BOSS BARISTA

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Hi, friends. A quick note before we get started: This is a re-release of an episode I did in November 2019, and features David Hu, former owner of The Peccary, a coffee shop in New Jersey.

I wanted to re-release this episode for two reasons. One: David is an incredible resource, and I regularly turn to social media for his insights (you can follow him @the.david.hu). Second: I’m preparing a presentation on how to advocate for yourself at work as part of a coffee conference called High Density, hosted by The Barista League, and the topics raised in our conversation have informed much of my recent thinking.

My talk focuses on the ways that baristas and other service workers can stand up for themselves, and learn about the laws and protections in place to safeguard their rights. As I’ve researched and prepared for it, I keep coming back to lessons that David shared in his episode, and I think it’s required listening for anyone who has ever held a leadership position. Essentially, he asks folks to step outside of themselves, be humble, and truly do good for the people around them.

My talk is just one of dozens of events, panels, and demonstrations happening at High Density, which is a free and 100% digital coffee conference like none other I’ve ever encountered. The conference takes place on March 9, and features an international program of speakers including Gwilym Davies, Kat Melheim, Freda Yuan, Lem Butler, and Vava Angwenyi. A number of folks who I’ve interviewed for Boss Barista are presenting, and I’m so excited to be part of this worldwide event. You can learn more by going to The Barista League’s website or by following them on Instagram.

Before you jump into my conversation with David, know that we’ve changed up a few things at Boss Barista since we recorded this episode, so some things might sound a little different. Rest assured, though, that the content and lessons are more applicable now than ever. Here we go.

Everyone has had a bad boss. Everyone has probably had multiple bad bosses. I had one boss tell me I was inauthentic and that he hated me. I had one tell me he couldn’t give me more money after he promoted me. I had two bosses—a married couple—get a divorce and put all their employees right in the middle of it. And I too, have been that bad boss. I’ve been overbearing, too nitpicky, too weird, too mean.

I learned to be a better boss—not perfect, not great, probably not even good, but better—through reading countless articles, and scouring the internet for anything I could find about how to manage more effectively. Surprisingly, there aren’t a lot of resources that address how to be a better leader. There are tons of articles complaining about shitty employees, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect between our understanding of the role of leaders and how we think they should treat and set examples for their staff.

It strikes me that we don’t really expect leaders to be held accountable for office culture—instead, we tend to write off negative work environments as a result of terrible employees. I know this is b******t now, but the only way I learned this lesson was because of my time as a middle school teacher.

I tell this story a lot, because it’s so important to me and who I’ve become. At the time, I was trying to get my students to behave by lining them up outside my classroom, and it wasn’t working. So my principal called me, and immediately, I blamed the kids, the fact that my class was right after lunch… Then, he said the single-most important set of words I’ve ever heard. He told me their rowdiness was my fault—I was the one in charge. But then he paused, and said, “That’s meant to empower you. You’re always in control.”

Fast-forward a number of years, and I vividly remember the first time I came across some striking posts on Instagram about leadership, posted by a coffee shop called The Peccary. These posts extolled baristas, and talked about how it’s the job of leaders to make the work of being a barista easier. David Hu, the owner of The Peccary, does this in a number of ways.

To begin with, he pays his baristas more than the industry average. His employees know their schedules ahead of time for a year. They were paid for months during training and on-boarding before the shop even opened.

I wanted to learn more about how David developed such an attuned sense of purpose and vision, and how he became the kind of leader who puts his staff first. His journey is not without its ups and downs—The Peccary recently closed its doors, which we talk about—but his perspective made me reconsider what my values are, and what we can all do to live out our values.

David: My name is David Hu. I am the owner of The Peccary Coffee Bar in Millburn, New Jersey.

Ashley: What made you want to open a coffee bar?

David: It was actually very unexpected. It was not a personal dream. I have been a career designer in the corporate world, in the agency world both here in the New York area and abroad. But as a designer I guess [my work] overlaps a lot with coffee culture, mainly because I would sit in the coffee shop all the time to do work.

I got to a point in my life—I'm 38 this year—and I felt that I've put in enough time of my life, on the commuting, on the corporate work … and I've put myself in a position where I really wanted to do something meaningful. I actually stepped away. I stepped away from working for about a year before this idea of starting a coffee shop came about.

But it was really a project where life told me that I should do something. And I got to a point where I understood what it means to hear myself talking—to understand what that urge was to step away from the daily grind, so to speak, and start something fresh.

So it certainly wasn't a project that I had thought of prior to two years ago. It was something that I think the spark of the idea was sitting in a coffee shop and talking to baristas whom I've befriended over the days and weeks and months I've visited. A lot of baristas started to tell me about the struggles they have at work.

I'm also trained as an engineer, so when they tell me things that didn't work that were logistical issues, to me, it was solvable. It wasn't that difficult. You could sit down and figure it out on paper. Then the design nerd part of me has always been very interested in designing an experience. And I saw a gap in the industry where I can combine those two experiences and try to come up with a solution that works.

Ashley: That's so fascinating to hear that your background is in engineering and to take the problems of baristas and think, “I can solve this.” So how did you go about planning the cafe to address those issues that baristas were bringing up to you?

David: Well, for example, one of the things was scheduling, right? A lot of baristas would not be able to get off from work on time because the next shift didn't come on time or someone would realize that, “Oh, this person is sick and they can't come in and fill in, but I already had something scheduled. But now I have to stay because that person cannot show up.”

I mean, this is just one aspect, but to me it was a scheduling problem. It's a mathematical problem. This isn’t to think of people just as data, but to me it was a logistical issue. And this logistical issue was compounded by the fact that I saw a lot of baristas were part-timers. So you have a store where your staff is composed of maybe 20 people, all part-time, all trying to figure out whose schedule is what.

To me, again coming from the corporate world where everybody's working 9–6, I thought there had to be a middle ground somewhere where you can address the fact that coffee shops need to be open most days of the week, especially on weekends…

That is just going to trickle down. I just had the feeling that if I could figure out the root problem, I could see all the benefits come through and trickle down. Right?

If everybody understood, for example, that there was a set schedule, that you're not running around trying to figure out week to week, day to day where everybody is, you're not trying to figure out, “Do I have the kind of coworker who is really good for the Saturday rush?” You know who's going to show up and you are going to work as a team and having that predictability and that confidence that this work is going to be there just as you are there makes a huge difference.

I just keep seeing that is more like a logistical issue. Not that the logistics solution will solve everything, but I could tell that 70, 80% of it could be solved with just good logistics.

Ashley: As a barista hearing you say things like, “You never know who's going to come in on Saturday to support you on maybe a busy day,” I'm almost holding my breath. That's such a feeling that I've had where I'm like, “I don't know who's going to come in and help me. I'd never know what my schedule is going to be like.” And you taking that and simplifying that is really powerful. So how did you start tackling these problems? What else were you noticing that you were like, “This is totally solvable?”

David: Well, one, I think I have to predicate everything that I was going to do before I actually put pen to paper was to make sure I would hire people of really good character.

I could use a lot more adjectives to describe it, but I think if I boil it all down is to just hire people with good character and good commitment.

So all the things have to fit in, right? For example, I could come up with the best schedule in the world—easy to understand, predictable, fits everybody else's private life schedule great—but if you had someone on the team who just cannot show up on time, that system is not going to work.

I brought in experiences from my corporate career because I was a designer, but my strength was not actually in design. My strength was in project management. I would manage groups of five up to a whole project where 50 people are involved, and I was the communication liaison between all these different departments. So to me having the right people is always first and foremost the most important thing. Having assumed that though, then I can come and try to figure this out.

Ashley: Let's go backwards a little bit because you talked about having the right people. So how did you code for that? What did you start looking for when you were hiring?

David: It helped that two of my eventual baristas, I was originally a customer at their shop. So when I found out that they were looking for new opportunities then I would sit down and talk to them. I talked to them about what their personal goals are. I did not really ask about skills. Skills, to me, I think you can teach as long as you have the right people to teach them and mentor them. That just simply takes time and commitment.

What I really look for is honesty, transparency, and a willingness to be very, very humble. Even before I opened the shop, I spent about eight months writing down what my personal values are and I collected it in a way and wrote it down in a way that I felt was understandable to most people.

So one of the things is the idea of baristaship. I actually Googled that word. It doesn't come up that often, to be honest.

Ashley: No it doesn’t.

David: Baristaship is a bit of a generic word. But everybody knows maybe on the surface what it means, but nobody actually sat down and defined it. So for me, I defined it as:

The baristaship is founded on three core values. One is self-awareness. Second is self-respect. Third is self-discipline.

I boiled down many, many things I wrote down to those three things that I feel cohesively help a barista become a self-respecting coffee professional—who then has the humility to understand that they are at the very end of a long chain of people who also are committed to bring coffee into our shop so that we can brew this cup of coffee for a customer.

So it's almost an ownership of responsibility, this huge responsibility, but if you are willing to commit to this, then you can be rewarded with all the tremendous knowledge and community that this culture brings. And at the same time elevate you as a person to be a good citizen.

So I mean, that was a long way of saying that. But that's what I tried to simplify and distill so that any barista who joins The Peccary has that right off the bat—it's not about coffee skills, it’s not about how well you dial in, it’s not about how well you do a pour over. I don't even really care if you know like, the elevation at which a certain coffee was grown. All that stuff, I don't care. What you need to bring to my company is character, humility, and you're willing to commit to this.

Ashley: I think there's so much power to the fact that you outlined this from the get-go—that you spent so much time thinking about what your values are. You wrote them down, you made them clear to your staff before you even hired them. So can you talk a little bit about what it was like to sit down and really think about what your values are and to not just have them in your brain—but really sit down and think, “What does this look like on paper, and how do I communicate it to somebody else?”

David: That's something that I was quite accustomed to doing because as a designer—well, when I first started as a design student, it was just really to design cool stuff. And once I got into the industry, then it was like a job. And then I get told what to design and I design it, and there's a project that gets shipped out. It gets sold and whatnot.

Eventually, and I think most people inevitably get to a point sometime in their career where they start asking, “Why am I doing this?” And same thing happened to me: “Why am I designing? Why am I a designer? What does it mean to be a designer?”

I went through that process over a number of years where I wrote down my own philosophy about design. What it means, and why I should be a designer that literally puts more physical waste into this world.

For me, if I do not anchor myself in this idea of the true humanistic value of being a designer, I cannot call myself a designer. It would just be job title that anybody can take away from me at any point in time.

So I saw parallels to someone who, for whatever reason, came into this as a barista—whether it's for practical reasons or for more fanciful reasons or for whatever personal reason that may be. I do believe that eventually they will ask themselves the same questions. Even if you don't, you should, because of how human-centered this industry is.

Just like design, it's a very creative field. Being a barista is a fundamentally creative industry. And if you do not understand the humanistic foundations of why you are doing this day in and day out, it's very, very difficult for you to see what lies before you, what can be there for the future.

And I think that idea, the simple fact that most people don't talk about this, makes it very difficult. You're just running on fumes. Most people, they're like five years into it, 10 years into it, and they go, “Wow, I've been doing the same thing all this time. I don't know what's fueling me except this idea of, ‘I like my coworkers. I like the customers.’ And I don't know what else lies before me.”

I think it's a very big missed opportunity [to not define your values]. And I count myself as very, very lucky to have done that. Yes, I did it on my own, but I was very lucky to have understood that on my own. I could have very easily fallen into the trap of just making design, getting a paycheck, and going home and go like, “Yeah, I'll just spend my money wherever I want.”

