goodwill—the thrift store has a barista training program, if anyone didn't know. It's an awesome program, but they usually look for mentors. So I was doing my bio for them. And there they asked what my goals were and I was like, “Oh, I just want to do this Matchbook Coffee Project thing. That's really my big one.” And it came to fruition two weeks later. I don't remember.

Ashley: I remember that happening!

When I reached out to Baylee to do Matchbook, Baylee said, “That was actually one of my goals that I manifested,” which is incredible. And for people who don't know what Matchbook Coffee is, it's a monthly roasting project. You should check out the interview that we did with Baylee on that platform, because that's also very exciting. So just wanted to make sure that people knew what Matchbook was, but keep going.

Baylee: For sure. So short-term goals, I think, are what kept me busy, because ultimately if you're a production roaster, it becomes a very monotonous thing that you just do. I'm not going to say you can do it in your sleep because you probably shouldn't fall asleep by your roaster, but you can definitely go on autopilot and just be fine with punching a clock for a company.

So it's kind of those extracurriculars that get you excited about things. Also for me, I wasn't part of buying decisions early on in my career. Green buying honestly is a new thing for me. But I was involved in profiling and I think when you get a new coffee, that excitement—and if you don't have that excitement anymore—I'm going to urge all roasters listening to go find that in some capacity, because if you are at a spot in your career where a new coffee doesn't excite you, there's not much left in roasting, you know?

So I think getting the opportunities to try things and then especially under the veil of like, somebody basically just gave you a puppy and they're like, “Okay, you get to do whatever you want with this. You get to raise it however you want.” That should excite you. So yeah, through that I kept elbowing my way and working and here I am.

Ashley: What an analogy—roasting is like getting a puppy. I don't think I've ever heard anything like that.

Baylee: I hope anyone listening to this is just going to crack up because I'm pretty notorious for roasting analogies. There's a fateful Coffee Roasters Guild retreat. And I say fateful because I was—I was inebriated. I was really, really inebriated.

I made this analogy about roasting where I'm like, “How do I explain it to people that don't even understand that coffee can be roasted? Like, they think it grows brown.”

I'm like, “Okay, no, I roast it.”

And they're like, “Oh yeah. Barista?”

And I’m like, “Okay. Yes, but no, I do this other thing to it.” And I was like, it's like cooking a frozen pizza. So I'm like, you could put your oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit and cook it for an hour. Or you could go to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and cook it for two minutes. But you just want to find that ratio.

Yeah. I don't know that I ever stopped replaying that in my head.

Ashley: That’s actually a surprisingly good analogy now that I think about it. Because you don't want to eat a pizza that you roast at 200 degrees, it's going to be baked—that's how you bake coffee, right?

Baylee: Yeah, slow and low.

Ashley: Yep, slow and low. But then you also don't want a coffee that you just burn the s**t out of because the top might be super brown, but then the inside is still frozen, going with the pizza analogy.

That's actually a really good one. I think you should, I don't know. I would like to see you teach one of those MasterClasses, those things that you get Facebook ads for, I'd love to see you do one of those.

Baylee: And just start with roasting coffee.

Ashley: “Roasting coffee is like cooking your frozen pizza…” and then the music comes in and that would be delightful.

Baylee: I’ve done the frozen pizza analogy. I've done the marshmallow one. Anytime I go to a barbecue, I try not to eyeball the grill the whole time. But I mean, when you look at a Weber grill, you basically have a heat source, you have airflow. Then you actually have two air flows. You have an environmental one up top and then down low, you have airflow, so you can adjust your coals.

I try not to eyeball grills all the time and people using them, but they're little roasters, they just don't have a drum.

Ashley: That's so funny. Let's talk a little bit about roasting now during these times—which I feel is such a cliche way to refer to it—but COVID-19 has certainly affected coffee on all levels.

I think it's easy to see it on the consumer and retail level. We see coffee shops close or people get laid off. But what I haven't heard a lot of people talk about is how COVID-19 has affected green coffee and roasting. So I was wondering if you could give a little bit of an overview of what those first couple of months were like for you.

