BOSS BARISTA

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Welcome to the Boss Barista takeover!

A few weeks ago, I put a call out to coffee folks, fans, and drinkers across the globe to pitch ideas about the podcast they’ve been dreaming of making—and today we’re turning the mic over to the second in our series of guest creators. 

Today we’re airing the first episode of the Updose Podcast, a show that chronicles American coffee in the 20th and 21st centuries. This project is near and dear to my heart because there are so many strange, incredible, and pivotal stories in recent coffee history—and there aren’t a lot of places where those stories are set down and recorded for future coffee consumers.

The Updose Podcast comes from Amanda Whitt, a barista and historian who explores in-depth questions about the way we view and drink coffee. In their first episode, they investigate the drive-thru coffee shop—a phenomenon that seems commonplace today, but was invented and first proliferated in the Pacific Northwest. Why the Pacific Northwest? Whose idea was it to serve coffee from a lonely kiosk off a two-lane highway? Amanda digs in and finds out.

You can find a full transcript of this episode at bossbarista.substack.com. Be sure to listen until the end to hear more about this takeover project, and to learn how you can get involved!

CW: Workplace sexual harassment—we do indicate when the moment is coming and how to fast forward.

Amanda: OK, let's set the scene. It's 1991, so you're about four years old, your parents, who generally don't like to go into the city, have decided to finally go and you're amped. You get to go to Portland, and this time you get to do something really exciting, which is to watch Tonya Harding skate. This is before I, Tonya. This is before we knew anything. She was just this tiny blonde girl zooming around the ice. And as a tiny blond child, I was very excited. I even thought about ice skating for a while and then remembered that it might interrupt my future plans of becoming a rodeo queen.... and also that there are no ice-skating rinks in Olympia.

On the way back, you're getting a little hungry and your mom just cannot imagine trying to park the car again. And then she sees a drive-thru espresso stand ... which, because you're not quite ready to eat, is very exciting. So you pull off, she gets a mocha, you get a hot chocolate with whipped cream, and drive back towards Olympia.

It almost seems that this concept follows you home and that by the time you get there and you turn around again when you leave your house, that there are seemingly these drive-thru espresso stands everywhere.

Hello, this is the Updose Podcast, the coffee history podcast about American coffee in the 20th and 21st centuries, covering coffee from special to specialty, the people who make it, and the places where we drink it. I'm a barista and historian based in Brooklyn, New York.

I decided it was only natural to begin the journey of making a coffee podcast by doing an episode about the place where my journey as a person working in coffee started.

Episode One: Baby, You Can Run My Cart

The Pacific Northwest is the likely birthplace of the espresso cart—when I say espresso cart, what I mean is a small kiosk, usually, that has a drive-thru window on either side, but sometimes has a lobby on one side and a single drive-thru window.

These carts are pretty ubiquitous there even today—they'll be in a lot of grocery store parking lots, strip-mall-type areas, basically anywhere off the highway where one might get thirsty and want a coffee. And sometimes they're in really unusual places you wouldn't expect—you'll be driving down a small, two-lane highway out, you know, nowhere near any town that you can think of. And suddenly you'll see this nice flag with a coffee cup sticking out of the ground and just beckoning you. Like, honey, this drive is going to be long. Pull off, get an iced mocha. You're going to feel so much better. And I usually do.

The likely birthplace of the espresso cart is the Pacific Northwest. The history of these businesses is difficult to track. And it is possible that some happened before this, but they really got their footing starting in the early ’90s. There are parts about this that make sense and that put the Northwest as a likely contender for the first drive-thru—period.

It really does rain in the Northwest all the time—and outside of Seattle and selected downtowns, development of the state is incredibly motorist-centric, meaning that the ability to stay in your car and not get rained on, and pick up a coffee, is just really enticing. Well, there is a part of me that studies history that is worried about making a definitive claim. I feel like we're pretty safe in saying that there is no very obvious detail that I am missing here.

But skepticism aside, the popularization of these carts starts in Portland, Oregon, with a little cafe called Motor Moka. Motor Moka was founded in 1990 by Jim Roberts as an offshoot of his company, Coffee People. The space was a converted Dunkin Donuts drive-thru that he was able to take the lease on. The logo was very much inspired by a Shell gas station colorway, and kind of that bright, visible-from-the-highway look, via the logo, is really gorgeous. It's a yellow cup on a red background and the cup is kind of spilled off to the side and has these very graphic wings shooting out of it. It calls to mind the crown of the Greek god Hermès (pronounced the French way) and just sorry, Hermes (Anglicized pronunciation). Hermes is the French fashion designer ... and was apparently a pretty interesting place to be employed in Portland. At the time, the coffee shop boasted a literary zine.

Jim did have a background in poetry and was pursuing an MFA in Portland before opening his cafes. And also they, for a while, had a radio station out of the cafe. So that seems pretty amazing. Most of the information for Motor Mocha came from the Willamette Week article titled, "Portland Invented the World's First Drive-Thru Coffeehouse: Here's The Story" written by Jay Horton, which is one of the only resources I could find about this place.

Again, this is why I wanted to start this podcast. The number of dead clips, links that I discovered that were for a bygone blog hosting forums, really showed me that there was information to be preserved here that maybe the Wayback Machine wasn't attaching, and maybe I could have my own amateur effort. Jim didn't have Motor Moka for too long before selling to the Canadian company Second Cup. It sounds like it was kind of a heartbreaking deal gone wrong. And what it resulted in was the entire company folding by 1997.

Only a year after the first Motor Moka opened, there was already a great many business owners looking towards building drive-thru espresso stands all over the Northwest—perhaps, as is the slogan of the now-defunct Olympia Beer, it was just in the water. One of those founders was Terry Ziniewicz. Before starting in the coffee industry, Terry worked as a self-employed contractor and was quickly hooked on coffee through his mother-in-law, leading him to seek out espresso as he worked on projects around the state. He joined as a partner in Piccolo Espresso, which had started primarily with coffee carts often located in the parking lots or entryways of Bon Marché department stores.

The first Piccolo Espresso locations that were drive-thru were a result of a large-scale lease takeover where Terry Z took over these locations that had previously been Fotomats—a Fotomat being a little hut that you could drop off film that was then taken to a secondary location for developing, and then you could pick it up the next day or the next week.

So according to Terry, the first location to actually give him the permits to open was Centralia, so Lewis County. That's funny to me because I did spend a lot of time in Centralia as a child. And to think of them as being the first people to do anything makes me really happy. It's a pretty sleepy place, very quiet, very sleepy. I do have a lot of love for it. If you live in the state and you're not going there to buy your vintage or your antiques, you are kind of screwing up, I just have to say.

But anyways, this is not my antiques podcast. I was lucky enough to speak with Terry for well over an hour through this. He was a huge resource, someone whose voice you’ll probably be hearing a bit in future episodes, and whose perspective on the coffee carts was very different than the workers who I also interviewed. Terry also was a regular at a diner I worked at when I was in high school. So there's also a little part of me that feels some embarrassment talking to him because I was a really bad waiter. I think it's one of the few food service jobs that I've just never been able to wrap my head around. I'm just really glad he never held that against me. So I can't thank him enough. But I also think that it's important to let people speak for themselves instead of talking about them. So here are some clips from our longer interview.

Amanda: And what was your experience with coffee? Was it mostly as a consumer or were you just kind of seeing the trend growing in the area?

Terry Ziniewicz: Yeah, I wouldn't have known a trend from anything. I had the construction company, but I was kind of interested in doing something else. So about the time that we were pregnant with our son, Sean, I came up with this crazy idea to get out of construction and go into the coffee business.

Amanda: And go into the coffee business he did. Terry opened multiple locations under the name of Piccolo Espresso, as well as Crazee Espresso, and then later Espresso Parts Northwest, as well as Olympia Coffee Roasters. Terry and I talked a lot about coffee as a career, and one thing he was very proud of was the number of people who started as Crazee and Piccolo Espresso employees that have remained in coffee, either long-term or to this day.

Amanda: Anybody you have from the Piccolo days that you can think of?

Terry: Yeah. So you know, a lot of long-term employees—a young lady by the name of Erin Griffin that, you know, started working at our first drive-thru in Lacey. But the Lacey drive-thru was probably our most fun, busy, profitable space for 15 years—a spot that launched a lot of our efforts into coffee, including the parts business and all of that. But she started with us when she was 17, in high school. To this day, she still works with the Espresso Parts company.

Amanda: Interspersed through the rest of our interview, Terry would occasionally remember the name of another long-term employee or long-term coffee person that I should know, look at, or speak to for this podcast. Another topic that we talked about was how the coffee carts were the main impetus for starting Espresso Parts Northwest.

Terry: Espresso Parts. You know, Espresso Parts was started by way of a need to supply the businesses that we were already operating. I was the person that was responsible for maintaining all the locations. And so the supply chain for me was ... wasn't working, you know, like the espresso machines that we had were poorly constructed. And I just didn't know the difference between a good espresso machine and an espresso machine at the time.

So we just had different … different failure rates at the locations that were caused by having different equipment and different setups everywhere. So I was trying to standardize what we were doing and in doing so, loaded up the shelves in my workshop with a lot of product. And I thought, ‘Wow, I have a lot of products. I might as well sell it because that's what entrepreneurs do.’ And you start a new building or a new business and yeah.

So, Espresso Parts—or at the time it was called Espresso Cart Parts Northwest, and we had another side of that called Seattle Carts Manufacturing Espresso Carts. And so we supplied that company as well as Piccolo Espresso and then eventually other companies through the years. It grew and we scaled it up and scaled it back down several times and it kind of just made its own way.

I would say it kind of had a revisit every five years to see what we were going to do. We sold a lot of syrups at one time. You know, there were just a number of different bits and pieces that we did. All of the things you think about, like when putting together a drive-thru, the espresso machine should be in a place where your customers can see it, that the prices aren't turning their back, that the interaction is literally face-to-face.

You know, you're looking out [to see] if you're on the right side of the building, you're looking out the right window and being able to converse with the client and create the beverage and have that two minutes or three minutes of time with them that they learned to have as part of their daily routine. At about 20 years into it, it was just time to do something different.

Amanda: Terry was also able to really eloquently capture one of the thoughts I had about how the drive-thru had brought some simple pleasures into the lives of busy families.

Terry: You know … from my standpoint and starting with the drive-thru, as you had mentioned, we had two young children, Sarah and Sean, and you know, getting in and out of the car to run into the store wasn't a really viable thing or an easy thing, I should say... Not that it's not possible. It's just that there's another step.

Amanda: It’s a pain!

Terry: So the drive-thru thing, to me, seemed pretty reasonable. You know, this allowed families to be able to treat themselves to something as simple as a coffee beverage.

Amanda: And that's it for Terry. I want to thank him again for all of the time he spent talking to me for this podcast.

So something that Terry brought up and that we actually discussed at length—and that I realized will actually just need its own episode—is coffee syrups, and how we got them. His company worked with Torani, whose syrups, they claim, were the first that were specifically formulated for espresso. We'll get into that story of how the flavored latte was likely a staple in the United States first in San Francisco.

When I spoke to the other baristas who had worked in coffee carts, one thing that we bonded over, whether it was the people I interviewed today or people that I just spoke with over the internet while I was getting ready and doing my research, was that we all had spent some time, had enjoyed the creativity that we had creating drinks with those syrups. And that was our first experience, kind of building signature beverages and creating things that were really our own in a culinary sense.

When I was working at a Clubside Cafe, one of my greatest triumphs was a blueberry and amaretto latte. I don't know if it's something I would want to drink today, but I feel like teenage Amanda was just so excited to be able to create something that was probably something that nobody had ever had before. And I guess it's a feeling that I've been chasing most of my professional life.

When I started this project, I looked to social media to see what other people wanted to share or say about their jobs as drive-thru coffee-cart baristas, either around the same time that I was working—some a little before, some a little after. One of the people I spoke to was Becky Reeves, who was kind enough to allow me to record our conversation.

Becky is a brand ambassador for the company Oatly and is just an all-around nice person. Becky worked in Las Vegas, Nevada, and had some really lovely stories to share and some really great insights into how doing that job has informed the way that she continues to interact with the working world. It was just really, again, a really lovely conversation. But to stay on the topic of coffee carts, without further ado, here are some clips from my interview with Becky.

Becky Reeves: I'm Becky, I worked at a coffee drive-thru place with a small lobby—it would have been … is that 2010?

Amanda: Yeah, 2010-2011...

Becky: Yeah, yeah. So it was around that time and it was in Las Vegas, Nevada, about 15 minutes from the strip. So we saw all different types of folks all the time.

Amanda: And how old were you when you were working there?

Becky: I had started there when I was 16. By the time I was 19 I was managing, and I left when I was 21 to go move to Portland, Oregon, to go work in a "real coffee shop."

Amanda: Oh my gosh.

Becky: I'm rolling my eyes at myself for that one.

Amanda: Yeah, I feel like we all ... we all do. I definitely went through that as well—I worked at a drive-thru stand and then would go into town and be like, it’d be so nice to work at a place with a couch. Wow! Where you like what kind of drinks were you serving. Like what was the coffee that you had?

Becky: The coffee that was served was mostly flavored 16-ounce iced beverages. And because it was so popular, we actually had a system that upon reflection is very efficient but pretty disgusting, where we would pull a bunch of espresso into little syrup-looking containers, and we would pull the espresso in there. And so then we would just have 12 to 20 iced espressos ready to go. And then we'd take those espressos and dump them on everything and then just make the drinks. And that's how we were able to make them so quickly. But it was yeah, it was mostly a lot of blended drinks, tons of blended drinks, mostly all iced drinks because it was just hot all the time. So we had like, iced Nutella lattes.

Amanda: Yeah. Did you ever have a signature beverage on the menu?

Becky: I had a few. Oh, this is going to show my age, but I was really proud of making a lot of Harry Potter-themed drinks. This is so painful to say, but I made a butterbeer drink—that they might still have on their menu—that people went WILD over. Making signature drinks was always my favorite part, just figuring out things that could go together and having people try it.

Amanda: Another thing Becky and I discussed was our relationship with regulars at our coffee jobs.

Becky: My god! I could talk about the regulars there forever. We had this one regular named Pam. She would—I miss her—she would always be at the drive-thru ready to go before we were even open. And we always knew she'd be there and she'd wait as long as she had to. And we'd put on our headsets first thing in the morning and would start clicking and we'd be like, ‘Good morning, Pam.’ And she'd always be ecstatic that we remembered her. She's like, 'Oh my God.'

And she tries to remember everybody's voice. And so she'd be like, 'Becky?' And she was just the best, I hope she's having a really good day today. We had tons of regulars that would come in, just use our bathroom and then spill Splenda all over the place somehow and then never come back. George Lucas' daughter was a regular. She was an incredible tipper, super nice. Every, every coffee shop job I look at, like in my past, the regulars were always the best part.

Amanda: Later in the conversation, we discussed the things we learned by working those jobs. Since Becky had worked as a manager and at such a young age, she had a really great perspective on the things that were valuable about the job, over and above your usual first-job stuff.

Becky: It's hard to reflect poorly on myself, because I was a child and they were putting far too much responsibility for someone that was paid $8 an hour, if that. But I definitely think I learned a lot about knowing what's worth communicating, being able to weigh values, being able to weigh emotions, being able to communicate emotions in a way that isn't super invalidating to employees.

Amanda: I also think back, when I was 16 to 19 especially, I was like—I had such a chip on my shoulder.

Becky: Yeah, me too!

Amanda: The way that I behaved to my coworkers that I had NO charitable assumptions about whatsoever because of the very visible differences in the economic background that we had ... And then I think about it later and I'm like, you know, that might have been true, but I did not need to behave that way towards them and I did not need to talk about them the way I did or talk TO them the way I did, because, damn, I was a dick.

Amanda: Another thing that was never lost on either of us is that while we were doing these jobs, we were also just doing random teenager stuff. This came up when we were talking about the way that we were able to start recognizing automobiles by their engine sounds.

Amanda: One skill I got that I realized later is I can tell a make and model of a car from very far away.

Becky: Yeah, I can tell by the sound.

Amanda: Yeah. Or somebody is like something, something. And I'm like, ‘oh, it's the diesel.’ And they're like ‘huh?’

Becky: You can hear.

Amanda: Or Dodge trucks, even the gas ones have this thing where they sound weird.

Becky: The guy I was dating towards the end of my time when I was working there drove a Subaru WRX. And so any time a WRX would come through the drive-thru, I was like, 'Oh, I know what that is, like in my ear.’ I was like, ‘I can hear it.'

Amanda: Yeah. I didn't get too many chances to flirt at my job because it was right near where I went to school. So I knew EVERYBODY.

Becky: I wasn't good at it. I had some of the workers that were amazing at it and they would just tell me stories about all the dates that they went on with customers and all the things that they got bought. And I wanted that so badly, but I just could not figure out how to talk to people like that.

Amanda: As it turns out, Becky and I both experienced feeling as we worked at places that were a little cooler than we felt like we could rightfully exist within.

Becky: In Vegas at that time, there were very few coffee shops, too. And so the few coffee shops there were, they were cool—they were a hub for someone or something cool. And so I think that there was also an idea that the baristas of these coffee shops were thereby cool, or knew of cooler things. Even though I didn't, some of my co-workers did, but I was not one of them.

Having people give tips through the drive-thru was very disorienting for me, just because it didn't make sense until I started to really understand labor, and that $8 an hour is not a suitable amount of money to have a life. But that was always fun because then that also taught me relationship-building. So people that were really good tippers being like, 'Oh, so this is how you ... this is this now.' So that was an interesting lesson to learn, the politics of tipping. I learned all of that there.

Amanda: Oh yeah. I think that the tipping is interesting because I feel like it's ... I feel like I made better tips there than I did at my next job. even. But I had some weird interactions with customers at the drive-thru, which is why I ended up leaving, because men are gross.

Becky: Yeah. Super gross.

Amanda: Anyways, so I feel like we've gone well away from coffee carts. So before I hit stop on the recording, I would like to ask you if there's anything that I didn't ask you that you would like to talk about?

Becky: I mean, I'd love to talk about the games that we would play to keep ourselves sane...

Amanda: Oh, my god. Yes, please!

Becky: We would oftentimes—one of us would bet the other to include certain words in your order, like when you're talking to a customer and it was a blast. ‘Meow’ was an easy one. And so then it became like, how many can you say? And so it would be, 'What can I get you right meow? OK, would you like any muffins right now or right meow?’

And I always thought that was a blast. And then there was one word ... There was a word that I was told that I had to work in and I don't remember how I did it. That was always very fun. I loved talking in the drive-thru and accents and then having someone else go to the window so that the person driving would just be very confused as to who was helping them. (Laughs) Those were the main ones.

Amanda: Thank you so much for doing this and talking to me.

Becky: Oh my pleasure, it was so long ago. And like, it's hard to remember. And it's also wild to think of how long of a coffee career I've had. It's bizarre.

Amanda: Thank you so much for speaking with me, Becky. That was really amazing.

So remember how earlier I said that there might be times where we need trigger warnings in our coffee podcast? Well, this is why I said it. So as I mentioned before and alluded to during some of the interviews, working at a coffee cart was one of the first jobs I had with a W-2. And it was one of the first times that I experienced a lot of sexual harassment in a workplace.

If you would like to skip this part, it's about two-and-a-half minutes long. You'll know it's over when you can hear background music again and when the italics are gone.

Most notably, I had a period during one summer, the only summer that I worked there where I had not one, but two serial masturbators, one of which would actively flash their penis at me from their car. And it was just really unnerving and disgusting. I was a teenager. I didn't really understand yet or have the language to describe what was going on. I didn't really talk to my parents about it because I figured they would ask me to get a different job, but then continue to have the same expectations for my income that they had had previously. And my employer was really not very helpful other than saying, ‘Oh, just memorize the license plate, don't serve that car,’ not realizing that the way that our cart was set up, it was really hard to see the oncoming car until they were really right upon you.

I really carried that helplessness. And it's definitely something that I think about a lot. Attending talks by the Rock Center here in New York, that one thing they bring up is that often restaurant and food service jobs are the first jobs that a young person has or a person newly arrived to the United States. And often that means that you're dealing with a workforce who knows very little about their rights and about what sorts of things are acceptable and unacceptable. Fundamentally, I knew that what happened to me was unacceptable, but I also did not know what sort of recourse I had if my employer chose not to protect me in any way, which they didn't.

And yeah, I just felt like it was important to share that, because when I had to sit and record and think about what coffee carts meant for the Pacific Northwest and what they meant for specialty coffee, I also had to spend some time thinking not just about the good memories I had from my coffee cart job, but also some of the harder memories, and some that I'm sure are not super uncommon amongst people doing the same type of work.

At this point, I feel like it's pretty safe to say that espresso stands are here to stay. It's clear that through their 31-year history, they've had a bit of a boom and they've had a bit of a retraction [contraction—I used the wrong word]. But I think now the market has stabilized and it is proven that this is a pretty sustainable business model in the areas where it will actually work.

The question is, as we move towards a less car-based infrastructure—if that is something that will happen in my lifetime, as I hope it will—if this is still a model that will continue. Maybe in a hybrid form, with a little bit of walk-up and a little bit of drive-thru, or if this is going to continue to be the phenomenon that it has been for the past 30 years.

One company that has shown a lot of staying power and has grown beyond the Northwest is Dutch Bros Coffee. I'm not sure if they're Dutch, but they're definitely bros and they are from Grants Pass, Oregon. By 2005, they had 75 (franchised) locations, and as of today, they have over 250. And I'm actually a pretty regular Dutch Bros customer when I'm visiting the Northwest—it's one of those things that I'll stop and get a drink on the way between visiting my mom's house and my dad's house and my grandparents’ houses, and just gives me something to keep me company on the highway on the way.

Dutch Bros started in Grants Pass, Oregon. They were third-generation dairy farmers who were being asked by the government to reduce the size of their cattle herds and needed to figure out something else to do, and chose coffee. What's really interesting about that is in my conversation with both Becky and with other baristas I spoke to, we ended up talking about how milk, and especially whole milk, was something that we ended up drinking significantly more often once we became baristas.

Funny enough, somebody works for an alternative milk company now, but I digress.

Dutch Bros is a pretty interesting case study as a franchise business and as one that has really taken and made the espresso-cart model a lasting thing around the country now.

The assessment that I got was that the coffee cart and drive-thru coffee cart craze was very much founded and grown because during the time when they were founded, Howard Schultz refused to get into drive-thru because he felt like it undermined the quality of his product. However, Starbucks is much larger than one person and has continued to grow and evolve.

I would also love to hear from people who may be able to tell me if there are coffee carts in places outside of the U.S. Clearly, they exist in Canada. I've seen them in British Columbia. But are there any ... anywhere else? Did anybody take them to Mexico or maybe outside of North America?

If you know of any, please let me know. Send me photos, or if you have any tips, comments, or you just want to keep up with what I'm up to, please follow me on Instagram and Twitter. I am @UpdosePodcast on Instagram and @UpdosePod on Twitter. The music you heard today was “Crusin' USA” by the band Iji (pronounced eehee) and “Wozniak Effect” by the band Stark and Nimo. Thank you to them both for allowing me to use their music for the show. Again, my name is Amanda Whitt. Thank you so much for listening to and being part of the very first episode of the Updose Podcast.

Go get yourself an iced mocha. Goodbye.

That was the first episode of the Updose Podcast!

Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear more stories from guest creators—some will be launching their own podcasts, and some are doing one-off audio projects. Thanks to Chobani, all creators will be paid for their time!

If you liked this episode, go follow Amanda on social media—they shouted out their handles just a moment ago, and stay tuned for more guest appearances over the next three weeks. We’re just getting started.

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. 

Boss Barista is a weekly newsletter and podcast series about workplace equity and employee empowerment in coffee and beyond. If you’re not already subscribed, welcome! I’m glad you found your way here. Before you go, sign up, will ya? Here’s a cute little button to make it easy:

If the following piece resonates with you, consider donating to my Patreon. Pledges of any size help me produce these stories, and your support is gratefully received.

We’re taking a quick break from our Boss Barista takeover this week—folks are busy working on their projects, and will have lots to share with you soon—to revisit an episode from April 2020. Sahra Nguyen is the founder of Nguyen Coffee Supply, a coffee brand based in New York that’s dedicated to promoting specialty Vietnamese coffee.

In this episode, we talk about why Vietnam, which is the world’s second-largest producer of coffee beans, goes largely ignored in the specialty coffee industry. Then we take the question one step further, and ask: What makes a thing special in the first place?

What does specialty coffee mean to you? If you work in coffee, it might signal one thing. If you don’t work in coffee, it might mean another.

The word “specialty” implies something unique, different—dare I say special—that makes it different from just regular coffee, right? Classing something as a specialty item implies the existence of the regular, the mundane—the non-special.

Today, we’re going to break down just what “specialty” is, and what makes a thing special, with Sahra Nguyen, the founder of Nguyen Coffee Supply in Brooklyn, New York. Sahra was a filmmaker and owned a restaurant in New York, and often found herself in coffee shops that had some of the “signals” of specialty coffee—coffees from a single origin, for example.

She’d see coffees from Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, and wonder—“What about Vietnam?” Sahra is Vietnamese-American, and would regularly see restaurants and cafes advertising Vietnamese iced coffee. But often, she found that they didn’t actually use coffee from Vietnam in those drinks.

As she questioned this—why would a coffee drink claiming to be from Vietnam not have coffee grown from Vietnam in it?—she encountered those broader questions about specialty. Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world, and the first-largest producer of robusta coffee. So why couldn’t she order a coffee from Vietnam at her local cafe?

Coffees from Vietnam don’t get talked about a lot in the specialty market. You don’t see them winning barista competitions, and you likely can’t order them by name at most cafes. But if you’ve had instant coffee, if you’ve had something from a can, if you’ve had any sort of diner coffee, you’ve had Vietnamese coffee.

So what is it? Why isn’t it talked about in the specialty world? In this episode, we explore what it means for a product to be considered special. And we ask, “Is specialty inherent or is it created?” Here’s Sahra.

Ashley: Where does this story start for you? When did you start getting interested in Vietnamese coffee specifically?

Sahra: I'm Vietnamese-American. My parents are Vietnamese—they're both refugees. They escaped the country after the Vietnam War. So for me, Vietnamese coffee as a culture, it's always been a part of my life.

I experienced it growing up, and also when I would go back to Vietnam throughout my childhood and my teenage years and a lot in my adult years. Drinking Vietnamese coffee or cà phê phin or cà phê sữa đá was always a big part of my cultural experience.

But really entering—in terms of my journey entering into a coffee space as a professional—it's really a new journey. I would say around 2016 was when the idea first started brewing for me. I had a small restaurant here in Brooklyn, so I've always been a part of the food and beverage community and around, 2015, 2016, Vietnamese food and culture was really having its moment in the culinary world, especially in New York City.

We were seeing the emergence of so many amazing first-generation, more modernized Vietnamese-American restaurants and on a similar wavelength, I noticed that Vietnamese coffee was also trending.

I would go into non-Vietnamese cafes and restaurants. And I would just see the words “Vietnamese coffee” on a menu. And I thought, “Oh, this is so exciting. Vietnamese coffee is having a moment right now, outside of the restaurants or the mom-and-pop restaurants in Chinatown.”

But actually what I was noticing was that a lot of places were putting Vietnamese coffee on their menus, but they weren't even using Vietnamese coffee beans, right? And I would ask them because I would drink it, and it would taste totally not like the Vietnamese coffee I knew.

And I'm asking like, “Oh, how do you make this Vietnamese coffee?”

And they would say, they used their cold brew, their house cold brew, or their drip or their house espresso. And they added condensed milk, right?

Oftentimes these beans were not Vietnamese coffee beans. They might've been a bean from South America or Africa and they were treating it, calling it Vietnamese coffee because they added condensed milk to it.

Ashley: Right.

Sahra: So I mean, in Vietnam there is a culture and there is a style where people use condensed milk, but it's not a requirement, but most of all, it's not like the core piece of Vietnamese coffee. The core piece is Vietnamese coffee beans.

I thought that was really interesting that as a culture, people were interested in Vietnamese coffee, but in terms of as a product, it really wasn't accessible or being utilized. And I think the biggest issue for me there, as a Vietnamese-American, I felt a huge level of injustice being done because I felt like Vietnamese people and Vietnamese producers were not benefiting from this transaction.

Ashley: I'm wondering at what point did you see this problem and decide, “Oh, I can fix this,” or not fix it maybe, but like, “How can I be like a change-maker in this process?” Because that's a huge jump.

Sahra: It was a really big jump! The way it happened was I was like, “Okay, well, why aren't you seeing Vietnamese coffees?”

And I was like, “Well, you know what, I want to make some Vietnamese coffee right now.” I would go into the grocery store and I'd go to every coffee shop and cafe. I would look for a single-origin Vietnamese coffee bean, and Ashley, I could not find it.

That's when the lightbulb kind of went off, and I was shocked that I couldn't find it because the specialty third-wave movement was all about all these different single origins and being so transparent. I was finding coffee from all around the world, but not one transparently [sourced] Vietnamese coffee. So that's when I was like, “Oh, well maybe I should bring it here.”

Ashley: How did that even start? What was the first step to even begin thinking, “Let me bring this coffee here and start importing it.”

Sahra: That idea first came to me in 2016. I remember in the fall of 2016, I was going to Vietnam to visit some family relatives. I was actually on the way to Cambodia to film one of my documentaries at the time—before I started the coffee company, I was a full-time journalist and documentary filmmaker. So I just hit up—and most of my relatives, most of my extended family are still in Vietnam.

So I hit them up, and I was like, “Hey, I'm coming to Vietnam.” And I was like, “Curious, question: does anybody know anyone who has a coffee farm or who has access to one?”

And my aunt was like, “Oh, actually I do know someone. Someone I used to work with left the company to take over his family farm.” My aunt lives in Hanoi, which is in the north, and then his farm—Anh Thien, who's my current producing partner, his farm is in Da Lat, which is in the central region. So we arranged a trip where we flew from Hanoi to Da Lat to meet up with him. This was in 2016, and that was pretty much the beginning of our relationship.

Ashley: Just from there, you were like, “This is happening. Let's bring this over here.”

Sahra: I mean, it didn't happen that fast. So in 2016, we went to his farm, and Anh Thien, he gave us a tour and I was just super excited and inspired by his passion for clean coffee, for organic coffee, because in Vietnam, there is a movement all around clean coffee, it's called cà phê sạch or pure coffee, cà phê nguyên chất, because for so long the coffee over there is known to be blended with fillers, such as soybeans or corn or artificial ingredients, like oils and butters.

But now with the new generation, there is a movement for clean and pure coffee, right? And my producer partner was very passionate about that as well. So for the rest of 2017, not much had happened, but I was just constantly thinking and doing a lot of research and a lot of self-learning through the internet and asking friends. And then it wasn't until 2018 when I was like, “Okay, I'm ready to make this happen.” That's when I started actively building the business from the beginning of 2018.

Ashley: That's amazing. I want to ask you a little more about the personality it takes to start a business, but I want to go back a little bit on the historical context that Vietnamese coffee exists in. As you were doing research, what were you finding out about Vietnamese coffee and how did that historical context inform the way that Vietnamese coffee was being viewed at that moment? Like in 2016, 2017?

Sahra: That's such a great question because I was doing a lot of research about the coffee industry and Vietnamese coffee and also exploring this question of like, “Why doesn't Vietnamese coffee exist in the U.S. or why couldn't I find it?”

And Ashley, I was so surprised to learn that Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world. When I learned that fact, it was like, my mind was blown. I was like, “Oh my God, Vietnam is the second-largest producer of coffee in the world yet I didn't even know that. And I'm Vietnamese!” A lot of people don't know that. All of these learnings just started to fuel my motivation more, to increase the transparency here. And the more I dug, I also discovered that the United States is the second-largest importer of Vietnamese coffee beans.

And then I was like, “Oh my God, mind blown, right?” So here we have this economic relationship that already exists between Vietnam and the U.S., but there's no transparency around it. Generally, Americans don't associate coffee production with Vietnam.

For me it was just like, this is really interesting what's happening here, because it's not like I'm trying to introduce a new sector, right? Or a new product. It just feels new because on a cultural awareness level, we don't know about it. So that really blew my mind, and just gave me a lot more motivation to right this injustice, to bring more visibility to a major contributor to the global coffee experience, and to increase the representation of Vietnamese folks. Folks in America who probably have already consumed Vietnamese coffee beans and some of their products, whether they're aware of it or not. I just wanted to build out that connection more between what folks may or may not be familiar with where it's coming from.

Ashley: So you were living in New York at the time, and you said that you would try to find coffees from Vietnam, especially in like 2016, 2017. [At that time] we already were pretty aware at most coffee shops that you could get a coffee from a single origin. You could ask for a coffee from Honduras or Ethiopia or Sumatra. So the idea that Vietnamese coffee is there and most people probably drank it, but they just don't know it, is really interesting.

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the perception of quality in terms of Vietnamese coffee, because I think if you asked specialty coffee folks, they'd probably be like, “Oh, I've heard Vietnamese coffee is bad,” or “I actually have no idea what Vietnamese coffee tastes like.”

Sahra: Yeah, that's a really good question. What I was finding online, on all the blogs and all the sites, it was this general common sentiment of Vietnamese coffee is inferior. Literally, the adjective ‘inferior’ kept popping up. I was like—and again, I’m Vietnamese-American—I was like, “Well, that's not nice!”

Also, my experience with Vietnamese coffee is so different. I've never seen it as inferior. I've seen it as integral and delicious and comforting. That for me is just pure societal and social context and just constructs of ideas. So I already, on a personal level, just didn't agree with it because I was like, “Well, that's not my experience. And I know I'm not the only one.”

Because there are a lot of people in the world who drink Vietnamese coffee. [But] then the blogs and people and everyone I’d talk to are saying, “Yeah, Vietnamese coffee is inferior.” Or, if you want to get more specific, they say, “Oh, robusta beans are inferior and arabica beans are superior.”

That also just feels like such a shocker. And again, that didn't resonate with me because I was like, “Why are we talking about varietals in a hierarchy?” We can talk about how treatment [of the producer] and production can be better or worse for the environment or better or worse for the consumer. But it just wasn't—it didn't feel fair or right at all to throw all these labels of hierarchy on to two different types of varietals. So that was what I was getting.

As I was interacting with some folks in the coffee space I just felt like a lot of people were just regurgitating old ways of thinking or regurgitating what they've heard, what they've been told. But then if I asked them, “Oh, have you ever had a single origin Vietnamese coffee?” and they would all say no.