But I was very lucky to do that. As I see more people falling into that trap, I just felt like there has to be some way of talking about it so that people don't get so discouraged or get burnt out because these are people, whether it's a shop I go to once a week or a shop I go to every day, these are people I care about because they show me a lot of kindness. They show me reminders of why we are here and why we do these things that we like. Even though it's very much a thankless job, right? And to see young people fall into that, it’s kind of—it's disappointing.

Ashley: Hearing you tell that story reminded me of my very first coffee job.

I worked at a coffee shop in Times Square and it was a grind. But I had this manager who was really good at identifying what people were good at. Like, “You're good at this. You should do this.” She was really kind and generous with finding things for us to do that bent to our skillset.

Five years later, I was working as a trainer for a coffee shop. And I asked my coworker—who was also trainer—I was like, “What are you good at?”

And she said, “I don't know.”

I said, “Has nobody ever told you?”

She said no.

I realized that I was also very fortunate to have that moment where someone invested time in me to say, “What are your values? What do you care about?” And I wonder as a leader, as somebody who does hire people and had these values listed out for themselves, how did you start to think about imparting values or helping people see their value as one of your employees?

David: It has to start right off the bat. I think one of the things that I told myself before I even hired anyone, and I wrote this in my job ad, was, “You're coming here for yourself. I, as an owner, am lucky that you are willing to share with me this time and this energy and this commitment with me, because at the end of the day, yes, I'm running a business. You're not deciding how I run my business. So you are working for yourself and I, as a boss, have to work for you. I have to work for you.”

It really can't be any other way. Having that value I think is really, really important in the very beginning. And I told them, I said, “This is what I'm about. It's a lot of exploration. It's a lot of experimentation, but I'm here to support you.”

In fact, when I was building out my team, two of the baristas I trained for over a month. I paid them for full-time, trained them for over a month before I even opened the shop. That is, as far as I know, unheard of to be a barista—to be trained and paid full-time for over a month before you actually start a job. And the vast majority…

Ashley: I can count the number of times I haven't been paid for working. (Laughs)

David: 60-70% of that time was spent on mentality training, if you could believe it. It was not skills. I had a very good friend who was a Q grader who taught them a tremendous amount of coffee knowledge, but most of that training was observing and teaching them how to think, how to be independent.

I have to see from a consumer side that that's what people come to coffee shops for, right? If you come in and you get a cup of coffee and you get people who respect you and talk to you and see you as another human being, you will understand why coffee is so special.

A lot of this is my gut feeling, to be honest. There are no books on this. There's no Google or Wikipedia page for this. It's just me following what I think felt right.

Ashley: What did that first month look like? What kind of emotional and mental training does that take? Because I can kind of imagine it, but I think when you just said that there's no books on this, you can't Google it … that also resonated with me because I feel like so much of what I value is ineffable. It's hard to explain.

David: When they were hired I was at the very tail end of finishing construction. And when I hired them, I told them, “Come see the shop as it's being constructed. Meet my contractors, shake hands with them, introduce yourself, talk to them, befriend them.”

I also took them to the dairy farm to talk to the farmers and get a tour of the farm. We get our milk from a Jersey dairy farm about an hour away. I said everything that I'm going to put into this business, you need to understand because I am training you to be independent. And that's part of the training. Go meet the farmer you are working with. Meet the contractor you are working with. Seeing what they do day in and day out, and respecting what they do day in and day out, you inversely understand why I respect baristas day in, day out.

And once you understand that I'm coming from a place of respecting my employees, you will get to understand why you should respect yourself and all the people who came before you, right?

I don't care how much money I have, I cannot build a shop. I don't know how to do it. And so a lot of the training was a lot of talking to people, sitting down and telling them, “Hey, remember today, remember what it was like to go up to our coffee roaster up in Portland?” And talking to them and seeing how they carry themselves. How you guys talk to each other. The words you say, the gestures you use, the way you stand, the way you answer my questions. So there are times when I talk to them and I'm saying something, and I said, “Take out your notebook, write this down.”

“I'm pointing this out in the most respectful way: I did not like the way you answered that question, not as an attack, as this is how you should say it and convey it, so that people understand you are being respectful.” Because once you understand the nuances of communication, you will actually become more empowered to know that when you say something and somebody takes offense to it, but you are clear about what you said, that responsibility of being taken offense is on them. It's not on you. It's yourself, right?

So clarity about who you are gives you so much more power. And I understand this because baristas have to meet all kinds of people, all walks of life, of all levels of respectfulness. They will get someone who's a bit of an ass—maybe twice, three times, five times a day. Right? You cannot take that to heart.

I will support you, but I'm not going to chase a customer out because I'm not there. You need to be able to understand where you are, and I am backing you up 100%.

If you need to take a break, whatever, but on the day-to-day communication, I want you to feel strong about who you are. And that trickles down to the way I built my shop and everything.

But a lot of it is explaining why I build a shop this way. A lot of it is meeting people. A lot of it is training them—the way they talk and they move. A lot of it was inspired by my own travels abroad. But then always keeping an eye on how did they express themselves as individuals. I do not want to smother that at all, but understanding and having that clarity and giving them that training makes them much more confident.

Ashley: It's so interesting to me that you talk so confidently about these values and the way that you approach training. And yet it is still so rare for somebody to approach hiring, training, employment in the way that you do. It's interesting how radical it is, but at the same time how basic it feels. Like when you say these things, “I'm like, yeah, of course, why don't we do these things?” So why do you think there is this resistance to treating baristas with the values that you've outlined? Why is this still rare?

David: To be honest, I think that the majority of people who start coffee shops misunderstand what that means.

It's a bit of a cycle. It's a bit of a self-feeding cycle where someone may go, “Oh, I love being a barista. I love being in coffee.” And they work their way up to some kind of level or power of influence where they can get enough money where they can save up and they start a coffee shop or, you know, whatever circumstances they may be.

But I think they approach that as, “This is a business. I'm going to be an owner. I'm going to have control. I'm going to have power.” To me, that's the opposite of what you're supposed to do.

To me, having that resource to open a coffee shop and then deciding to open a coffee shop is taking on a responsibility. It's not something to do for yourself as a fun thing to do to be in this position of power.

I was very, very clear about that: I am opening up a shop in service of other people. I am willing to take all my savings that I've accumulated over the past decade of my career in doing this, and I'm willing to lose it all.

I told my baristas, “I'm willing to lose all of my money to do this for you, because I need to, in this point in my life, prove that this is more than about money.” Again, that's very, very personal to me, but having done that and gone through that process, I just don't see how that's possible any other way. I just don't see it because the other ways always start off as mistreating baristas as the default. It just always happens that way. I am almost protecting myself as a business person to give up that authority.

I created the shop. I spend all that time planning on how can I make the shop not mine, if that makes any sense.

I plan that shop to not be mine. It has to belong to the baristas. I'm just the financier. I'm just the guy who brought the money. They're the ones who brought the character, right? The contractor brought the skills, that dairy farmer brought the knowledge and the time and the effort to do that. I am just someone with the money and I'm grateful for it.

I'm very grateful for the fact that I have it, but I am not going to use that as leverage against anybody else. And by not doing that, I actually am not afraid of doing it. I think it's when people hold onto that money, hold onto that power, that they get very, very scared of losing it. And so when anything happens that feels like a threat to that, they hold onto it tighter. To me, I just don't hold onto it.

Ashley: That's really interesting to think about, because that reminds me of all the coffee shop owners who are now in a little bit of hot water with their baristas unionizing. I'm thinking back to the gelato shop that's in DC that cut barista wages. And I think they were quoted saying, “We expected people to leave.” That was part of their business model so that they could pay people less money. What you're saying is in such stark opposition to that. That's really interesting to think about how, in a way, it kind of frees you from feeling that insecurity and finding that control.

David: Part of that was practicality. I knew I had enough money to pay for all this, right? The decision to pay my baristas 30 to 40% more than anybody else in the area, that is a decision that sounds good, feels good. I can pat myself on the back for doing it, but if I didn't have the money, that's no good. So that has to be balanced, right?

Ashley: Right.

David: Logistics-wise, I planned out a lot of efficiencies so I can figure out, “Okay. If I treat [my baristas] right, I can pay them well—I can pay them really well.” And I don't have to mistreat them because they own the shop. They run the shop as they see fit. And I have to trust that if I hire people with good character, that they're going to work together as a really, really great team. In fact, one month after I opened, I did not have to be at the shop. I didn't have to be at the shop. They didn't need me. It just ran on.

Ashley: Right. That's so powerful too.

I've been a manager for a long time. And I think probably one of my greatest achievements was knowing that the shop was fine. I don't have to be here every day. I don't have to be here for 12 hours every day because my staff is good. They can do this job. They don't need me.

David: Right.

Ashley: And that's still a lesson that I feel is just not … it gets lost. I think it goes back to what you were saying about control, is that there is the sense of insecurity in control. It can come from the opposite end where if you're not in control, you're not really sure what's happening, but the contrary, like, God, it felt good to leave the cafe and be like, “My baristas have it. They can make a decision. The milk delivery is late? They know who to call. They're fine.”

David: That frees me up to support them, right?

Ashley: Exactly, to do bigger and better things. It gives me time to go talk to my boss and be like, “Hey, you should pay this person more money,” or think critically about what it means to give someone a raise. And it makes everybody's job easier.

David: Right. But it takes work in the beginning to do that. Absolutely.

Ashley: Absolutely. And I think that that's really interesting to talk about too—I feel like I keep saying the words, “That's interesting,” but it is! It’s almost obvious, but yet not something that a lot of people do to really plan ahead and think, “This is what I need to do to be successful. I need to have an idea of what I need these people to be able to do. I need to be able to tell them, ‘I'm gonna pay you this much.’ And then I have to be sure that I have that money to do so.” And that's really cool that you went in with a game plan.

David: Right. I do think—I'm going to almost shoot myself in the foot saying this—but I think the specialty coffee industry really forgets or talks too much about the equipment or the technicalities. That's all good knowledge. And I'm not trying to discredit that, but the conversations that we constantly have about, “Oh, we can get the best coffee if we use this equipment or if we dial it in this way,” where you have all these numbers—we start to create this dialogue of, “Oh, as long as I have these things that are tangible, calculable data, this equipment, I can have a successful coffee shop.”

And we forget because there's so much of that, right? There's so much data and there's so much knowledge. Then we start to forget that all of this is predicated on human beings being happy in your place of work.

Like none of your La Marzocco machines or your pour overs or your grinders are going to work if nobody is there. So, to me, to chase after all the equipment, the hardware, without remembering the people, I think that's where a lot of people stumble. They just jump right in. And I spent most of my time thinking about the human side, the people side, because once I figured that out, equipment stuff, you can always have somebody fix that. You can always have somebody get better at it, but if you can't fix personal issues, you're not building a good foundation. You're just trying to make your house look great. And then you said, “Oh, skip over the foundation.” If you don't have a good foundation, it doesn't matter how good your house looks.

Ashley: Absolutely.

David: And that's one thing I told my baristas, I said, “I built a really nice shop. It's a very fancy space, but it means nothing without you guys.” And I absolutely believe that. And I said that right off the bat, it doesn't mean anything. It was just a space.

Ashley: Were there ever any moments of tension or were there moments where you … it seems like you have a really good game plan, but I imagine there are lessons along the way that you learned. So what was it like actually realizing some of these values? And did you have to adjust anything as you moved along?