Baylee: Currently, just the ports alone are a nightmare. I mean, it's kind of been a whole domino effect on the green sector of things. And I'm certainly not a green coffee importer, so I'm probably not the best person to ask.

But when COVID hit Trailhead, there were a lot of products not being able to get moved. I think every company puts in their best effort to find a pivot or a way to make it better or easier or just to survive. But I think a lot of the conversations around sourcing—they're just chaotic right now, my email inbox with green importers—no, one's having a good time. So I started buying a lot of past crop [coffee], which is a super sensitive subject for some reason. Just speaking out of the U.S. for roasters, I'm not sure how any other part of the world deals with past crop. But we kind of have a tendency to put our noses up at past crop and I'm just not really sure why.

Ashley: Can you talk a little bit about what that means, what past crop means, and maybe talk a little bit about—maybe there's no clear definition on this, but what would be an ideal window for green coffee, just for people who haven't bought coffee or maybe don't deal with green coffee?

Baylee: Sure. I'm probably not the best person to ask, but someday we'll maybe talk to an importer that is.

So coffee is harvested seasonally, right? Different countries have different months and some countries have multiple seasons so they can get two harvests in one year. They get packaged, shipped, go to the mill, all the things. And then they come to us by the time that they come—I say us, the U.S.—by the time they come to the U.S. at whatever port, they already have some age on them, obviously from when they're harvested.

But we have kind of a standard that we call “fresh crop” and “past crop.” There's also “current crop,” but we’ll not go there, or “future crop.” So when it hits the port, basically when we say past crop, it refers to [the fact that] you're still holding onto a coffee from Colombia while Colombian coffees are coming in. So your bag is now deemed a past crop bag because there's a fresh crop already arriving.

Ashley: The designation “past crop” and “fresh crop” doesn't necessarily have anything to do with any sort of flavor component. It seems to be a timing designation?

Baylee: I mean, there's science, right? And so the hard science is that yes, old coffee will have some volatile acids, I guess, which are kind of the big ones. So wow. How to not get too deep on this?

Ashley: No, go deep.

Baylee: So roasters, we manipulate volatile compounds, right? And those are the things that we can apply heat to, take heat off of, air, all those things. It's how you roast and which volatile compounds you can change, right? So volatile acids seem to be the big ones with past crop. The coffee acidity is the thing that's getting muted and tamed and less prevalent.

Ashley: Okay. That makes sense. So when we're talking about components in a coffee, like a malic flavor, or citric acid or something like that, that would be maybe more present in a fresh crop coffee—fresh crop coffee, say that five times fast. But those components would perhaps be more prevalent in those fresh crop coffees versus a past crop coffee, that’s right?

Baylee: Absolutely.

Ashley: And those are things that, as a roaster, you think about when you're applying heat to coffee, because those are the components that you're manipulating.

Baylee: Yes.

Ashley: So what does roasting a past crop coffee look like for you?

Baylee: See, and that's the thing. You don't know what you're losing with past crop. You don't have some kind of a temperature gauge or an acidity reader gauge on a bag of coffee. So it's all kind of speculation outside of that.

And there's so many variables, like, how was your coffee packaged? Is it in GrainPro, is it vacuum-sealed? There are transportation [questions], temperatures, was it ever exposed? Has it hit sunlight ... there's so many factors to that, that there is no hard metric on how fast your coffee is quote unquote “decaying.”

So that's why I think past crop is almost an eye-roll because we all assume that it's just becoming this terrible thing in our warehouses. And it likely isn't, but for whatever reason, I think the U.S. has this connotation with past crop where they're like, “Oh gosh, no old coffee, never,” and I just don't think it's sustainable.

Ashley: Yeah. And especially now I have to imagine that you've really had to think about that.

Baylee: Right. And as far as sustainability with coffee goes, we all, I hope, care about farmers and we all talk about caring about farmers, but frankly, if there's coffee on the ground, why are we not buying it up before we produce more?