Or I’d say, “Have you ever roasted a single-origin robusta?” They all say no. “Well, have you ever even tried or brewed 100% robusta beans that were [from a] single origin?” And they would say no. So that was on my mind—that people had such strong opinions around Vietnamese coffee beans and robusta beans, but they actually had never experienced it. And that for me just showed the power of old narratives and ways of thinking.

However, I do want to point out, Ashley, there is some truth to these ideas—of Vietnamese coffee beans being a different level of quality, and that there is some truth to that, because Vietnam's coffee industry for so long has been channeled into mass-market coffee. Or like, large volumes of coffee products. I think when that's happening—when the products are being sold at a lower rate—that system controls the pricing. That also controls the care that we have as producers or as buyers for the production of the coffee.

I think that is a systematic thing and that's a control thing and that's a construct of the value we place on a product, which affects what we're willing to pay for it, which doesn’t create any incentives for producers to change or improve their production, right?

Ashley: Yeah. We were talking about this a little bit before we started recording, but the idea that quality is inherent is kind of a problematic way to think about things, especially now that you've explained a lot of the ways that Vietnamese coffee has been funneled into our culture. It's like we have designated it as this lower-grade thing—we've put it in instant coffee, we've controlled it so that its value is lower.

Then when we suddenly start to prize coffee in a different way, because specialty coffee is still a fairly new way of consuming coffee, to say that Vietnamese coffee doesn't make the cut is really interesting. Because it assumes quality issues when really it's a social construct and it's an issue of, “Well, we funneled this coffee to be in this other space for so long. And then we never gave it a moment to be at the level that we consider specialty coffee to be.”

Sahra: Exactly. Exactly. And you know what, and I will say that in Vietnam in general as a country, as a coffee-producing country, there is a lot of work to be done across the board for it to improve its production, but that's also, like you said, because of the systems that have entrapped it so long into a certain tier of production.

But I know, because I know through my own direct relationships, my own interactions, that there are so many people in Vietnam—from consumers to nonprofit organizations to producers and farmers—who want to be a part of the specialty coffee movement. They're like, “Wait, what? People are paying what for Ethiopian [coffees]?” They want to be a part of it because they want to improve their quality of life, too. But if no one is looking to them to buy [coffee], then they're not gonna spend time to invest in their own production.

Ashley: Yeah. I'm wondering once you started your company, what were those first couple of months like—and how would you communicate what was happening to farmers? Because I imagine we live in this age of social media and the internet. It's not hard now, especially for farmers, to see what people are paying for coffee, or that there's a specialty coffee market that exists. I think it's really interesting that you mentioned that farmers want to be part of this process. I imagine now it's especially super visible and you've given some visibility to that as well.

Sahra: You know, I'll first share in terms of when I first launched—on the consumer end, Ashley, I was met with just so much excitement and enthusiasm, right? I think this is where, within the specialty coffee space, sometimes there's a disconnect between what's happening within the industry and what's happening with consumers, because within our industry folks could say all day, “Vietnamese coffees are inferior, Vietnamese coffee isn't good.”

But on a consumer level, consumers don't know about these old ways of thinking and they sometimes also just don't care. They just care what tastes good to them. And what they like. And so from the consumer end, we were met with so much support and excitement around Vietnamese coffee as a culture. And then also as a taste. So once people engaged with our product, we've continued to get such amazing feedback from people who say our coffee is delicious.

One person wrote, “Your coffee is divine,” the other day. Like this was the best coffee they ever tasted, and consumers don't care that it's robusta—whether they care or not, it doesn't matter to them. All that they care about is it tastes great.

So that has been the reaction on that front, which has been so affirming and so nice. For me, it's been really affirming because of course I felt a little nervous about entering the industry with a product or an idea that was just so hugely opposed, or that just seems so unpopular. But then the day I was like, “Whatever, this is what I like, and this is what I'm going to put out. I'm not here to convince anyone or I’m not here to convert anyone. I'm here to find people who like what I like.”

And then on the producing side of things, right now, I work with one farmer. One producer who has a team and then he has a whole network of cousins and aunts who also have farms.

The last time I met with him—he sells his coffee to Japan and he also sells domestically—and I asked him, “What is your dream? Why do you want to work together?”

And he said, “I think it would be so cool if my coffee beans made it to America.” And I was like, wow. And that's just this global cultural play of the power that America has in the eyes of others. But he said that and I was like, “That's so cool.” And of course, I pay higher rates so that if he was selling to people in Vietnam or Japan.

On top of that, he said something that was really touching. He said in Vietnam, coffee culture is huge because they know they're number two in the world. And they know they’re number one for robusta in the world, and they take a lot of pride in that—on top of coffee culture being a huge part of their life—but they also know that people don't know that about them. They feel a level of sadness and pain.

And one time I was talking to one of my partners and he said, “Cà phê Việt Nam có tiếng, nhưng không có tai tiếng.” And what that means is that Vietnamese coffee has fame, but doesn't have notoriety. So it's this idea of once it leaves the country, it kind of gets stripped of its identity.

Ashley: That's incredible. I have so many feelings about all the things you just said.

I want to talk a little bit about the idea of quality, because something that I would imagine is a big hurdle for you is that you had to redefine quality a little bit. Obviously, you had your customers telling you what they like and they don't like, but existing in this space where Vietnamese coffee has been disregarded as a quality coffee—how did you start to think about redefining what quality meant, and did you have to break out of ideas of what was good or what was bad, even for yourself? Did you think, “How do I present a thing that I am super confident in that maybe the rest of the industry hasn't seen yet?”

Sahra: Yeah. It's such a good question. And to be honest, actually, I've dealt with my share of insecurities around this question too. I'm entering an industry that has certain standards, expectations of quality, of specialty, and our coffee has never been graded. I haven't engaged with certain expectations within the industry because I'm not a veteran of the industry, to be honest. I entered this space three years ago, maybe four. And if I was going with standards and expectations, I would never be importing robusta beans. So our coffee has never been graded because I simply just don't care to meet that level of expectation or standard or validation. I just care so much more about the people within my ecosystem.

I care so much about my relationship with my partner and how that relationship is going. And I care so much about my relationships with my customers and what they think. And at the end of the day, do they like this coffee? That's what matters to me.

Quality of course is a production. When I met my producing partner, I felt like I got really lucky because I met someone who was also just so passionate about the clean coffee movement in Vietnam, and his company has been awarded, like, the top 20 companies in the country for organic practices. And so people ask, “Oh, do you have any certifications?” And we have no certifications to be totally honest, because certifications again are very expensive, they’re inaccessible, and my producing partner would not necessarily know how to navigate the bureaucracy of getting certified and/or have the resources to do that.

I remember I was on a panel recently at Coffee Fest with Roast Magazine—it was me and two other roasters—and someone asked the question, “Oh, do you care about certifications when you're buying green beans?” And I was so nervous about this question because I know that I don’t deal with certifications. And the other two also said, “No, we don't care about certifications.”

And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I'm not the only one.” I felt so validated that they said that. People, I think societally, have standards, expectations about what is quality, what is value, like, “Is this certified? Is it graded?” and all these things. I think to an extent that could be important because there are systems to validate or qualify certain things.

But at least for me, right now, within my journey and working with what I have, I just care more about the relationship rather than getting a certification. And I know that my partner is—I've been to his farm several times. I've seen his process. I know that he's extremely passionate about clean, organic coffee. That is how I think about quality. Of course, when we roast it, [we ask], “How does it taste? Do I like it? Is it something that I'm proud to stand behind—and then, do other people like it?” That's been my metric for putting together a product of quality and value.

Ashley: Which totally makes sense. It seems a little simplistic in a way, but at the same time, we all want things that taste good. Sometimes it can feel like the way that we evaluate coffee is almost convoluted. If a coffee is an 88, that matters to people who are Q graders, that are experts. But if I tell a customer this coffee scored an 88, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything.

Sahra: Exactly. Before I started the company, I was that type of consumer that fell so much into that demographic of, “I don't know a lot about coffee. I've never used a scale before. I don't know if the ratios are top of my head. I don't know anything about coffee scoring. I just know what I like.” As a consumer, I just felt such a disconnect from what was happening in specialty coffee. And I just felt like, “I can't be the only one.”

So when I started my company, we’re a people-centered company, which [means] we're always thinking about people every step of the way. And so that just translates into the product we produce and how we put it out. Always thinking about the end consumer in mind, rather than some other standards, expectations that may be valued by other people in the industry.

Ashley: Yeah. I think it's interesting. Because it feels like, in a way, you're very much part of the specialty coffee conversation, but in a way, you almost exist outside of it. Because you're doing the things that we in specialty coffee prize—we talk about wages for farmers. We talk about helping producers get more money for their coffee. But at the same time, when we write off a whole region, when we write off a whole country, is that in line with the values of specialty coffee? I would say no.

Sahra: You know what? Thank you for saying that, Ashley. Because I felt that, too. When I was starting the company, I was like, “Well, here we are at this moment in time where there's so much care in the coffee community around transparency and visibility and connection.” And I just felt like those values were not being applied to people in Vietnam. That disconnect was definitely a huge motivating factor for me to change it.

Ashley: What has it been like opening a coffee shop, being in New York—which is the center of the coffee world I would say right now in the United States—and doing something totally different?

Sahra: First of all, I was going to clarify that we don't have a coffee shop. We don't have a retail space. We had a four-month pop-up that operated five days a week, eight hours a day. So it was a pretty heavy coffee program. But right now we are mostly focusing on importing and roasting and we're DTC [direct-to-consumer]. So we focus mostly on selling online. And then of course we had some wholesale partnerships, which are now at a halt with everything happening with corona. So we're mostly focused on importing and roasting and selling direct to consumers online. [Some crosstalk.] Go ahead Ashley.

Ashley: Oh no, no, no. I was just gonna say, how do you make that sale? Especially in a system that's so entrenched in certain perceptions of what coffee is like—I imagine direct-to-consumer was probably a little bit of an easier sell—but I also imagine wholesale must've been a little bit more challenging.

Sahra: Not really, because there's actually an entire community and population and segment of business that serve coffee that a lot of specialty coffee roasters are not paying attention to.

These businesses I'm talking to are all of the Asian restaurants, bakeries, cafes that also serve coffee, right? Whether they're serving a Vietnamese coffee or they're a boba shop that also has an espresso machine or an Asian bakery that focuses on Asian treats and that also serves coffee. Also with this wave of first-generation entrepreneurs, there are a lot more restaurants, whether it's a restaurant or a Thai restaurant or an Asian restaurant that also serves coffee. So I've actually gotten a lot of inbound [inquiries] since we launched because prior to my company launching, I think a lot of people were using—the most common products people were using for their Vietnamese coffee was Café Du Monde, which is not a Vietnamese coffee brand.

And I don't even know where they get their coffee beans from, because it's not clear anywhere on their packaging or website. It's also not a freshly roasted coffee brand or products from Vietnam, which are imported from Vietnam that state on the packaging that it also includes artificial flavorings and ingredients. Right?

So there actually hasn't been a product like Nguyen Coffee Supply that is direct-trade, imported, and roasted fresh in Brooklyn—Vietnamese coffee beans. But there were all these businesses that were serving the idea of Vietnamese coffee. I've kind of offered a new iteration or an improved product for some that already existed. And none of these coffee roasters, no one was speaking to this demographic. And so in that space, it hasn't been a hard sell to people.

The inbounds—actually people reach out to us all the time. Because there aren't a lot of options. But if I was trying to approach a coffee shop or a hotel that may be serving more of a bigger roaster, then that is definitely a harder sell. Not just because of the beans, because I think with all of our storytelling, we've been able to really—I don't know if you've seen our articles or press articles, but there's a huge culture shift happening. Everything from CNN writing recently, “Why the world is waking up to Vietnamese coffees,” like Matador network recently, “It’s past time to respect the Vietnamese coffee bean.”

So there is a cultural shift happening. And I think the more storytelling that we're able to push, the more people are like, “Whoa, what is this Vietnamese coffee bean? I actually kind of want to have this unique product in my shop now.” I think as that grows, that will become less difficult. The main thing that is difficult for us right now to support, to compete with other roasters, is because we're so small, we can't offer the whole array of services, like tech support or free machines or 24/7 maintenance. That's something that's kind of holding us back the most with the traditional coffee hotel space.

Ashley: I want to go back to something you said about the attention that the media has paid to you folks because you're right—when I was doing research before we started talking, there are dozens of articles about Vietnamese coffee and about you specifically. I wonder—what is that like? What has that been like to see Vietnamese coffee receive so much attention? I wonder how, and you've mentioned this a little bit too, storytelling and just putting the spotlight on Vietnamese coffee has affected the way that your business can operate, and the way that we view Vietnamese coffee in general?

Sahra: Yeah. That's such a great question.

Ashley: Was it surprising? Because I was looking at the articles that have been written about you, and I can't think of a lot of other coffee companies that have been so well-covered.

Sahra: Thanks Ashley. Yeah, it does surprise me and honestly, it is the greatest joy of this job—to have our narrative and our perspective being amplified like this. And honestly, this is the reason why I started a coffee company. It's not because I wanted to get into one of the hardest industries, of learning how to import and roast and sell coffee beans. I mean, that's a small part of it, but really in my heart, it's because I just cared so much about increasing representation for Vietnamese people, producers, culture, and coffee, right? That is my true mission. And I'm using coffee—a very globally shared experience as a platform to get there. So when I see these headlines, honestly, sometimes I just kind of freak out inside because I'm like, “Holy s**t, it's happening.”

It's happening and it’s not about my business growing, but it's happening—the shift is f*****g happening. The culture shift is happening. These old ways of thinking that put Vietnamese coffee and people and culture down are changing, right? People are starting to appreciate Vietnamese coffee now, people are starting to respect it, Vietnamese people and culture. Producers are starting to get recognition—that is happening.

It just gives me chills to think, to see the shift happening, and it's happening in this moment. I just feel such a deep sense of gratitude for all the writers, all the people who take the time to listen and take the time to write and to amplify and to share.

It's been—I don't even have all the words to describe this feeling, but it's been such an incredible joy to be able to play a role in honoring Vietnamese people, culture, and coffee.

Ashley: That's incredible. I imagine it must be incredible to feel like you're doing a thing and people are noticing it and you're like, “Yes, I'm on the right track. I'm doing something right.” Because I imagine you can have self-confidence always, and you can be like, “I know I'm doing the right thing,” but there is a deep validation to feeling like, “Oh, other people are also noticing it and also give a s**t.”

Sahra: The articles about us, they're not just product-focused. It's not like, “Check out this new company that is producing this really cool coffee.” It's not about [that]—it's the fact that these articles and the way that people are understanding us or the way they're writing about us. It's really about a global movement and a global shift, right? That's what I think is so empowering about this process. It's not like, “Oh, here's a new cool company and here’s a new, cool product.” It's—the headlines are so culture-shifting, and it has such a deep, deep impact for the industry, for producers, and also for consumers. I can't even tell you how many amazing messages I get from consumers who are generally Asian-American, or more specifically Vietnamese-American.

So many times, people write to me and they say three words that just blow me away—they say, “I feel seen.” These are Vietnamese-Americans and Asian-Americans. A lot of POC, people of color, we deal with lack of representation in the media all the time—in leadership positions, in government, in business. That lack of representation is so deep that when they see their name reflected on a coffee bag, they're like, “I feel seen.” That level of impact is also just so deeply rewarding for me because if you looked at my work before I started a coffee company, it's always been rooted in representation and community empowerment. So that has been really incredible for me to experience in this journey.

Ashley: So we're in this moment in time, and I think it's kind of hard to ignore, and we talked a little bit about it, but coronavirus has obviously affected pretty much every coffee company across the nation, across the globe. I wonder how that has shifted the way that you've operated your business. Because you're probably set up, I would imagine, a little bit better than most, just because you do a lot of direct-to-consumer sales.

But I'm also looking at your Instagram account and I'm looking at your social media presence and your website and I'm like, “Oh, you folks are ready for this moment.” Not in a positive way. And I don't mean like territorial or predatory in any way, but you seem to understand that the shift in how businesses work will be direct-to-consumers, and will rely more on social media. I wonder how—number one, how coronavirus has affected you, and number two, how you posit yourself now as a business that is having to look to the future because things are going to be different.

Sahra: So when we launched the company, we launched as a DTC business, as a digital-forward company. We did spend a lot of time building out this infrastructure and its ecosystem of social media-meets-content-meets commerce. I am, at heart, I'm a storyteller, I've had a career as a filmmaker. I love telling stories. And so creating content and telling stories through social media and also through our blog—we publish at least two to four new blog posts weekly—we love telling stories. That's always been such a big part of our business.

At the beginning of this year, I was like, “Okay, now I really want to go into the B2B [business-to-business] space and I want to grow out the B2B program and I want to expand our business model in that way.” So we were working on that and by February, B2B sales were 35% of our revenue. But of course, all of that came to a screeching halt when all of our retail partners closed their doors.

As soon as it happened, of course, I, as a human, was just freaking out about the world. I was also just really feeling a lot of pain for all of my partners. And some of my closest friends in New York are restaurant owners—because I used to be restaurant owner, I'm really tight with the F&B [food and beverage] community here. I was just feeling a lot of pain over everything that's happening there.

We did quickly pivot. I mean, it wasn't like we had to rebuild our business model because we were already DTC it was just like, “Okay, now we're putting all the B2B stuff on hold.”

All of our B2B sales have stopped. We're not going to do outbound strategy anymore. We're just going to focus all the energy now back to DTC. But in, within the DTC space, the shift I was making—and I was talking to my team about this—it is so important that we proceed right now with a lot of compassion and empathy. Just thinking about what value we can bring to our digital community, right? Doubling down on our core offering, which is coffee, how can we bring comfort to people? Yes, coffee, that's where we've always done that and we want to continue doing that. But I also just felt understanding the needs of our community—it’s our community, they're coffee drinkers and they’re coffee drinkers across all industries and across all experiences, all cultures.

So we did a lot of thinking around how else can we support our community during this time? That included creating a lot of content around self-care for people who are staying home right now—we created a post around how people could generate some income from home. We're working on creating a list of digital tools for people. We launched a campaign called Make Mornings Better, offering 10 steps to fortify their mornings, everything from stretching to meditating to starting the day with gratitude to doing a power pose.

So for us, we've always been a people-centered company. We've always been about the people first, from our producing partners to our consumers. So yeah, during this time, as we did that quick pivot into DTC, it wasn't just about, “Buy our coffee, you need coffee now.” It was like, “Okay, how can we be really empathetic and compassionate right now? And add and create value, in addition to coffee, to support our community?” And that's where a lot of the content came in—also this Saturday, we're doing our first Zoom community session. We had a monthly event series that we hosted at our roastery, but since people can't come together, we're going to start doing sessions over Zoom together.

Ashley: That's amazing. Just hearing all the different ideas that kind of feel number one, they're big pivots, but at the same time, they also feel really natural and organic to the business that you've already created.

As we close out, I was wondering, is there anything that you'd want people to know about you listening to this?

Sahra: Hmm. Anything that I would want people to know about me? That's a good question, Ashley. No one's ever asked me that. To know about me?

Ashley: Yeah.

Sahra: Who's listening, first of all?

Ashley: Baristas, I think? Maybe some other coffee professionals, I don't know. Sometimes people message me and they're like, “I love that episode.” And I'm like, “Oh, you listen? That's great!”

Sahra: (Laughs) To know about me? I don't know—I'm kind of drawing a blank, but I want to give you something. What would I want listeners to know about me? I would say, in this moment, I just want to continue to find ways to support people, whether that's my team or my family or the community, with what I have. Right now, one of the things that I have is Nguyen Coffee Supply as a platform. So yeah. I don't know, Ashley, that's a tough question.

Ashley: No, that's fair. I feel like this is the part of the conversation if people don't care about the weird things that I care about, they can shut off right now.

But the things that I'm always really interested in are the personality traits—the things that kind of make, that kind of define a person. And not to say that there are certain defining characteristics to every person or that they're immovable or fixed. But something that I'm really drawn to with you is that you saw this thing happening, and then you kind of just went for it.

Which is incredible and not something to be glossed over. So I wonder, have you always been that type of person to just see a problem or see something that you were like, “Why is it this way? I'm going to go find out.”

Sahra: I have always been the type of person that loves to explore potential. I always want to see how far I can take it. I always want to see what I can do. I know exactly where that feeling comes from.

At a very young age, I just felt the pain of stereotypes. I felt the pain of being boxed in with the model minority myth—if you don't know what that is, Google that— being deemed the model minority myth. So basically, I just felt like society was boxing me into such a one-dimensional person of who I could be as an Asian-American, as a woman. And I just hated that feeling at such a young age. I was like, “I just want to smash this box open and see how far I can take it.”

So that has always been a part of me. I think whether it's been through my film career or through starting Nguyen Coffee Supply, I guess I just love seeing what's possible. I want to keep trying to do as much as I can and see how far I can take it before I pass it off to the next generation. That is something that really excites me.

One thing that I want people to know in this moment is that I really just want to help—in all aspects, I just want to help. I want to help people get through this corona situation, whether it's donating a part of our sales or starting the Undocu Workers' Fund, or I'm supporting my team, or helping to shift the culture because I just want to help. So if anybody out there wants to do some cool things to help the world, I'm super open.

Ashley: Thank you for taking the time to talk to me. This has been such an incredible shared moment, and I'm really appreciative that I got to spend some time with you.

Sahra: Oh my gosh. Of course. Thank you so much for taking the time to reach out and thank you for listening and thank you for helping to tell our story.

The Boss Barista takeover is brought to you by Chobani. Chobani’s mission is making better food for more people, and they’ve brought that mission to non-dairy by crafting the ultimate oat milk for food service—Chobani Oat Barista Edition.

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Welcome to the Boss Barista takeover!

A few weeks ago, I put a call out to coffee folks, fans, and drinkers across the globe to pitch ideas about the podcast they’ve been dreaming of making—and today we’re turning the mic over to the first in our series of guest creators. 

Today’s episode spotlights Cafetera Intelectual, hosted by Doris Garrido and Sandra Loofbourow. Their show explores the connection between coffee-producing and coffee-consuming countries and is bilingual, sharing insights in both English and Spanish. You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts, and new episodes come out every Friday. This is Cafetera Intelectual’s very first English-language episode, and Doris and Sandra are chatting with Rosalba Cifuentes, an international coffee exporter based in Mexico. 

The next voice you’ll hear is Sandra’s, and as always, you can find a full transcript of this episode at bossbarista.substack.com. Be sure to listen until the end to hear more about this takeover project, and to learn how you can get involved!

Sandra Loofbourow: Welcome to Cafetera Intelectual. We’re honored today to be featuring this interview with Rosalba Cifuentes of Mayan Harvest.

Doris Garrido: Cafetera Intelectual is a bilingual podcast hosted by Doris Garrido and Sandra Loofbourow. We’re two Latina coffee professionals living in the California Bay Area. Because of our shared culture and wide network of friends both inside and beyond the industry, we’ve heard a lot of amazing stories in multiple languages. We want to bring these stories to you.

SL: Today we’re featuring our interview with Rosalba of Mayan Harvest; you can listen to the original two-part interview in Spanish on all your favorite podcast platforms. Here, we’re giving you a glimpse of some of the amazing things that Rosalba shared with us in English, even though the interview was originally conducted in Spanish.

DG: Special thanks to Ashley Rodriguez for sharing our first ever English episode on Boss Barista. Thanks to our listeners and to our community. Bienvenidos a Cafetera Intelectual.

SL: In case you haven’t met Rosalba Cifuentes, let me tell you a little bit about her: Rosalba is a small Mexican woman from Bella Vista, Chiapas. Her outfit usually includes a shirt covered in colorful embroidery that’s traditional in her region; each style is from a specific town, and she can tell you exactly where it’s from based on the technique. Her hair is long and black, usually running down her back. While the decision-makers in coffee tend to be tall white men, Rosalba stands proudly among them. She’s a force to be reckoned with.

Rosalba Cifuentes: Es un placer estar aquí, de verdad. No es trabajo ni es un esfuerzo, es un placer estar acá.

SL: But how did Rosalba, who spent 20 years working at restaurant chains in the U.S., end up an international exporter of coffee?

RC: Lo que me llevó a estar en la industria de café son los recuerdos de mis familiares cuando yo era una niña. Segundo, la injusticia que hay en la industria del café. En el extranjero no saben todo. De ahí viene la idea de poder... de empezar esta exportación de cafe. Bueno, yo exporto e importo.

SL: She says that what inspired her first were the injustices she saw happening at origin, in her own hometown. Stories that don’t often make it out from the field. By taking control of the supply chain she was able to ensure that everyone was getting treated fairly.

I asked Rosalba, what is it about the coffee industry that has left an impact on her.

RC: Cuáles son las cosas que me han impactado mientras estoy en esta industria de café: la injusticia es uno de los impactos grandes. El saber que todavía existen personas que llegan allá y les dicen a los productores “te voy a pagar… no sé, el triple de lo que te están pagando en el mercado, pero te pago en veinte días” Los productores, por que el precio es tan tentativo, llevan todo su café. Luego esa persona de la noche a la mañana desaparece con su café. Es algo que a mi me impactó y me estremeció demasiado. Estar viendo la extrema pobreza de los productores, hasta personas que solo tienen que sobrevivir con dos o tres bultitos de café, y que alguien venga y se los robe, fue un impacto enorme para mi.

SL: First, she mentions the inequities of the supply chain. To this day, she’s disappointed to say that there are still so-called “coyotes,” coffee buyers who go to rural communities offering double or triple market rate for coffee. For smallholder farmers who only have a small handful of bags to sell for the year, this offer is hard to resist. Of course, the coyote can’t pay them today, but they’ll be back in 10 days to pay the full sum, promise. They obviously never come back, and the subsistence farmers end up losing their only cash crop. To know the harsh realities of life for these families and still perpetrate these crimes is to be truly heartless.

RC: El segundo impacto que tuve fue al yo traer mi café acá, sin tener mercado, sin saber dónde lo iba vender, solo lo traje y lo metí en la bodega aquí en Annex. Okay, ya esta el cafe aqui y… que hago con un contenedor de cafe? Mis veinte años de trabajo están en granitos de café. Me impactó tanto que yo iba a las cafeterías pero no miraba que tenían en sus menús café de México, siempre era café de otros países. Y yo digo, de chiapas principalmente, de Oaxaca, se manda toneladas y toneladas de café, como puede ser que no hay café mexicano aquí. Pero si, el café mexicano está en todas las cafeterías, pero está en mezcla. No es un café de origen. Tal vez han ido descubriendo más, pero muy poco. Eso me impacto.

SL: The second thing that struck Rosalba early on is that she wasn’t seeing Mexican coffees on specialty coffee menus. She knew first-hand how much coffee was leaving Chiapas, but it didn’t seem to appear anywhere on menus in consuming countries. With time she learned that Mexican coffees are often used as blends, not as single origins. She was disappointed to learn that Mexican coffees weren’t typically considered high-quality, and since then she’s been working to change this perspective. I would say that she’s achieved this; Rosalba is part of a new wave of high-quality Mexican coffees reaching the specialty industry, and thanks to her there are bags of single-origin coffee Bella Vista in hundreds of coffee shops around the world.

RC: Yo también. Me impactó yo misma al ver todas las locuras que hago.

SL: En eso estoy de acuerdo, yo casi a diario estoy impactada con las cosas que estás haciendo. Es increíble.

DG: Yo me acuerdo que una de las cosas que la Rosalba me dijo cuando yo recien la conoci es que queria poner el cafe de Mexico—mas bien el nombre de Bella Vista en el mapa de cafe.

SL: Bueno, ya lo logro eso

RC: Podría decir que ya está casi logrado.

SL: The last thing Rosalba says has impressed her in the coffee industry is herself, and all the crazy projects she’s been able to complete successfully, even though people said it was impossible. Out of all the incredible stories I’ve heard in this industry that I love so much, Rosalba’s is one of the most powerful, and one of the most unique. She has a tenacity, and a perseverance that’s unmatchable. Where others say “you can’t” she says “I can!” and then she does. In this interview we talk about just one or two of her success stories, but she has countless more, and none of them came easily. She has worked incredibly hard to get where she is today and I’m so glad that she’s able to take some pride in all that she’s accomplished.

Rosalba is particularly sensitive to the plight of women in her community. Machismo is alive and well in most of Latin America, and rural areas often experience it even more intensely. Being a woman, being Indigenous, are all factors that work against her. It’s part of what makes Rosalba’s story so inspiring: not only did she get out and build a life for herself, but she came back to Bella Vista and now runs a big successful company that helps support the people in her community. Everything Rosalba does is intentional, and this is one of them: She wants to make sure the young women in her community see what she’s accomplished, because if she can do it, why can’t they? She says women have to stop thinking we’re not capable, and instead get the “yes we can” mentality into our heads. We are capable of more than we think.

RC: De ser una persona con descendencia o raíces indígenas… Primero, en mi país es bastante complicado, por el machismo que hay. Hay mucho machismo en nuestras comunidades. Y fuera de las comunidades hay mucha discriminacion. Es muy difícil para nosotras que tengamos esta identidad indigena es bastante complicado para nosotras las mujeres. Solamente estamos para la casa, para ser amas de casa. Las pocas que hemos salido fuera de nuestra comunidad, pues ya viene la discriminacion, por la identidad de persona. Eso es bien importante, que como mujeres nos metamos en la mente el “sí se puede” y quitarnos el “es imposible”

SL: At the beginning of 2020, Rosalba was in Bella Vista getting ready to export that year’s harvest. She’s been exporting since 2015, and has achieved significant growth year after year. Rosalba is incredibly hands-on, and her growth is largely thanks to the fact that she herself travels all over the world checking in with her customers and meeting more. 2020 was set to be her biggest year yet. But everything changed with the pandemic.

RC: Ahorita estamos pasando un problema bastante difícil con la pandemia. A mi me agarro allá en la comunidad. Quedé prácticamente atrapada. Me di cuenta que se empezó a para mucho la venta de cafe. Bastante. Y así, de verle esas caritas sufriendo que si el café se iba vender o no se iba vender, señoras de 80, 86, 90 años de edad sufriendo por que es su única entrada de dinero. Están viviendo solas, y ahora su café se va quedar ahí porque no se puede vender. Entonces yo les dije “Bueno mis chicas, es tiempo de dejar de llorar y actuar. Vamos hacer algo.”

SL: “Mis chicas” le dijiste a estas señoras maduras! “Ya chiquillas, nos fuimos”

RC: Si, si. “Buenos mis chicas” les digo, ustedes no se van a poner. Les vi esa cara de alegría, y eso… Mi impulso de loquera al fin, cuando veo esas sonrisas que mi loquera les impulsó a algo bueno, eso me da mucho orgullo. Digo “Wow. Una cosa más que logro”. Y ya logre esto y tengo tantas más adelante esperándome. Tengo una línea ya de proyectos esperándome, la línea ya no tiene fin. Es complicado porque cada proyecto es un tope que hay que pasar, y hacerlo.

SL: She saw early on that coffee sales were slowing down. For many of the people in Bella Vista—especially the older women, single women, or heads of household—coffee is their only income. And now, their coffee was just sitting there, already harvested, processed, dried, and bagged, with nowhere to go and no buyers to take it. Rosalba had to do something. “Listen girls” she said—yes, she called the octogenarian grandmas “girls”—“Listen girls, we’ve got to stop crying and take action. Here’s what we’re going to do: We’re going to roast the coffee ourselves.” And although she saw a flicker of hope on their faces, the women weren’t convinced right away. “But Rosalba!” they said, “it will take all year to roast this much coffee on the comal!”

But as always, Rosalba’s plans were much bigger. In fact, Rosalba only makes big moves. Her reasoning is this: If it takes the same amount of time to do a small project, with a small impact, as it does to do a big one … she may as well go all in. Rosalba found someone in a nearby town to teach her to roast. She took a two-week intensive training, and came back ready to show the women all about a different kind of coffee production: roasting, bagging, and selling coffee to the national market.

RC: Nos vamos a poner a tostar el café. Alguien me dijo: “nos vamos a llevar todo el año tostando café en el comal!” Pero porque ellas no sabían cómo se podía tostar tanto café en un día. Ellas sabían que en el comal se tuesta, y esa es la única manera. Es bastante difícil para el grupo de productoras allá pensar … dicen “que estás diciendo, vas a tostar en el café” Si les digo, pero no en un comal”. Me voy dos semanas a aprender a tostar café, regreso y nos ponemos a tostar café. Me fui las dos semanas, volví con lo poquito que mire, y empezamos a buscar un lugar más cerca que me quedara para poder llevar y tostar el café. Empezamos a tostar, envasar, y el café ahora está disponible y voy hacer apenas un tour por todo México para poder llevar muestras y empezar a hacer promociones.

SL: At the time of our interview, the coffee from the women of Bella Vista was already in several Mexican states, including large hotel chains, and Rosalba was preparing to embark on a tour of Mexico to make more contacts and increase sales. She knew that her compatriots wanted to drink high-quality coffee grown right there in their own country, and she was right. Her roasting market is thriving, and she continues to see it grow.

And the women of Bella Vista, who only knew how to roast coffee on a comal, who had never cupped coffee or even seen a roaster, are now running a full production line fulfilling orders of thousands of pounds of coffee and shipping it all over the country.

DG: Incluso antes de que empezara todo el proyecto de café, siempre estaba buscando cosas que podrían mejorar el nivel de vida de las mujeres de Bella Vista verdad? Yo recuerdo un cuento de unas ollas eléctricas, entonces … por qué no nos cuentas, Rosalba.

RC: Si, allí, aparte de todo este trabajo que les acabo de mencionar que hace una mujer allá en el rancho, hay que cortar leña. La leña es de las ramas secas de los árboles, y hay que cortarla y hay que hacer fuego para cocinar. En mi cocina tengo una ollita para cocer frijoles y arroz, y se me prendió la idea y dije, “Les tengo que llevar a ellas esto, porque esto es super fácil para ellas”. Entonces me voy a las tiendas a comprar las ollas eléctricas y se las llevó. Y le ha ayudado tanto que… yo no he podido llevarle exactamente todas pero… de hecho tengo una lista grande de seguir trayéndoles, porque ellas están tan fascinadas con algo tan básico como eso. Es una gran ayuda, y algo tan pequeño les hace más fácil el trabajo al grupo de mujeres.

SL: Even before starting her coffee exporting business in 2015, Rosalba was always looking for ways to help the women of her community. Women in Bella Vista are expected to work the fields side by side with the men, but they also have to cook, clean, and raise the children—responsibilities the men rarely share. This means waking up in the early hours of the morning to cut firewood, get beans on the stove and make breakfast before everyone wakes up. After working all day in the fields they come home again to chop wood, cook for the family, and clean. They work all day long. So Rosalba asked herself: How can I give them more time?