David: Yeah, there was one instance—well, not one instance, but a period of time of several weeks near the beginning of our operations where I felt like the baristas were not pushing themselves as much as I wanted them to. And the team, to their credit, got together and said, “Dave, we want to sit down with you and we want to talk to you about something.”

And they were very honest with me. They talked together, like they should, as a team, they discussed it. And they had one representative—everybody who worked there was present, but they had one spokesperson—and that spokesperson told me what the team felt I was saying and what they felt I should not be doing. And that I was not being fair to them. It was a very big gut punch.

And I said, “Thank you for saying that. I am processing it right now. And I need a moment.” And I literally stepped out of the shop.

I think it was just me going like, “Wow, I did not realize that that's what's happening.” And I took maybe 10 minutes to collect myself and come back and say, “I'm really sorry I did that. I did not realize I was doing that.”

I think that all stemmed from what I said about developing them to be confident, I pushed that too far. I got to a point where I was thinking that, “Oh, I'm doing this for you. And therefore you should do this and this and this and this. And now you're not meeting my expectations.” That was very, very wrong of me to do that. And I did not realize I was doing that.

But in retrospect, I think I was very, very grateful for the fact that again, I built a team that trusted each other that got together and told me collectively, because I think that's so important. It's just like, that's proof that this has to work this way. Because if I did not build a team that loved each other, that did not support each other, this thing would not have shown up, right?

This problem would not have been told to me. And I would not have known that I was doing something wrong. So I think that foundation again—it's just so much more important. I think owners also should be more open—not more open. They should just be absolutely as open as possible to understanding where baristas are coming from and to build in the structure or the platform so that they feel that they can be together collected as a group and tell me that.

It's very, very difficult when, as an employee to go, “Oh, I have this problem that's bothering me, but it seems like nobody else is being bothered,” but actually everybody's hiding.

Ashley: Right.

David: Everybody's hiding it. And nobody's willing to share it because they're like, “Oh, I don't know if that person's going to tell on me,” or “I don't know, blah, blah, blah.”

And I said, “No, just tell me, tell me where I'm wrong.”

I said that in the very beginning—I didn't realize they were going to tell me that was wrong at that point on that topic—but that was very, very important to set up in the very, very beginning that they can tell me where I'm wrong, any time. I will never hold it against any one person, because I will assume that if something is wrong with that one person, I am doing the same thing in the wrong way to someone else, if not the whole team.

That's what it means to support your baristas. That's literally my job. I don't do anything else except to support my baristas. And understanding that on a fundamental level allows them to open up.

Ashley: Were you secretly—or maybe not secretly—but I imagine getting that feedback must've been difficult. But at the same time also a very proud moment to be like, “Wow, they came up to me and they told me this, and now we can actually move forward and be constructive.”

David: That was a proud moment probably later on, because to be honest, when they told me, it was a gut punch and I took offense to it—but I realized I was taking offense to it. So that's why I said, “Give me 10 minutes.” And I walked out of the store.

I think I cried a little bit because it hurt so much. But I think the hurt was not so much that I felt I was being disrespected. It was more like, “Oh my God, I didn't realize I was doing this.” It just took time to process it. And I came back and I sat down and I said, “I'm really sorry. I don't know what to do. That is a gut punch. And I'm just going to be honest and say that was a gut punch. But I hope you know that I don't mean that. But I understand why it feels that way, and it's my fault for making you feel that way.”

Over the following weeks, I still felt the guilt. I still felt like I had to keep a little bit of a distance. And to be honest, it took maybe like a month before I got back to the same level as it was before that. And that's just human nature, right? That's just me having to process that.

Ashley: Right. But it's so powerful that you didn't hold it against them. I can imagine 800 different scenarios that every barista has had where they either feel fearful to speak up about something that's bothering them or when they do speak up, they're retaliated against or told that they're wrong, or even subject to the anger that their manager might feel against them. “Oh, you made me feel this way. Now I'm going to make you feel.” That's such a common…

David: You can't…

Ashley: You can't do that!

David: You can't do that. We say you can’t do that—you and me are talking about, we can't do that because it sounds logical. What I think is really, really important is the owner has to feel that way. They truly, fundamentally have to feel that in the deepest part of their gut that that's the value.

I had to tell myself that before I hired anybody, I've figured it out on paper, that this is what I needed to be. I needed to be someone who supported my baristas, and that was on paper. But then I asked myself, “Could I do that day in and day out? Do I believe in that? Do I actually believe in that? And when somebody tells me they have a problem with me, how am I going to react?”

I had to do a lot of—it sounds a little bit clichéd—but I had to do a lot of soul-searching because I wasn't sure that I was that type of person. Then I spent time almost brainwashing myself and telling myself, “No, I have to be that person. I have to be someone who supports the baristas. I have to be someone who understands criticisms and absorbs it and tries to get better from it and not take that personally.”

Once I received criticism and I processed the emotions, my first task is to go back and fix that problem because I can't just be moody for the next three months. I can't just go like, “Oh, you hurt my feelings and I'm not going to retaliate, but I'm going to ignore you for the next three months.” That's not fair.

Running through that scenario in my mind was probably more important than anything else—understanding who I am and what kind of role I truly am taking on and the kind of responsibility that I'm taking on—because if I don't believe it, the person I hire and then I promote to be manager, they're not going to believe that either, right?

Eventually there's going to be some layer of hierarchy where there's going to be a shop manager and that manager is going to oversee someone else. And that person is going to feel fearful of bringing up that thing to that manager. So if I don't believe it, I can't tell my manager to believe it. And if my manager doesn't believe it or see me do it, they're not going to show that graciousness or that humility to that next person.

Ashley: Gosh, there's so many good things in everything you just said. But I want to shift a little bit because the way that I learned about your coffee shop was through Instagram and the fact that you're a designer makes a lot of sense. But you really utilized Instagram and social media in this way that I don't think any other coffee shop has ever utilized it. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you thought about using your social media presence and just your public persona in general.

David: There wasn't a plan to be honest. It really stemmed from my habit of being a designer. In design school, we were always taught to document what you do, no matter how mundane it seems. It's just a good record-keeping habit. So that's what I started off with.

I knew that Instagram was popular. I didn't really know how to use it. I took pictures of the construction. I started out with a sentence or two, then it became more long-form. But just showing respect for the people who built it. The very first “personal stories” I shared were of the contractors who came and built the space, put in the plumbing, put in the electrical lines, did the demolition and all those things and constructed the physical space.

It's a learning journey. I'm sure the writing has gotten better. The photography has gotten better, but I didn't really have a plan except to just say, “I'm going to document this.”

I didn't show that I was the owner until maybe late or middle of August. I always intended my social media presence to be a showcase for what my baristas did. I didn't actually show who I am until much, much later on. So that part was intentional, but in terms of what content I put on there, it was good seeing that people responded well, especially baristas, who seem to like my stories and my content seem to resonate with them. And I felt, “Oh, okay, well, it sounds like this is really helping someone. I should probably write more.” And just being .. I don't know. I want to say I'm courageous about it, but just kind of being honest and saying, “Hey, this is what I'm thinking about. This is what I think, this is why I appreciate what my baristas do.” That to me is just been an organic kind of growth, growing from there.

Ashley: You mentioned that you've gotten a lot of responses from baristas, and through my social network, that's generally the people that I see the most, but I wonder: Have other business owners interacted with you? Have you seen other business owners react differently towards you? I wonder what that process has been like.

David: Mostly positive. I guess I'm lucky in that way. I don't think I've had any other business owner who said anything negative. If anybody reached out to me, they said they really like what I stand for, that they see that their baristas resonate really well or at least like my content. And so they see that there's value in it.

A couple of them have reached out to me to sit down in person and say like, “How can I think this way? Or how can I approach it this way? Do you have any advice for me?” But the majority of my interaction is really with baristas. Supplementing my social media presence, I do go out to New York and attend coffee events where people do recognize me and I put my face out there. If I have an opportunity to talk one-on-one with baristas, they often have questions and I will spend like 30, 40 minutes—I get lost in talking. I love that interaction, and they follow me and a couple of posts here and there really resonated with people, which I'm happy to see. But yeah, it's half social media, half just putting my face out there in the coffee scene.

Ashley: There's no way to have this conversation without talking about the arc of your business. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the fact that you've closed, which feels very awkward for me to ask, but at the same time, it's part of the process. It's part of the journey that you're on.

David: I was very fortunate to have met other entrepreneurs many months back and one of the common refrains was, “You will not find your success until you’ve failed many, many, many times.”

So that kind of mentally prepped me. When I first started the shop, I knew that I'm going all in. If I lost all my money, that will be fine. It sounds really weird to have that be a throwaway phrase, but it's true. But coming to that realization of having to close, it was a decision that my baristas and I came to an agreement with. It was literally the fact that not enough people were coming in to sustain the business, and I had almost run out of money.

Everything has been financed by me. So there is a limit to how much money I have. And that was very much at the near end. So our summer months didn't pick up. You can dissect all the factors for why we closed, but the easy answer is not enough people came in.

For me to process the closing was tough. I did feel like I did want to tell myself that there's still legs. I could still keep going. I could go to the end of the year. But when that reality hit and I sat down with my baristas and they shared with me their thoughts on it. I took two weeks to process it on my own. I stepped away from the shop. I went to New York, went to see different shops. I drove around to just let it kind of settle in my mind. And after two weeks I realized it was a good decision. It was the right decision.

Then it kicks in: “What's the process like?” or “How are we going to close the shop? What are the logistics?” But the emotional roller coaster is still there because it's been kind of like a baby to me, it's been something that I pour my heart and soul into, but I also keep reminding myself: This is something that the baristas poured their hearts and souls into probably more than I could ever have, because this is something that they love doing. One of the things that really touched me was my team collectively told me they would not want to work for anyone else because of how happy they are. So I try to emphasize what a disappointment it is when the community doesn't support it in the way that they wanted it to.

That this good thing has to come to an end, that they now have to move on to the next phase of their lives. So if I keep thinking about what they must go through, not that I could 100% understand, that puts my emotion, my personal emotions, in perspective. I am at a point in my life where I know what I'm going to do. I can figure it out. I have that confidence. They may not be because they're early on in their careers and their lives, and they thought this was going to be a long-running thing. For that to end—it's more important for me now to support them instead of keep wallowing in that. Not to say it isn't hurtful, not to say it isn't disappointing, but I think having that perspective really helps me process that.

Ashley: Is there anything about closing that makes you think that you should have done anything differently, or does it shake any of your values at all?

David: No.

I am very proud of the fact that I started the shop, built a shop, built this team, did it the way I did it. If anything, the lesson is, I wish I had more money to do this—not to burn, but if I had another opportunity to do another shop, I certainly would have just done it exactly the same way. Maybe logistically it will be different for different markets, different demographics, but my value system of supporting the baristas, that has not changed. It has to be that way because I'm closing on my own terms. I'm closing, and my baristas have felt like that was the best job that they ever had. To me, the only failure that I had was I did not have enough people come through the door. I was successful in everything else.

It’s almost like … I guess if I put together like a, you know, how an artist puts together an album and says, “Well, it didn't do well in the market, but artistically or value-wise, that's who that person is.” Everybody who poured their heart into it understands that's the right way to express that art. That's the way we have to live our lives. We just put our values out there on the table. We put everything on the table. I do not regret any bit of that. Whether or not it performed well on the market, that's business-person talk.