I think that that's incredibly wasteful and I'm not necessarily pitching for everybody to go buy some past crop right now, but it usually is cheaper. And why would you waste it? I'm sure there's a menu offering where you can plug that in whether it's your cold brew or...

So backtracking to when we talked about volatile acids, right? So if acids are the things that are escaping from past crop, why don't we focus on sweetness?

Ashley: I don't know. Why don’t we?

Baylee: I don't know. I've been a huge fan of buying past crop, especially through 2020 and 2021. And honestly, no consumer has complained. It tastes pretty much the same to me. I would never offer a past crop as a single origin, like a bright, fresh look at this thing, but it's in my blends. And I think that that's really important to continue doing.

Ashley: Talk a little bit about sweetness, because I think that you're right. We talk a lot about acidity because that's what makes coffee super special, but sweetness still seems to be a component of coffee regardless of its freshness. And we're still manipulating coffee to have these Maillard reactions, to turn from green to brown and develop these caramelization flavors. So how does dealing with the past crop coffee make you think about bringing out other flavors in that coffee?

Baylee: For sure. I'm trying to not do this from a hard roasting standpoint because there would have to be some years of education here before I just start rattling off.

So it's less about if you have a coffee, let's call it a Colombian, and you have a strawberry note and a milk chocolate note, and you're buying past crop. You need to understand that that strawberry note might still be there, but it won't be as prevalent because you have past crop. So you should be focusing your time and energy on that milk chocolate and how to make that do better.

And honestly, I'm not going to say you can't have a dark-roasted acidic coffee, but if we're talking about sweetness, those are always more on the sugar browning side of things and less on an acidic fruit pop side of things. So they will tend to be more medium-dark roast.

Ashley: Totally, totally. That makes sense.

Something else that you mentioned earlier too was that there's really no hard and fast science to how we evaluate a fresh crop versus past crop. The designation that we made earlier was mostly based on a timing issue and it’s not necessarily like, after six months, all of the acidity has gone from this coffee.

You highlighted all the different points in which coffee freshness can be preserved. The way that you package a coffee, the way that a coffee is shipped, the way that a coffee is stored. And I wonder as COVID-19 has affected green coffee habits—maybe we're not buying as much green coffee anymore because coffee shops are closed, people are not consuming as much.

So have you seen people pivot the way that they store coffee? Have you seen people be like, “Oh, we're heading to have all this excess green coffee,” because that's a conversation that I've heard people talk about—that there's more green coffee sitting in storage because there's not as many people consuming it and coffee depends on a futures market, right? You buy coffee six months ahead, or you buy coffee with predictions.

Baylee: Right. So are we talking about storage in a roasting space or a green warehouse?

Ashley: Either one, I think. Whatever you feel most adept at talking about. I just want to know if there are conversations even happening around that.

Baylee: Around green coffee storage?

Ashley: Around the idea that, “Oh, we're going to have a lot more green coffee now because consumer habits are different. So what does that mean for us?”

Baylee: Right. And I think, as far as green storage is concerned, it's kind of a coin toss because as a roaster, especially a small roaster, you have storage fees attached to your green coffee if it sits in a green warehouse. So you don't want to waste money just having it sit there. Although those warehouses are temperature-controlled and as far as preserving coffee there, they're literally designed for that. But nobody wants to pay those fees to just have your coffee sit.

So I think a lot of smaller companies are avoiding that cost and bringing it in-house. But at the same time, a lot of those companies don't have space. I think green coffee right now is chaotic. And no one has an idea of what's coming and what they can afford to sell it for because a lot of companies are struggling.

These finer coffees that we offered and we used to love using in [coffee] competition, well, competition hasn't happened. I think we'll end up seeing the effects of 2020 much later from now, but this is a good taste of it.

Ashley: That’s interesting because like we were saying, coffee is bought on future predictions—that you know what 2023 will look like in terms of your consumer habits, that you know what your needs will be for the next year, because coffee comes from afar. Coffee comes from a different place, at least in the U.S.—we don't grow it here.