The answer came in the form of electric slow cookers. For years now, Rosalba has been bringing dozens of countertop slow cookers to the women in Bella Vista; even after all these years she still has a list of women waiting to get theirs. The cookers mean that they don’t have to wake up early to chop wood, instead they plop beans in there in the morning and by the time they’re back from the fields there’s food ready to eat. It’s a form of liberation, freeing up their time to do something else.

RC: Es bien curioso que muchas personas me han preguntado a mi si yo trabajo para alguien, y si esa persona me esta poniendo como la cara del negocio para poder avanzar. Les digo, no, es mi negocio. No hay nadie poniendo me a dar la cara cuando es otra persona la dueña. Son 17 años trabajando y ahorrando mi dinero más otros años más, en total son 20 años de esfuerzo que yo puse en este negocio.

SL: Many people think that Rosalba runs the company with her husband. Some ask whether she has a backer who’s using her as the face of the company while they manage the business. Let’s make one thing clear: Rosalba is the owner and founder of Mayan Harvest. She started these projects entirely with her own money and it’s her own hard work and dedication that’s gotten Mayan Harvest where it is today.

RC: Ahora, con el grupo de mujeres para tostar el café, para pagarlos fletes que mueven el café de un lado a otro, para comprar las bolsas, para pagar los de sanitización y de SAGARPA, son bastantes gastos. El envío de la paquetería, es un monton de gastos y son gastos que corren por mi cuenta. Ni si quiera se los hago saber al grupo de mujeres porque ya tienen bastante carga sobre ellas. Claro en un momento cuando esto está fluyendo mejor, ya de ahi mismo tiene que salir para hacerlos envíos pero ahorita les digo “son mis bebes y tengo que crecerlas.”

SL: In this new endeavor, the roasting project, she’s once again fronted all the expenses to get the business started. She looks forward to one day passing the management and finances back to the women of Bella Vista, so they can run this new business independently. But for now she knows that they have enough to worry about, and plenty to learn. “They’re like my little chicks. I’ve got to grow them up first, until they day they’re ready to fly on their own.”

Rosalba’s main business is green coffee. I ask her, how did she learn to become such a skilled cupper? She’s taken aback at first—despite running her business for five years, exporting, importing, and selling coffee, and now roasting it and teaching the women of Bella Vista how to roast, cup and do production—no one has ever called her a coffee cupper, a catadora.

RC: Pues fijate, primer persona que escucho que me dice “catadora.”

SL: Es lo que eres, estás organizando compras y ventas y tuestes y perfiles, no hay otra palabra para eso.

RC: Ay, gracias gracias. Fijate que me fui a tomar algunas clases con Katie.

SL: A lot of her training came from Kate Carguilo of Counter Culture Coffee, who would host the Tastings at Ten in Emeryville.

RC: Empecé con ella todos los viernes, a ir. Lo hice por mas de un año, y empecé a descubrir que podía diferenciar bien un café de especialidad y un café que noches de especialidad. Entonces con esa experiencias, esos tiempos que fui aprendiendo a catar el café. Tambien con Rosi.

SL: Rosi Quiñones, who worked at Royal Coffee at the time and remains a near and dear Cafetera Intelectual, has been another big support. When Rosi was training for her Q certification, Rosalba did a lot of practice sessions with her, and they learned together.

RC: Entonces cuando ella estaba haciendo su Q, fui también a algunas clases para aprender más. Entonces aprendí a distinguir entre los cafés de especialidad. Y eso se lo quise enseñar a las mujeres productoras de Bella Vista. Nunca en su vida ellas supieron que era, ellas escuchaban “es que el café tiene que ser bien procesado para que cate bien”. Y ellas decían “pero que es que cate bien??” Y entonces yo dije bueno, les voy a enseñar.

SL: Introducing the idea of cupping to the people of Bella Vista took some explaining, but they understand now how important it is that they harvest and process their coffee with the utmost care, precisely so that it tastes good on the cupping table. While the people of Bella Vista have a rich tradition of coffee drinking, it looks nothing like a cupping.

RC: Ellas lo preparan, lo tuestan en el comal. Después de que lo tuestan lo muelen en piedra, en el metate. Algunos lo muelen en el molino de mano todavía, un molino chiquito que lo vas dando vuelta y va saliendo el polvito a un lado. Entonces de esa manera lo hacen. Mas antes todavía lo quebraban en tipo morteritos también. Hay una trayectoria en esos de café, pero así es más usual usar la piedra o el molino.

SL: Usually, they roast the coffee fresh on the comal, and grind it on a metate, which is a stone slab with a rolling pin you may have seen people use to grind corn or chocolate. Sometimes they use a hand mill, or a mortar and pestle instead. Even if it’s not cafe de olla, the coffee is usually sweetened with piloncillo (unrefined sugar), cinnamon, and sometimes ground cacao.

RC: Mi café se ha exportado a Alemania, Holanda, Francia, Suiza, China, Dubai, pues… está en muchos lugares que ya ni en mi mente caben todos los lugares donde se ha ido, y está en casi todo los EEUU, y en muchas partes de Canadá también.

SL: Rosalba’s coffee has reached an international audience now; in 2020 she exported green coffee to a long list of new destinations, including Germany, Denmark, France, Switzerland, China, Dubai and others. It’s also in most of the U.S., and in Canada too. Next, she’s set her sights on a market close to my heart: She’s working on exporting coffee to Chile, where there’s a growing community of specialty coffee roasters and consumers.

RC: Mi meta ahorita en mi lista—de tantas que tengo—es exportar café a Chile.

SL: Siiii, esa! Escucharon eso chiquillos? Ya va llegar el café Mayan Harvest a Chile.

RC: Si! En eso estamos trabajando ahorita. Ya tengo varios contactos, y están bastante interesados en esa área de café de especialidad. Y me dice un chico: “Yo voy a abrir una cafetería, y la quiero abrir con café mexicano, y tiene que ser el tuyo.” Estaba como loca mirando el mensaje diciendo “Si! Si!!” bien emocionada. Y hay veces que, entre tantas emociones, hay veces en que se me salen las lágrimas por que digo yo, wow. Como aquella personita que llegó a este país cuando tenía solo 16 años de edad, perdida, sin saber leer ni escribir, trabajando en un restaurante, otra idioma. Ahora ya me veo toda una importadora y exportadora de café. Me estoy convirtiendo en una exportadora e importadora internacional.

SL: Sometimes she thinks about the young, abused, 16-year-old girl who came to the U.S. without being able to read or write, let alone speak the language. Now she’s a fully fledged importer/exporter with her sights set on international markets. She likes big challenges—after all, if she’s going to spend time on something she may as well make it as impactful as possible.

RC: Me gustan los retos grandes. Por que, pierdo mi tiempo en retos chiquitos lo mismo que en un reto grande, y en un reto grande voy a tener un impacto mucho mejor. Entonces siempre voy arriba, arriba.

SL: And her projects are BIG; often when she tells me about a new endeavor it takes me a beat to understand the scale she’s talking about. Doris and I have started to call it the “Rosalba Scale.” Whatever you think the Rosalba Scale is, I can promise she’s thinking bigger than that.

RC: Siempre les doy ese mensaje a muchas mujeres, que tal vez me ven como la loquita que anda haciendo tantas cosas por allá y tantas cosas por acá. Pero yo quisiera aparte de pensar en esa manera también sea yo una inspiración, y que digan “si ella puede hacerlo, por que yo no.” Hay que aventarnos, si te salieron mal las cosas levántate y aguantate y sigue haciendo mas.

SL: She wants to be a role model; if there’s anyone out there debating whether or not to embark on a project, Rosalba is here to tell you to go for it. If it doesn’t go well, that’s okay! Pick yourself up and try again! Odds are you’re capable of much more than you think.

RC: Yo estoy muy segura de lo que hago. Mi fuerte es que yo tengo muchas amistades que me apoyan demasiado. Eso es una gran ayuda. Mi consulado Mexicano a mi me a servido de mucho apoyo. Cuando yo necesito algo le llamó a un chico o una chica que está ahí en el consulado y le digo “Saben qué, necesito este permiso” y pum me mando en link. Y me meto y ya es todo. Mi consulado es algo que me ha servido bastante, me ayudan bastante. Y si hay cosas que ellos no saben, yo igual sigo preguntando, sigo llamando, sigo buscando soluciones. Mi perseverancia en lo que quiero es mas que nada mi secreto mas grande. Si aquí me dijeron “no se,” y en el otro me dicen “tampoco sé, tampoco sé” yo sigo buscando el “aqui esta.”

SL: Rosalba says that her greatest strengths are her perseverance, and her friendships. When faced with a new challenge, she’ll start asking around: “Do you know how to do this? Do you?” and no matter how many people she has to ask, she keeps searching until she finds the information she’s looking for. She makes phone calls, researching, searching, until she gets what she needs to make things happen. And then, she makes them happen. When we met several years ago to talk about the Chilean specialty coffee scene, I warned her that importation laws are particularly strict in Chile, and to expect having trouble getting the correct paperwork in order. She called me the next day to let me know that she had already gotten the licenses she needed and was ready to start sending coffee.

Doris and I are lucky enough to call Rosalba a friend, which means we’ve been able to taste her delicious food. Let me tell you, this woman can COOK.

RC: Tengo varios platos que son mis favoritos, pero el que realmente disfruto hacerlo es el mole. Hay infinidades de diferentes chiles: chile ancho, chile puya, guajillo, chile pasa, chile cascabel, chile de árbol, chipotle.

SL: I ask her what her favorite dish is, and she says: Mole. It’s a very traditional saucy Mexican dish that uses a medley of peppers, nuts, seeds, and spices. She starts listing the chiles first: Puya, Guajillo, Ancho, Pasa, Cascabel, Arbol, Chipotle. In with these go the seeds and spices: almonds, pumpkin seeds, pepper, cumin, garlic, onion. She likes to grill the chiles first, before grinding them on the metate. It’s a ton of work, just prepping all these ingredients can take hours, and then it has to simmer on the stove. She says it’s worth it—if it’s done right.

RC: La otra manera es que me pongo a freír los chiles, los pongo a la licuadora, los muelo, lo cuelo, pongo a hervir el pollo y ya está.

DG: Esa es la facil.

RC: Pero el sabor no es lo mismo! El otro lo haces con cada detalle, que quede bien asadito los chiles, que queden las almendras dorados bien, que no se queme… el sabor es totalmente diferente.

SL: I love mole, and I love to cook, but mole is a complicated dish. I ask her if there’s an easy recipe she can give me. Begrudgingly, she says that sometimes she puts the chiles and everything else in the blender to save some time, but then quickly says that it’s really not worth it. The whole point of mole is that it’s a labor of love; if you’re not going to put the time in and do it right, why bother doing it at all?

And this is the perfect metaphor for Rosalba’s work ethic. If she’s going to take something on, no matter how big or complicated the project, no matter how many people tell her it can’t be done, she will do it the right way, and nine times out of 10, she will succeed.

SL: El mole me suena un poco a cómo manejas tu negocio también. No puede ser fácil, tiene todo que ser de escala enorme, y bien hecho.

DG: No le gustan las recetas faciles.

RC: Si, tienes razón. Yo creo que me gustan los retos difíciles porque si yo voy a ser una inspiración para el resto de mis compañeras mujeres quiero ser una inspiración buena. Mi mensaje es que hay que luchar para tener lo que queremos tener, y no tener miedo a que nos digan “tu eres mujer y no puedes hacer lo mismo que hace un hombre,” por que eso no es verdad. Somos capaces de hacer lo que un hombre hace y más todavía.

SL: “If I’m going to be an inspiration, I want to be a good one,” she says. “Not someone who goes half way and calls it good enough. We’ve got to fight to get what we want. We can’t be afraid, we can’t listen when they tell us that we can’t do as much as men can. We can, and we will.”

SL: Ya nos diste un poco de legitimidad oye.

DG: Empezamos grande.

RC: Gracias por elegirme para estar en su show. Yo me siento muy halagada por eso, muchísimas gracias.

SL: No gracias a usted Rosalba. Y hasta la proxima en realidad por que ya te comprometiste a unirte a al menos un episodio más.

RC: A claro, a uno o muchos más.

SL: Fantástico, queda aquí grabado.

RC: Gracias entonces!

SL: Cafetera Intelectual is an independent podcast produced by Doris Garrido and Sandra Loofbourow. Follow us on Instagram @cafeteraintelectual, on Twitter @cafeterapod, or visit our website cafeteraintelectual.com. Join our Patreon and help us keep producing unique content for the coffee community. Hasta la proxima, we’ll see you next time.

That was Cafetera Intelectual!

Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear more stories from guest creators—some will be launching their own podcasts, and some are doing one-off audio projects. Thanks to Chobani, all creators will be paid for their time, but Sandra and Doris elected to have their payment made as a donation to RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services.

If you liked this episode, you can do two things! One, go subscribe to their show—there are way more episodes for you to listen to right now—and two, make a donation to RAICES. Tell the team at Cafetera Intelectual that you love their work by supporting legal and social services for immigrants. 

Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. 

Boss Barista is a weekly newsletter and podcast series about workplace equity and employee empowerment in coffee and beyond. If you’re not already subscribed, welcome! I’m glad you found your way here. Before you go, sign up, will ya? Here’s a cute little button to make it easy:

If the following piece resonates with you, consider donating to my Patreon. Pledges of any size help me produce these stories, and your support is gratefully received.

When a refugee—someone who has fled war, violence, conflict or persecution and has crossed an international border to find safety in another country—comes to the United States, they’re typically given very little help when resettling their lives. 1951 Coffee Company hopes to change that, using the coffee industry as a tool for empowerment and self-determination.

In this episode, I talk to Doug Hewitt, co-founder of 1951 Coffee Company, which is based in Berkeley, California. 1951 created a barista training program specifically aimed at refugees, and helps trainees find placements at its own cafes or at other partner cafes in the Bay Area.

The goal isn’t simply to train new baristas, but to give people control over their lives—without expectation. Plenty of folks go through 1951’s training program and ultimately decide to move on to other fields, or to go back to school.

Ultimately, the goal is to help people feel safe making their own decisions, and to give them the tools to figure out what their goals are, instead of forcing them to make choices out of necessity or scarcity. Doug believes that coffee can be a tool to give power and control back to displaced people—one that extends far beyond the Bay Area. Here’s Doug.

Ashley: Doug, I was hoping you could start just by introducing yourself for everybody.

Doug: My name is Doug Hewitt. I'm one of the co-founders of 1951 Coffee Company. I came to the work of 1951 Coffee Company by having worked as a coffee roaster. I worked with Boot Coffee Consulting on a project they had called Aleta Wondo coffee for a couple of years.

While doing that I actually got involved with the International Rescue Committee, volunteering to teach English to newly arrived refugees. I spent some time while I was roasting coffee getting more deeply involved in the refugee community and then eventually got a job at the International Rescue Committee working on helping newly arrived refugees secure employment before finally overseeing the Oakland office of the International Rescue Committee and overseeing the resettlement department.

In 2015, I left that work to start 1951 Coffee Company to create a coffee organization that would help newly arrived refugees find jobs in the coffee industry.

Ashley: What about your work—working in coffee and then working with the International Rescue Committee—made you think, “Oh, these are two intersections that I can solve a larger problem with,” or, “There's a need here that I see that both of these things can work well together in?”

Doug: So it's actually interesting. The first time I actually met someone who was a refugee here in the United States, I was working at another cafe. Had began working there as a barista. There was another guy who was hired to work alongside me as a barista and we became good friends.

One day we were just chatting over lunch and he was telling me a little bit about himself. And then I said, “Well, how did you come to the United States?”

And he began to tell me his story of coming from Eritrea—fleeing Eritrea into Sudan, from Sudan fleeing across the Sahara desert to Libya, from Libya attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea twice and eventually succeeding. The first time he tried one of the boats he was on sank and he was rescued by the Coast Guard.

So just this whole long process of sitting there in this cafe, hearing the story—for me, it kind of began both at the same time, my first job in coffee, working as a barista, and my first time meeting someone who was a refugee had happened in the same moment.

We went on to become good friends and I got to know his community more. I was working on my master's program and finished my master's, started working as a coffee roaster for that one year and continued to get involved more deeply with the refugee community.

I think in my time getting more involved, learning more, understanding more of what it's like for someone to come from outside of the United States, fleeing war, conflict, violence, to try to find safety here in the U.S., I began to realize that it was a very, very difficult system.

It's also a difficult path to navigate and a difficult system to be integrated into. In my time, working at the International Rescue Committee on helping refugees find jobs, refugees when they arrive have about six months—[this] is what the U.S. government says that they have to be economically self-sufficient here in the United States.

And these are refugees coming from all walks of life. Some who have very high levels of formal education [like] PhDs, and people who have had very little formal education in their life. There are people who speak fluent English, people who have never spoken English before in their lives—and the system is made the same for everyone.

When a refugee arrives, [there is] about a thousand dollars that is designated by the U.S. government to help them resettle per person. Here in a place like California, that resettling money is almost gone immediately just paying rent and the rent deposit just to get their lives started.

That's the only guaranteed funding they're ever going to receive to get their lives started here. So that means for refugee resettlement agencies that are there to help with that process, getting employment is one of the most important pieces.

I realized that because of the breadth of experiences that people were coming into the U.S. with, finding that survival employment—as we call it in the refugee resettlement sector—is extremely difficult. It's extremely difficult to land that first job in the amount of time needed to be able to really take care of yourself, to be able to take care of your families.

I think seeing that process over the years that I was working at the International Rescue Committee, I realized that the refugee resettlement agencies had this Herculean task, this task that is extremely difficult to accomplish. The funding that they're given to accomplish that work is very, very limited. I realized that there needed to be something—companies that could come alongside, something in the private sector that could come along and say, “Hey, we're here to step beside you and make this better.”

I knew that the coffee industry is all based around hospitality, around welcoming people around building community. And I thought, “What better way for cafes in the coffee industry to step in and be a part of the solution for the challenges refugees face when they want to resettle in the U.S.?”

Ashley: At what point does 1951 step in? At what point do you find people to be part of the community—of your community—and then help them get from that first initial point of, “We're looking for a job, we're looking to resettle our lives,” to, “We are financially independent?”

Doug: So 1951 Coffee—we work with a lot of the refugee resettlement and assistance agencies in San Francisco/Bay Area. What we do is we let them know about our services. Our initial thing is primarily focused on the most recently arrived refugees, those most in need of that survival employment.

Usually a refugee, when they arrive, maybe for the first month there'll be a lot of things they have to do—go to social services, getting IDs, setting up their legal existence here in the United States and all the paperwork to prove it and all of those things. That's usually the first month when someone arrives [when] a lot of that happens. But by the end of that first month, they're usually enrolled in some type of employment assistance program. Something that will help them build a resume and search for a job.

There are very few, if any at all, training programs that are out there to help someone learn a skill or acquire a skill that is immediately transferrable here into the U.S. workforce. And so that's when we step in. We have told all of these refugee resettlement agencies that we are offering a free two-week barista training program to any refugees, asylum seekers—or there's another group called special immigrant visa holders who come from Iraq or Afghanistan who were somehow involved either with the U.S. government of the U.S. military. Because of that, their lives are threatened. So we also work with that group if they are resettled in the United States as well.

We're really trying to step in, in that earliest stage, to provide this free training so that people can become baristas and find jobs in the coffee industry.

But we don't limit it to just those [groups]. We realize that people are going through life and they're operating here in the United States—maybe they found a survival job early on washing dishes at a restaurant or working somewhere. And then [they realize], “This is not the job that I want to do forever, but I'm not really sure how to transition out of that. I want to transition into a more public-facing job.”

We don't limit the time or the scope of which someone has been in the country for them to be referred to us. So other agencies will have someone—maybe they're finishing high school, maybe they're at a transition point in their life, or they just want to change paths in their life. They’ll be referred to us, go through our training program. From there we'll step in and help them find employment either at one of our cafes or in our growing number of partner cafes here in the Bay Area.

Ashley: I think that's a good thing to point out. Not only does 1951 provide job training to help refugees find jobs, but you also act as intermediary between Bay Area coffee companies and refugees in order to find them placement.

I was wondering what that process has looked like, because it seems embarrassingly simple—of course coffee can do this kind of work, and we should be doing more of this. But I know as somebody who's covered 1951 Coffee pretty extensively when I was working at Barista Magazine, I had never heard of a program like this.

As I was reading more and more about 1951, I was like, “Why haven't we made this a system?” Especially because in coffee, it is about hospitality and it is about being public-facing at the same time. You don't need a lot to do it, and you don't need a lot that we can't teach you how to do.

Doug: Right. I think the way that I've looked at the coffee industry is that there a lot of skills [required], especially when you're in the specialty coffee industry, right? There is a high value on quality, on focus, and making a drink really, really well for each and every customer that comes in. When we were actually in the process of starting 1951 Coffee, we spent a lot of time … initially, we were just going to open our own cafe. That was the only [thing]—we’ll open our own cafe. We’ll empower refugees to work at our company, they'll grow and that kind of thing.

But then as we went to the other coffee companies, we noticed there were so many people in the coffee industry looking for baristas who would come and work for them and stay for longer than six months to a year that would really make a home in the coffee industry.

So we toyed around with the idea of, “Well, what if we just had a training program? We're going to have to train our staff anyway, but what if we trained more people than we could employ?” And then we were going to these same coffee companies that are looking for baristas that want to be a part of their companies, that want to put down roots in those companies. Then it can be a mutually beneficial thing for both the refugees coming to the U.S. and the same coffee companies. So we began the process of doing that and creating this training program and then networking with cafes.

I think anecdotally—I kind of knew this inside of me—that the coffee industry is very, very well grounded in American society. Sometimes I think we'll say that coffee is one of the most American things, but it’s one of [the most] international things at the exact same moment. Coffee comes in from all over the world, but it's almost [like] some people will say, “There's nothing more American than a cup of coffee.” Because of that, coffee companies, cafes are located throughout all over the United States in all different kinds of neighborhoods. And it really provides a place—it's kind of a microcosm of American life.

I knew that it was a place where we could begin to plant those seeds of what a welcoming society in the United States was—working within the coffee company and then seeing it grow from there.

Initially when we began to think about this, we were really nervous—we thought maybe coffee companies wouldn't be into this. Maybe this wouldn't be the thing for them, but we found that we could do two weeks of training and yes, you don't know everything. You're not an expert by the end of those two weeks, but [our trainees knew] a lot more than a lot of people do when they start their first barista job.

We realized this was an opportunity to help refugees be competitive when they went to job interviews. We had actually some early success with some pretty major coffee companies here in the Bay Area saying like, “Absolutely, we want to be a part of this.” I remember one HR person that said, “Doug, I know that you're probably worried about whether we're going to do this,” she said, “but we're going to make this happen because we want this to happen.”

To me, that was so encouraging that the coffee industry would be willing to step up and say, “You know what? Yeah, we can do this. We can bring people into our team.” As we worked with these different companies, we're not asking people to hire 25 people at one company, but to bring one person in, help build that one person up, help make them a part of your team, welcome them into your cafe, welcome them into your community.

Then we'll all go from there because if we're all doing those things cumulatively, it adds up to a really, really big impact. We have that opportunity to do that in our cafes.

Ashley: Absolutely. I think what you said about community makes so much sense—the idea that there is nothing more American than a coffee shop. Everybody knows what one is. Everyone's been to one and it's also incredibly international as well. They can be incredibly reflective of the community that surrounds you and to make them welcoming for people who are new to this country, who are now part of our community, we're specifically saying, “You are here, you are part of our community,” and finding a way through that door is incredibly powerful.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what founding 1951 Coffee was like in the sort of cusp of the Trump administration, because I imagine that a lot of what 1951 does has been affected by the political climate. So I was wondering if you'd walk us through a little bit of that.

Doug: Yeah. That's a great question. It's very interesting because we actually opened our first cafe the day after Trump's inauguration. I mean, three days later, travel bans were happening. I think a lot of people thought that we specifically opened this cafe as a policy or an opposition to those policies—if only opening a cafe only took between the time that he was elected to the inauguration.

Obviously it took much, much more time than that. We started this long before Trump was really on anyone's political radar because we were already seeing the challenges at that time. I think in 2015, when we actually formally set out to create 1951 Coffee, [there were] these debates raging about how are refugees coming here. What are the real facts about someone coming here? Is it safe? Is it not safe? What is this all about?

It was in that environment of an already difficult system with a lot of misinformation that we said we wanted to start this to provide a better start for refugees, but also to inform the public about what it really is like for a refugee to come to the U.S.

That's where we started when we moved into the Trump administration—obviously those initial weeks were a whirlwind for us. We had people who were coming to us and were like, “Oh my gosh, I am so glad that you all are open and doing what you're doing right now,” because, for a lot of people that really wanted to be in support of refugees, or even just immigrants in general coming to the United States, there were limited number of places where they could really go and show immediate support to those communities.

You could show up at an airport and protest, you could protest around your city or at city hall. But you really couldn't go into—I mean, you could—a refugee resettlement agency or something like [that]. You could go sit in their lobby and tell everybody, “Hey, I'm glad you're here,” but it didn't really work the same way. Because it just wouldn't be the most effective way to do it.

The work that we're doing at our cafe has provided a tangible way for people to immediately interact with the refugee community in a very positive way. We had people who were coming in during that time, especially early on. And they were having groups where they would gather together and write letters or cards or whatever to their elected officials saying, “We've gotta get behind people making changes to [these policies].”

I think as we went on through the years and knowing that the system was threatened, I think that it provided a place for us as a staff, with the people who had come through the refugee process here to the United States, we had a lot of discussions about, “What does all this mean?” Because for a lot of our staff, they had family members that were blocked from coming to the country. They had people that were on their way that suddenly their flights were canceled—families that are separated.

We had to have a lot of conversations about that, but it also provided a place for them to vent, to talk about that, but also to constantly be able to be reminded that there are people who aren't the official part of what this policy is that are saying, “You are welcome here. You are valuable, you are a part of our society that we want to be here and we want to welcome you in and make this work.”

I think that was all—a lot of it was just that touchpoint, to always remind people that no matter how dark this overall political climate is, there are people in the community that are saying, “This is not the way that it should be. That is not the way that it's supposed to be.”

And honestly, even historically, refugee resettlement and welcoming refugees has been a largely bipartisan thing. Even though our commitment as a country to the U.N. had always been to welcome about 50% of the recommended number of refugees each year, we often exceeded that even up to 70, 75%, which for America following an international agreement and far, far exceeding it is, is pretty amazing.

That's something we really wanted to remind people, even in those darkest moments of the four-year period, that there is still work to do. But I think one of the things we also did is during that time—obviously the number of refugees being allowed to come in was cut very, very, very small. But the number of asylum seekers, people who were already in the United States in some other way, but are now applying for basic humanitarian permission to stay here in the U.S. so they're not sent back to a dangerous place, that number actually was a very large number still during that period. And so we expanded to working a lot more with asylum seekers here in the United States during that time.

Ashley: That's really cool. I dunno, that was a lot to take in—I’m kind of buzzing a little bit from all of that.

One thing though that I think is not to be overlooked is some of the signaling that you do at 1951. So it's not just about, “We have a barista training program and we find jobs for people,” but you walk into 1951 and the story of America's relationship to refugees and finding safe places for asylum seekers to go is very much ingrained in the physical space. And I was wondering if you could speak to that a little bit because it seems like 1951 was thought of as a very multi-faceted approach to a very large problem of how we treat refugees in the United States.

Doug: Correct. Yeah. Our three pillars at 1951 are obviously job training, employment, and then advocacy. And the piece that you're talking about is advocacy. We realized, I think any of us who've walked into a cafe know that, especially when the cafe's busy, you're going to spend a lot of time waiting for your drink to get ready. Back in 2015, when there was so much disinformation about refugees, we realized that refugees coming to the United States had these huge challenges to get here only to just have this skeptical public not really know, [for example], “Did it really take that long? Did it really take on average 17 years—from the time a refugee leaves their home to get here?” So we decided we need to find a way to just make this information readily available.

We knew that waiting time in a cafe is the perfect moment to inject as much information into these discussions as we can. When you walk into our cafe on Channing Way in Berkeley it's almost in some ways like a museum—we have a curved wall actually near where our condiment bar is. So when someone's putting sugar in their coffee, they can look up and they can see what are the general steps and path that a refugee takes to come to the United States. There's stats and information there from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees on the number of refugees in the world, the number of refugees that are resettled every year, and again, like I said, the flow of what that path and that resettlement process looks like.

But we also try to help people understand and know, why is it important for us to welcome refugees here in the United States? Right now there are around 26 million refugees in the world. There are countries outside of the United States that are hosting refugees. I think Lebanon host refugees up to—about 25% of the population of Lebanon are refugees. If you realize that if the United States hosted refugees at the same rate, we could host every single refugee in the entire world. Looking at those things and having these pieces of information in our cafe, we hope that people will one, have truthful information. And second, will realize that, “Wait a minute, there's so much more that we can do here to really solve a major global issue.”

Ashley: I imagine when you're thinking about these big goals for 1951, at some point you distill them down really basically—you take all these goals and then you're like, “What's the core of this?” And the core of this, it seems, is we are here to help people in need.

Then when you go to the other end of it, when you think about where people are afraid, what are people resistant to, and trying to distill that down—and it's mostly fear-based. Like you were saying, there's a lot of misinformation about what it actually takes to get to the United States. What are the needs of refugees? And you're seeing people talk a lot more about that now, especially when it relates to coffee, like you were talking about Eritrea, and now I'm thinking about Central and South American countries where we basically—the United States—very much caused political instability.

Now we have people fleeing to the United States to seek asylum from unsafe environments. As you distill these themes down, how does this affect how you talk to people? Because I have to imagine that for the most part, people probably come into 1951 and they're already bought in—at least to some extent. They're like, “We get this, this is amazing. I'm learning so much, but at the same time, I'm here for it,” but I wonder on the converse, how do you approach people who maybe don't have that perspective, who are maybe on the more fear-based side of this? I imagine there's some tension there on both ends.

Doug: Yeah. I think one of the ways that we do that is again, some of it is just to provide truthful, factual information information that we have, like a lot of statistics in the cafe, things that are not necessarily immensely controversial. It's just being able to inject those discussions with the right information, with the clear definition, legal definition for who a refugee is, so that when we even begin that conversation, we know exactly what we're talking about.

I think one of the approaches that we've taken, and this has been whether it's customers in our cafes, people that come and volunteer at our barista training program, or even times that we've had trainings for cafe managers that we've done, who work at other cafes on how they can welcome refugees, is we really try not to shame someone for whatever questions they need to ask in order to get the information they need to really form a good opinion about welcoming refugees into the United States. And that's sometimes really difficult. You hear people that you're like, “This is the most outlandish thing. How do you not know and understand this?” But at the same time, I know from my own experience, growing up in the foothills of East Tennessee, I wasn't exposed to a lot of people coming in from all over the world.

I grew up in a very close-knit environment that people looked like me, that acted like me, that walked like me, that talked like me, that had the same assumptions of life. If I hadn't had someone like my friend, when I was first working at that cafe to just blow my mind away with information that I had never heard before, I wouldn't have the opportunity even be where I am at this point. So we really try to make sure that we can—we try to be truthful, we try to be straightforward, but really try to give opportunity for people to see that refugees are people who, if they are coming to the U.S., a lot of times, like my friend, he told me about what it was like those nights, walking across the Sahara Desert, just to get to a small town in Libya where the first thing that happened to him was that he was put in jail for four months for entering Libya illegally, but he spent days walking across the Sahara Desert.

And I think that that strength and determination that it takes for someone coming that path to end up here in the United States—if you want to build a strong society, those are the kinds of people that you need, you know? When we're able to really distill it down to that basic core human element of what we're talking about, I felt like a lot more people then understand, “Hey, this is a lot different than what I had originally perceived we're talking about.”

Ashley: How do you think about storytelling? Because it seems like it's a pivotal part of what 1951 does. And as you rightly pointed out for a lot of people, big themes, like the need to help people seeking asylum, maybe don't always land until we hear firsthand experience, or maybe we see it in action.

That's perhaps a blind side to growing up with privilege. I think we just defined privilege right there. How do you balance the other end of it where we don't need, I guess I don't want to say like poverty porn or trauma porn, but how do you balance telling a story that matters? But at the same time, you're not trying to exploit people's stories. You don't want to put them out there just for the sake of creating this sense of tragedy to prove worth.

Doug: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That's something when we had initially started creating our cafe—I think anyone who has ever turned on the TV, or if you're following some organization, you see that you immediately connect [with] and you know, “Okay, this group of organizations or whatever, they're attempting to hit my heart and they're attempting to hit it hard, but what they really want is my wallet. They want my money.”

You see how this happens. There's this almost undignified element that they tend to portray when they're trying to advocate for a group of individuals. And I think from the very beginning, we want it to be really intentional of avoiding that style of advocacy.

I think a few different ways that we did that, even in the physical design of this cafe and the information and the way that it looks and the colors and all of that scheme, was done in consultation with a group of refugees to help guide us in, “What kind of an environment would you want to work in, and would also advocate for people who have come through the experience that you've come through? How do you want that story to be told? What are the key pieces of information that you always wish Americans knew about that endeavor?”

So I think one of the first things was engaging with the community and allowing them to have some say in what this advocacy looks like. I think another part of that is with the staff that work at our cafes or with the people who go through our training program, we always give them full autonomy over their own stories. If someone is coming to us and like, “Hey, can someone from your team, can they share their story about coming to the United States?” We never promise that someone will. We always go and we talk to our staff like, “Is there anyone who's willing or interested to do this?” If they're feeling like they want to do it, but they're a little bit nervous about it, someone from our team will accompany them.

We always tell them at any moment, if someone asks a question, or if there's something you don't want to talk about, you don't have to talk about it. Those stories are your own. You own them, no one can ever force you or push you to tell those stories. And I think for us, a lot of that comes from just giving our team autonomy. If they're interested in telling it, but they're just nervous about how to do it, we'll coach them through it. We'll help them navigate that process.

I think those are the main things that we try to do. Again, like I said, my friend who told me his story, like no one asked him to do that. He told it out of his own heart, out of his own desire for me to know and understand. And that's always more true and authentic. That's exactly what anybody would want when they're hearing someone's stories—the true, authentic story. I think as an organization, we've just tried to really make sure that's always the way we approach any storytelling from our team—is that it is their choice, their desire and in their power.

Ashley: It seems like authenticity is really tied to self-sufficiency, which I think is a bigger theme of 1951. I think you can say we are here to give refugees barista training so that they find jobs. But I think if you really widened the umbrella even more it's we are here to help people be self-sufficient.

