BOSS BARISTA

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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!