Then we have to think about the months it takes to go from a coffee being harvested to a coffee showing up in our warehouses, in our coffee shops. So it's really interesting to think about how the pandemic will have effects on the coffee industry for years to come.

Baylee: Oh, absolutely. Circling back to the past crop thing, you're right. We don't have a metric. There are so many studies, I'm sure of it, of where they test these—scientists, not roasters—test these things and can give you hard metrics, but I don't think it's an across-the-board thing.

And I just keep thinking about—I was like one of those pandemic people that bought a bulk bag of rice and it's still in my cabinet right now, maybe two pounds gone out of the five. And I'm like, if this were coffee, this would be almost two-year-old past crop at this point. You know? And I'm still eating that rice. It tastes totally like rice. It's fine. It's great rice.

So I guess I just asked myself those questions. As a roaster, I believe that the coffee is degrading in some way. I know that. I know it's not bad, though. I am hard pressed to believe that I can't do something with it. I think if we continue to look for these nice coffees, these beautiful 90-point coffees while there are still 84-point coffees left on the ground, I don't think that this industry can sustain.

Ashley: Something you mentioned, using both your perception of the rice that you've been eating for the last two years, but also talking about consumers. I think you kind of said this offhandedly, but consumers aren't necessarily noticing a difference, or if they're noticing a difference it may actually be for the better.

We might actually be making coffee that's more accessible, especially if we're focusing on sweetness, which is a way easier flavor note to perceive than acidity, which takes a little bit more explaining, a little more time. And so I wonder, since you guys are a roaster that serves retail coffee, what has been the attitude of your consumers? Have people noticed that coffee is different or it tastes different?

Baylee: I actually, very intentionally—it was actually the coffee that I used right after my Matchbook Coffee Project. It's a natural Colombia caturra, and the farmer's name is Rodrigo. And that's what we've named it at Trailhead. It tasted in the cafe like those flash-frozen strawberries that you would get inside of cereal. It was a very specific thing to me.

And then I bought that same coffee past crop this year, the same exact coffee. And it's much more like juicy grapefruit, like grapefruit juice literally. And I wouldn't say one is better than the other. They don't taste vastly different. I mean, they don't taste vastly different in the way that I can tell it's the same coffee, but they have two different things going for them. It would just be a mood-dependent thing for me. I couldn't pick one.

Ashley: Right. But when we serve this to customers, it seems like we don't lean into that experience enough. That, “These are different and let's celebrate that” versus, “These are different, so we have to sell it at a different price point” or “This was past crop, so it's not as good, so we have to put it in a blender,” or something like that.

It seems like there's an opportunity for us to acknowledge how the pandemic, or even just how buying past crop coffee, can change a tasting experience and make that a really positive and interesting thing to present to consumers.

Baylee: Right. I wish that we talked about it more. I wish that I could slap “past crop” on a label and not feel shame about that as a roaster or not feel like my peers are thinking less of me, or I wish that we could just be very transparent about using all that we have and not have a negative connotation.

Ashley: Where do you think that negative connotation comes from? I know that's kind of a broad question, but even thinking about the word “past crop,” that sounds icky. That sounds bad.

Baylee: Yeah, definitely. I don't know. And maybe it's all made up in my head. Maybe I'm just like, “Oh, it's probably not that my peers are thinking like, ‘Eww, past crop,’” but it's true. It doesn't get ordered very often. Most importers have a past crop sitting in their warehouse, somebody backed out of a contract, something like that. But I don't know.

I don't know why we're not more forward about it.

Ashley: Well, something that I think we ignore—I feel like we use the wine analogy in the worst possible times, but it feels like wine could actually serve us in this instance. You age wine, you don't necessarily always want the freshest wine, that would [sometimes] taste weird and funky. Maybe for some wines you do sometimes, sometimes you don't.