Doug: Right.

Ashley: What does that look like for you?

Doug: Sure. And I think we would even take it one step further. A lot of economic programs are here for, but we're also trying to help people have self-determination. What I mean by that, and maybe this is a distinct difference—self-sufficiency is, “I can survive. I can survive on my own,” but self-determination is when you have the tools and the abilities to make choices that affect your own life and with some guarantee that those things will actually come to fruition.

So what we're trying to do with people who come through our training program or to work at our cafes, we don't tell them how long they can work with us. We don't tell them how long we'll help them look for a job. We don't tell them, “Oh, you have to have been here this amount of time, or that amount of time, or you have to be this age or that age…” If you are able to work and you want help navigating the system, we will help you navigate the system through the coffee industry.

However, we also say, “Hey, if you decide that you go through our training program and you want to apply for a job that's not in the coffee industry, we're going to help you apply for that job too.” Because again, we want people to have the ability to make their own goals, their own choices. Some people have gone through our training program and immediately they were like, “You know, I'm not ready for work, but I'm really glad I did that because now I'm coming away with a group of friends,” and we continue to count that as a success because they're connected to a community of people now through that training class.

Just getting the economic piece may not have been the piece that made the difference for them. And so we really try to look at how we gauge success. Success that the people who come through our programs and say, “Hey, having been through this, my life is now better and moving forward in the way that I want it to move forward here in the United States.”

Very often, yes, that is economic, but it could be through community-building. It could be through having access to a network of resources and information. I mean, if someone wants to buy a car and they've never bought a car before or buy a cell phone or something, that's something that we can help people with that maybe a normal workplace, a normal job program wouldn't help someone do. But again, we're trying to help people navigate what their goals are. We're just trying to use coffee as one potential opportunity to do that.

Ashley: It seems like no matter what you do, if you do something new, or if you're in a new environment, there's going to be some lack of control of your life or control of what's going on around you. And it seems like 1951 really steps in and says, “We will give you that control. We have tools that will help empower you to take control over your life.”

So like you were saying—I’m really glad that you defined self-determination because I think that could be one of those terms that's [lumped in with] “the American dream,” or “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” but what you're saying is that people need tools to make that happen. People need tools to be able to apply for a driver's license or know what it is to access community resources. Or like you said, buy a car if you've never bought a car before. Once you get people those tools, they can take control over their lives.

And it seems like a lot of the goals of 1951 are to give people those tools and not necessarily to say goodbye to them, but to say, “We don't expect anything in return.”

Doug: Exactly.

Ashley: “You take control of your life. And if you need us, we're here. If you don't, we're always here, the door's always open, but you don't owe us anything.”

Doug: Right. We've had people work with us for six months—they just needed to transition to life here. We've had people who stayed with us for years because they wanted to put down roots. We've had some people that are like, “Hey, I only want part-time [work]. I'm going to school. That's what my real desire is. I don't want to work in coffee forever. I love you guys, but that's not what I want to do.” And we're 100% okay with all those things.

I think that's something as a company that we have to be flexible with. If we really want people to have the opportunities to do their own thing. A lot of other programs that are out there, they do a lot of really good work, but there's a lot of restrictions around it when someone's entering, whether it's time, age, what they have to accomplish, what they don't have to accomplish. And we just wanted to be different in that way, to give people the opportunity to be involved in something that hopefully lifts the burden from their shoulders and not adds a different one on their shoulders.

Ashley: How has COVID-19 affected 1951?

Doug: It's affected us a lot. To be honest, I mean, it just … if you look at cafe sales is one metric, and our cafe sales are down about 90% of what they were last year. We had three cafes prior to COVID. Right now, we only have one cafe that is operating. That's changed a lot.

We've gone down from a team of about 25 people to a team of about six people and thankfully we are still operating and I think that's, in this climate, when so many other cafes and restaurants have closed their doors, we're thankful to be at that point.

I think for us, something that has been challenging is that we're a non-profit coffee company. We do highly rely on the revenue from our cafes, but we also rely on contributions and donations to keep our programs functioning and our cafes operating.

I think in this year of significant need for everyone, the amount of funding that we've received, whether it's from foundations … a lot of that has changed. Foundations are saying, “Hey, we want to do these economic empowerment programs, but man, we have people that are losing their homes. We've got to shift to do that. Now we have people that are having health issues. We've got to shift to do that. Now we've got to figure out how to help people in this environment of COVID-19 just to make it through this period.”

We've understood that, but it means as an organization, our funding has gone down a lot. And as a cafe, the number of people coming in—we were actually really close to the University of California, Berkeley and this school year has been completely different.

It's been completely different. Where there's 30,000 people on campus, and right now the community here is about maybe 3,000 to 4,000, maybe 5,000 students that are on campus right now. That obviously makes a huge difference for us, and the number of people that are here. It's been a very different year for us. We're hoping, I guess in 2021, that things will gradually change. We're actually getting ready to reopen the cafe on Channing Way on February 1 to start serving the students who are here on campus and hopefully get things moving again, maybe in a more healthy way in this next year.

Ashley: What are the plans for the future besides slowly but surely opening up your cafes—bigger picture, five, 10 years down the line?

Doug: I think when we look at it five, 10 years down the line, I think what we do here in the Bay Area and the rapport that we have built with the coffee community is something that can grow outside of this area. Obviously the Bay Area is a place where people love coffee, it has a very thriving coffee scene with companies and roasters and all of those things.

But refugees traditionally have been resettled in about 221 cities across the United States. I would guarantee you that in almost any one of those cities, there are people who drink coffee and there are probably cafes. And I think there are opportunities for the work that we do, whether it's from creating flagship cafes in some of those key cities—maybe 10 key cities or something like that, where a large number of refugees are being resettled, not to replace the coffee industry—I think that's something that people often wonder, “Are you going to open up 5,000 cafes and take over and just have the refugees working?” No, that's not what we want to do. Our goal is to create a place that can be exemplary, kind of like the cafes that we have here in Berkeley that can show the coffee industry what can be done.

Our goal is to network with the coffee industry, to have a larger community of people integrating and working with the refugee community as they resettle here in the United States. Our goal is to hopefully be able to build those bridges, inspire more people and more cities through the coffee industry to do the same work.

Ashley: What would you want people to know about 1951 that maybe isn't as obvious or maybe we didn't touch upon in our conversation?

Doug: I think one of the things that people often wonder—people often don't realize that we are a non-profit. I know that we've talked about that already. And I think that's something that often catches people off guard as they come into our cafe and they're like, “Oh, this is so nice.” They're like, “It's a nice place to be.” But that we really are funded through people in our community contributing to the work that we do.

It's one of the few things that you can do where you can create, contribute to a global solution, but also see a very local response to that global issue. For people to support us, people to help us grow, people should come by our cafes, drink coffee, order our coffee online, all of those things enable us to be able to employ more people, train more people.

I think, even looking at the model of what we do, this was something that I was passionate about working in coffee. I was passionate about working with the refugee community and it just happened to be the skill that I had, but there's a lot of other needs that refugees have that go far beyond what our cafe will be able to provide. There are many other solutions out there and if you have a skillset, you have an idea, just start somewhere. Start somewhere, jump on it and try to get moving and see what you can do. So I think those are the things that I would kind of share with people.

Ashley: Doug, thanks for taking the time to chat with me. I really appreciate it.

Doug: Absolutely. I thank you for letting me be here. I enjoyed talking with you.

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A few weeks ago, the folks at Amor Perfecto, a coffee roaster based in Bogotá, Colombia, reached out to me. They offered to send some coffees from a new project they were launching: a collaboration with the Frida Kahlo Corporation, which highlights women producers and innovators within the country’s specialty coffee scene.

After I tried the two coffees they sent, they asked if I’d be interested in talking to the women who had grown them. One coffee was from the Tolima region in southern Colombia, and was grown by Astrid Medina (pictured on the left in red helping pick coffee with two coffee pickers) who won Colombia’s Cup of Excellence—a national competition that awards the country’s best coffees—in 2015. The other coffee came from northern Colombia, in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountain range, and was grown by Luísa de Salazar (pictured on the right in orange touching a bed of dried coffee in parchment). Both growers were kind enough to share their triumphs and hardships with me on this podcast.

A note on this episode: I highly recommend following along with the transcript, because there will be sudden shifts from English to Spanish. I ask all the questions in English and Astrid and Luísa respond in Spanish, while the Amor Perfecto team joins in and shares translation duties.

The result is warm and rough-and-tumble episode—there are multiple voices and moments where people talk over one another—and in places the sound quality dips (for Astrid in particular, who was recording outside on her farm). Regardless of the audio hiccups, I believe hearing people tell stories in their own words is deeply valuable, and I hope you enjoy hearing from the folks who make your daily coffee possible. Here are Astrid Medina and Luísa de Salazar.

Ashley: Thank you both so much for taking the time to talk with me. We actually have a lot of the Amor Perfecto team here, and then we also have Luísa de Salazar and Astrid Medina—Luís Fernando Vélez will be translating for us. So I’m going to be asking questions and then you'll hear Luís translating those questions for us. To start, I was wondering if both of you could talk about what it was like growing up in Colombia around coffee.

Luís Fernando Vélez: A Ashley quiere saber un poquito para ustedes que representa haber nacido y ser creado en Colombia en una finca cafetera? Y yo quisiera empezar esta pregunta por Astrid.

Doña Astrid Medina: Buenas tardes. Para mi representa la felicidad.

Luís: It represents happiness.  

Astrid: Soy la mujer mas feliz de poder aver ser nacido en el campo, haberme creado en el campo con tanta naturaleza y con tantas bendiciones, y ahora pues ofrecer al mundo un buen cafe.

Luís: I’m the happiest woman in the world. I’m really happy being born on a farm surrounded by all the forest and all the blessings that I have here. And now, I'm even more than happy, because I can offer my coffee to everyone in the world.

Luísa?

Doña Luísa de Salazar: Para nosotros es un orgullo haber podido conservar tanto tiempo la finca y están todos los recuerdos de la infancia de la juventud y todo, no vivimos allá en este momento pero siempre estamos en contacto y es lo máximo haber la podido porqué del sueño de nuestros padres, entonces haber podido llegar a realizar todas estas cosas ha sido una gran experiencia. Nos mantienen muy contentos.

Luís: We are very proud to have had the farm for more than 60 years and to me, all the memories that come to my mind are from when we were children and we traveled to the farm with our parents, and we are happy [that we get] to keep the farm and to offer this product to all the world.

When I think about coffee, all the memories of the farm come to my mind and it’s been a huge effort to keep the farm in the hands of the family and to produce a good coffee today.

Ashley: So both of you come from family farms—I was wondering if you could talk about when you decided that was what you wanted to do. Was it always obvious that you were going to take over and be involved in the farm or was there a moment where you thought, “Maybe this is not what I want to do,” but then you changed your mind or something changed your mind?

Luís: Ella pregunta que si para ustedes fue obvio siempre quedarse en el mundo del café o si en un momento en que ustedes pensaron ‘sí, yo definitivamente quiero quedarme en el mundo de café’ o tuvieron una duda en pensar en algo diferente? Astrid?

Astrid: Que? Yo ví ... en un momento yo no quería hacer café cultura porque no era una experiencia gratificante a que vivía mi padre produciendo cafés normales con precios bajos entonces yo veía … [crosstalk]

Luís: There was a moment I didn't want to be a coffee grower because at that time I looked at my father’s suffering—[he was] producing regular coffees at very low prices [crosstalk] with a lot of necessities of the farm. Adelante.

Astrid: Pero cuando decidimos participar en concursos de calidad y miramos que es produciendo café de calidad podría cambiar nuestra calidad de vida y indiscutiblemente nunca lo he pensado y nunca me querio devolver me querio quedarme siempre aquí produciendo café de alta calidad.

Luís: But when we decided to participate in a contest of high-quality coffees and we saw the results, that [was the] moment I said, “I don't want to go back, we’ll stay here, produce very high work, very high-quality coffees, and I don't think to go back to anything else than coffee.”

Luísa?

Luísa: Para nosotros en la finca muchos años, o hasta no hace tantos años, eran nuestros padres y nos que la manejaban y de eso dependíamos todo. Es gracias a la finca podimos hacer otras cosas, yo soy odontóloga, ya estoy retirada porque, los años, ya, mi profesor de universitaria regrese y a mi madre falleció entonces [he tomado las riendas] de la finca. Todo esa ha sido siempre estado en contacto con [el negocio].

Luís: In our case, it was different because, for us, coffee was everything. I went to college because of the farm, but then my mother passed away.

I am a dentist; thanks to coffee I could study to become a dentist. But then when my mother died and because I am now retired as a dentist, I took over the farm and we are now running the farm and having it allows us to produce good coffee. 

Ashley: So it seems like for Astrid the idea of competition—entering coffees into high-quality coffee competitions—really changed what coffee was like for you, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about entering coffee competitions and then what it was like to win the Cup of Excellence?

Luís: Que, hablando de competencias y hablando de el caso de Astrid y en el que las competencias la empezaron hacer pensar en calidad, y hablando de todo ese proceso, ?cómo fue ese proceso en que empezaron a mejorar la calidad y en él que usted ganó la taza de excelencia?

Astrid: Bueno en el año 2014, nosotros en la finca [y realmente?] teníamos muchos caturros, café caturro en toda la zona. Pero [vieron que ahí] era muy difícil de [donde] empezó a [llegar] la roya y acabar con nuestros cafetales y también con nuestras cosechas. Entonces la Federación Nacional de Cafeteros lanzó una variedad de café que se llama Castillo. En el año 2014, para la gente que producía café Castillo, había un programa que se llamaba [NH Time?] Eso era para gente que tenía esa variedad y que recordiamos a los cuatros semanas erá como cosechas tardías, entonces tenga que dejar que estuviera muy maduro buscar una fermentación adecuada y nos daban un precio alto y mas el factor, mas 300,000 pesos en carga, así que tuvimos un cupo para 40 cargas de café de nuestra finca y pues pudimos un ingreso que nos permitió empezar hacer inversión en la infraestructura.

Luís: In the year 2014, we had a lot of Caturra [varietals] on the farm and the roya came and almost destroyed everything. Then the FNC [Federación Nacional de Cafeteros de Colombia or Colombian Coffee Growers Federation] established a program with a new variety called Castillo, and also a program that was called [NH Time?] which promoted the idea to pick coffee cherries at the very last moment—more overripe [than underripe]—and in that program they pay us the basic price plus 300,000 pesos per carga, which allows us to improve the infrastructure of the farm.

Astrid: En el año 2015, ya mucha gente en nuestra zona participaba en la taza de excelencia, entonces nosotros sepamos de 1,780 metros y estábamos trabajando con el segundo semestre, con la [mitica], eh, decidimos participar con mi esposo en la taza de excelencia y se decidió [usar] el nombre mío, eran 16 cargas para poder cumplir con este café entonces hicimos con Castillo, caturro, y Colombia todavía teníamos, todavía seguíamos con la idea de que podríamos producir caturro. Participamos y fue así como tuvimos primer puesto en el año 2015.

Luís: In 2015 a lot of people from our region were participating in the Cup of Excellence. We decided to enroll in the program and we were working with the harvest of “mitica,” which is the second-semester harvest. We used a blend of Castillo, Colombia, and Caturra, and we needed to put 16 cargas of coffee to enroll. They enrolled us with the name of Astrid together with my husband. So, we presented the coffee and that’s how we won. 

Ashley: That’s a good point to point out—I have these two coffees here from Amor Perfecto and they have your names on them, they have Luisa’s name, they have Astrid’s name, and I was wondering if you could talk about how that feels, and how important does it feel to feature women who are producing coffee?

Luís: Cómo se sienten ustedes de que en las bolsas esté el nombre de ustedes en que ustedes y que ustedes están como las protagonistas de estos cafés? Adelante Luísa. 

Luísa: Muy contenta, muy orgullosa la verdad, ha sido una cosa increíble llegar a una feria nacional de los cafés especiales en Bogotá y que las personas que estaban y que eran años, dicen ‘la señora que está en la bolsa’ es una cosa muy gratificante la verdad es él, así que es el fruto de la cosecha. Gracias a Luís Fernando y a todo [el] entusiasmo que le ha puesto y [hemos] logrado en [el formato] y a todas las personas que nos colaboran obtener una calidad extraordinaria en el café y haber podido ganar en primer place

Luís: I feel very proud. I'm very happy when I go to a show, a coffee show, and people are there saying, ‘Oh, there’s the lady [whose name is on] the bag!’ And since then, we feel very happy to do it and that’s thanks to all the effort that people like Manuel Mata and key people that have supported us and gave us the opportunity to produce this coffee. And it's also thanks to Amor Perfecto that puts us on the coffee bag. Astrid?

Astrid: Don Fernando, no hay palabras para describir tanto felicidad y tanto orgullo que siente uno de ser productor de café. 

Luís: I have no words, I have no words and ways to express my happiness of being a coffee grower.

Luísa: Yo creo que yo siempre resaltado que uno solo como productor no lo podría lograr jamás, que es estar conectado con una empresa como Amor Perfecto que hace la otra parte que nosotros como productores no sabemos.

Luís: I have always said that we as growers alone cannot do everything. It’s being connected with companies like Amor Perfecto that we can do the best job [we can] because we don’t know what they know to do and … adelante Astrid.

Astrid: Yo creo que solo nunca no lo logriamos porque a veces uno se dedica a trabajar y a trabajar y es conocer otras oportunidades que hay en el mundo y yo creo que es gracias a Amor Perfecto y a cada una de esas personas que deciden a apoyar a un productor y hacer de que esa calidad de vida en cada familia cada dia mejore mas, como dice Dona Luísa que cada vez que mejora la calidad de vida de uno como productor, también mejora la calidad de la vida de la gente que trabajan con uno.

Luís: Alone we cannot do it. I think it’s with the effort of everybody, companies like Amor Perfecto and other people around Amor Perfecto and other people that work with us, as Luísa was saying. As long as our life quality improves, all the people around us improve their quality. If the salaries of the farmers are better, the salaries [of the people around us are better]. If the payment of the farmers is better, the salaries of the people on the farm level are better and all are more happy, I would say.

Ashley: So it seems like there’s a lot of really tangible value to being connected to a coffee roaster that is going to promote you. So having someone like Amor Perfecto, for example, put Luísa and Astrid on their bags has had a very positive tangible influence on their outcomes, like they’re making more money and things like that.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it means to have market access and if there was a time, maybe before, when you didn't have that market access, where things were different—I think Astrid even talked about her father getting paid a lot less before, and seeing how hard it was to grow coffee when you weren't making as much money. Does that make sense? It's a complicated question. 

Luís: Is that a question for me or for them?

Ashley: A little bit for the both of them because I imagine that there must have been a big difference in being able to have a national or international platform versus not having that same market access share. 

Luís: Un poco de la pregunta de Ashley es, como se sienten ustedes de estar conectadas en el mercado internacional y haber podido entrar a ese mundo internacional a través de la bolsa Amor Perfecto en comparación con lo que pasaba antes muy seguramente con sus padres que recibían un precio por la cosecha mucho más bajo y que no permitieran una cantidad de cosas ustedes si pueden hacer hoy con la finca? No sé si Ignacio si usted me ayudas con la traducción de ellas un poco.

Ignacio: Con mucho gusto. Ashley lo que pregunta es básicamente, bueno, que está diciendo Luís, de que si es notable la diferencia de ir de la mano con un productor, como un productor de café tostado como Amor Perfecto este, para poder llevar y subir la calidad de los cafés de ustedes, los precios que reciben, y los beneficios que esto conlleva para ustedes y los trabajadores de la finca? … Luisa.

Ignacio: I can take over Luís for a little while so you rest. 

Luís: OK. [Laughs] 

Luísa: Si, es completamente diferente y estamos muy contentos y muy agradecidos, de verdad, con Don Fernando con Hugo, con todas las personas que han logrado que lleguemos en este momento, porque nada que ver cuando que era antes, era un esfuerzo de todo, un año porque nosotros no tenemos dos cosechas, tenemos una sola al final del año y llegar y ayudas penas, alcanzar para los gastos que vencido.

Ignacio: Ashley, she’s saying it makes all the difference in the world because in the past it wasn't a differentiated price and there wasn’t a buyer who would recognize, through pricing and image, their efforts. They were barely scratching [together] an existence by producing and then selling their one crop a year—their farm, Sierra Nevada, is just entering the harvest season right now. So she said it makes all the difference in the world.

Doña Astrid, la misma pregunta para usted por favor, que si hace una gran diferencia trabajar con un tostador y productor de café como Amor Perfecto, particularmente Don Luís que se ha avocado a esto?

Astrid: Por supuesto, que juntos a una [marca] nacional como Amor Perfecto, como Luís Fernando, [le da] la oportunidad a hombres y mujeres de su café. En el mundo es una oportunidad [grandisima, grandiosa], por eso es que ahora yo no me quiero ir nunca de mi finca. Quiero trabajar y trabajar y replicar nuestro modelo con muchos más de nuestra zona, que mucha más gente [le da la] oportunidad tan grande que una [no] se pierde de [tanto] por desconocer el camino o por tener el temor. 

Pero Don Luís Fernando en el país, Don Luís Fernando él es en el país, ha hecho que el mundo nos reconozcan y eso indiscutiblemente ha cambiado la calidad de vida de nosotros y de la gente que trabaja con nosotros y en nuestras familias, y aquí ahora una puede invertir y hacer cosas en nuestra unidad productiva.

Ignacio: Astrid says there's absolutely no way they could've done this without the dedication of a national roaster that's now turning into an international brand—it’s long overdue. And that without the dedication and the different business model of Amor Perfecto, they couldn't accomplish … she loves working in her farm—she just repeats it every time she talks about it, and now she doesn't have to worry about scratching [together] an existence trying to survive. 

Rather, she can think more about the future and how she can make things better and better. She never wants to leave her farm and she says that the partnership with [Innovakit] and Amor Perfecto makes all the difference in the world for what she wants to achieve now as a coffee farmer.

Ashley: So maybe this is a question for you, but it seems like market access is a huge, huge differentiator between being able to scrape by versus being able to excel and thrive and maybe even win the Cup of Excellence one year?

Ignacio: Ashley, look, Luís Fernando has been doing this for 23 years, I've known him for seven, and his model is just completely different. He starts ... we always say we work for the farmers—it’s not the other way around. So he knows, being in Colombia, what a fair price is and he won’t pay anything other than a fair price, even ... he just won’t do it, and to do that it’s ... so we work for the farmer. That means we have to make sure that the farmer is happy and it’s a pact that we will take care of you and you produce coffees that are of the highest quality you can produce, and we’ll make sure the world knows this. And so that’s just that again, Luís Fernando and Amor Perfecto would never do this any other way.

Ashley: I was wondering, because we haven't talked too much about Luisa’s family and her farm, and I was wondering if she could give us more of a background about her family and her father and how they started their farm.

Ignacio: Sure sure—by the way Luísa is a odontólogo. Odontólogo is an orthodontist. She worked as an orthodontist but she always had ties to the farm that helped pay for her education and her career and so she knew that she was going to go back and she’s happy to be back. 

Doña Luisa, Ashley pregunta de cómo llegó sus padres y este a comprar una finca en Sierra Nevada y montar una finca de café y producir café y que la mantiene usted con ese legado por favor.

Luísa: Mis padres née Italiano llegó a Colombia en vivió 51 años aquí hasta que falleció, y en sus sueños le parecía divino, él área del sud de Italia, y las montañas aquí de la Sierra y la cercanía del mar porque a 12 kilómetros de la finca, que es una de las [recorridas] de la Sierra Nevada, está el mar. En ese contraste le parecía lo máximo por[que] allí no hay [cambio] de las estaciones y nada sino [el] clima [caliente] todo el tiempo en Santa Marta entonces allá en la finca encontraba una temperatura deliciosa [y un] cambio completamente el clima y todo [para] el [era] el café y ese fue el sueño, siempre [era] como sentirse ganador de la lotería poder tener un [?] no importaban [todo sumaban] nos [trataban] con el amor y a toda [la gente] [de] la finca y a nosotros en la [realidad] de yo [poder] devolver [a] echarme a cargo de todo.

Ignacio: A ver, that’s a great answer. Her father fell in love with the Sierra Nevada and the idea of doing something and growing things in the mountains. The special thing about the Sierra Nevada [region] is that it’s about 15 kilometers from the Caribbean and so she said he just enjoyed, for 50+ years, the proximity to the ocean and the incredible temperature. 

He got completely addicted to producing coffee up in the mountain and it was, she says that he felt like he had won the lottery with those circumstances and so she just ... she grew up in that very positive environment and she just wants to continue doing this and ... much to what Astrid said, these farmers, they love what they do, and that’s what she’s expressing.

Ashley: That’s incredible. It must be so lovely to absolutely love what you do and also get to experience something that you can drink—something that you can hold in your hand—so going back to Will’s question a little bit, how would you describe your coffees?

Ignacio: That's a great question. Doña Luisa … una excelente pregunta personal para mi porque tengo años tomando el café de ustedes dos, entonces [laughs] aquí lo tengo, hoy me tomé las dos. Ella quiere saber cómo ustedes, como caficultores, hablarían de su café, el café que hemos perfecto como esta ... y le ofrece al mundo. Como la descripción de su café. Si usted fuera a decir a alguien a que sabe su café y cómo se siente tomar su café, cómo lo expresaría? Doña Astrid por favor, para usted se ... hará lo encontraste los dos cafés de ustedes es muy grande.

Astrid: Bueno, yo creo que mi café es el resultado de un esfuerzo mutu, de mucha gente que quiera hacer las cosas bien. Siempre seleccionado uno a uno cada cereza retirando los verdes y los pintones, siempre son cafés que han flotados siempre son cafés que son producidos con todo el cariño en el mundo. Siempre estamos muy enamorados de realizar una gran tarea. Entonces yo siempre que estoy seleccionando las caseras o estoy haciendo flotes o estoy mirando el café que traen los recolectores. Siempre quiero que los mejores granos se han los que son seleccionados. Son los que son para los microlotes que siempre los compran Amor Perfecto.

Ignacio: Okay. Doña Luisa, ahorita dejarnos a responder lo que ... Dona Astrid, en que este.

She’s saying this is a team effort. This is dedication and a team effort of making sure the cherries are picked when they’re ripe. [Have you seen] how they paint their nails? Each of the coffee varieties has a tone, an ideal mature level of ripeness and it has to do with the color of the cherries so they paint their fingernails to understand which is the right color to pick. So what she’s said is she takes enormous pride in the—she calls it microlots—that are the most select coffees of her farms and the neighborhoods and they only pick the absolute best for the lots that they sell to Amor Perfecto. And they're just methodical that that’s how they do it. 

Doña Luísa le puede hacer la misma pregunta también en los sabores, que busca, como .. .habla de su café, por favor.

Luísa: El café de nosotros es el más sabroso que se pueda tomar, la verdad, es muy suave, es con un sabor a cacao y a flores, a frutos, es una cosa exquisita. Nos saben la tosion que le hace Don Fernando es increíble y hemos logrado nosotros hemos mejorado como [gente de] los cultivos y hemos mejorado el proceso del secado y el beneficio del café para obtener cada vez la mejor calidad, y hemos hecho todo el esfuerzo tanto como económico, como físico, como emocional, y como decía Astrid, prepararse pepa por pepa de café asi no se vayan las [gente] y que todo será de máxima calidad, las [paseras?] en con todo todo todo todo no [escatimamos] de esfuerzo y ponemos todo [el] entusiasmo y todo el amor a lo que estamos haciendo. La verdad, es ha sido un gran premio de la vida porque se ven los resultados.

Ignacio: The only thing better than the question were the answers. 

OK, so what she’s saying is they’re very careful. They make sure—all the coffee in Colombia is handpicked, there are no machine-picked coffees in Colombia—but they take extra care [to ensure the] ripeness of each one of their beans. 

Doña Luísa says that her coffees have a very noted chocolate flavor that’s characteristic yet is very elegant at the same time. And she thinks it’s the best coffee in the world. Again, that's the beauty of Colombia, the coffee in Sierra Nevada tastes very different from the coffee of Tolima, and you can tell the difference when the beans are fresh and you can decide, “Well today I feel like this [kind of coffee].” 

She's saying they take enormous pride in producing the best coffee and she knows that Luís Fernando and the Amor Perfecto roasters will take this product that they are so proud of and roast it to perfection to produce the coffee that people want to drink.

Ashley: What would you want drinkers of your coffee or people on the consuming end of the coffee supply stream to know about you and your coffees?

Ignacio: Bueno, otra pregunta bueno. Ellos quieren, Ashley está preguntando que, que quisieran ustedes que los bebedores de su café digan de su café y de ustedes, por favor? 

Luísa: Sigan consumiendolo porque le hemos puesto todo el cariño, todo el entusiasmo, toda la energía para que cada cosecha sea mejor que la anterior y puedan disfrutarlo intensamente

Ignacio: She’s asking people to continue to drink [her coffee] so they can appreciate all the dedication and love that has gone into making the coffee—so that, year after year, they can produce it better and better. 

And look Ashley, I've been drinking Luísa and Astrid’s coffee for four or five years with Amor Perfecto in Bogota, and it changes every year. This is the best year of Luísa’s coffee I’ve personally tasted. Luísa, Astrid dropped off. Let's wait for her to reconnect to ask her the same question, great question. 

Doña Astrid, qué le diría [a los] que consumidores de su café y de usted cuando prueban el café? Astrid?

Astrid: Creo que, si? ¿Me escucha?

Ignacio: Si, cuentame [crosstalk] cómo responden? Si, por favor.

Astrid: Bueno, lo que yo quiero es que los consumidores de nuestro café bajo la marca Amor Perfecto es [connection issues, coming in and out] que lo quieren tomar [poor audio quality] por siempre y que se sientan felices. Sientan [bad connection, poor audio quality] y lo recomiendan a otros, para poder ser [bad connection] en el mundo de cafe.

Ignacio: She wants people to be happy when they drink her coffee and to enjoy the coffee that she makes. She specifically said that because it is roasted by Amor Perfecto, people are happy, so happy that they recommend the coffee to other people and her coffee becomes more and more recognized and enjoyed around the world.

Ashley: I was wondering if both of you can talk a little bit about the future of your farms. What are you looking forward to and what for you represents success?

Ignacio: La pregunta Astrid para ambas es ¿que, por favor pensando en el futuro de la finca y usted, que aspiran, que hacen de ustedes en el futuro para su café y para su finca y para sus trabajadores? Astrid, si quieres, con usted por favor. Está en, necesitan quitar, poner el micrófono.

Astrid: Listo, ya. Mire. En el finca yo siempre sueño por mejorar. Cada día que mi finca sea una granja productiva, con menos necesidades. Ya les decía que mi finca acaba de 1,780 a 2,000 metros. Tenemos lotes casi sobre los 2,000 a los cuales los trabajadores tienen que cargar ese café al hombro. Yo quisiera hacer una inversión de una garrucha o de un caule como fuese mas fácil para nosotros y para ellos trabajar. Y quisiera tener en mi finca un comedor mucho más amplio donde [estemos más cómodos cuando están sentados]. Quisiera realizar en el finca muchas más [unidades] sanitarias para que [son] pequeña las [que]tenemos. Son inversiones -que una siempre suena para mejorar la calidad de la vida nuestra y la gente que trabajan por nosotros. Porque la gente que trabaja con nosotros tenga menos riesgo de tener accidentes.

Ignacio: Ok, dejame traducir.

She always wants to improve her coffee and she’s thinking about how to make things better and how to make life better for her workers. So I don't know if you understood, her farm starts at 1,700 [kilometers] and goes up over 2,000, and that’s a long way to haul the beans up and down, and so she’d love to have a pulley system—I guess is what she’s talking about and improve the workers ... just make it easier for them. 

She also would like to build out a new dining area for them to be able to have better meals and a more relaxed environment. She’s always thinking about how to make things better for her farmers and how to make better coffee. 

Doña Luísa cuéntame usted que aspiraría para su futuro y su finca y su cafe?

Luísa: Explosionando cada vez mas y mas y mas y llegar hacer lo mejores de Colombia y los mejores de la Sierra Nevada y Santa Martha, la verdad. Necesitamos que ojala la vía de acceso a nuestra finca mejoren porque las vías no son tan buenas y como decía Astrid una carucha para no tener que subirnos en la mula y todas estas podrás mejorar [en esto] la calidad. En ese sentido mejorar porque la verdad hemos hecho inversiones y tendemos que seguir haciendo en nuestra finca para ahora con la pandemia nos tocaban a mejorar y nos de los baños, los maroces para ello y los ahora en esta época de cosecha entonces han sido inversiones y cada vez nos esperan más y quisieramos hacer mas la verda.

Ignacio: Let me start backwards. She mentioned COVID—and Astrid mentioned this as well—COVID has required them to have a much better health situation, particularly in terms of sanitation, so they want to focus more resources on that. Luisa says she wants to produce the best coffee in Colombia—make it better and better for everybody and she also mentioned the same [hurdles as Astrid]—of relying on mule-drawn and manual labor and wanting to put in place a pulley system to make it easier. This will translate into a better crop of coffee and better coffee beans for everybody.

Ashley: This has been really incredible and I appreciate both of you taking time to talk to me. 

This transcript was edited lightly for clarity. Thank you to Bani Amor, Jeni Green, and Ignacio Iribarren for help translating and clarifying.

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In these interviews, I connect with people in different ways. Sometimes it’s immediate, sometimes it’s helped by a previous encounter or even a longtime friendship, and sometimes it never comes. I had never met Jiyoon Han before I asked her to be on the show, but her clarity and deep intentionality clicked for me instantly.

Jiyoon is the co-owner of Bean & Bean Coffee in New York City. Her parents opened Bean & Bean’s first location in 2008, a few years after immigrating to the United States from South Korea, amidst the year’s financial crisis. Since then, Jiyoon’s life has been wrapped up in coffee—it comes naturally to her, it’s embedded in her senses.

Jiyoon has a background in UX, or user experience, design, and uses that knowledge to help run aspects of Bean & Bean alongside her mother. On their website, Bean & Bean has a detailed and clear commitment laid out to promote gender equity—almost all the coffees they buy are from women-led farms and cooperatives, and they aim to have all their coffees powered by women by 2022. Their stores are reflective of their communities, including a flagship in the Little Neck neighborhood of Queens where Jiyoon grew up.

In this conversation, Jiyoon articulates so much of the potential in coffee—what responsibly run shops can look like, what being value-driven means, and how to actually grow. Growth for Jiyoon isn’t about expansion, but about depth and learning: honing your craft and getting better at what you do.