I'm still very, very grateful. I'm not homeless. Nobody else is homeless. This is just a matter of money. Life is telling me that my success was not in the coffee shop. My success is inspiring baristas, my successes is baristas feeling like somebody is looking out for them. Maybe they don't know me, but somebody is putting that value out there on social media and saying, “Hey, I know you don't do this, but look at The Peccary. The Peccary did it. And these are the baristas who came out of it and they're successful in their own careers. And they're confident who they are.”

And that's just an example, right? If I had spent all that money to just prove out and set examples for other people, it was well worth it. I don't even care. I just don't care. I just believe that money can always be made. That is not my motivator. So closing the business is just the end of a chapter. And now I am going to focus on what's the next chapter. What is the thing that I could figure out so that I solve this riddle, because I solved so many other riddles, so many other problems. So I'm successful in that. I just happened to be a failure in this. So I don't have any issues with that.

Ashley: Thank you so much for being on my show. I really appreciate it.

David: No, thank you for inviting me. This has been really, really great.

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Let’s say you’re trying to get good at playing the guitar. Maybe you’re taking a class, or you have a tutor. How do you get improve? You practice—and a lot of that practice involves going home, sitting alone with your instrument, and taking time to work through every new skill or small snag: a couple of chords, finger placements, some tricky pieces of music.

Now imagine you don’t have a guitar at home. When would you practice? Would you get as good if you were only able to play at school, or with your teacher? It’s possible—but it’s not likely.

Now let’s apply this example to the service industry. How do you get better at cooking, or making pastries, or making coffee? You practice. And in an ideal world, you’d have everything you need within reach—the space, the equipment, the resources—in order to improve day by day.

Chris McAuley is the founder of getchusomegear, an organization that gives away free coffee equipment to marginalized baristas. The idea first dawned on Chris when he noticed a pattern: He knew plenty of baristas who were eager to learn, but who—despite their enthusiasm—were slower to gain new skills, simply because they didn’t have anything to brew with at home.

Since its inception, getchusomegear has shipped hundreds of boxes across the United States, expanded to Canada, and started a secondary shipping hub in Los Angeles. He and his team have worked with coffee businesses to fund grants, have helped folks with their resumes, and have created a system that normalizes mutual aid and redistribution of resources.

Perhaps what’s most telling about Chris and his mission for getchusomegear is that there is no expectation of reciprocity. You don’t have to give anything back, or commit to loan repayments. You simply state your need, and Chris and the getchusomegear team—which has expanded to educators and organizers across the country—will do their best to get you a box.

In addition to addressing the gap in equipment needs, getchusomegear also confronts the information gap. As Chris says in this episode, many have a tendency, across domains and disciplines, to hold information back, to hoard knowledge and not share it with others. In our hyper-competitive society, knowledge is often treated as its own commodity, an entity that can grant power and which must be protected. But when information is guarded, people—often people of marginalized groups—are left to scale the impossible barriers built by these gatekeepers. It’s unfair, and Chris is doing his best to break down those walls.

Just a quick note before we begin: I noticed a factual error on my part. About seven minutes into the conversation, Chris and I are talking about our early coffee jobs and I mentioned that my first job had a Mazzer Super Jolly—the source of those clack clack clack sounds you’ll hear Chris and I make later. I was misremembering: It was at my second job that we had a Swift grinder and a Super Jolly. At my first job, we had a Mahlkönig that I think was K30, which we were not allowed to change the dial-in on. Now, on to the show.

Ashley: Chris, I am so excited for you to be joining me on Boss Barista. I was wondering if you could tell me about some of your first memories of coffee?

Chris: Well, hi Ashley, thanks for having me.

My first memories of coffee are just how different people in my family prepared coffee differently. My mom is Puerto Rican, so she made a lot of her coffee in what I call the sock or a mocha pot. My grandmother made instant coffee and they put a ton of sugar in it, and that was a different sensory experience. My dad just wants his coffee to be as hot as possible and as convenient as possible. And so he has the Mr. Coffee going.

I remember enjoying coffee with individual people in my family differently. And it was just really sweet to share those moments with them. My mom is Puerto Rican, so of course I grew up drinking coffee and eating Maria cookies. If that sounds weird to people that are like, “Oh, why was Chris drinking coffee as a child?” It was just very sweet memories.

Ashley: I’m Cuban. So I have very similar memories of just drinking coffee from a mocha pot. Although it’s a little bit mixed with what your dad wants—my grandmother will take her coffee from the machine and then she has a little espresso machine and she'll take the steam wand and heat the coffee up more.

Chris: My dad puts it in the microwave! That's amazing. I love that.

Ashley: Like, this isn’t hot enough. Let's just go to 11.

Chris: I made—a neighborhood friend and former coworker and also just great guy who dropped an espresso machine off on our porch and was like, “We're getting a new one, you can have this one!” which was amazing—so my parents come for social-distanced yard hangs and we'll make them coffee. And I always make my dad an Americano because I can control the temperature of the water. Wow, and he still asks me to reheat it and I'm like, “Dad, this water is literally 210 degrees. This coffee probably tastes terrible. But you still want it to be hotter. Okay.”

Ashley: Oh, he wants it to be evaporating off his tongue, apparently.

Chris: I guess. I don't know.

Ashley: Oh, that's wild.

Chris: What a dude.

Ashley: So when did you start working in coffee?

Chris: I started working in coffee when I was in college in 2005. I was going to Meredith College and was going through some s**t, definitely. My grandma died and I wasn't feeling right at a women's college. And so I mostly just lived there and worked at the coffee shop up the street for a semester, which was ridiculous. I definitely paid for that. But yeah, that's where I started. I’ve been kind of in and out of coffee and the specialty grocery industry, but all service positions.

Ashley: So at what point did getchusomegear become an idea in your brain?

Chris: I was managing at the last cafe [I worked at] and I happened to be managing at—I don't know if I was managing it at two of the locations yet. But I knew some staff at the other store, like a sister location, and they were so interested in learning from the barista trainer that we had on staff because he was amazing and such a great teacher.

So [one of those staff members] came over and I realized and learned that she had been a barista and a bartender for a very long time, but didn't have access to coffee gear at home. And that's how it happened.

I was talking with Chelsea (Chris’ partner) about it on the couch at my old apartment. I was like, “Let's see if we can get some gear for the staff.” And we got more gear than we thought we were going to get—she showed it on her Instagram, I shared it on my end. And I think that's it. That's what happened.

Ashley: And here we are now.

Chris: It's weird. I don't remember where the shipping aspect came in. It just happened. Things just happen. But that's the story.

Ashley: Something I wrote down before we hopped on the phone, as I was thinking about what getchusomegear means, is I wrote down the relationship between passion and access. I think in the coffee world, we have this almost obsession with passion—that people go to different coffee shops on their days off and brew coffee at home all the time. But if you don't have things to brew coffee at home, how do you get to that passion? There are other avenues obviously, but when we value this idea of people experimenting on their own, if they don't have access to those things, then how are they able to do that?

Chris: Yeah, it's impossible. Your experience with coffee at home as a coffee professional is entirely different from your job or your career or whatever. It's more intimate, there's no pressure, there's no coffee bro that's like, “No, this is like, this is orange peel! This is what you have to taste!”

You’re kind of free to do what you want, but you have to have the gear. I didn't have anything to make coffee with at home besides a Mr. Coffee maker until—maybe a French press every once in a while—but until Chelsea and I started dating three years ago, and she hooked me up with my setup and it changed the way I felt about coffee at home. It changed the way I felt about coffee at work. Especially being able to take beans home and having stuff to brew them on instead of just giving them away as gifts. So that made me better at my job. And then I got to share that with other people. So yeah.

Ashley: That's wild to think that you didn't have access to coffee gear until three years ago, when you said that your coffee career started in 2005.

Chris: Yeah, it's weird. It was like a second-wave shop where we had the click clack grinder, the Mazzer, like the really, really old one. There was no dialing in, we weren't allowed to touch the grinder. I mostly just had that job to pay the bills. It wasn't very interesting and there wasn't space to learn. Yeah, three years ago.

Ashley: My very first coffee job was also a place where we had the clack clack clack clack clack sound. And similarly, we weren't allowed to touch the grinder. You weren't allowed to dial in, you just had to take it as it was. So, for all the kids listening…

Chris: So weird!

Ashley: I feel like even that sound, the clack clack clack sound, and people are going to be like, “What sound is that?”

Chris: Oh, here's another one. We didn't really have Toddy [cold brew]. We saved our leftover espresso shots and put them in a Lexam and put them in the fridge. And that is how we made frappuccinos on an Island Oasis machine.

Ashley: I have a similar story, too. I think we kind of knew cold brew was—we had heard about it, but I think we made it using these buckets from Home Depot and cheesecloth, like just straight up.

It was like, “Oh, this looks like what that is.” No. That’s not how you make cold brew at all.

I remember straining that first batch of cold brew and just being like, “This is wrong. We're doing something wrong.”

Chris: We can’t serve this!

Ashley: We can’t serve this you guys! Oh man, that was bad. Those bad times.

Chris: We've come a long way, Ashley.

Ashley: We have come a long way. So I was wondering, this seems like an obvious question, but I was wondering if you could talk about why is access to equipment important? And you touched a little bit upon that, but I was wondering, as you've seen getchusomegear grow and expand, how have you seen people benefit from having access to equipment?

Chris: Oh, geez. In so many ways, it's a confidence-builder, and I can speak to that.

Folks reach out and they're like, “Whoa, we didn't know that we could do this with this and now we're experimenting,” and there's that.

And then there's the folks that reach out and they're like, “Oh, hey, I went out for this position and I wanted to thank y'all because I built confidence because I had this gear at home and I was able to feel like a coffee professional,” whatever that is.

And then there's the coffee business owners that we've gotten gear to and they're able to bring in more income, hopefully, because of the work that they allow us to do for them. So I think having access to gear is important for all those reasons and probably a whole lot more. And I'm really looking forward to seeing what that is as getchu grows.

Ashley: Something that you hit on too was the idea of it being a confidence-builder. Even thinking of the analogy that you used earlier, where you can be in a cafe and you can be learning from maybe a coffee trainer or a coworker, and if they don't come in with kindness and understanding, that can be so intimidating—you could be trying to figure out the right answer. Like is orange peel the answer you're looking for?

And if I don't agree with you, what does this mean versus being able to brew at home, and really being able to discover coffee on your own terms—which I imagine is a huge part of building confidence?

Chris: I think so too. And I'm glad you brought that up because that's been my experience with coffee educators in companies that I've worked for. It's kind of weird that you go into a coffee company like I did. And the educator, besides the manager of your shop, the educator is one of the first folks that you get to meet from the company. If you don't vibe, it just doesn't feel good. My experience with coffee educators that I've worked with is that they want you to know some things, but not too much. And if you look different then it's harder for you.

Ashley: Can you talk a little bit about that? Because I think I was reading an interview that you did, I think with Sprudge, that when you would show up specifically saying, “I want to learn,” or, “I want to do more,” you were met with that wall of, “Oh, you can learn a little bit, but don't learn too much.”

Chris: It was like, “Are you going to take my job?”

Yeah. Bringing some things to folks in leadership at places I've worked at and being like, “Hey, I really want to do this for the staff. I want us to make these educational materials about the different coffee processes and like, you're a [coffee] buyer. So let's talk about this. Let's make this a collaboration because you also buy the coffee that we sell, so let's get it, let's sell more coffee. So we can make more, so you can pay us more.”