So I wonder if there's a way for us to borrow from that world to be like, “This was harvested in 2018,” or like the way that George Howell does it where he has a 2018 Mamuto Kenyan [coffee]. And then he can compare it to 2019. But that seems like a lot of intentionality as well that maybe, I don't know. I don't know if our industry is ready for.

Baylee: Right. I think that's the worst part about it, is that we don't know if we're ready and—oh, that's where I was getting at. Wow. What a shift.

My same qualm that I feel about past crop is also around the freshness parameter that we all put on coffee. I can't tell you what an eye-roll I think companies stressing the freshness of their coffee is.

This whole idea of a fresh-roasted coffee stemmed from what feels like a Peet’s and Starbucks shift in the ’90s. Peet’s and Starbucks had all these young employees that were working for them, but obviously fell in love with coffee on a small scale because Peet's and Starbucks weren't these mega corporations back then. And so then they branched shop and then they want to open up their own shops.

And with that, they're like, “Well, so Peet’s and Starbucks, we would roast coffee and it would sit around for like six months before it hit a grocery store. We're going to make a coffee roaster where it's like, two weeks.”

I feel like every year since then, everyone keeps trying to push that freshness. “Oh yeah, your coffee's fresh? Mine's only four days off-roast.” You know what I mean? And we pull coffee out of grocery stores and we don't allow our consumers to buy them when arguably, I would say that some of my coffees don't taste as good as they would until day eight.

So the idea of past crop being like, “Oh, it's old—eye roll.” Whatever. It's kind of as ridiculous to me as like, “Oh, your coffee's 10-days fresh. That's old.” I just think everyone needs to be a lot more relaxed about time and coffee and when we're agreeing is too late or too soon to drink something. Obviously let your coffee off-gas, but I just don't think there's anything wrong with a 10-day-old roasted coffee.

I just don't think I ever will, unless it's a French roast and it's obviously sitting in its own oils, we should just be consuming these things.

Ashley: Right, especially in the niche that we occupy, the specialty market—no one's roasting coffee that dark. So you don't have to really consider coffee going rancid. Unless, like you said, it's super oily and that's what causes coffee to go rancid quickly. It seems like, and you pointed this out, the idea of freshness is almost a marketing tool that we haven't utilized correctly.

Baylee: Right. Agreed. Yeah.

Ashley: I just did an espresso machine review for a website and one of the things I was really wary about—I would buy these machines and they'd be like 17, 18 bars of pressure. And I'm like, that is unnecessary, but it's the idea that more is better. And the idea that fresh is better. It's these signifiers of quality that we don't know how to present correctly.

So we sell it in the most straightforward way possible. So then we're like, “Oh, people think fresh is good, let's sell this as the freshest coffee,” even though that might not actually be a good quantifiable quality.

Baylee: Right. Absolutely not. I think that one-upping thing, I think it's one of the most toxic things I see as a roaster all the time. I don't define a good roaster by the people that work at these very—I mean, they're talented, I'm definitely not saying otherwise—but I define a good roaster as somebody that can take an 83 or an 84 coffee and make me think I'm drinking an 86, not somebody that's getting access to 88-, 89-, 90-point coffees. And I just don't think a dollar mark equates to talent. I think good roasters are people that can take something moderate or average and make it taste spectacular.

Ashley: And it seems like it's also working with what you have in front of you. So if you have a past crop coffee that maybe doesn't have as much acidity, what does that mean? How do you approach that coffee and how do you adjust the way that you would roast that coffee to accommodate for what's in front of you?

Baylee: Every coffee's a first date. What works with one—you could get the same coffee, the same farm, the same farm at the same altitude, you could do all the things right. And they still won’t roast exactly the same.

I think a lot of the weight that we put on metrics as far as moisture content and water activity—those are great things to measure and no data is bad data kind of a thing, but I just don't think depending on these arbitrary rules that we have … you really just have to try it.

Ashley: How would you market a past crop coffee differently? What's your dream to see on a retail shelf? Because I'm imagining you having two coffees. One is from this year, one is from last year, and they're somehow marketed as a special experience because they are—how exciting would it be to be able to taste two different coffees, the same coffee from past years? What would that look like on the shelf for you? Or how would you market that differently?