I can’t recommend this interview enough. Here’s Jiyoon.

Ashley: So to start this conversation, I was hoping you could introduce yourself.

Jiyoon: Sure. My name is Jiyoon Han. I'm based in New York City currently. I source, cup, roast, and curate coffees for Bean & Bean Coffee. My mother and I are the coffee team at Bean & Bean Coffee. So there you go.

Ashley: You’ve got this. I think it's always a funny question to ask people to introduce themselves because they're like, “What do I include?” It’s like if you get in an elevator and you're like, “What's my elevator pitch as I'm going up these flights?”

Let's talk about your history and coffee, because like I was saying earlier, I usually start all these conversations with what is your coffee story, or when did coffee first get introduced in your life, but you've really grown up in coffee.

Jiyoon: Yeah. So I was a high school senior when my parents opened their first coffee shop in downtown Manhattan. That was in 2008, actually on the brink of the financial crisis. I have memories of working behind the bar sometimes before school and sometimes after school and the PM.

I remember my dad and my mom talking to me about what the double A in Kenya AA means; why peaberry coffee is special and different; us having all these ventilation problems with the roaster set up on site—Manhattan is a crazy place to be roasting coffee. Especially given that our first location is nestled inside a landmark building that was built in the late 1800s. All these regulations around roasting ventilation.

I remember all of that and representing my parents—sort of being their ambassador and lawyer, sometimes negotiating with landlords. So for me, coffee has always been part of my upbringing.

Ashley: Yeah. It seems like the minute your parents opened this business, you were right in the thick of it. What inspired your parents to want to open a coffee shop?

Jiyoon: My parents, before immigrating to the U.S., were always in food and beverage. They were one of the early franchisees of Wendy’s hamburgers at the time in the ’90s when fast food wasn't a thing yet in South Korea. So through operating their Wendy's location, they sort of learned the ropes of how to operate a food establishment. And I think that's when my mom and dad started to be interested in coffee.

So when they moved here and were looking for ways to build a new life in the U.S. they decided to focus in on coffee as a singular concept. I know it may sound crazy because if there's anything that Manhattan doesn't need any more of, it's probably coffee shops, because there's a Starbucks on every corner in the city.

But I think what we believed strongly was in freshly roasted coffee. And at the time in ’08 we were serving exclusively organic, Fair Trade coffee. So those were the two value propositions that other coffee shops were not delivering. So even though the first location was only two blocks away from a big Starbucks we were able to survive, and that location actually still stands.

Ashley: I was about to say, it's no small feat to have a coffee shop that you built in 2008 still standing now.

Jiyoon: Oh my god. Yeah, that didn't come easy. We've had so many ups and downs, obviously the year that we opened was on the brink of the financial crisis. So the first couple of years were very difficult. And we just recently renewed the lease at that location. It's a long history, 12—now, 13 years. And I think you really have to believe in your business and the community that you're serving and the network that you're a part of to want to keep doing it. And it means a lot to us to still have that first location standing.

Ashley: Was it always a given that you were going to work in the family business?

Jiyoon: Ah, that's a hard question to answer. I want to say yes and no. I mean, a lot of people [would] ask me, “Are you going to be in coffee?” or, “Is coffee going to be part of your career?” And for me, it's almost an impossible question to answer because I can't really separate family from coffee from career.

It's just always something that has been part of my life—tasting and cupping coffees. And I'm always thinking about coffee. Just yesterday, actually, I was doing a meditation exercise where they guided us to think of the green light inside our body and trying to hone in on that green light. And the exercise was to get us to activate our senses. What are we smelling? What do we see with this green light activating inside of us? And it's so crazy. I started smelling coffee, so I know what that says about me.

Ashley: That's so wild and cool because I think it articulates exactly what you just said—that coffee's so fundamentally a part of who you are.

Jiyoon: Yeah. Yeah.

Ashley: So I want to talk a little bit about the way that you're incorporated into the business, because if you go to Bean & Bean’s website or your Instagram account, the branding talks about being a mother-daughter business. And that's why I was curious about if your role in Bean & Bean was always part of your plan or part of something that you always wanted to do, because it seems like it's probably evolved over time, I imagine.

Jiyoon: Definitely. I think 10 years ago, I remember myself strongly believing that people didn't change. And that there was this one version of the self that stuck with us for life, because how do you change who you are?

But I think with time, I've come to realize that if I frame it differently, people evolve and so do businesses and families and their stories, right? I think the way we present ourselves and the way relate to the customers and our barista team and the rest of the world is evolving through time, and always will be.

I think that the mother/daughter coffee team identity has always been there, but I think more recently I've been spending a lot of time trying to come up with ways to tell our story, to tell the family story. Of course my parents are immigrants from Korea and there's a limit to how much they can tell their own story. I almost take it upon myself to be that voice.

Ashley: I love that you talked about the idea of evolution as something that happens to everybody and everything. It's not just people changing, it's not just ideas changing, but it's whole identities. It's whole businesses, it's whole modes of expression, because I think you're absolutely right. It's easy to think that there are fundamental things about people, right? There are fundamental ways that we operate and some things are kind of immovable, but I think the biggest moments of excitement that I find in Boss Barista and in the way that I write and communicate about coffee is moments of evolution and change—where I see things from a completely different perspective. So I love that you mentioned that.

Jiyoon: Yeah. And it's, I think—it's not always apparent or detectable at the time as you are in, this inflection point when you're about to change or when you have just gone through that change or transformation. A lot of the realization of these moments of change and transformation comes through time and reflection, I think.

And going back to your question around the mother/daughter identity, that's so core to Bean & Bean—to me it's only natural and organic to talk about the team that is behind sourcing and cupping and curating all the coffees that get put out. And there is a mother behind the mother/daughter coffee team, and a daughter too.

Ashley: How do you and your mom work together? What is that relationship like, if you don't mind me asking? I know that I mentioned this to you when we were emailing, but I'm fascinated by partnerships and how people work together. So I was wondering if you'd talk a little bit about how you and your mom work together.

Jiyoon: Oh god, well, I'm lucky to have such a wonderful mom. I don't know. I can depend on her for everything. So as it relates specifically to coffee it's almost like my experience of a coffee is not complete without having my mom taste it too. And after we talk about it together only then will my experience be complete.

That is not to say that we have exactly the same preferences when it comes to coffee. We actually don't, but I just can't not have my mom taste the same cup of coffee and talk about it. Because I have to know what her experience was like in order to feel complete, as it relates to that specific coffee.

Ashley: That's such a lovely sentiment. I had a conversation with somebody about the idea of dependency, or the idea that we have relationships with people that feel just naturally part of who we are as people, and how sometimes that's seen as a negative, right? It's seen as like, “You should be able to do this thing on your own,” or “You should be able to form an objective opinion without the influence of others.”

And you're a Q grader. So I'm sure that you've been told the protocols for cupping and it's supposed to be totally objective and it's supposed to be without any biases, but I love that you seem to know that that's not always possible—that part of your experience having a coffee very much depends on this relationship that you have with your mom.

Jiyoon: Yeah, absolutely. To me, coffee is, beyond just the literal association of the motherhood behind the mother/daughter coffee team. Coffee to me encompasses everything about motherhood in that beyond just my own mother, if you think about everything that it takes to drink a cup of coffee, there is a lot of, so much care and patience, love, nourishment, and nurturing that goes into bringing that cup of coffee to people.

So it's of course me and my mom, but before it ever arrives at our roasting plant, think of all the mothers along that entire process, right? And all of the relationships that are formed. And as you say, the partnerships that are supported by motherhood—that’s what's so beautiful to me about coffee, and it takes time. I think a lot of motherhood has to do with patience and time.

Ashley: Yeah. It seems like you've gleaned a lot of lessons from this partnership that you've built with your mother. Obviously you have a relationship with your mother outside of the business, but it seems like you've probably learned a lot working with your mother side by side within the business.

I love that you mentioned this idea that the relationships of motherhood translate throughout the coffee supply stream, because I think that speaks really beautifully to your commitment to gender equity. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that—explain your commitment to gender equity for our listeners.

Jiyoon: Sure. So our commitment to gender equity—we were talking about evolution and the evolution of identities through time—I think that for me, running a business is about being true to your core values and being able to realize and materialize those values in a tangible way, because you have this amazing opportunity to do something about the stuff that you believe in, right?

So as a small business, we can't do everything, but we can do something and even doing something is a start. So as we think about the core values that we believe in: coffee as a vehicle for change. I think it was a process for us to exactly articulate all of the many problems that exist in the world, and of all of the things that need to be improved in the coffee world, in the world of coffee, gender equity is one that we are strongly committed to.

Of course the coffee being powered by me and my mother, we are change agents in a direct way. Women are underrepresented and marginalized in the coffee industry, but going back earlier along the value stream, my mom and I have been fortunate, super fortunate, to be able to actually meet with mother/daughter coffee farmer/producer teams, and their stories resonate with us so much.

Women contribute more than half—60 to 70%—of the coffees that get produced in the world, but they don't have an equal share of the pie. Especially when it comes to international market opportunities, they don't have that same access. So what can we do as a small business that is in the business of roasting coffee and serving delicious coffee to people in New York and beyond—what can we do?

I think it comes down to being conscious and making intentional purchase decisions, and choosing with intention the partners at origin that we want to support. So we have amazing partners. We buy direct from some women-led coffee farms, and in countries where we cannot, we partner with intermediaries who are able to help us stay true to our commitment.

Ashley: I like that you gave a really holistic answer to that question, because I think it's easy to say, “I believe in a thing,” and not really know what to do next with it, right? It's easy to be like, “Of course I believe in gender equity, but what can my business do?”

To hear you talk about, “Well, this—this is where we're at, right? We are a roasting operation. We sell coffee to people. This is the actionable step that we can take.” And you really lined it up with your values as well. You were like, “We are a mother/daughter team. This is what we can do. And this makes sense for who we are. And this is a way that we can actualize some of our beliefs.”

That was probably one of the most well-articulated statements about values and actionable steps that you can take that I've ever heard anybody say.

But I imagine that comes with work, right? You folks have had to sit down and say, “What are our values? What do we believe in and how do we consciously execute on that?”

Jiyoon: Absolutely. It takes so much work. I think business values are a reflection of the people that run the business. So to me, and to us, it's not just about coming up with values for the business, but being able to articulate who we are as people and transcribing that into a business context. So this is why I can't really draw the line between myself and coffee and career. I can't really separate them, which I think a lot of people [may] think I'm crazy, but to me it's so natural.

Ashley: Does it feel … I guess you just answered that question, but it feels natural. Like it feels just part of you, right?

Jiyoon: Yeah, it does.

Ashley: I feel like having such strong values has probably been the vehicle that's kept you afloat since 2008. Like you mentioned, you opened in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. I graduated college the year after that, and it was really grim trying to get a job. So I can completely understand just how scary it must have been to have a business at that time.

And it seems like this strong tie to what you're about and your values has really been the vehicle that's kept you not just afloat, but pushing forward—because you folks have expanded since that one location in downtown Manhattan. How have you been able to push forward? What does that look like for you folks?

Jiyoon: That's something I think about all the time: What does growth look like? And how can we grow?

Again, tying this back to how I think about growth on a personal level—a very close friend of mine told me a couple of years ago, “Why are you so fixated on growth? Like not everything is about progress. And sometimes things are fine the way they are.”

I don't know, it's something I'm grappling with, right? Because if you're not growing, then what are you doing if you're not growing? To me, a lot of that growth is so tied to learning. And that's what's so beautiful about coffee because I'm learning every single day, even if I'm tasting and cupping the same coffee three days in a row, it's going to be different—my experience is going to be different, and I'm going to pick up on different things.

Going back to your question about expansion, I think it's been difficult, right? Because you have to think about how you want to be growing because unbridled, just crazy growth measured in terms of, do you have three locations or do you have 10 locations? Do you have 10 baristas working with you or a 300-person barista team working with you?

So the way I try to gain clarity on this topic for me personally is to go back to purpose—why am I doing anything that I'm doing? And how can I get closer to delivering that purpose? At this moment in time I would say that my purpose, my commitment is to keep finding and serving good coffee and to make specialty coffee approachable and easy for everyone and using coffee as a vehicle to do good in the world.

We don't want to be a super exclusive coffee roaster serving only super exclusive coffees. There's so much more we can do as a business that serves a staple good that people have every single day—it's millions of different touch points that we can create and shape in a positive way through coffee as your neighborhood roaster. It's hard to … yeah, so I don't know. I'm still trying to understand what growth means to me and what expansion means to us as a business, as a small business.

Ashley: Well, it seems like you touched on two different ideas of growth a little bit—the idea of growth as a mindset, as a way of thinking about how to do things differently and better, and then growth as tangible expansion. We are growing to two stores, and three stores, then four stores.

That's a balance that I imagine that you have to grapple with a lot, right? Do we improve a system internally because you always [want to be] growing, you always [want to do] better, you're always learning. Or does growth look like we need to open up another shop?

It seems like you really sit with that question, very concretely, right? You really sit with it and say, “Are we growing just to grow or are we growing to actually serve a purpose—to go back to our values?”

Jiyoon: Yeah. Definitely. I think growth can be difficult too, in the sense that if you grow too quickly, you lose control, and you're unable to do things the way you want to be doing them in that exact way. So I think organic growth and growing with intentionality and a purpose is very important.

Ashley: Something that I really liked about that last answer that you talked about was the idea of not necessarily always being the place with like, the fanciest coffees, but really being a neighborhood roastery, being a place that serves the community.

I think that people are starting to parse those things out. The idea that the pursuit of quality is not always the end-all be-all—not to say that you're not producing quality coffees, but you don't have to have a super fancy gesha coffee to be the best. Perhaps being the best is assessing where you are in your community, and being able to serve that community where they're at. I was wondering how you think about translating your message to your community.

Jiyoon: Sure. I think a lot of that has been done through our choice of where to open our locations, following the first one.

So our other locations currently are in Chelsea right next to FIT (Fashion Institute of Technology). This is where a lot of the creatives and students come. And then our roastery is in Little Neck, which is very close to where I grew up and where my family first moved to. So it's kind of like our way of going back to where we came from and serving that immediate community. That location has a lot of families. And there’s an elementary school on the block next to us. So lots of teachers coming and moms and families on the weekends for snacks and quick grabs—just to hang out.

And so pre-COVID, I think a lot of that connectivity and that service as a neighborhood coffee roaster and coffee shop was facilitated through our offline touch points with customers. And that's being challenged because of COVID, right? You don't have ownership over that, over the entire customer experience, from having them enter, interact with baristas, being part of their decision-making process and serving them that coffee and having them enjoy your space and spend time in your space, right? And giving back to the community and that way, by providing this experience that goes beyond just the coffee, but it's so tied to the spatial and time element.

My mom designed all of the locations. So the core thing that she kept in mind when designing the stores was comfort.

So how can we deliver comfort to people? We want everyone and anyone to be welcomed to our locations and just be able to relax over a cup of coffee. So this is something that I'm thinking about a lot. How do we translate those experiences in an online-first world, through COVID and beyond? That touches on a lot of my priorities at the moment. How do small businesses make effective and smart pivots to be online first? And this goes for not just our business, but for all coffee businesses and all small businesses that are going through a similar transformation.

Ashley: Yeah. I went to your website and I saw that you have so many options to engage online. You can take a cupping class, you can take a cold brew class—you have them set up via Zoom. That's a platform that so many people know. So what has that looked like for you? What has post-COVID life looked like for Bean & Bean?

Jiyoon: I think there are two main considerations.

One is how do we make that online pivot for the offline brick-and-mortar business?

The second is how do we open up new opportunities for us online in a domain that did not exist before?

Speaking to the first, I think I have more faith now in delivery platforms. I might change my mind in a couple of weeks, but I think there is opportunity for traditional brick-and-mortar businesses to really get that right, get the ops down, and try to work with delivery platforms as a way to withstand the craziness of COVID in the months to come. And also anything that makes that customer journey and that customer experience as COVID-proof as possible is helpful.

Then speaking to scoping out new opportunities—I think we have to think about as small business owners, we have to think about how are people interacting and in this increasingly digital-first world. What do people crave and how can we deliver our services? Not exactly in the way we were delivering our services pre-COVID, but how can we adapt? For us, it's delivering joy through cups of coffee, so how can we create similar experiences online? The classes, the Zoom tastings and classes that you are referring to are a way of doing that.

Ashley: I've really enjoyed this conversation in a way that I didn't expect. And part of that is because this is the first time you and I are talking to each other, but it seems like in general, you're just an incredibly thoughtful person. I was wondering if that tracks—like how would people describe you?

Jiyoon: This is a hard question.

I would say the first word that people use to describe me is curious. Maybe thoughtful is a close second.

Ashley: Probably the biggest joy that I get in conversations like this is, obviously talking about the practical ways in which you do business [is important], because I think that's incredibly illuminating and it's powerful to have these things on record—it's almost like a living record of where the coffee industry is at in this moment. But I think more so than that is really figuring out the way that people think and the way that people attack problems and the way that they look at their businesses, or they look at their careers, or they look at just the way that they live their lives.

And they're like, “Oh, I do these things this way. And I think about these problems this way.” And I know that's super nebulous. That's not a very concrete mindset, but to me, that's what's most compelling about these conversations. And I feel like instead of maybe digging wide, we really dug deep on a couple of small points that are actually incredibly large. I think it's because you have such an introspective and inquisitive way of looking at the world.

Jiyoon: Oh, thank you. So I'm taking time off grad school right now, but right before I started grad school, I was living and working in Korea for a couple of years before returning to the U.S., and my last job was in user experience, UX design. I worked for a search engine company and did UX design for their maps service, sort of like Google Maps, but the Google Maps of Korea.

What I enjoyed so much about doing UX is that essentially what you're doing is you're trying to understand why people do what they do and why people consume what they consume and respond the way they do. It's really getting to the core of understanding human behavior. I think UX, user experience, goes beyond technology, like the material app or platform.

I think coffee is all about user experience because you set up an offline shop. You design the bar to be a specific way, you place the espresso machine at a specific location on the bar, you have your pastry shelf exactly where you want it to be and place tables and chairs in those exact locations with intention, right? Because you want to create this amazing experience for customers when they come in. And also on the backend, you're designing the best espresso bar and the whole ops layout to be as convenient and easy for the baristas too. You're designing the space and the experience for both the team internally and for the customers that you're serving. So I feel like I'm still doing UX type work right now.

Ashley: That totally makes sense. And I think that knowing that background about you really informs the way that you approach how you view your business and how you think about growth and all the things that we've talked about in this episode.

Before we sign off, is there anything that you'd want people to know about you or to know about Bean & Bean that are listening to this?

Jiyoon: Sure. I think something you said earlier about pursuing quality for the sake of quality—so one of my more recent realizations has been that quality is heavily relative and contextual. There is no absolute definition of high quality versus low quality. And I'm so happy that I know this now because when I have all of my coffee equipment and that setup is perfect at my home, I'm able to make coffee in a very specific way using all the equipment that is available to me versus when I am at a friend's house who has zero equipment, versus when I am hiking or on a backpacking trip—I don't have access to the same things under the same tools, right?

So just thinking about it in my own context, quality is intensely relative. And I think this applies across all people too. One way of making specialty coffee and the mission behind specialty coffee as accessible as possible to people, to me, entails understanding exactly this—that quality is contextual and relative. So I'm coming up with new ways to do that. It's so exciting, designing experiences and coming up with new, innovative ways to have people interact with coffee and everything that is behind that coffee.

Ashley: Jiyoon, thank you so much for taking time to chat with me. This has been a really lovely conversation, and I appreciate your time.

Jiyoon: Thank you so much, Ashley. This was so fun. I loved your thoughtful questions.

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Tax season is almost upon us, and if you’re like many service workers, you’ve probably been juggling a number of different jobs and gigs. Feel your blood pressure rising already? Take a breath: To help soften this always-stressful time of year, we’re re-airing an episode with Tiani Wright of Coffee and Tax. Listen along, and she’ll help you figure out how to file correctly—and how to stay on top of your money for the rest of the year, too.

Most coffee workers—not to mention others in the hospitality and service industries—have probably been told a number of conflicting things about taxes over the years. Declare your cash tips. Don’t declare your cash tips. Your tips cannot be taxed. You owe a tax liability at the end of the year. The varying narratives we’re given about how to manage our income can be confusing at best, and financially harmful at worst.

My guest today is Tiani Wright, a tax professional and founder of the group Coffee and Tax, and she wants to help coffee folks get financially literate. As she explains, a lot of that has to do with being open to talking about money in the first place. Tiani encourages people to get to know their pay stubs, to ask questions about their W2s, and to make sure their bosses are deducting the right amount of money from their paychecks.

Being financially literate means being in control of your future, and knowing where your money is going. And Tiani has the advice to help you get there.

Ashley: Can you introduce yourself for everybody?

Tiani: Yes. My name is Tiani of Coffee and Tax and I am the founder of a nonprofit organization—[also called] Coffee and Tax.

We are a nonprofit organization designed to build and support initiatives that shine a light on marginalized individuals, specifically within the specialty coffee industry. We also design and build initiatives to encourage tax literacy among not only baristas, but specifically Black people, marginalized individuals, those that are often uneducated—I don't want to say uneducated, but just unaware of certain things when it comes to financial literacy, specifically tax literacy.

We like to encourage tax literacy as a part of financial literacy and overall wealth-building because it's such an important thing. I think a lot of times people often forget about the tax portion of things when we're talking about building financial wealth and being financially literate. So that's who I am.

I started the organization about a year ago or so, but I had the idea for a couple of years now. We're just getting the ball rolling with really honing in on what our mission is and really, truly trying to see how we could be of help to people all over.

Ashley: That's incredible. I think somebody mentioned to me when I was recording an episode of this podcast with them, they were like, “You love to talk about money,” and I'm like, “Yeah, I do! Because not enough people talk about it!”

I want to talk about kind of the—I don’t know what a word for this is, I'm failing at English, apparently—but where coffee and taxes kind of come together. But I wanted to kind of isolate those both separately just to start. So where does your coffee story start?

Tiani: My coffee story started when I was very young. I’d probably say five years old. My grandfather and I used to go to lunch after church every Sunday. We’d go to this smorgasbord or out to eat and he let me get coffee.

It always made me feel just like such a big girl at such a young age. You know, I felt like such a big girl, and it kind of stuck with me since then. It was something that I always enjoyed. I love the taste of it. I always got a great feeling whenever I drank it.

From there, I remember growing up as a little girl always wanting to own a cafe. I thought that would be such the coolest thing to do—to be around something that I love so much. Even into adulthood, I tried to figure out ways that I could open a cafe or have that under my belt. But life wouldn't really have it that way—not in a traditional sense.

So I always consumed coffee. But I could never really get into the industry of coffee because I started a family and I just got into [what you’d call the] traditional sense of work—like corporate settings and things like that. So that's where my life took that turn.

But I always wanted to maintain that love for coffee and learn more about it or as much about it as I possibly could. It's always been a part of my life, always been a part of who I am, and I am so excited at the thought of diving deeper into the industry and learning as much as I possibly can. Right now, I'm coming from a consumer standpoint, but I hope in the future to really gain more experience and knowledge and skills when it comes to coffee, for sure.

Ashley: Where does your tax story or your financial literacy story start?

Tiani: That's an interesting one. I remember growing up, finances weren't really a thing talked about in our home. I come from a family with a single mom—for the most part, she was a single mom, and her relationship with money was not the best.

It was kind of a situation where if she didn't have the money to pay for something, she just didn't pay it. It wasn't really discussed with me how to think of money, what to think of money. I kind of grew up with the attitude of, “Well, if I can't pay it or if I can't do something, I just can't.”

It wasn't until I started a family of my own—I probably was about 28 years old when I really started to pay attention to finances and money and everything dealing with it. Because, of course, now I'm married, and it's not just me, and I have children to think about, a husband to think about, who was, when I met him, really good with money—and I felt like I couldn't really contribute to the conversation because I didn't know much about it.

And it was intimidating! It was very intimidating to me. I felt like because I didn't know about money, and I'm already probably close to my mid-to-late 20s, it didn't make sense for me to learn it. But as my kids grew older, our kids grew older, I began to see the importance of paying attention to those things.

I wanted to be a more responsible parent. I wanted to teach them all of the things that I didn't know growing up. When I was 16, I remember getting my first paycheck, and my mother took me to have my taxes prepared and I sat there the entire time. I was so disengaged from the process. I wasn't involved at all. I don't know what numbers were ran. I didn't know anything. And I remember that just so vividly. I remember being an adult and not wanting the same thing for my children.

So I think that's where my story stems from—just finally coming to a point in my life where I was like, “You know what? It stops here. I don't want to raise our children not to know or have that same experience that I did. And I know if I had that experience, there are so many other people out there that probably had the same [experience].”

So I took it upon myself about maybe—well, I didn't take it upon myself. I was actually introduced to it by a friend, a former colleague, she introduced me to taxes about maybe five or six years ago. I was in no way a math guru and I wasn't involved in money before then, so it was intimidating, but I did it. I did jump into it because I knew it was something that I needed to do. So that's what's kind of led me here to the point where I am today and now I'm just excited about furthering my education when it comes to taxes and money and financial literacy.

Ashley: I like that you mentioned that you're not necessarily a math guru because I think it could be really easy to think, “Oh, this person is good with numbers,” or “Oh, this person has a mathematical background or an accounting background and that makes them more inclined to be interested in taxes.” But it seems like that's not the case. And that makes it more accessible for people—that this is something that they can understand. This is something that they could dive into and build their own financial literacy without being a math whiz or somebody who's super competent in analytical things.

So I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about wealth-building and that idea of ensuring that you are financially, not necessarily taken care of, but that you understand where money is coming from. Because that's a term I'd never heard—the idea of wealth-building—until I was a lot older. But then that made me think about, “How do I think about my own life, and how do I think about my own finances as an adult?” So I was wondering if you could talk about the idea of wealth-building and why that's important.

Tiani: Yeah, for sure. Well, I know for me—I don't want to say, to be honest with you, I’ll be completely frank, I don't want to say that people don't have a similar story or similar upbringing or experiences as most Black people, but I can only speak from my perspective as a Black woman, as a Black person, as growing up in Black community and things like that. I mean, finances, I know that's a huge issue within our own community, you know?

I know that a lot of parents, because they weren't necessarily taught within our communities how to think about finances, they don't really know how to teach their children. Again, I'm not saying that it's all Black families because I have plenty of friends that grew up the complete opposite. But I do know that it is an issue specifically within the Black community.

I definitely think it's important to realize the older we get, how important it is to really change that narrative—change it specifically for our children. Growing up as a child, to be honest with you and completely frank, Black people that were tax preparers in the community were often looked at as if they were scamming or they weren't being honest or truthful. And that's not necessarily the case.

Okay, so where did that stem from? Does it stem from a place where it's a little bit more deeply rooted as far as like, maybe Black people aren't as financially literate as they should be? I'm not really sure where it stems from, but I just know that the narrative then was insanely inaccurate, and I know it's probably not as much that right now, which is awesome and it's great, but I'm here to further that—that idea that that's not the narrative. That's not the true narrative.

We're just as concerned about finances. We're just as concerned about educating our children. We’re just as concerned about money and wealth-building, and I think more so now than ever people are seeing that across the world. We're fully capable, we’re fully prepared, and we're ready to really contribute to the overall success of our families, our children, our legacies, things like that.

I think it's important to really understand we just got to take a look at it and see that financial literacy, across the board, is important for absolutely everyone. I think when we talk about financial literacy and we talk about wealth-building, we don't really get specific enough because included in financial literacy, included in wealth-building and legacy-building, is taxes—we cannot leave that part out because it's such a intricate part of it all.

I like to say that there is no complete wealth-building or financial success sans knowledge of taxation—we have to know it. It's a part of something we all have to do, so we can't ignore it. We can't leave it behind and just focus on other things, you know?

So I think we’ve really got to take the time out to make sure that it's being included in the conversation. We have so many young people out here these days that are getting jobs early. I think I got my first paycheck when I was probably 15 years old. They had programs in place where we would go on work and we would actually make a check. And so many kids then didn't know exactly what that meant. So I think it's important to make sure that taxes are included in the conversation when we're talking about financial literacy and wealth-building.

Ashley: I think it's interesting that your work specifically looks at folks of marginalized identities because we can look at the confluence of all different factors—of race and class and things like that. But it kind of comes down, not really comes down to, but one of the big components of that is money. Who has access to capital, who has access to funds, how many people have savings so that if they wanted to open a business, they could rely on a savings account or something in their checking account—or just even understand financially what they have, so that they can build a business or they can take the next step in their career? Or they could go back to school or things like that.

When you're starting to have these conversations with people, what are some of the questions that you start to ask, or some of the things that you want to highlight? When people first start thinking about like, “Oh, I have a tax burden,” or “I have to file my taxes this year.” What are some of the things that you're really looking for when you first start talking to people?

Tiani: When I first started talking to people about it, some of the questions that I asked them are what is their history. Not necessarily specifically life-story history, but more so financial history, specifically dealing with taxes.

I know a lot of people that I talked to, a lot of my clients have come from a place where they've dealt with preparers or dealt with CPAs or dealt with accountants in the past, and they haven't had the best of experiences. And it's a really touchy subject, dealing with people's money. So people are very sensitive about their finances, very sensitive about their money, rightfully so, and especially if they've had bad experiences in the past, it could definitely put a sour feeling in the pit of someone's stomach.

You kind of have to go through a process where you're breaking down that barrier first and reassuring them like, “Listen, some things are probably within our control as your preparer, CPA, or tax professional. Some things just aren't. But I'm here to help,” and a lot of people often don't look at it that way.

They see you as not necessarily trying to help, but just trying to get as much as you can from them. And so I take my time. Really, I ask questions. I try to find out their history in the past dealing with taxes and their experiences with different professionals within the industry, but also, probably more importantly, try to get them to understand that I'm here to help. I'm not the most well-known in the industry. I'm still learning myself, but at the end of the day, I want the very best for you.

So I honestly spend most of my time just trying to reassure people—that again goes back to redefining that narrative, right? I'm really trying to let them know not everybody is here to strip things away from you. In fact, I really want you to have the most and the best of everything. So just if you'll allow me to help and to be honest— and people are really receptive to that.

I've had clients in the past come to me and they’re like, “Listen,”—and these are adults in there like, “I just want to know what I'm doing when I'm filing taxes every year, I just want you to explain to me what this line means or what this means.” And it could be a simple as that.

A lot of people are really more inclined to feel comfortable with me because of the fact that I reiterate to them that I just want to help you. I just want you to be in the best position you could be. I don't like the feeling of you thinking that I'm not here to help. It's been, more so with my own personal experience, a matter of me just taking a lot of time, of reassuring and not necessarily just probing them with questions, because a lot of people take that as, “You're asking the same questions that the last couple of people asked, very technical questions about my taxes and my finances,” but they really want to know and are oftentimes not—I'm not going to say in a position to ask, but in the mindset to ask, “Well, how can you help me? I've struggled in the past, and I just need help.”

Ashley: You've touched upon a couple of different ideas—[one being] that we don't talk about finances very openly. It's this subject that we're taught to be very prideful about— to be both prideful and private about. We want to project that we’re successful, that we know what we're doing. But we also don't talk very openly about money. I remember as a barista the first time I got a paycheck, just not understanding at all, not knowing where any of my money was going.

I've been a barista over the last 10 years, and I’ve seen employers treat my money totally differently, seen me even being scheduled for shifts in a way so that you don't have to pay overtime because taxes are different on that. Or not claiming tips in certain ways, which would then go on to bite me in the butt later. Then as a freelancer not really understanding what my tax burden was—so as a barista, I've had to confront taxes in a lot of painful ways.

I was wondering if we could focus on baristas first and look at some of the ways that a barista can look at their paycheck understand where their money is going and what that will look like come April—I mean July for this year, [2020]—but come April, when you do file taxes, what are things that they should be looking out for?

Tiani: For sure. I think one thing that's important for baristas to understand is very important, and not just for baristas but we're talking about them specifically, just understand and ensure that their paychecks are fair and accurate.

I think there was a case not too long ago that I'm actually in the process of studying— there were a couple of baristas and they filed a lawsuit against Starbucks because of the mishandling of how the tips were being “collected” from their checks. So it's important to pay attention to paychecks.

I know that we oftentimes rely on our employers to do what's fair—to do what's right. But there's a lot that we shouldn't leave in their hands, only because of things like human error, there's all kinds of things. Errors are the responsibility, ultimately, of the employees or the barista, so you’ve gotta be sure that the information on your paystub matches the information on your W2. That's also really, really important.

A barista should also spot-check their paychecks regularly. I know it sounds like more of a hassle than not, but if you could keep, or if baristas could keep, accurate records of how many hours they work to ensure that they're getting paid for all of the time that they put in, that's super helpful. Super, super helpful. Because clerical errors can happen and paystubs can vary from company to company. So it's important to check with the employer to understand that you understand the terms on your paycheck or the abbreviations on your paycheck. That you understand what they mean, what's being taken out.

Ask questions. A lot of times, people are very intimidated and don't wanna ask questions because they feel like they're coming off as uneducated or not knowledgeable in that area. But it's important. You want to understand what those things mean that are coming out of your checks. So when it comes to tax time, you know even beforehand what you can expect come tax time each year.

Going back to keeping records. I think that when it comes to record-keeping, I think that's probably one of the biggest things I wanna stress because you can't necessarily put that burden upon your employer. Baristas are going to have to keep good records of what it is that they are getting in tips and how many hours they're working per week. Even if it's in a little notebook, so that if there's anything that does come up, at least you have record of what has taken place. Then you can fairly fight [discrepancies] because you've kept your record. I think that’s important.

Most importantly for baristas throughout the year is just make sure they have a good understanding of what's being taken out, what their paycheck looks like, and why those things are listed the way that they are—and ask questions. Ask questions if they don't know.

Ashley: That's a good point about record-keeping. And I think you even saying that [it’s enough] just putting it down in a notebook is super helpful.

I think it's easy to be like, “Oh, my records don't mean anything because I wrote them down.” It's like, “No, that is evidence,” and it's something that I advise baristas on if they want to file a complaint with the EEOC—the Equal Opportunity Employment Office. I think that that's right? [Note—it’s not. It’s the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.]

That is a totally valid way to keep track of what's happening around you—to take notes and to make sure that you have your own records so that you can show that, “Hey, but what my employer is saying is actually not accurate based on these notes that I took.”

What are some common things that baristas should look for on their paychecks? I know that it's going to vary state-to-state or depending on how many hours they work. But what are some expected things that are going to be taken out of a paycheck?