But the dude felt very threatened by that in a way that the energy that he was giving off, he felt like I was after his job. And I'm like, “No, I don't want to work with you.” [laughs] Well that was maybe mean…

Ashley: No, that was perfect.

Chris: Like real talk. I don't want to work with you, man. I want my staff to feel fulfilled, you know? And like, not be bored.

Yeah. Pushback like that is so weird. Don't you want your staff and your coworkers and the people that work in your company to do better, so you could pay your people more? It doesn't seem like that's the case.

Ashley: Yeah. That's always an interesting…I don't know—no. Maybe it’s not interesting. It sucks.

It's a dumb thing that happens. I think people don't really understand why folks come to coffee shops, and it's because of baristas. And if baristas don't like their jobs, you can tell. You can tell who here is like, “I like being here and everyone treats me well,” versus, “No one treats me well here and this place sucks. And there's going to be new folks in the next two months.”

I think about that a lot in terms of turnover, because I think that people assume that barista work is a very turnover-type job, but I've been to coffee shops—I'm sure you have too. You've seen coffee shops where people have been there for a long time. It's possible. And we just keep f*****g it up so much.

Chris: I think the last large team that I was on was a team of coffee veterans in that company, like three years, four years, one of the guys that was there that was a trainer had been there for like, 10 to 12 years.

And so I don't know—if you keep the staff engaged and happy and give them gear and give them incentives to learn more and help them grow to a point where it would be okay if they left the company, because your intent should be to help them get where they need to be wherever … that would be great.

Ashley: I feel like people don't think about their employees as alumni of their coffee shops. They're the people who go out in the world and they're like, “Oh, I loved working at this place,” or “No, I hated it. And I will tell you why…”

Chris: Yes, that definitely happens. Companies and coffee business owners really underestimate the advertising value that your staff has. Your staff can build quite a following if they're at a coffee shop for a long time and that comes with good stuff and bad stuff.

But once that barista leaves, it's likely that that customer or that customer base will leave. We've seen that happen locally and it's wild to see it. And it's wild to see those customers that were like, “Oh yeah. So about that place … this person's gone, this person's gone, this person's gone. So like, why are we going there now? This is our community. And it doesn't feel that way anymore. You know?”

Ashley: So on Instagram you asked folks to talk about moments that radicalize them working in coffee. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why you asked that question, and what was the response like?

Chris: Wow. The year anniversary of the thing that pushed me over the edge to leave an abusive work environment—it's coming up on the anniversary of that. I talk with Chelsea and Sally and Cydni (members of the getchusomegear team) sometimes and we joke about it, but it's like, “What was the thing? What was the company that radicalized you in this industry?”

And it's funny, we all say this same company. Well, except Chelsea, but I felt like I wanted for us to engage with the community because we've all gone through some really traumatic things working in service, in coffee, out of service jobs and it sort of felt like it was the right time to connect.

The response was kind of emotionally overwhelming, but also wonderful and kind of beautiful to see that folks that have gone through such horrible things were just willing to share. And it definitely helped me feel less alone in that service industry trauma, whatever you want to call it. We hope that other people felt that way too.

Ashley: There's something I've been grappling with in my own brain about validation and how important it is for people to both hear your stories and see them and say, “I see this. And that sucks.”

Like, just even giving that moment of, “Your story is real, and it is hurtful.” And just to be able to see from that perspective, because I think for a lot of people sharing their stories of trauma in coffee shops, you're often the only person experiencing that trauma juxtaposed to someone telling you that you're wrong.

So you oftentimes end up in a place where you're like, “Wait, am I wrong? I know I'm not, but everything around me is telling me I am.” And that's awful. I think that can be—I don't know, I don't know what it can be, but I have to imagine that just being able to see other people's stories, even though they're emotionally overwhelming, has to feel like, “Oh, I'm not alone in this.”

Chris: Oh yeah. And sometimes I forget, sometimes we all forget, and I think it was an unexpected reminder that we're not. But we also wanted the folks that follow the getchu Instagram to see what the hell is going on, to see what's really going on and not have a space to deny that.

Because if someone hit up the DMs, we would shut that down immediately, any kind of denials. But it was there in their faces. And for the five seconds that a story's in front of your face, I hope that it had their attention. I hope it's just the first step, the listening and the saying, “Oh, you know, that sucks.” Like solidarity, whatever. It's time for people to start really acting and really doing the things that they claimed they were going to do when they posted those little black squares in their feeds.

Ashley: I have to imagine as an Instagram account that does so much of the work that you do and being really visible about calling other coffee companies to action, you've also been watching people pretty closely and saying like, “Okay, it's December now. What does that actually mean for you?” And I don't really have a question for this as much as I have to imagine that that sucks.

Chris: Yeah. A lot of people on the getchu team spent a good bit of time meeting with folks when all this was happening in June, July—the meetings would be like an hour or two hours. And a lot of those folks that we talked to committed to being a part of this change, this thing that's bigger than everybody or bigger than all of us.

They ghosted. They're gone, for whatever reason. Maybe we said something too controversial or maybe the commitment actually just wasn't there and it was completely performative. But we're not going anywhere. We're pushing forward just fine. And I think maybe better off.

Ashley: At least you have confirmation of who's in it and who's not.

Chris: Oh yeah.

Ashley: I wanna talk a little bit about your Re:co conversation. And I was wondering if you could talk to folks about what was the inspiration behind it and what was it like giving it.

Chris: Oh, okay. So I am a very serious Capricorn person, Ashley.

Ashley: This is my favorite, thank you for telling me your sign.

Chris: I dunno, I'm mostly serious and sometimes like a little bit of a goofball, but I like to plan stuff.

We wanted the presentation to be in the front yard because we figured that people would be using their offices or like a stuffy classroom, whatever. We wanted to sit outside. The wallflowers were really pretty. But I had this plan, I had a script and there were these things that we were going to say. I held it up, I was talking with Cydni about it and Chelsea (my partner) was there because she was filming. And I think Cydni and Chelsea looked at each other and they were just like, “No, you're not going to have a script for this. You don't need, we don't need a script. We can just kind of wing it and brew the coffee and have a conversation.”

So they made me throw my planned script away and we just went for it. I don't really like speaking publicly very much. I just feel very awkward. But I felt like this was an important opportunity to talk about the things that are important to us.

Ashley: For anyone who maybe didn't get to see your Re:co speech, could you give a quick and dirty overview of what you folks talked about?

Chris: Oh yeah. Give your staff tools and resources that they need to move forward wherever they want to be.

Don't be racist was one of the takes.

Cydni just, she speaks so beautifully. She was talking about how no one in her family—and I'm probably going to screw this up completely—but no one in her family would not teach her how to take care of something in their house, you know?

And that's how business owners should think about educating baristas and equipping them with tools, giving them gear, and giving them access to information instead of hoarding it and gatekeeping it like it's money. I don't know.

Ashley: I like that analogy that Cydni gave because there's the implication of like, you're in your home and your parents or your family members wouldn't teach you how to do something in your house, but likewise, your family wouldn't expect you to stay forever either. If you leave, it's not like, “Oh, we taught you these tools just for you to leave.” Do you know what I mean?

Chris: When Cydni talked about her parents teaching her how to take care of the house and that prepares you to do other things in life, coffee business owners really could have looked at that and been like, “Oh, okay, this is a great analogy. If I take care of my staff and I give them what they need and I teach them how to take care of everything in this cafe, and I compensate them fairly for doing so, they're either gonna stick around and be great for the team or they're gonna move on and be great somewhere else.”

Ashley: I think that just speaks to the bigger idea of an industry. If we care about coffee growing and being better for everybody, then we all have to do our part in the small ways we can.

So empowering staff is part of the system, it's part of the making coffee better. So it's interesting when … maybe I'm going to throw roasters under the bus a little bit, but I feel like they're kind of the easiest target—but no, not roasters.

But you know when you look at a roaster's website and they're like, “We care so much about meticulously roasted coffee…” It's like words like that, that always kind of seemed like a red flag to me.

It's like, “Oh, if we care so much, we clearly care about the future of coffee, but we don't seem to consider all of the things that go into that.” It's not just about meticulously roasted coffee. It's not just about sourcing the best green coffee we can— and that's a whole other rabbit hole, but it just seems like we forget all the other stuff that makes coffee better and the stuff that makes coffee better is people.

Chris: And yeah, we forget to take care of the people or just maybe don't take care of the people. And thank you for bringing up—we've got a lot of work to do, but if we all try to do the thing just a little bit, you know, we can accomplish a whole lot. Because that was also the end of the theme, the end of the Re:co chat that we had.

Ashley: I wanted to talk a little bit about you and I'm glad that you brought up that you're a Capricorn because I love trying to figure out how people's personalities fit into the work that they do. And I was wondering, this might be a big question, but how do you see yourself in the work that getchusomegear does?

Chris: I thought about this a little bit. I really, like tbh, I really like to give people stuff and I have no money, so this is a great way to do that! And that ties directly into just really wanting the people that I care about to have the things that they need.

Ashley: Yeah. That seems to be a theme for getchusomegear in general—the idea of reciprocity, because there is no expectation of reciprocity. You get a box, and that’s for you.

Chris: That's for you. You can have it.

Every part of this, I want folks to know that there's no expectation. With the original getchusomegear application for baristas, I think there's like, eight questions and one of them is, “What's your name?” And another question is, “What's your address?”

Those are the hardest questions that you really need to answer. Because I think some programs that I've seen outside of coffee have just asked so much from people and just wanted them to bare their souls, to get a thing that they should already have access to. And I don't like that. And I think that's ridiculous.

Ashley: I just had this conversation with Mansi [Chokshi, of the Specialty Coffee Association] who you and I have actually also both texted or DMed about before and something that Mansi mentioned in her interview—I'm going to assume that Mansi’s interview will be out by this time because if it’s not, I'll cut this.

Mansi mentioned, and I forget what the program was, but she mentioned that for the first time, the SCA decided to not require an application for [a scholarship for the program]. They were like, “Do you need this thing? Cool. This is how much of the thing we have and we're going to put everybody in a lottery.” I think it was for Sensory Summit.

Chris: Oh dope! Cool!

Ashley: Mansi was like, “We have 50 boxes to give people for Sensory Summit,” or something like that. I might be making the number up. But instead of this application process, she was like, “Why am I questioning people's needs? What proof do they have to give me to say that they need a thing? If they need the thing, they need the thing.”

Chris: Yeah, they should just have the thing!

Ashley: So I think that that kind of mimics a lot of the understanding behind getchusomegear. And it seems to also speak to the larger theme of what we give people in coffee shops. What do we give our employees? And I bet you the idea of reciprocity comes up in coffee shops a lot. Like, “Oh, if I train you, then you will be a good barista for me. You will be good in this shop.” But if we remove that, if we just say like, “I just want you to be the best version of you,” then … wouldn't that be better?

Chris: It would be so much better!

And when I think about getting, in particular, gifts from coffee shops at around the holiday times, or as a Band-aid when something weird happens, it just feels like there's strings attached to that. I don't want there to be any strings. Our getchuagrant application was very open-ended and similar to the gearbox application. It's like, “Do you need the thing? Okay. Tell us whatever you want to tell us in your video.” Okay.

Ashley: How did you make decisions on that?

Chris: You mean on the grant?

Ashley: Yeah.

Chris: We had a sweet team of getchuagrant … I don't know what you call that, the application review squad?