Baylee: I'm seriously two people in one brain. So part of me is all chaos and would want to be like a fresh crop/past crop, the good st/the bad st, and just be really dramatic about it and vulgar and crass in the way that I'm trying to make fun of my own consumers. Being like, “Look, they're both good. But one's old and you still went for it.”

Honestly, I wouldn't do it that way. That's just my own little brain.

The way I would probably go about it is if you focus on sustainability and talking about using what you have before you have to buy a new thing. Or if your farmers maybe haven't collected money on the past crop, they may still be waiting for that. So it's like, if you do care about your farmers and you do care about the progression of this industry, you would care about somebody being like, “Hey, listen, this was the last five bags of whoever's farm. I bought them. They're old, but hear me out, I believe in zero waste, here's what I'm trying to do.”

So if on the bag you explained that this is the last five bags of a farmer's crop, and now this farmer has sold 100% of their product from last year. And I mean, even if you made it less from a farmer's perspective, but just a little more of like, “There is no waste.” Anyone that has a recycle program in their city is going to care about that.

Ashley: Right. It seems like we have a lot of ways that we talk about sustainability in the coffee industry. But we talk about it from the two ends. We talk about it from the consumer end, where we're talking about paper cups, straws, the things that we all use and dispose of. And then we talk about it a little bit from the farmer's perspective about climate change.

But we don't talk about that middle ground. I think that idea of zero waste—you wouldn't buy another, I don't know, vacuum cleaner. I don't know why that's the first example that came up. But like, you wouldn't buy another vacuum cleaner unless you used the one that you had and you repaired it or you took care of it and then it was no longer usable. You would use everything that you had before you bought a new of something.

Baylee: And I mean, I wouldn't even say—I like the vacuum analogy. Don't get me wrong. Because I definitely worked on my vacuum not too long ago, but I think it's less because the vacuum sounds like something that you can't use, but more like cell phones. Yeah. That's a good one. Because it's like, every year you're not buying a new Apple iPhone or whatever that comes out. That's just ridiculous. One: Who can afford that? But two: What was wrong with your phone?

Ashley: Right. How can you make do with the thing that you have and then treat it as something different? It might not be the same thing it was last year—it might be different. So how do we adapt to that? Especially with something like coffee, which is so malleable. You're a roaster, you change coffee, so it's going to be different and you have the skillset to change that coffee based on what it's presented.

Baylee: Right.

Ashley: Is there anything else you want people to know about you or about past crop coffee that we didn't cover?

Baylee: No, just—I want people to be more inclined to buy past crop. That's all I got.

Ashley: I think they will be after hearing this conversation. So thank you for taking time to chat with me. It's always a pleasure. It's always a delight and I have so much fun talking to you.

Baylee: Thank you so much, Ashley. Thanks everyone.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Cover photo by Appetite.For.Color

This Boss Barista episode is brought to you by Urnex.

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If I could sum up this interview with one quote, it would be: “Everything you do is better than what you didn’t do.”

That line was written by today’s guest, Brittany Sims, a barista and coffee writer who runs the Non-Binary Barista blog. Brittany uses their blog to talk about gender in the workplace, but also to discuss accessibility issues, neurodivergency, how to deal with trauma, and big feelings at work. Essentially, Brittany’s blog humanizes service workers, and shines a light on the real experiences people go through on the job.

Brittany is a person who tries things. They’ve been writing for almost two decades, spanning genres and platforms, including a recently published novel. In this interview, they demonstrate their willingness to explore and be vulnerable. They buck the traditional ways we view customer service—the “leave your feelings at the door” mentality—and talk about how interactions with customers can be authentic and true to the way both actors feel.

Change begins with having a conversation, picking a starting point, and being open to new ideas. Brittany has a talent for being present, acknowledging both the humanity of others around them and also within themselves. Here’s Brittany.