Tiani: Okay, so when it comes to your paycheck, you're going to see things like your gross pay, which pretty much is the total amount of money that you earned that period.

With regard to taxes, baristas are going to see things like withholdings—so that could be state taxes, health insurance premiums, Social Security, Medicare…

More specifically, some of the things that can often be seen on a barista’s paychecks is federal taxes. So the federal government gets a percentage of any income earned by the barista. When you hear income tax, that's what it's referring to. Your employer uses several pieces of information to get that, and that includes how much you make on average and how many dependents you say you have on your W4. That's how they estimate a barista’s federal tax liability.

The estimated amount is divided by the number of pay periods you have each year, and then that amount is deducted from the paycheck. That's definitely one thing—the money deducted for federal withholding taxes is sent by the barista’s employer to the federal government. That's typically how it's done. At the end of the year, if the amount withheld is more than the actual federal tax liability, that's when a barista can expect a refund. If it's less than that, then the barista will typically owe [money].

So when people say, “Yeah, I got a refund,” versus somebody that says, “I actually owe”—that's where that comes into play.

There's also state taxes. Depending on what state you live in, you may be required to pay state income taxes, you may not. But just like federal taxes, money for state taxes is withheld from every paycheck, and it shows up as a deduction on a separate line on the paycheck.

Baristas can also expect for FICA to be taken out, which stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act. It's actually the law that requires every person who works to contribute to Social Security and Medicare funds. So if you see FICA on your paycheck stub, it's pretty much just a deduction for those two federal programs. Some paycheck stubs break out the deductions and show how you're paying for both Medicare and Social Security. For instance, every worker contributes 6.2% of their gross income directly to that fund, and every employer chips in an additional 6.2%, so that's typically how that works there.

In cases where a barista is self-employed or is an independent contractor, what usually happens is you have to pay both the worker and the employer portion, so the paycheck is effectively reduced by 12.4% because you're contributing to both sides. You're contributing on both the employer side and the employee side of things.

Then there's other deductions and benefits. So then that's when your childcare comes into play. That's when your retirement contributions come into play, depending on where you work, PTO, insurance. If you have any flexible spending accounts or health savings accounts, you'll see all of that taken out of your paycheck, typically, in addition to any retirement savings plans that you may have.

And then you have the net pay. The net pay is pretty much the amount of money that you get to take home or the amount that you receive after everything is deducted. So that's what typical paycheck deductions and taxes include—are those things right there.

Ashley: There are two things I want to talk about because one of them is kind of important and in the zeitgeist right now, and then the other is just important to baristas in general.

I want to talk a little bit about unemployment and what that looks like right now, especially because I think there's a lot of confusion for people who think that people who are on unemployment are taking away from the system—but you pay unemployment taxes or your employer plays unemployment taxes. So I was wondering if you can talk a little bit about that.

Tiani: Now, when you say that as far as how my personal feelings are about unemployment or is it just as far as…

Ashley: How they're paid as taxes, how we all pay into the system of unemployment.

Tiani: Right. So we do all pay into the system of unemployment. Unemployment, for me personally, is a necessary thing, in any event, or in situations where something happens and you just cannot work—say you've worked for years and years and years, whatever the profession, you pay into these things and you pay into them without question or complaint. And then if unfortunately something bad happens, or it doesn't even have to be bad, there's a period of time where you can't work and you have to be out of work for an extended period of time, right?

Ashley: Which is super right now, because a lot of baristas are out of work.

Tiani: For sure! That unemployment comes in handy, and it's something that I think should be taken advantage of. I know that a lot of people don't necessarily—I'm not gonna say I know, but I think there's a lot of controversy when it comes to unemployment, and a lot of people might feel as if they shouldn't take advantage of that resource. But I don't think there should be any shame there.

I think it's important, especially like I said before, because we all do pay into it religiously. And I think it should be utilized when needed, and so many people need it, and I think that there shouldn't be … I know that there are gonna be, just like with everything that we do, there are gonna be situations where it's being taken advantage of. But I honestly don't believe that’s the case with the majority of the situations and again, like you said right now, we're seeing so many people that are unemployed because of reasons beyond their control, you know?

And so why is it OK now for people who have just come to their senses and realized like, “Okay, yeah, it's needed. We need it, let's do it,” but before, a lot of people are actually looked down upon because they have to utilize that type that resource—its's for that specific purpose and reason.

I think there are systems in place to ensure, as best as we possibly can, that it's not being misused or abused. So I think we should let it be handled in that way, and if we need it or if there's a situation where somebody needs it, I think that they should definitely look into how they can get it because it's helpful. Not everybody that takes unemployment is doing it with the mindset of, “This is it. This is the end-all, be-all. I'm gonna be on unemployment for however long…”

No! I think most people that utilize that resource go into it with an idea like, “All right, this is temporary. Just until I can get a job or get employment.” I think it's a good benefit. I think it's a good resource, and I think more people should be forthcoming about their utilization of it, because I think the more people utilize it and learn about it, the more they can educate other people about it and how to utilize that resource in a responsible way.

Ashley: Right. And it seems there's confusion about the role of unemployment—we pay into the system. This is not necessarily the government just giving money to people willy-nilly. When you have that pay stub, part of that money goes to unemployment taxes. So the idea is that you've been putting money away for the potential that you could be unemployed or something like a pandemic—which more people should stay home for if they can—is meant to protect that.

Tiani: Yeah, I think a lot of people, where it gets a little sticky, is that we pay into it and we think about it in terms of, “Oh, yes, it’s there for us if we need it.” But when it comes to other people, I think we then like to pick and choose, and we like to dictate how it's being used.

I think we forget sometimes that it's a resource meant to be used by anyone that is unemployed or who needs the assistance or the help. So I think we just gotta be a little bit more mindful when we're doing it. That OK, it's there for us, for me if I need it. But it's also there in case it's needed by someone else. We really can't control that aspect of things as far as how it’s being utilized.

We have a certain amount of control over things, but I think we need to understand that, listen, at the end of the day, we don't have total control over that, just like a lot of the things that we pay into. We don't really have a lot of control as to what it is that money or those funds are being utilized for. I mean, of course, we have our complaints about it, but I mean, does that stop anything? We still have to pay into it.

Ashley: Right. I think we've been clear on this, but just in case things needs clarification, I don't think you and I are glorifying or condemning anything specifically. But the idea is that the information that you're presenting is helping people make more informed decisions and understand where their finances are going. That's not to say anything is good or bad.

I do want to talk about tips. As we start to wrap this conversation up, [I want to talk about tips] because this is probably where there's the most ambiguity about what to do with them. I've worked at jobs where I was told not to declare my tips. I was told to declare my tips. You get some of your tips in cash, so how do you work around those?

So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how tips are looked at from a tax perspective—not necessarily provide advice because everybody is different and everybody's needs are different. But just how to think about some of the ramifications of what does it mean when you don't declare tips or how can that affect you, either positively or negatively?

Tiani: For sure, definitely. I think probably the most important thing for any barista to take away from the conversation when it comes to tips is look at it like: You'd rather report tips. You'd rather have that information reported and as accurate as possible than not, specifically when it comes to the IRS.

I'd rather be as close to perfect as I can possibly be when it comes to reporting numbers to the IRS than severely under or just wrong about any of it. Because again, so many people, so many baristas know or have experienced, it could definitely come back to bite you. It's not just the situation where it's like, “Oh, I messed up, I'll do better next time.” This can really cause some financial detriment in a lot of cases.

So I think the most important things when it comes to tips, in my personal opinion, is to just definitely—in addition to just paying attention to your checks and your stubs and your W2s and W4s—report any numbers that you have, and and cross-check your employer again to see what numbers they're reporting also. If it's a situation where you have to self-report, that record-keeping is gonna come into play and is going to be extremely handy. If you have questions or you aren't really sure—report, report your tips.

I know that they say that some amounts aren't necessarily reportable or aren't necessary and they don't need to be reported. It should probably be good practice just to report those numbers anyway. We all know it’s the responsibility of the barista to pay income tax and Social Security and Medicare taxes on the tips that they receive. So again, it's important to ensure that employees are reporting those numbers accurately.

I know some employers may have advised that cash tips are under the table and non-reportable. However, it probably is best to just [follow] good practices and ensure that these numbers are being reported accurately. You want to avoid false amounts being reported, you wanna avoid incorrect reporting of any of these numbers. Because again, if they're insanely inaccurate, it leaves the barista vulnerable and subject to audit and subject to having to pay out thousands of dollars potentially in the future.

I'd like to just tell people that if you have a question, just report. Not all numbers are going to be taxable, but just report it anyway. In a situation where you have tip-sharing arrangements—I know a lot of restaurants and bars do that—if your employer doesn't report your tips as income on a tax form, then it's your responsibility as the barista to report those numbers.

It should be reiterated that nontraditional items such as [lottery] tickets or other items of value are also considered to be tips, and they should be reported as well because a lot of people have questions about like, “Well, what if I get a lottery ticket and I have lottery winnings and things like that. Do I have to report that?” Well, yeah, you report it. I'm just gonna err on the side of caution to say, yeah, you should report it.

If your employer takes on the responsibility of reporting your tips to the IRS on your behalf, then they say you don't need to report the value of any non-cash tips. Again, you don't have to—everybody's situation is different, and I know people are gonna do what they feel is best, which is completely okay. But I think it’s a good practice to report it.

Again, keep good records—and they have a form. Actually, it's a form, I think it’s IRS Form 4078, and it's actually a form that baristas can use to report daily records of tips. I didn't even know that that form existed before, but it could be a helpful tool to utilize to keep track of what tips you do bring in. Just make sure you write the date and the amount of tips that were directly paid—any tips from credit cards and debit cards should be on there. The value of any non-cash tips…

And it's also important to keep a record of tips for as long as you keep your other important tax documents. So if you keep your tax documents for a minimum of a year or two years or three years, which is what they recommend that you keep them for, then you should probably also keep a record of your tips for that long as well. Just in case you need to go back and bring it back on the table at some point.

Baristas should also be sure they file W2 on a tax return as well as any overages that they might have because those might also be subject to Social Security and Medicare taxes.

When it comes to tips, I think the biggest thing is just accurate record-keeping. Just knowing that if you are self-employed, if you are an independent contractor, you're going to have to report those amounts yourself, regardless of if your employer is going to be reporting those numbers on your behalf or if you're gonna be reporting those numbers—important record-keeping or accurate record-keeping is going to be very, very helpful to you. It’s probably best for baristas to go ahead and to report all numbers when it comes to tips.

Ashley: Is there anything else that you think baristas should know or other coffee professionals should know as we close out the conversation?

Tiani: For sure. There is a couple of things that I think the baristas should know, especially when it comes to filing taxes every year.

So the first thing: I think it's important to prepare ahead of time. So don’t just think about it when tax season arrives and it's time to actually file—be thinking about [your taxes] throughout the year.

A couple of things that baristas can do in order to actually prepare to file is remember that tips are taxable, including cash tips. Report all tips to employers, especially if they total $20 or more—and again, it goes back to that tips have to be reported if they're $20 or more—and it’s just a good practice. You should probably report it regardless.

It's also important for baristas to know what counts as a tip. So what counts as a tip are things like service charges—some of those service charges could be things like bottle service or room service or delivery charges and gratuity—things like this are also important to know, because again, these are considered as tips.

Get familiar with the math. Tipped workers usually make money via both an hourly set wage and tips. Many people get tips at the end of each shift. However, the taxes on those tips don't typically surface until the tips are reported to the employer. Then the employer withholds the appropriate payroll tax from the employee’s paycheck. It is possible that the hourly wages on the barista’s paycheck may not cover the taxes that they owe on the tips that they've already taken home. And if that happens, they should be able to make the tax payment through their employer, have their employer deduct it from their next paycheck. So get familiar with the math if possible—it's gonna be very helpful.

At the end of the year is when they’ll receive a W2 reflecting their wages and the tips that were reported. A copy of that will go to the IRS and a copy will come to you. That's what you use to file your taxes each year. And again, if tips aren't reported or are reported inaccurately, it can be costly to the barista. So it's probably best practice to try and get a good grasp on it throughout the year instead of waiting around tax time. Because then if there is something that needs to be caught, the chances are you're going to catch it throughout the year and get it corrected before tax time comes and then you don’t have to on the back end, deal with the whole process. And as we know, you can't get in touch with anybody from the IRS right now.

So I know a lot of people are struggling and having issues. They can't get their answers covered, their questions answered. It's just hard, but it's because of the pandemic. It's just difficult. So it's probably gonna be a little bit of a headache throughout the year. But I'm pretty sure we'll save people a huge headache [with this information] at the end of the year come tax time for sure.

So that's just preparing to file. And then when filing, you want to do things like pay attention to filing deadlines—those are also really important because if you don't adhere to certain deadlines, of course you have a penalty. Baristas wanna pay attention to the ways that they can maximize their refund. So depending on the employer, did they use all of their flexible spending account dollars? Things like that. If they didn't … it's just important to know how baristas can maximize their deductions and really make sure that they take every precaution in doing so. They’ve gotta be sure that they claim all available deductions, including any charitable deductions. So that's also a really important tip when filing.

Another important tip is to consider filing status. So your relationship status on December 31st [of last year] will determine your filing status for the entire year. And that's the filing status on things like, are you filing as head of household? Are you filing married? Are you filing joint taxes? If you have questions about that and you're not really sure how to file or what would be the best way to file, definitely ask before you commit to any tax preparer for the definition of each. Make sure you understand which applies to you. That's important.

Be sure to have all of your reported income, make sure your bank information is correct. And I think probably another really important tip is choose someone that you trust. I'm big on referrals, and it takes me a while to choose somebody to do anything—it takes me a while to choose a doctor, it takes me a while to choose someone to come and mow my lawn, like it takes me a minute to really choose. But I just want to make sure that whoever I choose to do the things in my life, that I feel comfortable, completely comfortable with.

I know a lot of times people feel really crunched. Maybe they are waiting late to file or they don't know where to turn. They don't know who to turn to, and they just choose people. But it is important to ask those questions. Even if you're not 100% familiar with taxation yourself, you want to make sure that you feel comfortable that the person you're choosing to prepare your taxes is comfortable and that they're willing to divulge that information to you—that they're not just running your numbers and saying, “All right, pay me.”

At the end of the day, you want to be sure that if you have questions that they’re patient and they’re explaining it to you—those are helpful things that I know personally a lot of my clients are grateful for. It's the fact that I take the time to explain it, regardless of if they utilize my services or not. And it goes back to just making sure that everyone is as educated as they possibly can be about the process, because it's a scary process. You think about being audited by the IRS and you think about losing thousands of dollars and you want to make sure that you get your maximum refund, and so it's a lot to consider, and you want to make sure that whoever is going through that process with you is somebody that you feel completely comfortable with.

So I think those are the main tips that I would suggest when it comes to filing taxes, specifically for baristas each year.

Ashley: Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

Tiani: I appreciate you having me come on. I really thank you for that. I had fun.

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To walk into Everybody’s Busy is to walk into a precisely curated space—like a gallery, but without pretension. The coffee, supplied by Onyx Coffee Lab, is spot-on; the menu design changes monthly and reflects a deep love of music; the speakers are always playing something fun, selected by the shop’s owner, Melissa Stinson.

This is the second time I’ve sat down and recorded with Melissa, and we’re revisiting a few of the themes we covered in the first episode, including our local coffee scene—we’re based in Chicago—and what it means to make something totally unique to you. In that conversation, we lamented that, for such a big city, there’s not as many coffee shops as you might expect. There are definitely folks opening interesting and fun shops, but Chicago is the third largest city in the nation—and there’s room for more. Way more.

But recently, we were spurred to record again after we noticed something promising happening: Despite the fact that COVID-19 has devastated the local dining scene, a number of new coffee shops have been opening across the city, many of which are run by people of color.

Along with a commentary on Chicago’s current coffee landscape, Melissa and I talk about being value-driven, and what it means to have a vision for your business. I reiterate a theme that came up in our first recording: No one else but Melissa could have made Everybody’s Busy, and her vision shows through in every detail and decision.

Our conversation is more a swapping of thoughts than a traditional interview, so if you want to hear two coffee folks try to dig into the reasons why their city and its coffee culture are so peculiar and idiosyncratic, you’ve picked the right time to tune in. Here’s Melissa.

Ashley: I have Melissa Stinson on with me from Everybody's Busy. Melissa, thanks for joining me.

Melissa: Thanks for having me.

Ashley: This is the second time that you and I have actually recorded together. We recorded with each other about two years ago, and some of the big things that we talked about in that episode were the state of the Chicago coffee community and just what it was like to open a pop-up bar.

I wanted to revisit some of those themes with you, because we're in COVID times now, and pretty much everything has changed. So I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about what Everybody's Busy has been up to in the last two years.

Melissa: Let me see. So last time we met, I was actually at my first location, which was on 51st Street. I have since moved to Pilsen. I moved a couple of times in Pilsen and I'm now on the other side of Ashland on 18th Street. So I'm now in this really small—it used to be an old butcher shop, and I'm in the meat locker. Then my friend who does the clothing, he has his store on the outside. So I've got more space. I've kind of gotten settled.

Since the last time we talked, I've added Onyx Coffee. Before I was just a multi-roaster. I specifically use Onyx as my coffee provider; I only use Oatly. What else has changed? I mean, a lot has changed, but yeah, that's kind of what…

Ashley: Yeah, those are the tangible things that have changed, but I wonder for you, how has your mindset changed, or maybe the way that you approach your business changed?

Melissa: I don't get so down on myself like I used to. I mean, it happens because I'm human, but I feel like I know what I'm doing that day. Before I was just kinda all over the place. I don't know how to explain it. It's interesting because when we spoke there really wasn't a lot of options. There's a lot of local coffee now. There's a lot of, not a whole lot, but it's way more options than it was before.

Ashley: That's interesting—the idea of competition. And coffee shouldn't be competitive, but Chicago has never [even come close to being] competitive. Which I totally agree with.

Number one, Chicago coffee has never been competitive, but two, I don't really think it'll ever be competitive because Chicago is number one, a humongous city and two—and I think you'll agree with this—I don't really believe in competition.

Melissa: Yeah? But I would say to me, in my opinion, I don't have experience in coffee shops. I literally just built my own house because I wanted to get into coffee. But it's still kind of divided. I mean, it's getting better, but to me it's still divided—not just by neighborhoods, not just race, but it's divided in quality. Does that make any sense?

Ashley: No, that makes sense.

Melissa: Yeah. It's divided in quality. And since this is a metropolitan city, we're working people and teachers and all types of things and people drink a lot of coffee here, and there's a lot of Dunkin and there's a lot of Starbucks, which is fine. There is limited quality. It's kind of like there are shops that are up to be social, which is totally fine, but the coffee’s not good—to me.

How do I put it? I'm not saying to be more competitive about that, but I would think the stakes would be raised because, okay, I have a shop, here's another shop. Like I said, there's shops popping up on the daily, on the weekly to have the best product, but it doesn't feel like it's about the product. It feels like it's the space. Does that make any sense?

Ashley: Makes sense. And that's an interesting point to make, because I think about that too, with the new shops that have opened. I think that some of them have really hit the mark on quality, just off the bat, but then there is an evolution I'm seeing in other shops where … you're right: Quality might not be the target.

And I don't know if I necessarily agree that quality needs to be the target as much as community can be the target or serving an underserved community can be the target or just solely the idea of business ownership can be the target. But it does seem like an oversight that Chicago has missed the mark on quality, just because we have so many excellent restaurants, we have so many excellent—pretty much everything. And I would say that our coffee scene is probably one of the least interesting ones.

Melissa: I would say that too.

Ashley: How has COVID sort of changed things for you? Because one of the things that you and I have talked about on the side, not on recordings, is that there have been so many coffee shops popping up during COVID, which is not what you would expect.

I don't know that other cities are experiencing this the way that we are, but we have so many coffee shops that have popped up in the last eight or nine months.

Melissa: I think, I mean, granted, COVID has an ugly side to it. I think it made a lot of people pivot because nothing was guaranteed. Like literally you had no idea if you're going to be able to leave the house next week, tomorrow, or—you just didn't know!

You didn't know if you're gonna be able to go back to that building you used to be in, because then we also had the social injustice going. I mean, literally everything was torn up, basically. I mean, except for like the really big corporations, because they have money.

But I think people started to, because they had time to reflect and think about, “What do I want to do? What do I want to have next to my home? What do I want to have in my community?” Because they had time to see—everybody before was just rushing.

You had all these options and you also thought you had all this time. And I think that it changed because you just really didn't know if you were going to be alive or dead or if the city was going to be destroyed, you just didn't know—to me—day to day. So I think it made people look into themselves or think about things they always wanted to do. And I think coffee, [maybe] some other things were probably on their minds. And it was like, just all or nothing, you might as well because you literally do not know what's happening the next day.

Ashley: Did that enter your mind when you were thinking about your business?

Melissa: During COVID?

Ashley: Yeah.

Melissa: Because I am a micro coffee bar, concept coffee bar, and I believe in delivering a great product and also an experience, it did sort of f**k with me a little bit because now I was like, “How is this going to happen? How do you make … how's this going to happen?”

I was kind of troubled by that. I didn't know what to expect. I didn’t know if it was over. I was trying to think of how to pivot. But because I have a really small business, I was worried, but it wasn't as if I had a huge space and employees and had to figure out how to pay them. That's really something to worry [about]—it's just me.

I didn't know if the experiences now, if that was done and things are going to just be like, you walk past, you pick it up, and you keep it moving. You don't have time to think. You have to go home and think and do everything. I just didn't know what that looked like. I didn't know if my concept was, I guess, necessary.

Ashley: Oh, that's kind of a scary thought.

Melissa: I mean, yeah.

Ashley: So what do you think kept you going then? Or what kept you open?

Melissa: I tested the waters a few times. I mean, granted, as much as I'm a homebody, being at home for those many days and hours started to also mentally—and I suffered from depression, chronic depression—but mentally it was messing with me and like any other human being, you need interaction of something.

And so as they [city officials and ordinances] kind of said, “Okay, you can go back and do this,” this was maybe April-ish, I can't remember, I would tiptoe out maybe once or twice for a few hours. Just to medicate myself, that was a way of medicating myself—doing something. And I knew I could [keep going, even if] okay, maybe somebody wasn't coming, but at least I could be in that space and I could entertain myself. And it wasn't at home. I could get my mind off of all these thoughts. You know what I mean? I was occupied.

Ashley: I think something that you mentioned that I want to touch upon is the idea that your business was really … I mean, you have obviously lots to worry about because it's your business, this is your livelihood, but you didn't have to worry about employees. And the stakes were a little bit lower because it's only you that you have to watch out for.

As I'm looking at all these new businesses that are opening up versus the businesses that we've seen close, it seems like a lot of the businesses that have suffered because of COVID are larger businesses, which makes sense, because there's a lot more to lose when you have a lot more employees. But then that to me also speaks to maybe the negative aspects of growth. Like maybe aggressive growth is not the way to go, because if you could grow this fast, you can lose it that fast.

What seems to be holding true are businesses that number one, have really strong concepts, and really know who they are. I think you're one of those people—you know exactly who you are. Even if that changes, even if that evolves, but two, businesses who maybe aren't striving for aggressive growth. And I also think that you probably fall into that category.

Melissa: Hmm…

Ashley: If that makes sense.

Melissa: It does, I’m just trying to process it. I don't know, I'm trying to think of how to respond. Let me just say this, nothing lasts forever. Some people think everything lasts forever, but they just don't. They have to change or they have to break down and become something else. It's just impossible. To me, I'm not speaking for everybody else.

And I think, like I said, COVID and the social injustice and just everything that was going on broke down businesses, or let's just say broke them open, because it was a lot of stuff going on. I mean, it's business, it’s always a lot of bad guys. It's a lot of immoral people. For a lot of business it's about money and power, so it's ugly. I think [this year] just kind of broke that, not all of it, but a lot of it down, and people didn't have anything to depend on. They didn't have a place to go and have a check to get, I mean, there was unemployment that they were getting, but they were left to their own devices. If that makes any sense.

Ashley: I think that first part, where you said that COVID and the social injustices of the summer broke businesses open, is a really poignant thing to talk about, because you're right. It broke things open, and you were suddenly exposed to all the shitty things that a lot of people were doing.

And I think, kind of going back to my question, I think it really exposed people's values. What are you here for? Why are you doing this thing? And I think we're seeing that now with some of the new businesses that are opening in Chicago and—this is maybe a very Chicago-centric conversation, so people listening to this might be like, “This doesn't apply to my city”—but just to set the scene a little bit, a lot of coffee shops have opened during COVID.

A lot of pop-ups that happened during COVID, and almost all of them are helmed by people of color, which is awesome. And I think something that I'm seeing through messaging and social media is that a lot of these businesses are really value-driven—they seem to have a really good sense of who they are as people and are able to lead with that.

I think you've kind of always done that—which is cool to see you as almost a pioneer in this space. That you've been able to take who you are as a person and really translate it into your business. And this is something we talked about in our last episode. Nobody else could have opened Everybody's Busy, only Melissa Stinson doing what she's doing could have opened Everybody’s Busy. And I think we're starting to see that more in other businesses, too.

Only the folks behind thrd. coffee could have opened thrd. coffee, only the husband-and-wife duo of Atmos Coffee could have opened Atmos Coffee. Only people who were really obsessed with Scandinavian coffee could have opened Dayglow. It's all these things that I think have really forced people in the coffee industry to think, “Why am I opening this business?” And if you don't have a good why, if you don't have a good sense of who you are and can translate that into your business, then nothing really matters.

Melissa: Yeah. Okay. That's, that's a good point. And people are paying attention actually.

Ashley: Right, exactly. People are demanding more as well.

Melissa: Yeah. They are. Before it was like “do-do-do-coffee.” But, because I think, like I said, we had so much time to reflect and we didn't have anything to do, so you started to pay attention and you started to notice and even the coffee industry, and all the other industries too, but the coffee industry it’s like, “Oh, wait, these people like coffee, these people like coffee? Oh!”

It's an all-around drink. You could be nine and love coffee. You could be 99 and love coffee. You could be fresh and love coffee. You could be stale and love coffee. It's coffee, it's a drink, like water. So I think people were able to sort of identify with coffee. “You know what? I don't have a space I can go to and have an okay cup of coffee,” or, “I don't have the space I can go to and see art or feel energy.”

So it's like a bunch of sneaker stores, but it's coffee. Right? Some of them have identities. Some of them don't, some of them are still trying to figure it out, which is totally fine. The point is that you tried, you gave it your all, whether you had money or you didn't have any money, you tried. And to me, those that were able to push through during this time will hopefully be really successful once we get into the new future, because there's no going back, it's over.

Ashley: Talk about that a little.

Melissa: When people say, “Oh, when we go back to normal…” I just don't look at it that way. Maybe they're just using that as wording. Like I said, everything's been broken and cracked open, and it's still continuing to be pooled.

There is no 2019, there's just 2020 and 2021—to me. I mean, philosophically, that's what I'm saying. There's just go.

There's almost like, I want to say maybe you had a handbook, but there's no handbook. Nobody's ever been through this. This is like the first time globally everybody's having this experience. It's not a United States thing or African thing. It's the whole planet. And that's interesting at the same time: Everybody's experiencing the same thing, whether you're a business owner or you're not, you’re a caretaker, whether you're a 10-year-old doing home school at home, I mean, everybody is having similar experiences. Don't you think? That's something.

Ashley: Absolutely. We're all experiencing a collective moment that will probably never be repeated in our lifetimes. This idea that everybody right now is experiencing not the exact same thing, but at least an umbrella under the same thing—we're all experiencing COVID probably in very different ways, but we're all experiencing COVID. Right?

Melissa: Right.

Ashley: I think you're right, there is no 2019, 2019 is over. We're never going to go back there. So I was wondering when you think about that, when you think about going into the future and not being able to go back in the past, what are some relics that you think that we can't go back to, or what are some ways that you've had to reshape your mind to be like, “This is my new normal, this is what I have to think about now. That thing that I used to do doesn't work anymore.”

Melissa: Well, I'm a bit of an oddball, and I'm proud of that. It took many, many years to just say, “You know what? Okay.” I've always kind of been, I don't want to say a futurist, but I've always kind of been ahead in a sense. So for me, I'm not really struggling with how to adjust because also, I worked in the entertainment industry. Your world is being shaken constantly, so I'm kind of used to it.

I'm just trying to figure out how to keep up. Because like I said, the one thing I don't know is what's happening from day to day, month to month, but there—to me—there are no, I wouldn't say there's any old ways. And maybe because I've been doing me, maybe I'm so into me and so into the music and so into my idea that—how would I explain—that hasn't penetrated that or it hasn't affected me because where people are kind of going to now, I've already [been there], I'm there. Does that make any sense?

Ashley: No, I think that speaks. I mean, yes—not no, jeez Louise.

But that totally speaks to what we were talking about earlier, about businesses who seem to have a really good core sense of self being able to penetrate through this really difficult time. And you've always had that, that's always been clear every time we've talked or anytime I've gone to Everybody's Busy. And every time I look at your social media, I'm like, “Oh, Melissa knows what she's doing.” Not necessarily that you have to have the answer to everything per se, but you are able to connect everything you do to the core of what your business is. And again, that doesn't mean that things don't change. That doesn't mean that things aren’t fluid, but it seems like you've always been able to connect what you want to do to who you are as a person.

I wouldn't go into Everybody's Busy and think, “Oh, this isn't Melissa. This doesn't seem right.” But I think that when you go maybe to some other coffee shops, you're kind of like, “Oh, why are they doing this? This doesn't really make sense.”

We've seen coffee shops like that close, and I don't want to name names, but we were talking a little bit about that off the air, and I think the coffee shops that maybe have suffered a little bit, have been places that don't have that really core sense of self. And because of that, they can't connect to their communities in the same way.

On the other end, the coffee shops we have seen close are coffee shops that have pretty much just denied union rights to their baristas, which is ludicrous. We've covered that a lot on Boss Barista, but everything you're saying totally makes sense to me. And I don't know, I guess it just speaks to your strength of character, which is pretty cool.

Melissa: Well, thanks. You know what, I think I had a, not a great thought, but an okay thought.

Ashley: All thoughts welcome here.

Melissa: I think for me, it took me so long to make sense of what skills either I possessed or could do—I'm still figuring it out—or what kind of creative I was, or if I was going to be one to make money or if I was going to be that reclusive creative. And coffee was sort of my little tool to say, “Okay, huh? What are we doing here?”

And organically just things started coming. The other thing is too is I'm a person of color, but for me, I'm not one of those shops or brands or people who have to post, “Hey, I'm a person of color. Hey, I'm this. I'm that.” That doesn't work for me. I happen to be a woman. I happen to be Black. I happen to really love a lot of great music. I happen to really like coffee.

It's like all these things are organic and they’re not contrived or anything. They're just like literally flowing through me. I don’t go on my Instagram and say, “Okay, what am I going to? What pictures I'm going to take?” I have a lot of pictures and it really just deals with lifestyle.

I don't want to go—there’s a lot of coffee places you go to and it's like, “How many times can I see latte art? How many times did I see a coffee cup? I can do that at home. I could do that at the shop.” I mean, I get it, but a lot of the coffee brands, not all of them, but a lot of them too have sort of led that way where it's like, “Okay, well you got to show instead of just being,” does that make any sense?

Ashley: No, that totally makes sense.

I think maybe this is a little bit contrived, so maybe go with me on this one.

But I think that just speaks to the idea of what we were talking about earlier about aggressive growth. I think for so long in the coffee industry and pretty much any industry in general, we've had this idea that if you're not growing, you're not thriving. You're either growing or you're diminishing, but it seems like COVID has really taught us, I hope, that it is okay to do the thing that you want to do and be content in that thing that you want to do. You don't have to have a hundred coffee shops. You don't have to have a big expansive bakery or whatever to be successful.

And that goes back to the idea of knowing what's right for you and being like, “This works for me, this business model works for me,” or, “This messaging works for me.” And not to say that that won't change again. This is not about being rigid, but rather about pursuing things willy-nilly without thinking, “Why does this serve my business?”

For example, you switching from a multi-roaster to Onyx, that is a decision where I was like, “Oh yeah, duh, of course, that makes sense to me, you actively pursue quality really aggressively. And Onyx produces some of the best coffees in the world.” And the co-branding thing that you're doing with them is really cool. We'll talk about that in a minute. But at the same time, I see other coffee shops who are doing other things and it seems like, “Oh, maybe you're doing this because this is what you think is right. But it's not true to you.” Yeah.

Melissa: That's kinda what I'm trying to say. (Laughs)

Ashley: We’re getting to those points. We're just circling each other.

Melissa: I talk in in circles sometimes.

Ashley: So let's talk a little bit about Chicago coffee specifically. I mean, we have pretty much only talked about Chicago coffee, but I was wondering what it's been like for you to see more and more pop-ups in the style that you've been popping up. I would say you were probably one of the first to do it in the city. What has it been like to see other coffee shops kind of pop up during this time? What does this make you feel about the Chicago coffee community?

Melissa: It's interesting. And this is solely based on—this is an emotional answer. Like anything, things become really popular. I called it many, many, many, many, many years ago, but coffee is like that thing. Not tea, but coffee. Boutiques have them, barbershops have them, I mean, coffee is everywhere.

And now seeing that Chicago is kind of slowly getting into that, where you have coffee and South Side, the West Side, the North Side, in the hood, in the suburbs, you can find something, somewhere—before you had just a few places to go or you just make it at home or you just suffer with bad coffee. I think too, it's become very Brown.

Instagram I call my family. Chicago is my home, but Instagram is really my virtual family, my virtual cheerleading squad. I virtually cheer for people on there. So here [in Chicago], I think people are still trying to figure it out. I think as usual, some people do stuff for the wrong reasons. Some people just do it because they want to jump on the bandwagon. And some people are just interested in it.

And like I said, they had to pivot, they had to figure something else out because they didn't want to go crazy. They had to do something. So it's like all types of reasons people have started their coffee business or the coffee space business or the mobile coffee. I think to me, and I'm kind of hard on Chicago, I think it’s still very separated, not just by race, but by neighborhood.

This is just a very, to me, separated city. It just is. It is. So why would I think the coffee scene would be different? I mean, you have to have people who run it so naturally they're going to bring in how they feel and it just becomes a mini Chicago if that makes any sense—a mini Chicago coffee scene.

I think it's getting better. I haven't gone to every coffee shop. I haven't had everybody's coffee. I have gone to quite a few. There are some gimmicks to me, but that's not my business. I wish you the best and things will play out the way they're supposed to. Then there's some people who are really into it. And I totally appreciate that. It's somebody to talk to you. Before, I didn't have anybody to talk to. Like I said, Instagram was my family. I could talk to Ian [Williams] from Deadstock or Nigel [Price] from Drip.