We had 49 applicants and we picked folks that were doing mutual aid work in their communities, like Mina’s World. We try to focus on gearbox recipients with the LLC boosts. Just folks that align with our ideals because Cydni has smacked me upside of the head with a lot of truth lately. And she's like, “Just because my identity, our identities intersect with other folks, it doesn't mean that they're necessarily for what we're about.”

And yeah, so those are the folks we went for. And the first five recipients from Seattle Coffee Gear were all Black women. That's the least-protected person in this industry and we've got to do whatever we can to protect and uplift Black femmes.

Ashley: When you look at getchusomegear, what do you think are the goals? I have to imagine that you've thought about this before, but the idea that it'd be great if getchusomegear wasn't necessary.

Chris: It would be really cool if coffee shops and coffee business centers, whatever, would provide their staff with the tools that they need to learn more. It would be great if they all wrote taking care of the community into their budgets. It would be great if they all had policies in place to protect the best interests of the staff.

So there's a lot of layers, I think, to what getchu has ended up doing and being, so I don't know what the goals are in that way. It would be nice for all of those things to be fantastic and not a problem. But they're going to be, and so I think we'll be around. I don't know if that was like a rambling answer…

Ashley: No, that wasn’t rambling at all.

Chris: Seemingly everything happened by accident with getchusomegear. And so we’re just gonna kind of wait for more good accidents to happen.

Ashley: What else would you want people to know about you listening to this?

Chris: Oh, Lord. I don't know. I'm working on being less of a like, not in the shadows might not be a good way to put it, but I haven't always been the most outgoing person or the person that's had a good community of people around them, especially in work environments. I just want to thank the people that are involved with getchu and the folks that have signed up to get a gearbox, all the people that applied to get a grant. I have a community around me now and I've literally never had that before.

Cydni and I wouldn't have been friends without coffee, Sally either. I don't know. I don't know how to put into words how much that means to me or how much I appreciate that I have felt like a very lost person for a long time. And because of coffee, I don't feel that way anymore, because of the people that I've met in this community. And that makes me so happy.

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

Chris: Thanks for having me, Ashley.

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In the last three years, there have been a number of unionizing efforts within the coffee industry. Baristas across the United States have come together to organize and demand accountability from their leaders. They’ve expressed the need to have a voice in decisions such as hiring and firing calls, wage increases, and workplace conditions.

We’ve covered a number of those efforts on previous episodes of Boss Barista. From the Gimme! Coffee Union in New York to the Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative (formerly known as the Augie’s Coffee Union), we’ve heard stories from coffee workers and organizers about the many ways in which those in power are threatened by collective action.

Not a single one of these unionizing efforts has been without strife or difficulty. The Gimme! Union folks were in negotiation with leadership for half a year before their union contract was ratified. All the baristas at Augie’s Coffee were fired. Mighty Good, which is a coffee shop in Ann Arbor, initially recognized the union started by its baristas, which formed after one of its employees, Nya Njee, shared that she was being paid less than her white colleagues, many of whom were hired after she was. Months later, the owners of Mighty Good shut down its retail locations and fired all baristas.

But there is hope in all this. More and more baristas are fighting for their rights, realizing the power of collective action and bargaining. Though unions may have a difficult reputation among workers for any number of reasons, at their core, they’re meant to help elevate the voices of those not in power, and to give space to workers who are often at the mercy of employers without any support networks.

Today, we’re chatting with two folks in the midst of a union battle—Zoe Muellner and Robert Penner of the Colectivo Collective. Consisting of baristas and other employees both in Chicago and Milwaukee, the union is still fighting for recognition by providing information to employees and garnering support from customers and local representatives.

In this episode, we talk about how unionizing efforts began, and what it feels like for your leaders to deny your concerns and complaints. The folks at Colectivo have highlighted the myriad ways their worries have been dismissed and their safety put on the line during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the union folks are attempting to bring accountability to their leaders and find a voice in the collective. Although they’re fighting for a better workplace for themselves, they’re also using social media to dispel common misconceptions about unions, and to keep folks informed and updated on ways to organize in their own workplaces.

If you want to hear more from the folks we mentioned above, as well as other coffee unions, check out our episodes with the Gimme! Coffee Union, Nya Njee, WACWA (the union formed by the Mighty Good baristas), Tartine Union, and the Slow Bloom Coffee Cooperative.

Ashley: So before we begin, let's have you both introduce yourself? I'm going to start with Robert just because Robert was the first one on the call.

Robert: Hi. I'm Robert Penner. I am a now-former worker from Colectivo Coffee. I'm a resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I worked for Colectivo at a couple of different stints between spring of 2016 and then winter of 2017, and then again from 2019 into 2020. I was a warehouse and production facility worker there.

Ashley: Zoe, what about you?

Zoe: So my name is Zoe Muellner. I use she/they pronouns and I worked for Colectivo for just about two-and-a-half years—from August 2018 through October of this past year. I worked as a cafe co-worker. Then I was a lead barista, or lightning rod as Colectivo calls it. And then also worked my way up to being one of the barista trainers for the Chicago market.

Ashley: Where does the story of the union start for you folks?

Robert: I think there's kind of a parallel beginning to the union because, what I know, is that in the warehouse prior to COVID-19 there was a lot of frustration and this was coming in the fall and the winter of 2019. The workers in the warehouse were kind of being ignored.

We've got a lot of complaints about workplace processes, about changes that are being made without us being informed ahead of time, inconsistent ordering, and unsafe work practices. We also kept having our reviews, our yearly reviews, pushed back, which isn't good because that's how we get our raises. And so the more they push those back, the less time we have in that year to cash in on the raises that we're supposed to get.

And it was just kind of a thing where it's like, it says in the employee handbook that we'll have performance reviews in September—and September comes and goes, and we're like, “Okay, when's this going to happen?”

We're asking the COO Leo [Lettow] and we're saying, “Look, when are you going to do our reviews? We'd really like to have our reviews.”

And he's like, “Oh, we'll do them next week.”

And next week comes and goes, and we're like, “Leo, you said we would do our reviews next week. What are we going to do?”

And he's like, “Oh, we'll do them next week. We'll do them next week.”

And they get pushed all the way to December before we finally have to pressure them into doing these performance reviews.

They don't go by the handbook and it's totally a disorganized process. It was one of many complaints that we have in the warehouse, but it led us to try and seek out different kinds of action we could take.

And so me and a couple of the other warehouse people sought out the IWW, which is the Industrial Workers of the World, because they've run some pretty good direct action campaigns in Milwaukee. They helped us do a little bit of direct action in the warehouse where we as warehouse workers compiled a list of demands that we wanted to put forward when we went into our performance review meetings with Leo. We all went in with the same message and we were able to win a couple of small concessions there.

And that's really where the interest in unionizing, at least from the warehouse end, started. But then we realized later that there was also talk in the Humboldt cafe going on at the same time about unionizing. We didn't really know that back in the warehouse. I mean, we talk to people in the cafe a lot and work with them, but there's a little bit of a communication divide there. So we found out later that there was also union talk going on in the cafes in Milwaukee as well.

So that's kind of where the union efforts started—when both the warehouse people and the cafe people realized that they were both thinking about unionizing.

Ashley: Zoe, when did you first hear about union efforts starting?

Zoe: My first clue was around the beginning of the pandemic, a petition started that said, “Many cafes around the country are shutting down with two weeks’ pay. We would like to see that happen here. It's unsafe for us to work right now. We need to take a pause and figure out where the company's going and how we're going to safely handle the pandemic.”

And it got like, 4,000 signatures between the folks who work within the cafes and our surrounding community, which was amazing. And the company agreed to follow what the petition asked for. I think it was a couple months later, around the beginning of June, one of the other people on the VOC [volunteer organizing committee] approached me and said, “Hey, we're organizing. Is this something you'd be into?” And immediately I was so excited about it.

My only real familiarity with unionizing was through the television show Superstore. So just seeing what that was, I was like, “I don't know a whole lot about unions yet,” but I started attending meetings and really just jumped on board from there.

Ashley: It seems like information is a big component to union efforts, which is something that you folks tackle a lot on your Instagram account, which we'll talk about in a little bit, but I want to talk about the moment that you folks declared your interest in starting a union to the leadership at Colectivo. What was that moment like?

Zoe: It was nerve-wracking for sure. We sent a letter with a list of names of people who were on the volunteer organizing committee. We didn't hear a response back for probably about two weeks. There was no formal response, but you could tell that there was an energy shift, at least from the regional manager in Chicago. We had been very friendly before, we had talked about things going on in our lives—and then the day after the list went out, eye contact went down to a minimum. There was very little conversation. There's definitely a shift in how upper management dealt with us.

Robert: Yeah. And there's also a lot of buildup to it because we had been organizing for quite a while before we went public. And so going public was a big deal for us. That was the result of several months of work and organizing and communicating with union organizers in the IBEW—The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers—who we were unionizing with. It was a big moment and it was for sure nerve-wracking, because there were people's names that were on that list, including myself, that were not back to work yet. So that was just a very important moment and kind of a turning point in the union effort as a whole.

Ashley: What did your letter specify as some of the things that you wanted to see leadership address?

Zoe: We didn't have immediate demands right away because the company's so large—at the time, there were 19 cafes that were open, two were still closed down due to the pandemic, but we have the bakery, the roastery, warehouse workers, and drivers. So we didn't quite list demands right away because we figured that we were such a small contingent thus far that we didn't want to make decisions or have big statements that not everybody might agree with right away.

We essentially brought our names forward and said, “We want to unionize, and we want to work together. We would love it if you would recognize us. And that way, we can come up with a contract altogether that works for everybody rather than putting forth something that just focused on a few people that were involved right at the beginning.”

Ashley: So this was really a moment of goodwill on your part saying, “This is something that we're interested in and we want to work together to achieve something that works for everybody.”

Zoe: Absolutely.

Robert: Right. Yeah. And this has never been about destroying the company or hurting the company. This has always been something that we want to make a collaboration. But we need to be sure that workers are being treated fairly, that we're being treated with respect, that we’re being communicated with.

And so it was an act of goodwill and that goodwill really wasn't returned. Just to put it in that perspective, we're not trying to destroy Colectivo by forming a union, even though that's what the owners and upper management seem to think that we're doing. This could be a really major boon for the company to say, “We have a unionized workforce; it's producing some of the best coffee in the Midwest,” but that's not on their agenda.

Ashley: I like that you mentioned that because I have talked to other union organizers in the past about the optics of a union, even if management disagrees with the union, the optics of having a unionized workforce is probably some of the best marketing you can ever buy.

It's an interesting—not to say that's a good reason for recognizing a union—but it's one of those moments where you're like, “Are you doing anything good for your company? Why are you being so negative on so many fronts?”

Which comes back to that moment when Colectivo then responded, which has been covered on Eater and a couple of other local outlets. And some of the rhetoric that they used in that letter is wild. So I was wondering what that was like, receiving the response back from the Colectivo management team.

Zoe: I think “wild” is a good word.

With them being silent for about two weeks, there was a point where you're like, “Maybe they're not going to respond. That would almost be kind of nice!”

And then this letter went to everybody. It was one of those things where your entire face goes hot while you're reading it. You can tell that your face is red and you have so many feelings about it because there are things that are frustrating and things that are kind of demeaning and all of this rhetoric that is basically saying, “All of these things that you have worked towards, we either do the bare minimum, which should be just enough, or we don't do it at all, but it's not important. So you guys should just stop. We don't recognize it. This is not for you. And it shouldn't be.” And it it was pretty demoralizing.

Ashley: One of the things that the letter said was that, “A union would fundamentally change our culture.” I was wondering what that meant, because that was the point, right? The point was to change the culture, to make it more communicative! What did it feel like working at Colectivo before that? I don't know, this phrase “fundamentally change our culture” is really bothering me.

Robert: That was the main thing that bothered me too, was harping on this idea of our workplace culture, this sacred workplace culture, and my immediate response was, “Look, you wouldn't have a large portion of your workforce trying to unionize if your sacred workplace culture was so great.” You just wouldn't—you wouldn't see that.

And so I think that either they're trying to manipulate us with this or they're just totally out of touch. It could just be a combination of both, quite honestly. Because there need to be changes in the workplace culture. You have a workplace culture where management’s disrespect of workers is rampant, where there are expectations that are not communicated—and then you're disciplined for not meeting those expectations later that you had no idea even existed.

The culture is of not truly fixing things that are broken, not actually fixing equipment, or making sure that people are certified or using equipment safely. That's the culture: It's a culture of covering problems and putting this hip shiny facade over the inequities and inefficiencies in the workplace. That's their culture. That's the culture they're talking about. And really what they mean by that is, “We don't want to have to change things that we think are too expensive to change.”

Zoe: They have a saying in part of their mission statement where everybody is a customer and that includes, or it's supposed to include, coworkers. But I think a lot of us have not felt that for a very long time.

There might be an issue within a cafe where somebody who works there, or say within the warehouse, will voice what is going wrong or what issue there may be—and there might be no response from management, or there might be a “We'll look into it,” or some sort of placating response and nothing happens. But then if an actual customer who is spending money within the cafe says something, then a change happens, then you see immediate response, then you see something that will actually produce a positive change.

So that feeling like we're actually customers and that we're all in this together hasn't really been a through-line for quite a while, I would say.

Ashley: I think that reduces down to power, which I think nobody in upper management wants to talk about, right? No one wants to admit that this is a power struggle because when Zoe, as you laid out, when there's a transaction of money, a customer is giving money, therefore we're going to listen to them. But as a co-worker, that relationship is inverted. Your employer is paying you. Suddenly those power dynamics get totally shifted. So you're treated totally differently.

Zoe: I mean, I’ve seen one of my cafe managers not go on a break because the ownership was there. And they said, “Oh, at this point, I'm just a number. I can't go sit down and eat. I can't go on a break. They have to see me completely working 100% of the time.” That kind of culture is super unhealthy and toxic. And it feels like that's the kind of culture that is permeating the company at this point, rather than this supportive, boisterous [culture]—everybody lifting each other up and trying to work in tandem towards positive goals.

Ashley: There's another part of the letter that also is incredibly angering. “Camaraderie and respect would be replaced by workplace rules,” Which number one, as you laid out, there is no camaraderie and respect, and number two, wouldn't it be nice if some rules were enforced?

Zoe: Yeah!

Ashley: Like, yeah, take your 10-minute break! What did that feel like, reading that?

Robert: Oh, seriously, that sounds great to me! Workplace rules? That sounds great to me, because we work in this environment where there aren't these hard-and-fast rules, and that's so frustrating and it's demoralizing and it's inefficient and it's just not an effective way because it's all off-the-cuff.

So we have this employee handbook and you don't even know if it's up-to-date most of the time, and it's not followed.

Zoe: It can be changed at any time.

Robert: It's not a contract. It can be changed at any time. And upper management doesn't even follow it. Like I was saying with our performance reviews earlier, they just didn't follow it. I think that hard-and-fast workplace rules sound excellent to me, that would make things so much better for workers at the company.

I don't think they realize that—I think they want to come off as these lenient, cool … “Oh yeah, my boss, the owners of this company are awesome. We don't have workplace rules, we just kind of show up or we do our thing and everybody just kind of comes in and does it…” No! That's not actually the reality that exists in these workspaces. I don't think that the owners actually realize that. I think probably some of the management does. But there's so caught up in their inefficient and really kind of, as Zoe said, those toxic ways. They aren't really trying to make any changes.

Zoe: And it's so much easier to have camaraderie and fun at work when you feel listened to, taken care of, and safe.

Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. And from all angles, it also seems like rules would be easier to follow, too. For example, if I know that all of my employees get raises in September, I can plan a fiscal year around that, I can hire people based on projected wages and things like that.

So to me, it doesn't seem like it's a business decision. It's not about, like we were saying, money, which they talk about a lot in that letter—they talk about how the pandemic has affected their profits. It is 100% about power.

Like you were saying, Robert, they want to be the people who say, “We're cool, we're lenient. We don't need to enforce rules,” but that's a thinly veiled way of saying, “We don't want to let go of our power. We don't want to have to be forced to listen to other people when we want to be the ones ultimately making decisions.” It's almost like your parent telling you to do this thing because I said so.

Zoe: And if it was such an issue with money, then I think hiring the Labor Relations Institute—they had two people going around to the different cafes having captive audience meetings—and those folks charged $3,000 per day per person. So if money were really the issue, I don't think that they would have turned to the Labor Relations Institute to solve it because that cost them a pretty penny.

Ashley: Did you have to sit in on any of those meetings?

Zoe: Yep. It was very uncomfortable.

I definitely had to listen to some pump-up music in my car to feel any amount of confidence going into these. I was part of one that was at one of the cafes within Chicago, and there were a lot of worst-case scenarios. There was a lot of doomsday talk.

And at one point I talked about the Labor Relations Institute, because I had done my homework before going into the meeting and had looked up who was the person conducting the meeting, and found out that when he worked with FedEx to squash their union, that he got paid over $226,000 for about seven months’ worth of work with them. And he was one of, I think, six people who worked on that union-busting campaign. And when I said the term “union buster,” he lightly reprimanded me because apparently that's a derogatory term. So he got mad at me for using the term “union buster,” even though that company is legitimately on a Wikipedia article front page under “union busting.” It was wild.

Ashley: Yup. Yeah. I needed a minute with that. Whew.

Zoe: That was a lot.

Ashley: It’s kind of amazing that you had the foresight to do a bunch of research and come to this meeting incredibly prepared. And I think that shifts to how you folks have handled your social media messaging. If you go to the Colectivo Collective page, it's pretty much a rulebook explaining, “This is what union busters do to try to convince people that unions are bad.” So I was wondering how you folks thought about what sort of message you wanted to portray, because you're still in the middle of this fight.

Zoe: Absolutely. It's been evolving for sure. It's me and one other person—we've been the main folks who are running the Instagram page with varying degrees of help, as far as what people's bandwidth has been throughout the past nine months or so, because that's definitely been a variable.

I think a lot of it has just been somewhat responsive to how Colectivo has been handling themselves and what messaging that they have been using. We really want to talk about everything in a positive light as much as possible, because folks who work for Colectivo are probably getting their fair share of negative union coverage from the company itself. So we want to show the positive side and what things can be done and what things we can do despite what union busters or what the company might be saying.

Ashley: So let's talk about some of these things. What are some of the common union-busting tactics or rhetoric that are maybe not specific to Colectivo? I'm not sure if you can get too into that, but what are some of the things that you've seen or you've read that you've talked about on your Instagram account?

Zoe: Definitely the captive audience meetings. That was a big one, because if they are paying you to be at this meeting and they make it compulsory, then you have to be there. Pretty much everybody within the company had to attend one of those meetings over a period of two weeks or so. That's definitely a big one because we can only suggest and hope that you interact with our information and with our page, but they can force you to interact with union-busting scare tactics. I think that was probably the biggest one.

There’s also the rhetoric that went into the couple of letters that have come out, using doomsday phrasing like, “This union might be the wrong one for you,” and, “It's really hard to remove a union once you're already unionized. So you should just not do it in the first place.” It feels like there's almost too many things to mention.

Robert: They harp on money a lot, and one of the big things that’s just a total lie that came out in both of their main letters was they're saying, “Oh, the union is going to cost you money. Your wages are actually going to go down.”

First of all, IBEW would never sign a contract where our wages actually went down on account of dues. When you join a union, you do have to pay dues, but those dues would be very small and we would get to choose what we pay based on what benefits we want as union members from the union. And they said, “Oh, you're going to have to pay into a retirement fund.” Well, that's not true—if we don't want to pay into a retirement fund then we don't have to.

They're like, “Oh, you're going to have to pay a thousand dollars as a trainee fee.” It's like, “No, that's for journeymen electricians that join the union. This is a coffee workers union.”

So all of this stuff they’re trying to come up with to make it seem like we're going to have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to become union members—it's all scare tactics, it's all lies.

Even coming out with propaganda, the company saying, “We can't lie to you, but the union can.”

It's like, “No! You've been lying to us this whole way. And you're reversing the places that you're in because the union cannot make promises. The union cannot tell you untruths because they’ll be censored by the NLRB (the National Labor Relations Board) for that.”

The company is trying to reverse fields here and portray itself as the thing that's being aggressed against rather than them being the aggressors against their workers and against this union effort. It's very frustrating and they're trying a lot of different tactics. They've thrown the book at us to bust this and make people scared and make people fearful and feel animosity towards the union.

Ashley: It's interesting to hear you both talk about the way that Colectivo has used scare tactics, because it feels very applicable to the current moment in time that we're living in—where you’re almost being gaslit about what is true and what is not. And you have to keep your head above water to figure out that you know what's true and you know what’s right. And you have these people around you saying untruths and attacking even the way that you present information. And I wonder how has that felt emotionally?

Zoe: It's incredibly draining. We had meetings also with the CEO, Dan [Hurdle], and Leo, who's in charge of operations, and they wanted to come sit down with the Andersonville cafe. I have had somewhat of an issue for a long time with some of the imagery used in our messaging—stuff that uses the sugar skull, which is associated with Día de los Muertos. None of ownership is Latinx—it's three white men—and so a lot of people don't realize that it's not a Latinx-owned and -run company, and it feels like … it just feels a little crummy.

It’s on shirts and all of these things. So I suggested a T-shirt buyback program because it felt like it was taking advantage of cultures that don't belong to you. And the CEO was like, “Hmm, I hear what you're saying, but I don't agree.” And so it feels like there's a lot of like active listening “signaling” that happens within the company, but not any, “Oh, I understand what you're saying. I hear where you're coming from. Let's get together and let's make a positive change.”

Ashley: So I think if you folks are willing to talk about this—we don't have to talk about it—but both of you were let go at different times, and it seems like it was because of your union efforts. So I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Robert: Yeah. I can go first. I was laid off back in March when coronavirus really started to pick up. Initially, I had decided to opt out and I thought I was only going to be away from work for a couple of weeks. I don't think anybody knew the scope of what coronavirus was going to be yet.

So I had opted out for, I think two weeks is what they gave us as the opt-out period. And then shortly after that I was laid off. Since that time I had been looking for opportunities to try and get back to work, get back to the warehouse. I knew they needed help there because I communicate pretty regularly with some of my coworkers—they're my friends, I've known them for a long time. And they needed help.

They had lost people to the layoffs, to people quitting. I was looking for a way to get back. And so in the late summer I had told my manager, “I'm ready to come back. Whenever you need me, give me a call.” And he was like, “Oh yeah, for sure, for sure. We're going to do it.”

And a little bit later, at the end of September, I finally got the call and he said, “Hey, we need you back. And we're ready for you. Can you start on Monday?” And I was like, “Yes, that's awesome. I will be there.”