Now I have more opportunities to go to somebody's space, experience what they're trying to do, learn about their way of, I don't know, getting into the coffee scene or their history of being a barista for 10 years and finally they want a coffee shop. You have those spaces now. Before it was like, “Who do I talk to about this?”

Ashley: Right, right! Yeah. That feels similar to me too. For awhile, I felt it was because I was an outsider—because I think when I had met you, I'd only been in Chicago for less than a year. And I felt like, “Oh, maybe I'm just not part of this community. Maybe I'm just outside of it.”

But then I would talk to my partner, Jesse, who worked for Intelligentsia for almost a decade. And he even expressed some of the fragmented nature of it and I will blame Intelligentsia—I'll name them—for part of that. I think that's true of any city that has one major player in general. And I think that's true of any city that has a dining scene or a whatever scene that kind of takes over at a very particular moment in time.

I think for a while, and maybe this is, I don't know if you agree with this, but I feel like Chicago was just stuck, because Intelligentsia was so dominant for so long and it was the innovator for so long. And then you get stuck in that moment. This is not like a knock for or against any particular brands per se, but just commenting on how a coffee company who's dominant can stall progress.

Melissa: I agree. And if it wasn't for Intelligentsia, you wouldn't have a lot of other people. I don't hate on them, I don't hate on Starbucks because this is all part of the experience. You can't have one without the other, but I think, I don't feel like coffee was … I think it was very personal here. I don't think it was as important. You know what I mean?

We'll have a coffee shop. We'll be really scientific about it. And you know, we're into this. But I don't think it was a necessary thing, which is why to me, I couldn't find any good coffee shops. I mean, you happen to be in a bodega or a diner and you have some coffee, but it wasn't like we got to have good coffee.

It was like you had to go to certain places. Most of the time it was downtown or up north where maybe coffee was valued more. Because for some reason, the South Side, they didn't think they value coffee, maybe the South Side didn't value coffee, even though people drink coffee every day, they make it at home. They have great-grandparents and they'd grown up with it. I just don't think it was valued the same way.

I think too it was intimidating, because it's like, “How do I make this a business?” It's coffee and it's complex like beer, wine, bourbon … You would talk to people and it's like, “Oh my God, I don't know anything about that. I just like the drink.” I'm coming from [the perspective of] a consumer. I'm not coming from a worker. I'm coming from a consumer that's now behind the bar.

It was very important and it was really upsetting to me. Especially, and I lived in New York and you had thousands of little bitty spots, restaurants, whatever. I still had trouble finding really good coffee. It wasn't a big deal [then]. It's a big deal now. It's a way of life for a lot of people. It's a way of communication for a lot of people, a way of expression, which is great.

I think now you're starting to see people of color are now like, “Hey, hello, I drink coffee. I've been drinking coffee. My grandma has been drinking coffee. My mother's been drinking coffee. What's this all about?” But it's still some kind of … still a divide there because, say for instance, the coffee masters or the coffee key holders—they're not really helpful to everybody. You know what I mean? And granted, it depends on how you approach things. If you approach things wrong, you're going to get what you get. But it hasn't been presented in a comfortable way or a welcoming way. It's been very intimidating.

Ashley: Yeah. That makes sense to me. I totally get what you're saying.

And again, not to knock anybody specifically, but just the way I think that coffee has been served in Chicago for so long until I would say very recently, it is super intimidating. You have to know what a pour over is. You have to know what the single-origin menu means. It's like we went from zero to a hundred without any space in between to build up a customer base. So naturally that customer base became pretty stratified because we didn't think about accessibility.

I think that’s where Chicago really suffered. So that's why we don't have as many community shops. We don't have as many people who are like, “Oh, I live here, I'm going to build a coffee shop here,” or, “I want to start a concept bar because I care about X, Y, and Z. and I don't necessarily have a built-in customer base.” Which is really interesting.

I was wondering, as we start to think about what the future holds, what are you thinking about? What's on your mind, because you said you're a futurist, you think ahead—what's ahead for you?

Melissa: Well, I'm not going to reveal that. (Laughs) Because I do change my mind too.

Honestly, Ashley, I don't know. And I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing because I am definitely the person that takes risks, but then there's a fear there—but I definitely will jump off the cliff and be like, “I have no idea how I'm going to land, but I have to jump off the cliff, you know?”

I don't really know. I'm hoping to make Everybody's Busy a bigger brand, because like I said, it's not just about coffee. It's also about culture and about paying homage and design and art and photography, all these organic things that I do. It's also about raising awareness—I mean, music is my number-one love, in case you don't know that.

My Instagram pretty much says I'm a music head. I don't know all music, but music is my lifeline and I've kind of used coffee to push that agenda. I don't know how it’s communicating with everybody.

I would like to see, for instance, because it is a very divided city, South Side, North Side, the West Side—and granted, the kids have changed, the industry has changed, but for it to be such a … it was a soulful town. It was a music town. A lot of people from the music industry came out of the Midwest, came out of Chicago, came out of the South Side. Nobody looks back—like there's no soul as a whole, like there's people who have souls, but for me there’s no soul. I don't know what that looks like, but like I said, it's me pushing a mostly musical agenda and really trying to get people to play more music, play other music.

You got to go back to the past, because if you didn't have the past, you wouldn't have right now. Instruments, bass, I mean, like just that feeling. I don't really feel that when I'm here, I'm not going to compare us to New York or LA, because that's completely different. We're in the middle, so we're different. But I'm really trying to push that.

I don't even know how to put it into words. It's an experience, but it's also paying homage and it's also learning. Music does a lot, but right now it doesn't seem like it gets credit, if that makes any sense. I mean, it literally is like chicken noodle soup. It does a lot. And it blows my mind when I go into spaces, and they don't really ... it's either in the background or they kind of abuse it. I know as my opinion, bad music, whatever. It's just—it's abuse to me. I … (Sigh)

Ashley: I used to know this one barista who would play nu metal at like, 7 a.m. And I was like, “Why are you doing this to people?” But I see what you're saying.

I think it's easy to enter a space and feel like, and I'm going to extrapolate a little bit outward from the music analogy because I think it can apply to a lot of different things, but it feels like there's not consideration for a holistic experience.

Melissa: OK.

Ashley: Does that make sense?

Melissa: Yeah.

Ashley: Music is part of that.

Melissa: I don't think people are thinking about that. Because they also haven't been taught to, they're not accustomed to that. Maybe nobody told them it was okay. Because for so long, you'd go into spaces and you'd have Muzak playing. There’d be somebody in Seattle who's basically programmed all his music, sent it to the store and you have to listen to that over and over again. Now, and same with all these streaming services, to now create a playlist or create a vibe it's a job for certain people. You know what I mean? It's a lot. To run the register, to make the coffee, watch the people, but you got to worry about the music too.

Ashley: You also have to worry about all of it, right? You have to worry about the seating, you have to worry about where your lids are. I get really frustrated when there's not a natural flow in a coffee shop, where it's like, “Okay, if I enter, where do I exit? Am I bumping into people?” Like it's all of it.

It's not to diminish music by any means. But I think that you can take that example and extrapolate outward and think, “How do we think about this experience holistically?” And I think you're right. We don't really teach people how to do that because a lot of that is subtle. If you're doing a good job, you don't really notice it. You know what I mean? It all flows. So it's really hard to say this is actually super intentional. Especially when we don't have a lot of examples of that in Chicago. That's what … I dunno?

Melissa: I mean, like you said, if you have to worry about all facets and maybe music kind of falls to the side, I'm not saying everybody can do that. Because you just can't. If that's not your thing, that's not your thing.

I get up every morning. I don't know who I'm going to see. I don't know who I'm going to run into. I don't know who I'm going to be introduced to, but I'm ready, if that makes any sense.

And I think we sort of miss that—and that's me being like, kind of petty—but we sorta miss that expression from our clothes, our feet, our hats, or not wearing hats. It's a total thing. And you don't always see that and that's that either you have it or you don't.

I'm not mad at anybody if they don't have it, but it's full on you trust that person when you go in [their space]. It's like, “Oh s**t, look at this. All right. The product—it's gotta be good because everything else in here is good.” And a lot of times you don't see that it's like half-assed, and that's not something that a lot of people can control because if you don't own it, what can you do? But just show up and go to work.

(Sighs) I just want a lot.

I just want a lot and it's not necessarily fair. And I mean, I'm not perfect by any means. I'm still figuring out. But I want an experience or I want to be inspired.

Ashley: I think that's a pretty good place to end. Thanks, Melissa, for taking time to talk to me.

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“It’s almost five o’clock, and Darlene and I just realized we haven’t even eaten today. It’s been such a wonderful day, such a busy day, but we’ve just been constantly in motion that we didn’t even stop to eat.”

The person you just heard was Shanelle County, co-founder of Standard Pour, a new coffee shop in Valley Stream, Long Island. Shanelle reached out to me just a few weeks before the soft opening of her business, and I asked her to capture some snippets from those early days of its existence—the moments of excitement, struggle, and gratitude as they happened in real time.

The story of how Shanelle’s business came to be spans just a few weeks in the summer of 2020, starting from the very first time her cousin and business partner Darlene posed the idea to the day Standard Pour opened its doors. Throughout this experience, Shanelle has contended with all types of new feelings, many of which we document in this episode.

“It’s been about a week since the grand opening. And I think things finally feel like normal. Yes, it’s like we finally could think about the business and how it runs day-to-day.

In our first month so much has happened, and it was like the first hurdle was getting to the soft opening and then from the soft opening to the grand opening and all the things we wanted between the two end points. It’s actually kind of funny to see, to even think about how much we’ve had to take our vision and stick with the vision, but pivot during the process. It’s definitely not easy, but it’s been fun.”

I’m always interested in the moments we remember and the ones we forget, and the unreliability of memory. I wanted this episode to be about Shanelle, and also to paint a portrait of a distinct chapter in her life. When I mentioned this idea to Shanelle, she was gracious enough with her time to capture fleeting impressions and experiences—some from her, and some from customers—during the grand opening.

The result is both a traditional interview—we recorded this conversation just as Shanelle was closing up shop one day in December 2020, and you might catch the hum of refrigerators behind her—and also features clips from both Shanelle and customers of the shop scattered throughout.

I hope you enjoy this one-of-a-kind episode. Think of it as an interview with an incredible new business owner, but also as a meditation on memory. Here’s Shanelle.

Ashley: To kick things off Shanelle, can I have you introduce yourself?

Shanelle: Yes, I am Shanelle. I am one of the owners of Standard Pour.

Ashley: And can you tell me where you are right now?

Shanelle: I'm in the shop right now. We've closed our doors for the day—we close at 5 p.m. So I'm just hanging out here in the shop with you, Ashley.

Ashley: I am so excited to have this conversation with you because we had a pre-conversation, and I felt so much of your energy and your excitement. I want to walk through what it was like to open Standard Pour, because you're still really in the thick of it. So how long has Standard Pour been open as of today, which is December 3rd?

Shanelle: We opened our doors on October 15th. That is approximately six weeks—I want to say six weeks as of yesterday, because today is a Friday. That's how long our doors have been open.

Ashley: I want to talk about some of these really early moments of opening, because I feel like we don't often get to capture them in real time. Often we reflect back on the good old days of, “We were not sleeping at all and it's just starting and blah, blah, blah…” But we don't really get to sit and catalogue those moments.

So I was wondering if you could walk me through—we're going to do a little bit of time-hopping here—but I was wondering if you could walk me through the night before the doors opened for the first time. How did you feel?

Shanelle: So it was an interesting experience because I assumed that the night before we opened, I would feel pure bliss, pure excitement. But you're so in the moment of things that need to get done or need to be done in order to have the opening that you envision, that you didn’t even get to stop to think about that.

So the night before, literally, or the day before, I remember stressing out, I remember calling Darlene and saying, “Well, maybe we shouldn't fully open up doors. Maybe we should do like this…”

She said, “No, we're going to open. You have to open. It's going to be fine. How can I ease your mind?” But I say all that to say that we were doing work in the store, we wanted to make sure things were organized. So we had a lot of cleaning to do and a lot of running around just to make sure we had the materials that we needed for the next day, so that when our friends and family showed up for that soft opening, that we were able to really serve them in a way that we felt would represent us and the business positively.

And so it was a long night. [Laughs] We were tired. Definitely, probably went to bed after 2 a.m. the next morning. But at the same time it was like, I could never pretend like this experience didn't happen. I can never, never not be grateful for it because it's like, when in life do you get to go through this? And the reason that we're going through it is because we're opening our own business. So that part of it is the exciting part of the experience. But in the moment it felt very stressful.

Ashley: I’m sure! Let's jump back a little bit, and by a little bit, I mean a little bit because you and Darlene, who's your business partner and your cousin, opened Standard Pour in about two months. Is that right?

Shanelle: Absolutely. That is 100% correct.

Ashley: So what was that first conversation like with Darlene when—I believe she presented this idea of, “Let's open a business!”

Shanelle: Yes. So I would say maybe the end of June, early July—so both of us live in Valley Stream where Standard Pour is located, and we live five minutes apart, if even that much, but definitely within walking distance of each other. So she would come over, especially because it was summertime. So it was nice outside and she would walk over.

And I remember us sitting and talking, and she's like, “Girl, I need to have a business. I need to open a business on Rockaway Avenue. There’s many opportunities here and it's time to have a business.”

So I took that opportunity to say, “Hey, me too, I'm very interested. You want to do something together? Like I am 100% into it.” I've had all these ideas over time. We’ve talked through so many different business ideas that we think or thought would be good for the area.

And so we said, “Okay, you do this work, I'll do this work. We'll come back together in about a week and see where we are.” And a week came and a week went because we are also working full time in our jobs—and we still are, by the way—as well as just life is happening.

So I remember reaching out to her saying, “Hey, I know I was supposed to follow up about X, Y, and Z, but I've been busy. I'll get to it.”

She said, “Same here. I understand how it is.”

About a week later she sends me a text. I remember seeing the text come through, but I couldn't read it at the moment. And then she calls me and she said, “Hey, did you see my text?”

And I said “Yeah, but I didn't get a chance to open it.”

She said, “No, open it.”

The coffee shop that was really renowned in the neighborhood had closed their doors maybe a few weeks prior. They closed at the end of June. And they were in Valley Stream for nine years and they were definitely well loved, well received. People were very sad to see them close their doors. But at the same time, the space went up for lease—a “For Lease” sign went up in the window. So when we saw that, we said, “Wow, this is an amazing opportunity to bring a coffee shop back.”

Because like I said, it was well received, and people were sad to see a coffee shop go—their space to hang out, to do work was no longer available. So she suggested to me, “What if we kept it as a coffee shop? But we also add a wine bar.”

I said, “Oh my gosh, that's a really cool idea,” because I really wanted to open a wine bar.

And so we said, “Okay, let's put an application in and see what happens.” And this was maybe a Wednesday or Thursday. We got approved for application by Friday and the rest is history. And that was the end of July.

Ashley: That’s wild.

Shanelle: We've been on a rollercoaster ride, a whirlwind of a ride since then.

Customer: “I am so absolutely proud to be here. The ambiance is to die for. I tell everybody, ‘Come and check it out.’ This is a place you want to be.”

Ashley: That's wild to think that happened so quickly, because you hear of other coffee shops taking months, years. And it seems like within maybe what, 10 days, you went from Darlene coming up to you and saying, “I have to open a business,” to, “Oh, we have a lease. We're doing this.”

Shanelle: Exactly. And that's exactly what I said! “This is really happening. Okay!”

Ashley: It seems like the story of Standard Pour is a lot of those happenstance moments, those moments of kismet, where you meet somebody that you tell your story to, and they're like, “Oh, I'm a baker,” or “I'm a contractor,” or something like that. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about those two months and how things sort of fell into place for you.

Shanelle: We had to hit the ground running doing research. What are the things that we need to open a coffee shop? What does it take to open a coffee shop? Understanding third-wave coffee and the importance of it, because we knew we didn't want to just have the regular [coffee] experience based on who we are and what we represent. We wanted more.

I remember we found this long list of like, “What do you need to open a business in New York State,” and going through this list. Literally that's the list that we worked off of—from figuring out what inspections we needed, what things we had to have in this space to make sure that it's safe, every … what is it? I dunno what to say. It's not a bureau, but every…

Ashley: I think that's right, some sort of government organization has to approve stuff that exactly, that we have to be in contact with for approval.

Shanelle: Exactly. [What bureaus] that we have to be in contact with for approval, knowing what our village requires for us to be able to open our doors—and then knowing what we wanted the shop to look like, how would we get it to transform? And then building out a timeline to get that done and then everything else in between.

What are we going to have to eat? Who's going to cook? What's the menu going to look like? Where's our coffee gonna come from? What are our hours—everything under the sun we were just thinking about in real time at all times, and it didn’t stop. And it's like, “We need to think about this. We need to think about this.”

As you said, how we met everyone who has worked with us has been amazing. The way I met the baker … I don't know if I'm supposed to say this, but I had gone to another coffee shop …

Ashley: You’re allowed to go to other coffee shops.

Shanelle: It was very early in the morning. I'm working remotely right now due to COVID, but I was starting my work day. So I wanted to get a cup of coffee before my day started. And I walked into the shop, but I was like, “How is somebody already in here? If the shop just opened, I didn't see anyone walking through, I'm the first customer.”

So I'm speaking to the barista about the options for pastries. And he's like, “Oh yeah, meet our baker.”

I said, “This is your baker?” And then I started speaking to her and I was like, “Oh, hi, nice to meet you.” And the energy that we exchanged was amazing.

And I said, “You know what? I am actually looking for a baker.” I didn't go into much detail, and we exchanged information. When I eventually was able to speak to her at another point in time, everything that she was able to do is everything that we were looking for.

She'd sampled her scones for us, her cranberry orange scones, which is a staple on our menu right now, we were like, “Oh my god, this is amazing.”

We can't make this stuff up. Like, how does a baker just land in your lap who also bakes really well? So that's Warberry Cakes. Her name is Odetta. So that was just an amazing experience of how that came to be.

Even with our contractor, we talked to different firms and we knew exactly what we wanted. We had an idea for the space, how we wanted to transform this space. And then I remember a contracting company coming in and we walked through everything we wanted to do from top to bottom. And the quote we got back was insane. We're like, “Wait, what? How is this small business supposed to pay for that?”

And I remember having a moment of stress and I remember Darlene saying, “What's going to happen?”

But this is how you learn to appreciate the people in your life and your friends. Because she had a friend came in to put up our emergency lights. And when he came, he brought another friend with him who he also works with. In talking to that friend, he said, “My father does work.”

And I don't know how, Ashley, I wasn't even the one who had the conversation with him. Darlene was, and once she told me the story, I said, “Darlene, I have a feeling that this is going to work out.”

So his dad, his name is Alex, is the one who did all the work on the space for us. I mean, honestly, in a way that has been affordable for us, in a way that has been manageable for us. He brought so many ideas to the table that have been so helpful to what we've envisioned that you can't make this stuff up.

Then the same friend with the floodlights, and the son [of the contractor], and some other friends that Darlene has painted the entire space for us. And so again, if we had to go to a large company for that, it would have just been a different experience. The type of care that they put into it—because they know it's for friends, and they're very good at what they do. If I told someone, “This is how everything fell into place,” I wouldn't be making it up, you know? I don't know if people will believe—I mean, people do believe it, but it's just very hard to believe that it wasn't harder in getting us started.

Ashley: I think that there's a power to everything you just said—of just saying things out loud and not necessarily knowing that the community can meet your need because maybe they can't, but you never really know, right? Until you say it out loud.

So having these conversations with members of your community, it totally makes sense that people would come out of the woodwork who you maybe didn't know and were like, “Actually I do this,” or “Actually I do that,” which is incredible. And I'm a big proponent of just saying things out loud because you never know what will happen. This is the perfect example of that actually happening and working out really well.

Shanelle: 100%. I'm a big believer of manifesting great things and that they will come and recognizing that we deserve these things. So it's not like it shouldn't come our way, right? And I think that oftentimes, you expect life to be extremely hard at all times, or to think about opening a business, or the idea of opening a business, it just seems like an insurmountable task. And now that I'm here, I'm like, “It's not impossible.” It definitely is challenging. It has a lot of stresses that come with it, but nothing that I would trade in at the moment for having this business. So yeah.

Ashley: I wanted to ask you about, because we're talking about things moving so quickly and we're talking about how everything sort of fell into place, but you were also really careful about the decisions you made. You didn't just go into partnerships with vendors without carefully considering, “Who is this person, and why do I want to work with them?” So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that process of making decisions, because I imagine there must have been a lot of pressure to move quickly, but you also want to keep the integrity of the space and keep the integrity of your view.

Shanelle: Absolutely. While we had a very short turnaround time opening our doors, we still knew that we weren't just going into business to make quick money.

To have this opportunity as two young Black woman is very important to us. And what was more important is that the message that we show or send, the experience that we cultivate, represents that—that we are about supporting other Black-owned businesses, supporting other women, supporting locally, because we are from Long Island, we are from Valley Stream—and then about quality across the board.

The biggest partnership we have is with our roaster, right? We are a coffee shop and in making that selection, we had a few—maybe five roasters on the table that we were interested in. And then naturally those that fell off the table fell off the table on their own.

So we were down to two roasters; one was local to Long Island. And the other is who our roaster is—Counter Culture Coffee. We really took time beyond going to tastings and cuppings. Once we did our research about how the beans are sourced and all those things, making sure that it's ethically done, it became a question of where do we see an opportunity to really do well as a small business, as women, as Black women.

And recognizing that, “Hey, listen, Counter Culture Coffee is not a Black-owned business. Counter Culture Coffee is a corporate business, a white-owned business,” but that doesn't mean that we don't and cannot support and make sure that this partnership can work well on both ends, right?

I'm a firm believer in life that everyone has an opportunity to choose. So as much as we were choosing them for everything that they had to offer, they are also choosing to work with us. It has been a wonderful experience to date. So definitely no regrets there. Then the coffee's delicious, it’s amazing. That partnership was very important to us.

Then meeting our baker, Odetta with Warberry Cakes, she is local to Valley Stream. She is a woman. She is a Black woman. Fancy Confections, her name is Lady Ashley. She makes our desserts and she really tries to pair our desserts to match our specialty drinks.

Right now we have a white chocolate pistachio blondie that matches our pistachio rose chocolate latte on our menu, which is actually really cool. And then she just bought this week these eggnog cupcakes with these gingerbread men, which is really fun because we have a specialty latte called Ponche de Crème.

And I'm kind of going off course here…

Ashley: No, I’m into it.

Shanelle: But this is also important to us as cousins, Darlene and I—our family is from Trinidad and Tobago, which is in the Caribbean. And another part of our vision was to make sure that we are honoring our culture through our menu as much as we can. So while we're not a Caribbean restaurant, we want to make sure we're infusing our Caribbean flavors where we can.

So the Ponche de Crème latte is a December special because Ponche de Crème is a creamy drink. If you want it to compare it, it's similar to eggnog, it’s similar to Coquito, but it is typically an alcohol-based drink with milk and spices. We're building our latte on that concept. It doesn't have alcohol, but it has everything else. And so Ashley built the cupcake to go along with that latte. And Darlene had already worked with her in the past, and once again a Black-woman-based business. So that's…

Oh my god, I can't believe it! Our tea! So as much research as we put into getting coffee, we put in that same research for our tea. And so we landed on Brooklyn Tea and they're local, they're Brooklyn-based, which is in New York. They're also a Black-owned business, a Black couple. Jamila has been amazing to work with, but Brooklyn Tea, what really stood out to us was that the teas smell amazing.

All of their teas are loose-leaf teas. It's just a wonderful palate experience. To be able to carry Brooklyn Tea in our store is an honor for us. We really took a lot of their styling—so when you go into their store in Brooklyn, they have their teas in these small glass jars, where customers are able to smell the tea and really see the ingredients and the benefits of the tea. We did a similar setup.

We did some glass jars as well, and we have the labels that tell you what's in each tea. You get to smell the tea if you'd like, and then customers love waiting because they could see their tea steeping and pulling all the flavors out of the leaves, as opposed to quickly throwing in a teabag and you're on your way, if that's how you want it. If you're in a rush, you may absolutely get it that way. So that's really just a quick bit on some of our vendors.

Customer: “Get some of this! I had the salmon—the smoked salmon, avocado toast to die for. I got to take a picture with the chef and [turns to partner] which one is this? Pistachio—pistachio chocolate, rose chocolate. It was recommended. Everybody needs to get a cup!”

And I can't forget our chef. So our chef is Dwayne Daniel, and his assistant chef or sous chef is Raya Alleyne. Again, this is how things have just happened in this process:

One morning I'm getting ready to work remotely and open my laptop. And I'm like, “Gosh, we need someone to cook. We need a chef. We need a chef. Where are we going to get a chef?”

And it hit me: “I know somebody, I know someone who cooks.” And I called him, I reached out to him—actually, I didn't have his number. I reached out to a friend who had his number. I said, “Hey, I want to reach out to him. I know he cooks. Can I get his number?”

So I reached out to him and he was on board from the inception. The beauty of it is that we were able to sit down the three of us, he, Darlene, and myself, and really talk about what we wanted the menu to look like and the flavors that we wanted to come out with. He said, “As long as you allow me to be creative, it will be great.”

When I tell you the timeline was tight, we had all these plans for a tasting and everything—that never happened. It was showtime. Since day one, everyone has raved about everything on the menu. So kudos to Dwayne for really holding the kitchen down and to Raya for doing an amazing job with him.

Ashley: That's so cool. It's really incredible to see how proud you are of the vendors that you feature, which seems of like an obvious statement—that you would be proud of the people that you feature—but it's not always a given, especially if you're not clear on your vision.

If you're not like, “I want to do things with intention and I want to do things well and I want to give care to the things that I decide to put in this coffee shop,” which is really incredible. I want to talk a little bit about that first day that you opened. We kind of did a little bit of time jumping—we went from the night before you opened, then we talked about some of the time before that, and now we're at that first opening day.

I was wondering if you could talk about some of the feelings you felt as you saw your friends and family come in and experience the space that you've built.

Shanelle: Yes, it's surreal. I'm talking about our soft opening, which was in October, but then when I think about the same feelings, it was very similar to our grand opening day, which was November 14th, so just about a month later.

I had to take a moment—I don't cry in front of people, but it was an emotional moment to recognize that all these people are here to support us. They didn't just happen to walk by [and say], “Oh, there's a coffee shop. This is cool.” They're here to support Darlene and myself, and they want to see us grow. They want to see us thrive. And on top of that, as your friends and family, they'll always support you. To know that they love the products that you're putting out is really even more amazing.

They’re not saying that just to say that. Because they’re family and they’re our friends, they are very candid. Our family is very real. They'll tell you in a second if something needs improvement and while we appreciate that, and that's what we wanted from the soft opening, that real feedback, they just genuinely were happy to be here to support us.

So the feeling that I have, it's hard to put into words, but just to know that people are here to celebrate you is amazing. And as I was telling you in our pre-conversation, I'm very modest. I have my friends telling other people, “You know, she opened a coffee shop!” because I wouldn't talk about it. I know that it might not be the best for business. But you need [your friends and family] in these moments and you need to recognize that and be grateful. And for me, to know in those moments that these people are here because they love us and they support us and they want to see us do well, is just amazing.

“Today is our grand opening. And I don't know, I think I've just taken putting out the pastries under my wings since our soft opening. And so I'm very particular about it every time. If I'm able to, I will always put them out, but today we have so many pastries.

We have gluten-free, we have vegan. Plus we have our usual basic goods by Warberry Cakes and Fancy Confections. It's so much, and this is taking so long to put out—it's like an hour, but it looks so good. These new display … not cases, but they're like nice slate with some glass domes. So I'm really excited about it because it's like an upgrade from what we've been using. So this is exciting. Plus, we have these risers, but my goodness it’s taking so long.”

Ashley: I think you talked earlier in this conversation about how smooth the process was of opening, and you talked about deserving it. [There’s] this perception that it's a business and it's supposed to be hard and you almost go into this moment of self doubt. “Can I do this or do I even deserve this?”

Recognizing that, “Yes, I do deserve it. It is okay if this is easy, because I'm allowed this. It doesn't always have to be hard.” I imagine some of those similar feelings must have come when you opened your doors. And even afterwards when you're talking about maybe not talking as much about the coffee shop.

I wonder, since you described yourself as a very modest person, I wonder if this experience has changed anything about you. It doesn't just have to be about modesty, but one of the things I wrote down before we hopped on this call was that you're a subtle perfectionist. And you talked a little bit about learning flexibility. So I was wondering throughout this process, like, how have you seen yourself change?

Shanelle: It's definitely been a challenge in that sense. I've never thought of myself as a perfectionist. I'm always that person that can see things from multiple perspectives and understand that things will always go as planned, et cetera, et cetera … but I never realize how hard I am on myself.

When I'm putting out something, it has to look and feel a certain way. Darlene and I knew what our vision was, we knew what we wanted our space to look like. And she already has a business of her own. She’s gone through these experiences before. This is my first time. And even though her business is very different from Standard Pour, she knew what it meant to own your business, to be an entrepreneur and knowing how to pivot and think on your feet in the moment.

So I'm a person that like, I need the structure. We have to have a schedule. This is what every week is going to look like. We going to meet at this time every week. And if we say we're going to do A,B,C, it has to look like A, B, and C.

Going through this process, I've learned to recognize that you might not even ever get to A or A may look like A and a half, whatever that may mean. I've had to learn to know that I don't have to sacrifice or compromise the integrity of what I want to do, nor the quality of it, but I have to be able to change from what I originally planned, because circumstances just offer themselves up differently and being able to be flexible in those moments and to pivot in those moments is what will allow me to be more successful.

I've been able to do that—such that from the soft opening to the grand opening, the anxiety that I had before the soft opening was definitely different from the grand opening. Learning to relax more and be in the moment more, knowing that we have put in the work.

Like you said before, and I've said before, we deserve to have this experience and it's okay. Where we want to see the shop, it will come, and we are working towards that. But it'll come how it's supposed to happen. I can't make it happen or control the things that I cannot control and embracing that and allowing that to be.

Customer: “I must say congratulations, Darlene and Shanelle—you’ve done an awesome job. For putting my cafe in a beautiful neighborhood. The food is truly delicious. The ambiance is breathtaking! All the best, enjoy, and continue to grow with the business. Love you girls.”

Ashley: So you have the soft opening—that's when you have your friends and your family coming to check out the place and you get this outpouring of love and support, which is incredible. And then you have the grand opening, which is about a month later, which welcomes a different subset of people, people in the neighborhood, people who are excited to see the coffee shop open again.

I was wondering what it was like to get feedback from people that you didn't know. What was it like when you started hearing from other folks about what Standard Pour meant to them or their experiences there?

Shanelle: Man, that's the wildest part of all of this, right? Because like I said, your friends and family that had to show up for you, they'll always support you, but for strangers to have such amazing things to say, that's just the wildest part.

I know myself and I will show up as the same person in every entity of my life. So I'm genuine to people, but you don't always expect that [from others]. Why would you care about us, you know? While it's very important to us to cultivate an amazing customer service experience, the way our customers have been so genuine, have been so excited to see our the success, so excited to see us in the neighborhood to have another coffee shop that they can come to, that they can sit at and they can work and then to enjoy our coffee, our food, I mean the positive feedback is amazing.

I remember the grand opening date. So we have one customer, her name is Crystal. I remember meeting Crystal because once we opened for our soft opening, we would [stay] open there after, but what we would do is every week, we’d slowly roll out new menu items, try new things, see how they would be received until we got to our grand opening where our menu for our coffee bar is pretty much set.

I met Crystal, Crystal has so much energy. So amazing, ready to see our success on day one, she shows up the day of the grand opening with a bouquet of flowers, like, “Shanelle, oh my god, congratulations!”

And I'm like, “What? Thank you, Crystal—it’s 7, 8 o'clock in the morning. So you thought about us. You thought about me to go and buy flowers to come and say, ‘Here, congratulations on your grand opening.’” And so it's things like that that you can't make up.

We've had so many positive reviews and experiences and even if something doesn't go the way that we would have liked or the way a customer would have liked the way that they reach out to us and tell us about it has been so kind. You don't always get that in this day and age, people are so quick to go and slander, and you don't just see things from one perspective.

And [customers have] been so kind to say, “My customer service experience was this, but this also is something else that I experienced that could be better.” And obviously, our immediate response is to make sure that they're satisfied, but even in that realm, to get negative—I don't want to call it negative—to get feedback in such a positive light has just been amazing.

Ashley: What does it mean for you and your cousin who are from Valley Stream, who are women, who are Black women, to open this business here, now, where you are?

Shanelle: I think what it means is so much greater than many people can imagine.

As Black people to be able to open this business that's patronized by everyone is, first and foremost, something you can only dream of. That's when you get to the point in your life where you realized you do deserve these things. Because as much as I have wanted a business …. it's not that it seems unattainable, but it did seem unattainable.

And so now to be here, it means so much more than just, “I have a business around the corner from my house.” It sets a precedent. It sets an example. It creates an opportunity for our family. It creates an opportunity for our community. It's bigger than just the coffee shop. It has so much more meaning. It is now part of our legacy.

Opening this business is more than just a coffee shop for us. For us it’s a message. For us, it's a dream come true. And for us, it proves to Darlene and I that we could do this. So this is just the beginning and that's literally what it is for us. Only the beginning.

Ashley: Why did you want to open a business? I'm curious to know more about that.

Shanelle: Me personally, I don't want to work for someone else for the rest of my life, but I think bigger than that, we wanted to open a business to have something of our own, to have something, to keep in the family. And, like I mentioned before, to be able to create an opportunity for other people like ourselves and to create an opportunity in our own neighborhood.

To be able to do all those things, we didn't have to go to another town. We're from here and to have this opportunity here, we want a business because we know what we want to offer to people. We know what we want to experience. And so to be able to create that vision and make it come to life—why not?

Ashley: We touched on a lot of different themes, but I think the one that was maybe the most unexpected to me—which I'm excited about, this is why I love interviewing—is this idea of deserving and worth. And knowing that I do deserve these things, no matter how easy or hard they come. I'm wondering, as you're sitting here in this coffee shop, I'm interviewing you while you're sitting there after the doors are closed, what does it feel like to look around and think, “I built this. This happened because me and my cousin had an idea and it is here. It is physically here.”

Shanelle: I don't know if I've actually sat in that yet. I don't think I've really sat in it. I'm 100% grateful. I show gratitude every day. I have my affirmations. I say my prayers. I don't know if I know the magnitude of what we have here just yet.

And I say that because it's still unbelievable. I can't believe it, and then it's so funny. We've also been blessed with a great staff, great resources, great servers. And they sit there and say, “Well, you know, Shanelle, you're my boss. Darlene, you guys are my bosses.”

And I'm like, “Wait, what, I'm your boss?” While I do hold a leadership position in my career, it's still like, “Wow, this is mine. This is mine.” So even when we're stressing over the things behind the scenes, you're like, “We have no one to turn to. This is ours,” but I'm sitting here like, “This is my business. It doesn't belong to someone else. It's not for someone else, it's for us.”

I think this is a transition period in my life because all my life in all my jobs it's for someone else. When I was a child, when I was young, I'm working towards pleasing my parents and then working towards getting my education and creating a career for myself. And then I go and I work for someone else.

While I value all the work that I have done in my life to bring me to this place, and the work that I'm still doing, it's like—now is the time. Now is my time. Now is our time. And this belongs to us. So that's an amazing experience.

You don't even realize the example that you set for other people. And so even for staff, who for the majority, we've known for the six weeks, or it's actually seven weeks that we've been open, the value that we are to them is amazing. And I'm not saying that from a standpoint of overconfidence or anything, but just to know and recognize the example that we set for them and how powerful that is.

Ashley: The idea that this is possible for them.

Shanelle: Right. And I think another part of it is they know our vision and I think they are excited to be part of that and they want to see us do well as well.

Ashley: We’ve done a lot of time-hopping in this. We started with the night before you opened, we talked about planning Standard Pour—so let's bring it to the future. What do you hope the future looks like for you?

Shanelle: The future of Standard Pour? I look forward to how we blossom. I look forward to how we become a full thriving business, with our wine bar, with our brunch. A bustling space for everyone to just come and enjoy working here, eating here, hanging out here.

I'm just excited to see us become a staple. Everyone talks about Standard Pour, but now they're not talking about us as the new business in town, but rather a place where they can always come to and feel comfortable and look forward to being here. And we know everybody by name. We wanted to be like “Cheers” in the sense that everyone knows your name and everyone feels comfortable when they come.

And then we also just love the fact that we could bring a little bit of ourselves out in this business. For myself, or for Darlene and I, I think the future holds a lot for us when it comes to knowing that we did this—so where are we going to take ourselves [next]? Our dreams have now been just taken further. So it's like, “Okay, we attained this goal. We showed ourselves that we're able to put in the work and the follow-through to attain this goal. So how much work can we do and how much more can we do together?”

Ashley: Is there anything else that you want people to know about you or about Standard Pour?

Shanelle: We're here to stay. We're looking forward to the longevity of our business and we’re looking forward to creating and stamping our identity for everyone. And we hope that they'll enjoy it.

“Woohoo! That's a wrap folks. Grand opening is a success.”

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Every year, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) hosts a conference called Sensory Summit, where coffee folks come together and explore wild ideas about taste. I went one year, back when I was the online editor for Barista Magazine, and tasted some of the most bizarre, unexpected, and wonderful things I’ve ever had.

For this year’s conference, the SCA announced that it would give out a certain number of scholarships so a handful of people could attend the virtual event for free. And instead of making folks apply for the program, they were entered into a lottery, and scholarships were doled out randomly.

I wanted to learn more—not just about this idea, but about the person behind it. And that’s Mansi Chokshi. She’s the regional community director for the SCA, and has been with the organization since it was known as the Speciality Coffee Association of America, or SCAA—back before the American chapter merged with its European counterpart.

In this episode, we talk about building community within what has become coffee’s biggest trade organization. When Mansi started at the SCA, she had no coffee experience, but was determined to learn what exactly coffee people needed.

And learn she did. One the very first things she did when she joined was to sit down with members and ask, “What do you need from us? What do you need from a trade organization?” She continues to ask these questions, heralding new scholarship programs and sitting on the board of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA). Even this far into her tenure, she’s still always asking questions, and making sure she’s listening to the communities she’s working for.

I recorded this episode just a few days before my conversation with Chris McAuley of getchusomegear, and the two discussions address serendipitously similar topics. Both Chris and Mansi hit on themes of reciprocity—that’s one of the reasons Mansi pushed to eliminate the application process for Sensory Summit scholarships—and both are attuned to the needs of those around them. As Mansi points out, community development doesn’t mean much if the change isn’t driven by and for the communities themselves. What makes so many of the initiatives that Mansi has launched so impactful—like the Leadership Equity and Diversity (LEAD) Scholarship, which gives five coffee professionals two years’ worth of mentoring and paid professional development—is that she’s always ready to adapt.

Just a quick note: We had a few issues with recording this episode, and did so entirely on our phones, so there are some parts that sound a little shuffly. We cleaned up most of the weird sounds, but just a heads up if you hear some background noises. Here’s Mansi.

Ashley: So let's start, Mansi, by having you introduce yourself.

Mansi: Absolutely. So I’m Mansi Chokshi. I am based out of Southern California—I was born and raised here. I’m the daughter of immigrants. Both my parents came from India. My dad came here early on and attended college and then went back and had an arranged marriage. Both my grandfathers knew each other and that's how both my parents met.

They came here and had me and my brother. And I find myself back in the same city where I grew up. Now my husband and I have a daughter and she is going to the same elementary school that I did, which is so bizarre and also amazing at the same time.

Ashley: It's all full-circle.

Mansi: Yeah, and I love it. My parents are close by, so I have a support system, but we still have our separate homes.

I grew up in a very Indian household because of my parents having immigrated from India. But at the same time, I grew up here and took on some of the American culture and values. So I think it's kind of interesting that I'm here in the same city, but it also makes sense because I grew up in that type of environment where we all live together. I had several relatives that came from India at certain points, so it felt like my house was always busy and full of family members. And I absolutely value that. I love that, and I want to keep it going. So my daughter experiences that same type of family feeling.

Ashley: That's really cool. I feel like I come to this movie a lot just because I think it mimics the story of a lot of immigrant families, but I'm imagining that very last scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding when she's like, “Oh, look, I'm in my own house!” But it's right next door to her parents' house.

Mansi: Exactly. And while the cultures are different, it's very much a similar story. Actually that movie was playing on something that I just watched. And I was like, “This is one of those movies that I love because I finally understood like, ‘Oh my God, there's other people like me that come from my type of culture.’” So yeah, I have fond memories of My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I even watched the second version of it, even though it wasn't good, just because I felt, “This is familiar to me. This is my life right now.”

Ashley: Right. My mom is a first-generation immigrant—I think that's right. I always get confused because she was born in Cuba, but she was raised in the United States. And I remember watching that movie with her and I felt like I was seen, but at the same time, I feel like she was even more seen. I couldn't quantify exactly how important that was to her, to see an immigrant story being told.

Mansi: Yeah. And then fast-forward to today, I shared this momentous occasion with my daughter of like, “Look at the Vice President,” you know Vice President-elect at this point—but it's amazing. I've never, ever experienced that. This is a reality where immigrant families can actually see themselves in top leadership. You work hard and especially like in Asian culture, Indians and Chinese and Koreans, etc … we all kind of have a similar background where our parents, because they fought to get here, they had such a hard time integrating themselves into the community, the one thing that they could do for their kids was [tell us], “You’ve got to study hard, you’ve got to get into these schools, you’ve got to have a good, successful career.”

But never was it like, “Oh yeah, you should go into politics or you should go into this,” you know? And it’s so cool to see that, I love to see it.

A lot of things have changed for me in the last six years, since my daughter was born, and seeing things differently, making sure that there's enough of my Indian heritage and culture being passed on, but also the right of questioning like, “Why do we do this? How are we doing it? For what purpose?” And making sure that she's getting to see the clear version of what we can show her about what her reality is here. And I love that. That was a momentous occasion for a lot of people with daughters, I think.

Ashley: I know I saw on your Instagram page that you were sharing a lot of moments between you and your daughter of like, “Look, the Vice President looks like you, this is a big deal!”

Mansi: I shared this with one of my colleagues. She was like, “Yeah, I don't want to be president.”

And I was like, “It's fine. I'm not asking you to be president. But the fact that you have this choice and you can see somebody like you, that's huge, because I felt like growing up, I never saw that as an opportunity.” Because it was only white people that can do those types of roles. So it was kind of nice to share that with [my daughter]. And even if she doesn't realize that, because she's six, I think the fact that she's getting to see this as she's growing up is a huge thing—for all girls that are growing up in our country right now. So it’s significant for me.

Ashley: It seems like you think a lot about the idea of representation and who's at the table in your job at the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association). So I want to step back a little bit and talk about how you got there, because as we were talking about earlier, you never had a job in coffee before you started working for the SCA. So how did you get here?

Mansi: So, super interesting! When I was going through college, I spent a lot of time—and we had a very weird major that was called Social Sciences and you can pick whatever discipline you wanted. I picked one of the disciplines that was called “community service,” and that’s what I focused on.

And then I graduated and there was this crazy turn and twist in the economy. You kind of had to take whatever job was available. I think that's the one crash reality for all people that graduate from college, they're like, “Oh, I could do what I wanted to do and what I studied.” And it's like, “No, you've got to do whatever is available to you.”

So I entered this [random] job doing all sorts of random things—I learned about corporations, like inside sales, marketing, packaging design, but I was like, “I want to do that thing that I studied. I want to work on community development and nonprofit structures.”

I had my volunteer work when I was in college at the YMCA. So it was really important for me to find some type of nonprofit structure that I could work for. At that time I had no idea what associations were.

But my friend, my colleague at my work, she started working for the SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America—before it merged to become just the SCA) at that time. And she called me over and she's like, “Hey, this is pretty interesting. I think you'd like it, there's a position open. Maybe you want to apply for it.”

I was interviewed by Ric Rhinehart. I think I was the second person he hired or something like that. So it was very early on when SCAA was getting restarted—there's a lot in the history of the SCAA that I don't know if people have time or interest to kind of look into, but there was a big restart that happened in 2008 when I joined and it had to do with new people being hired in. We were coming up from an embezzlement that happened, and so it was a big task.

Ashley: That’s a Boss Barista investigative series that I want to do.

Mansi: When I started at SCAA I knew nothing about coffee. Never worked in a cafe. My experiences were only from purchasing coffee. I went to a school where there was a cafe on campus and that was kind of it—I had no idea about the industry, about the different professions that are in it, not even how coffee is grown.

So I really did a deep dive into specialty coffee from day one. Yeah, it's just funny—and I will never forget my first trade show. Ric was walking me through the aisles and I picked up, I ran to one of those little stands and they gave me a drink. And I was like, “This is amazing! I've never tried this.”

And it was one of those fruity drinks or something and I’m like, “This is what specialty coffee is!” And he just like looked at me and gave me this shaking-his-head look. And I was just like, “Okay, I have a lot to learn.”

Ashley: That’s so funny. I can just imagine Ric being like, “What? This learning curve might be a little bit steeper than I thought.”

So your first job with the SCA, because you've done a couple of different jobs since you started, your first job was as membership manager—and something that I didn't think about, that you mentioned before we started recording, is that it gave you a really great insight into who is actually a member of the SCA. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that role, and how that helped you see what community looks like within our industry.

Mansi: Absolutely. I started as membership manager and moved up the chain, if you want to call it that—because there were only like, 10 people at SCA at the time. It was a very small crew, skeletal, if you want to say that. But I moved my way up to the membership director and then spent some time there.

Early on, the first event I ever went to was the Roasters Guild Retreat. I got to meet a lot of the Roasters Guild members and that community, and that was my first ever specialty coffee event. Then you kind of work—if you can imagine the life of a staff member, you kind of work all year on this, at that time for me, a nebulous expo—like what the heck is an expo?

My start date was May, and I remember the whole year all I heard about was this immense expo and crazy experience that these nine—we were nine people on staff—were putting together. That was just always this thing that we were leading up to, the biggest event that we did as an association, but in the meantime, my job and my day-to-day thing was to figure out what benefits members would want, who are our members, and figure out how to create a community amongst the different members that we had.

One of the first things that I started researching was, “Who are our members? What do they do? How do they work?” I remember presenting in a staff meeting that I wanted to do member visits, and we started this concept of going and visiting members and just sitting down and talking to them, going to their places of work. As somebody who came from a social science background, this was so right up my alley of like, “We're going to do a research project and I'm going to find out who are the members, and we're going to study them in their habitats.”

Ashley: I was just about to say, “Are you writing an ethnography?”

Mansi: It was right up my alley of the type of work [I wanted to do]. I remember having such great conversations with people. [They’d say], “Nobody's done this with us, nobody's sat down and asked us what do we want, what are we looking for.”

I kinda made that just a little bit more of my [job], even if it didn't have anything to do with my role, it just ingrained something in me. You’ve got to know who you're working with and who that community is that you're trying to serve. Serving is one thing, but if you're not able to relate to people or connect with them, then you have a problem.

And that's when my relationship with being a people person kind of blossomed, I think. I don't have a hard time talking to people, but what I realized was that I'm able to actually listen to people and hear their stories. And that was really important to my work, but also it's important to my memories of starting at the SCAA. And I still draw on those connections that I made, this was now 10, 11 years ago.

So I remember some of those things, and we made it a part of our routine—whenever we would travel for an event, or we were going to a different trade show, we spent a day just doing member visits and going to different areas. And it wasn't just cafes. We went to warehouses, roasters, manufacturers. We went to different members and we just tried to see: Who are these people? What do they do? How are they benefiting?

I always found it curious as to who was displaying the [SCAA] member logo versus who wasn't. It was really, really fun times, but it set my foundation for this industry. And I think after a few years of that, I actually felt like, “Okay, I know this community and enough of them know me where I feel like I belong.” Whereas before I've definitely felt like I was just doing more of the research, ethnographic surveys, you know? But it was good.

Ashley: I think you touched on two big things in that answer. Number one, that things that kind of seem obvious—we're going to go talk to our members, of course we're going to do these visits—are not always obvious.

So you have the SCA—at the time SCAA—serving as this industry trade organization, but really what does that mean and who shapes that? It’s really shaped by the people who work for the SCA. So it's interesting to hear you talk about you stepping into this role of membership manager and being like, “What does this actually look like and how can I shape this based on what I think the industry needs?”

And two, and I love conversations like this—I love when people can identify what they're good at. Because I don't think that that's an inherent skill a lot of people either have or are told. And I think about this a lot. I had a manager at my very first coffee job who would constantly tell me what I was good at. And I was like, “This is great.” And then I started meeting more people and they're like, “Oh, I don't know what I’m good at.”

Mansi: Yeah, that’s the first thing you should figure out for yourself.

Ashley: Right. But it's really hard—I think both of these points kind of point to a level of cognizance that is maybe one step above experiencing the world, but taking a step back and saying, “What's actually happening around me and how can I address it?”

And it seems like you're very good at that. It seems like you're good at taking a situation as a whole and being like, “What do I bring to the table? What can I specifically do?”

Mansi: One other thing I would add to that—I agree with you, and I'm aware of that— but the other thing that I know that I have is some degree of influence on some of this decision-making. And that could be—fast-forward from when I started to 11 years later—I'm working at the SCA and I don't take for granted that I have a level of influence and information that I can share with the community around me, but also make it so that I'm a resource for people.

It's not just that I'm like, “Oh, that's my skillset.” I absolutely work on that. And I want to be that resource for the community. So it's not something that I feel I was natural at from the very get-go.

We talked about this earlier before we recorded, that it took a couple of years, maybe actually three or four years before I felt comfortable as a part of the community—I didn't think of myself as that. I always felt like I'm serving the community because I work here, but I'm not part of them because I never started as a barista.

You hear all these stories of people like, “Oh yeah, I started as a barista…” and I never had that. I jumped into SCAA, you know? But I felt like because of my experiences, because my skillset of being able to connect with people, I absolutely worked on that strength that I wanted to build for myself. That makes me proud that I was able to grow into that position and use that [skill], no matter which title I held in in the SCAA or even SCA now.

I felt like that was the thing that I carried with me. I have to be able to connect with the community. I have to be able to share resources with them. Knowing that, I agree with you, it is hard, but I think being able to set your expectations for yourself of, “This is what I'm good at. And so whatever I do, I'm going to have to keep this in mind.”

Ashley: I want to fast-forward a little bit, because I think most people who are listening to this probably know you as the person responsible for scholarships. So you're the person who's organizing everyone to take the group photo. You're the person who's making sure that all of the LEAD Scholars or the Re:co scholars know what's going on, and you're the main point of contact for people. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about those programs because those aren't new, but you were part of making it happen.

Mansi: I want to share just a little bit, if that's helpful. Growing up here in the States, I definitely felt like, and I mentioned this earlier, but like I wasn't raised to be part of the political structure or leadership, but it was something that I had an interest in.

But the only way I saw myself getting positions of leadership or even getting involved in something—high school, college, you name it—I felt like it had to come through a scholarship lens or some type of lens where they were looking for somebody of a diverse background. I am very familiar with the scholarship territory, because I grew up in that. I felt like it was a way that I could get myself represented. Growing up in an immigrant household, this is one of those things that I could share with my parents, like, “Oh yeah, I'm part of Model United Nations. And because of that, I'm going to go travel to these places.” And that made it okay for my parents. If it was just like, “I'm going to go on a trip with my friends in high school,” it was like, “No, you're not!”

Ashley: But if you're going to go to school…

Mansi: That's fine. And I got involved with a lot of things that taught leadership skills. I went to several different programs throughout high school and college. And so that's why this world of scholarships and programs that focused on leadership qualities was so important for me to kickstart, or be involved in at SCA.

So [Re:co] fellows started with my colleague, Peter Giuliano, but it was something that I felt like after the first year, I was like, “Oh, I like this. I want to be involved in it.” And I just kind of volunteered myself to support the initiative. I wasn't on the initial Re:co team or anything. In fact, I think I was pregnant the first year that they had the program. So I wasn't even there, but as soon as they came back and the next year that we had it, in 2015, I was involved in it—I just raised my hand for it, because I was like, “I'm familiar with this world. I like what it did to shape me. And I want to be involved in that, to shape others in the community, to support them so they see themselves in these positions and they can find the way to…”

Someone mentioned to me that it’s like you're in the carpool lane or the speed track of the highway, you know? And you're just able to get from one place to the other quickly because you have the people in the right places telling you, “Do this, and do that.” “This will get you to where you want to go and helping you shape what it is that you want to do.” And that was important to me because that helped me in growing up. So that's why I'm passionate about the programs. Fellows was the first one. Then we develop the LEAD Scholar program—that actually came as inspiration from one of the other events I went to. Believe it or not, an association of all the associations. [Laughs]

Yeah, it's funny when you talk about the acronym, but it was great for me looking into that world, because I wanted to see what other associations do and how we can bring that to our SCAA world. I had discovered that they have a leadership program and the intent was so that people can go into leadership positions, not just in the companies that they work for, but also at the association itself. I looked at them, and I was like, “We're missing this, we need this.”

And so it took a few years to get it started, but I'm very happy that we were able to do that. And then most recently, we've noticed through all the different events [we host], there is an inaccessibility issue to all of our events—we have to charge for them.

I absolutely understand that, but that makes it so that the people that want to be in the room don’t get a chance to be, because there is a price point and that creates a barrier.

So when we approach this idea of like, “Okay, let's try event-based scholarships,” we'd been trying it out for a long time, but finally, I feel like we got to a space, the most recent one that we did, it was a lottery. I absolutely credit a lot of this development to … I'm interested in it, but I've only been able to progress it recently, because of the work that community is doing in this space. I feel like there's people in the community that have called us in on this information of like, “Hey, we need to do this.” I've gotten some really great feedback from community members that feel comfortable sharing it with me.

Like, “Hey, this wasn't the right way to do this. You vetting makes us feel like, yuck. I don't want to be vetted.” I'm appreciative that people are able to share that with us so that we can grow this together. I've always felt like these programs are only successful if the people we're trying to serve have an opportunity to share their concerns or comments with us, but it takes a lot. You have to also be able to ask for that feedback and then be able to do something with it, which I've been fortunate in the scholarship world. I have been able to mold and shape things. There's other areas that I don't feel as comfortable, but this is one area I feel comfortable, because I'm passionate about it. I feel like I have the influence for it. And community members have been generous in giving feedback.

Ashley: I love that you mentioned this holistic approach to these programs, because I think it's easy to say, “Okay, let's start a program. It's aimed at these people. Why aren't these people applying?” or, “Why isn't this working the way that we want?” and then sort of give up, which is true, and that happens a lot.

And I think it's again, going to that second level of, “I'm going to do a thing,” but then stepping backwards and saying, “But how is this thing actually working? How do I assess if it's successful or not?” which requires a bit of introspection that isn't always natural.

So being able to step back and say, “Is this actually serving the community that I intended to serve? And if it's not, how do I change things?” is a really big deal.

I want to talk a little bit about some of the successes from the scholarship programs that you've started. I was wondering if you could share any specific stories of success or moments where you were like, “This is working,” or maybe even a story that's like, “Maybe this is not working. How can I change this and how can I make it better?” And maybe the practical application of that.

Mansi: Where I think I've seen success in this is the LEAD Scholar program. What it is able to do is really get into the hearts of the folks that have applied and got into this moment of being a LEAD Scholar. And what we're doing is going on this journey with them and supporting them throughout it.

What we're noticing is people change their minds about things, and that's okay. And we're trying to make that completely fine. If you want to start [the scholarship studying] sensory coffee or green coffee, but now you're changing your mind and you want to switch to sustainability—that's fine. What it's doing is giving us insight into how the community operates and what things are more relevant and topical.

What we didn't expect for it to do was—I was hoping this would happen, but I didn't know how it was going to happen—but it actually promoted folks to finding the right context to get jobs.

That's a big deal. We don't have a current recipe for how that works, but being able to connect people to the right mentors or coaches, or even just industry contacts, is valuable. I know that it's valuable, but how do you create that program?

It takes the industry wanting to help each other. And that's not something—like we can want that all we want—but I need the community to support that effort. When it came to the LEAD Scholar program, we did get a lot of support from the community. We approached people and they said, “Yes, I'm up to connecting with this person. I'll definitely help them out where I can.” Our sponsor was amazing in that effort as well in providing leadership and development coaching.

So that program, the LEAD Scholar program, is so much—it has to do with education, it has to do with community events, it has to do with getting access and presence at Re:co, but it wasn't just like, “Great. You have a ticket.” I was actively supporting our LEAD Scholars in meeting people, networking with the right people, that they set their intentions of like, “I want to do this.”

So then I was supporting them and getting connected to those right folks that can help them get there. It was very intentional. It's a lot of work.

And I think where you can say where it's not working, or where it could use some improvement, is it's only for five people and it takes two years. How do we make this program even bigger?

But I think that's one of the things that—you mentioned this just a little bit ago, and I value the design thinking process a lot, because you have to start small, you have to be able to take things through, and then you have to be able to assess if this actually works or not. Because if it didn't work for everybody, then there are flaws to the program. If it worked for some and didn't work for others, there's reasons to explore: Why did it work for this person? Why did she get a job? And if this one person credits the LEAD Scholar program for it, why did this [other] person not even get to finish their education programming? The same accessibility was offered to both, but the person has a lot to do with their own success in this as well.

We have to do this type of assessment before you can scale, and I think that a lot of people want it to expand so quickly and say, “You should be able to support a hundred people through that.” But I think that's part of the design thinking process that I have used in this environment. We’ve got to pilot this, we got to figure it out. We’ve got to make sure it's actually working, then we can scale it. And some of these programs are not going to be ready to scale up to that level. So I think it's a success, yes, but I think there's room for improvement.

I'll mention one other thing—the process in which we started with vetting [for Re:co scholarships], we would get people applying for positions. We would look at their applications.

It's hard, it's hard to say, “How would one person in this random city across the country, why is it that they are more deserving of this opportunity than somebody else that maybe works for a bigger company, but is feeling like they're unable to access the right resources? And they need the scholarship so they can get to it?”

There's a lot of room for unconscious bias to come in. So there was a lot in that process and we finally just said, “You know what? We're just going to have people apply. And we're going to do a random lottery for selection because if they say they need it, they need it.”

Ashley: You don't want to question the need.

Mansi: I listened to a couple of podcasts on this and one of my colleagues actually sent one to me.

There's a great one on the lottery process and how it works. I've been really advocating for this throughout the organization. We're trying to support this for the next version of the elections for the [SCA’s] U.S. chapter. But also in this vetting of the scholarship programs like, “Hey, there's no longer a vetting, you just apply. And it's a random lottery to say who got it and who didn't.”

What doesn't change is the fact that there's so many people that want these opportunities. And so the scale question is a reality that we need to work on. And it's something that I'm very conscious of. I just don't think that the right approach is like, “Okay, the community wants in. So we should figure it out right away.” I think we need to step back and take a look at how this works.

Or maybe the program design is wrong, where so many people are finding that it's inaccessible. There's so much involved in these programs. I don't think it's a solution forever, but I'm so happy to get to work on it. And I feel like the folks that go through it are super happy to give feedback, and they've shared stuff, and I've seen them get involved in other things, which is the point. We want this to be something that helps somebody grow into the next part of their career. Not just because they needed a free ticket to the next event.

Ashley: Absolutely. That totally makes sense.

I love that you talked about this idea of lotteries, because I've been thinking a lot about the idea of selection, and can it ever really be done fairly? How can I assess someone's need? I can't—I can't assess someone's need, especially if they're not given the tools to fully express that need.

So there might be something that I don't know. I had this visualization in my head, when I was a coffee shop manager, of just throwing a bunch of resumes in the air and just grabbing one, and that's the person I'm going to hire—because how can I say if you need this job or not? I can't assess that need, but that's another story for a different time.

I wanna shift a little bit to your work with the IWCA, because that's such an important organization, and I think that it often gets overlooked. I want to talk a little bit about what it is, and what are some of the goals for the IWCA.

Mansi: This has been such an amazing journey for me. When I started at SCAA, one of the first things—I'm just used to always volunteering for something—so one of the first things I volunteered for was IWCA. And I've been volunteering there ever since.

It's an organization that has so much value—the stakeholders are the chapters of the IWCA, and there's a chapter in each country. But the value that the chapter leaders get, the type of education, the type of leadership development, it's right in line with the type of things I enjoy and I'm working on at SCA. It was absolutely the perfect match for me, and I started off as just a volunteer on a committee. And now I'm on the board, I'm the vice president, and it's amazing. The journey for me has been fulfilling.

I think the work that we've been able to do is way beyond. And that's what I've been proud of. What I think people don't know is the IWCA is this global association—I assume they don't know, because I feel like every time I talk to somebody they're like, “What's IWCA, what do they do?” It's the one thing that people struggle to keep in their mind, they know about the breakfast—but this is how I explain IWCA to everyone: “It's a global organization that focuses on empowering women through leadership.” We work on different types of market accessibility, skillsets, and tools for them. Most of them are chapter members through different countries that produce coffee, but that doesn't mean that that's the only type of chapter that exists.

We have chapters in countries that you would say are more consuming countries than producing countries of coffee. So I guess that's a little bit of a MythBuster that people think that only people that grow coffee can be involved in an IWCA chapter. And that's untrue. We have many people that have been members and new chapters that have just been formed that are in countries that don't even produce coffee.

But going back to what the organization does is it empowers people, women especially, in coffee. And what's really important about that is that it is set by the local community. So this is the one fact that I wasn't aware of when I first started volunteering, but I learned through my volunteer experience, the global association of IWCA—their role is to serve the chapter leaders. And so what they do is if somebody comes up and says that they want to create a chapter, that's when the global organization supports them in creating the chapter and creating that community.

But that local organization is the one that decides, “Hey, we're going to focus on health and women. We're going to focus on marketing tips. We're going to focus on financial stability for the women in coffee that are in our region.” They get to decide what it is that they want to focus on. Their organizations are set up to be independent and run on their own.

The IWCA umbrella just connects everybody through the support network, but each of them have very different projects. And that's, I think, unique. And that's why maybe people get overwhelmed by, “Oh, there's so much, each chapter does something different.” But I find the thing that's cool about the organization and the reason that I continue to stay involved is because I know that my work is supporting the global umbrella of marketing the IWCA, and making sure that those women in different countries know that there's an organization that exists to connect them and empower them.

They are the leaders of their own fate for what happens at that local level. And they have all of the access to what they want to do. Nobody's telling them from a global side, “Hey, this is what you must do.” They get to decide that for themselves.

That's what I've found is most special about this organization, because you hear a lot about nonprofits that go in and they say, “Okay, this is how it should be done. We're going to set up the school. We're going to do it this way. We're going to give you the teachers.” And then once they leave, then that school falls apart. There's no infrastructure to keep it going because it didn't come from the community itself, whereas the IWCA was built with the community in mind. They're the ones dictating how it goes, what they want to see, what goals they want to set for themselves. And the global group is just there to support all of that getting done.

Ashley: It seems like that's a big theme in a lot of the work that you do. It's not about saying, “Hey, we're going to do this. And if it falls flat, well, we said that this is how it's going to be done.” It seems like you focus a lot more specifically on how to give a community the tools to figure out solutions that work for them.

And I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons someone can learn from listening to you talk. Because it seems like it's something you think about a lot—how does a group of people come together and actually create something that empowers their community?

So just to start to wrap things up a little bit, I was wondering for people who feel disconnected from the coffee community—maybe they don't see themselves in the SCA, or maybe they don't see themselves in a global coffee community—how can they start to pinpoint their community and start bringing them together?

Mansi: It's hard. I'm not gonna sugarcoat this. If you're looking for that community and you want to build it, I think that you have to be willing to put the work in. This is where, in the type of work that I do, one of the things that happens a lot is people want this ready-made solution for everything like, “Okay, I want this. So I'm expecting somebody else to just have it all ready to go.” And that's hardly been the truth of what I've experienced. Nothing is ready to go. If you don't see yourself in something, then you’ve got to build it, and you’ve got to create that, and it's going to take work.

And what I think is really important is the types of organizations that I've been involved in, the types of projects that I choose to work on—all of it has that general theme of supporting others, finding the right networks, making sure that people can help themselves, but it doesn't have anything to do with the personal gain.

Sometimes people get that confused. “I want this because it's going to help me.” I think when you focus on helping the community, that's when you start seeing that change happen. And I don't know if everybody is in the right space to do that. And that's okay if you just need something that helps you. That's fine. But we also can't keep expecting somebody else to do that work if you're not willing to get involved.

So I don't know—that would be my advice, if someone's looking for that community before they say, “Okay, cool. I need to see a community for myself. I'm just going to go and build one.” Because that's a lot of work. And it's not easy and you can't do it alone. You're going to have to find people to work with on it. Before you do that, you might as well see if there’s a community that connects with some of the things that you want to see—or you're already able to see, and could you just help shape them to get to the next level.

A lot of our charitable organizations that are in our industry—they need support. And a lot of them are very direct to say that they need help with monetary contributions, but if that's not the right way that you can support, I don't think there's any organization that's like, “Nope, we're not looking for any help with volunteers.”

I've seen all of them say that they're open to volunteers. Before we start creating a hundred different organizations for people, what you’ve got to remember when you're trying to look for a community that you belong to, you want a community, you don't want just three people.

This isn't a small exclusive club that you're trying to create, right? You want a big community that you can connect to. So that would be my advice. Look for things that you want to be involved in, try to join something. Even if it doesn't have all the things that you want, that you're maybe feeling—that doesn't matter. Because if you get involved, you're able to influence some of those things to go in the way that you want, or maybe you learn something, maybe you learn why your way of thinking on it wasn't the right way for that organization. That should open up your mind to a lot of different things. That would be my advice.

Ashley: I go back to the idea of what your goal is when you start a community organization, because I think a lot about, what does it mean for me to be personally successful, and what does it mean for the initiative that I want to participate in to be successful?

It reminded me—maybe I'm getting too introspective—but it reminded me of when I was a teacher and I was like, “What's the point in this moment? Is the point in this moment for me to feel like I taught this well, or is the point for the student to understand what's happening?” And those are different sometimes. That is a very hard mental break to make because you ride your success on the success of others.

Mansi: I totally follow.

Ashley: Maybe I’m getting a little bit weird on this, but it was really hard for me as a teacher to get into the classroom and be like, “But I wrote this lesson plan this way.” My idea of success was to deliver it as I had pictured it, and I think the biggest lesson I learned as a teacher is that I had to adapt, because my success in that very linear way, the way that I was picturing it, does not matter.

My success matters when the students are successful. And again, it's part of removing that sense of self and sense of ego and really thinking about what is an actual measure of success in this moment? So I think that you really hit the nail on the head, thinking about how people start community organizations. What is the actual point here?

Mansi: Oh my gosh. I love your teacher reference because I don't think I would have been a lot more clear on these types of things until I had my daughter. Any sense of planning goes out the window.

I still do a lot to prepare. I'm an avid believer that you can't just have a meeting to have a meeting. There has to be an agenda. I led a lot of different community groups, so I value the importance of icebreakers, all of that kind of stuff. But I do know, thankfully because of my experiences with my daughter, that things don't always go the way that you want them to go—that icebreaker sometimes doesn't break the ice. The agenda really doesn't get followed, or we go off on a tangent.

And it’s the same for community groups. I think just because the recipe had worked in a different community, it's not gonna work in every community. And I think that's the thing that I value most about IWCA, is that they support the group and understand what happens when you do community development and that you get to decide what those reasons are and how do you want to do it.

And even in my work at SCA, that's what I get to focus on. LEAD Scholars, for example, they get to decide what they want to focus their education on. If they change their mind, that's fine, too. We're going to figure out how to pivot, how to adapt, how to change from that moment.

That is so important. I think flexibility in anything that you're doing is—especially given this year, gosh! People that had plans for executing different things in 2020, I'm sure that that's turned upside down for everybody. I don't think there's been one person that's like, “Oh yeah, I had imagined this world the way it is this year.”

So it really gives you insight into like, we’ve gotta be more adaptable. We've gotta change things with what [is actually here]. I think it also gives us a little bit more introspection on these buzzwords that we're finding in the community. I would argue “community” has been a buzzword, “culture” has been a buzzword, right? “Workplace ethics.” There's so many different buzzwords and it might be relevant to the time, but what's actually happening for those things right now is something I think about.

That's one of those areas that I would want people to be intentional about what they're doing and what they're saying and what they're working on. Maybe it might help them to feel more satisfied with their day-to-day if they felt like they knew exactly what they were trying to get to.

Ashley: Mansi, thank you so much for joining me. This has been such a fun conversation. And I think a lot of people are going to learn a lot about the work that you do with the SCA.

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