And I was pretty excited. I was excited to get back to it—not having any income for months and months is really, really tough. A lot of unemployment checks coming in at that time. And so yeah, I was excited.

But on the Friday before I was supposed to come back, I get a call from Leo, the COO, and he said, “Actually, we're not calling you back to work.” He was like, “Your floor manager overstepped his authority in calling you back. We're going to shift other resources around instead.”

And I said, “Well, what does that mean? I know you're down two people in the warehouse and I know another one has just turned in their two-week’s notice. What do you mean you're going to shift other resources around? Does this mean I’m fired? What's going on here?”

He just would not answer any of my questions. And then he finally just hung up.

So that felt really bad. And then a week later, on October 7th, I got my final termination notice.

This seemed really blatantly targeted because I had been invited back to work because there was a need for me back at work. I've been there quite awhile. I know how to run all the machines. I know all the processes and I do some processes that nobody else in the warehouse does, including the labeling of every bag that comes out of the place. And the running of some heavy equipment that only one or one other person in the whole place can do.

And so that was it. It just … it doesn't make any sense to do that, to fire a long-time employee that has a lot of expertise in this area. And to fill in my spot with people from the cafes, which that's not their job, but that's what they're doing now—the workers that they've lost in the warehouse, they haven't replaced them with actual warehouse-trained workers. They just replace them with new cafe workers every day.

And I know that the cafe workers go in and do their best. But you have to have a lot of training and experience with these pieces of heavy equipment to know how they work, especially because a lot of them are in disrepair and don't get fixed when they're broken. So you really have to have a lot of subtlety and grace in operating these machines.

And so it just doesn't make any sense. And the only reason it makes sense is because my name was on the union organizer list. I had been extremely vocal. I had been out putting up posters around the cafes—pro-union posters—and had been very much involved in the union efforts. So I know why they fired me. They won't ever admit that because that would be retaliatory under the National Labor Relations Act. But that's how I ended up getting fired. So I haven't been an official employee since October 7th.

Zoe: And as far as my story, having worked my way up through the company to be one of the barista trainers, which I had done for other companies before, so I'm good at it. I'm not a person who likes to toot my own horn, but I'm good at it. And it kind of all changed when the VOC, or the volunteer organizing committee, list came out with my name on it.

As I said, with our regional managers starting to not make eye contact with me, anytime that I would send out a congratulatory email where somebody would pass their bar certification test so that they could make drinks on the espresso machine completely by themselves—we send those out to the owners and that cafe, the person who just passed their test. We write up all of the great things that they have as far as qualities on bar.

And people respond back with letters of congratulations and well-wishes, and I noticed the CEO either would respond much, much later to my emails than to any other trainer or sometimes not at all. One of the managers at one of the cafes started to request only the other trainer to work with their coworkers at their cafe. So very much targeted on that.

When we got masks that said “IBEW strong,” I started to feel like I had a bit of a target on my back because they knew that I had passed some out. So it really just felt like all of that plus with the captive audience meeting, the energy really changed around me.

They had sent out this letter on October 15th saying that two of the cafes were closing and the Chicago bakery, which was planned to be built this past summer, but then was put on hold from the pandemic was now canceled.

It kind of came with no warning and all of us were in shock. When I went into work the next day on October 16th I found the new head of HR—who I had never met before—in the training lab. And I was kinda taken aback, but I met this person, so started introducing myself and then the head of coffee purchasing essentially came into the room as well and said, “Hey, did you get that email yesterday? And did you have any questions?”

And me still not getting it was expressing my concern for the coworkers who had just lost their jobs, because it was two cafes’ worth of people who had just pretty suddenly not had income or not had a job to go to. So I was mostly worried about them still and then came the, “We'd like you to sit down.”

They informed me that my position had been eliminated. When I asked, “Does that mean I'm done with the company, or can I move into a different role? I would work in one of the cafes for now if that needs to happen.” And they said that there were no positions in Chicago available. If I wanted to move to Milwaukee, I could do that and reapply—not be assured a position whatsoever, but I would have to go through the application process after working there for almost two-and-a-half years.

So they gave me information on unemployment and wished me farewell. I didn't get to finish out my day. I had meetings set up throughout that day and things to talk about with folks and hand out, as far as informational things to send people for the cafes.

And it was incredibly sudden. I was blindsided completely. Then pretty much past that point did not receive much communication from the company whatsoever. My boss, who I was pretty good friends with, I think, never communicated with me. I never got, not even a text. I called my other trainer in tears.

Sorry, I'm kind of getting a little emotional about it too. Because I was just so shocked and I knew that they were going to fight back, but I didn't think they'd fight back like that.

Ashley: I think it's completely expected that you would be emotional or that anyone will be emotional because this is a place that you've put in so much time. Like we were saying earlier, if anything, you folks unionizing is this beautiful expression of, “We believe in this company that we can make better. We can do something better. We can make this better. We didn't just leave. We decided that we wanted to make it better.”

And instead of being embraced or at least being told, “Hey, maybe we don't agree with you, but let's talk about this,” you were gaslit—you were told that unions would be harmful and would harm the company culture and all these very hurtful lies.

And I think that that probably gets missed sometimes—it probably seems like a very black-and-white fight sometimes, but it is really emotional, and it does involve people fighting for their livelihoods.

Zoe: Absolutely.

Ashley: Something that I wanted to come back to is what you said earlier, Zoe, about your manager not making eye contact with you. And I think it's so bizarre how conflict is handled when there's a power dynamic.

So you saying, “Hey, not everything we're doing here is totally cool. Let's talk about it!” Instead of being like, “Oh, yeah, let's do that. Let's talk about it,” people will just avoid eye contact with you. I wonder what that felt like, because to me I'm like, “Oh, this is about something different. This isn't about making this workplace better. It's because I challenged your authority and your ego can't handle it.”

But I wonder, what did that feel like seeing that divide happen?

Zoe: I think that we were all holding our breath once that VOC list went out. We were all curious how folks were going to handle it. This person in particular I think … I was not the most surprised that they avoided eye contact.

I feel like they put everything on the line for the company and I think sometimes in a way where they should take care of themselves a little bit more and maybe … I don't know, they work themselves to the bone. I think that they are fully in it 100% and if the company was going to be against it, then they were going to be against it, too.

So I wasn't the most surprised with how they handled it, but it was kind of one of those like, “Well, I'm here to train somebody. So I got to keep a smile on my face. I got to keep it up and lively. I'm not going to act like anything's different. Let's keep this positivity train going. And I guess pretend that this weird attitude is not really happening.”

Ashley: What do you folks want people to know about your union efforts, and what should people be paying attention to?

Zoe: I remember that there was a meeting where I think Robert summarized it in the best way that I've heard:

We're looking for the three Cs—consistency, communication, and collaboration. It's not going to be that hard, I don't think, once we actually get to bargaining for the contract, because we're not looking for things that are astronomical.

We're literally just looking to be on the same team. We're asking for some accountability for not just the people who work on the floor, but for everybody who works within Colectivo, which right now it's not really a two-way street. It's kind of just on-the-floor workers who get held accountable.

For me, you see a lot of companies with a board of directors, but I would love to see a company with a board of directed, because we know the things that are going on on the floor and the issues that we have, we know first-hand. I hear a lot of very good ideas coming from folks who are down and dirty on the front lines. I want to see those things, those suggestions, those fixes actually put into practice, because oftentimes they're very good ideas because they fix practical issues with practical responses.

Ashley: Thank you both so much for joining me. This has been an incredible conversation and I feel both inspired and angry. So I think we achieved what we were trying to do.

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This episode is full of laughter and joy, and shared moments of growth and reflection.

On The Go Jo is a coffee company based in Chicago, Illinois. Founded by three friends—Crystal Graham, Toni Dale, and Quiana DeBerry—the business started out as a mobile coffee cart and has since expanded to a bustling e-commerce site whose reach extends well beyond Chicago city limits.

In this episode, I chat with Crystal and Toni, and we talk about how On The Go Jo came to be. The two met in college, and their story is a tale about the serendipity of paths intertwining. While describing their mission for On The Go Jo—which is to empower women across the coffee supply stream, and to showcase beautiful coffees for their customers—they also share how they’ve grown together, both as business partners and as friends.

Growth has been a necessary part of running the business. Crystal, Toni, and Quiana, do everything—literally everything. They source coffee, they roast, they work on packaging, and they invest in their community. At one point, Crystal reflects on how they’ve been able to be so industrious and creative: She lives by her school—Clark Atlanta University—motto: “I will find a way or make one.”

There’s so much good stuff in this conversation, from what it means to recalibrate your business during a pandemic to how to set values and intentions for your work. What always fascinates me in observing partnerships like Crystal and Toni’s is how adept they are at empowering one another, and how through that continued support—which takes the form of pushing each other, identifying the other’s strengths, and supporting each other during tough times—they’ve been able to fully execute their vision.

That approach isn’t just limited to their own working relationship. They’re also deeply connected with the folks they source coffee from, and are incredibly close with their customers and fans. And each bag of coffee you buy from On The Go Jo supports local social initiatives, which change every month.

As you listen to their story, I’d encourage you to reflect on the people who make up your own community. Maybe you have a business or creative partner, or even just someone you work closely with. We don’t often take time to think about how these relationships impact us in daily life and make us better, but I hope this conversation helps you make space for the people who truly build you up. Here are Crystal and Toni.

Ashley: So I'm here with On The Go Jo, and I was hoping that both of you could introduce yourselves to our audience.

Crystal: Sure. So I am Crystal Graham, and I am one of the co-founders of On The Go Jo.

Toni: And I am Toni Dale. And I’m also a co-founder of On The Go Jo.

Ashley: How did you two meet?

Toni: Crystal and I met at college—at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. We had a mutual friend, and it's very funny because Crystal always says that when she initially met me, she thought I was annoying and that my voice was too high-pitched and she was kind of giving me the side-eye like, “Who was this girl?”

But I was like—almost 20 years later, we are still friends.

Crystal: Yes, yes, yes. The first time [we met] it was just this high-pitched, high-energy, and I was a very mellow and chill girl in overalls. And I was just like, “Who is this girl? And why is she so loud?” But yeah, we have been friends for almost 20 years—through a lot of good and bad and ups and downs, but we're here and we're excited to talk to you today. Ashley: I'm so thrilled to talk to both of you, and I want to step back a little bit and talk about your first memories of coffee. Do you think you can recount a particularly visceral moment with coffee or maybe the first time you were like, “Oh wow! Coffee can taste really good?”Crystal: I know for me, I was about 11. My mom used to take me on a lot of her meetings. I just remember—I think I snuck [a sip of coffee] the first time and I used to see people put a bunch of cream and sugar, so of course it was diluted, but I just remember liking it, which I know a lot of kids don't usually like it the first time around. So I think for me, I kind of always associated coffee with adulthood and business and community. But yeah, about 11 years old was my first sip.

Toni: I think I had to be in grammar school for sure, in my grandparents' kitchen. They would always prepare their brewed coffee the night before so that when they get up, they would just press it on and have their cup together in the morning. And I remember they would put eggshells in the basket and I always wondered why. They said that it made it more smooth.

So I of course wanted to try it, and I did not like it, but I remember that was just their routine in the morning. I feel like that reminds me of home a little bit.

Ashley: I love when people share stories about coffee in their lives, especially during childhood, because I feel like coffee is one of the only things that people have these childhood memories of that they take into adulthood—and then perhaps start a business like you folks did. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your lives before you decided, “We're going to do coffee, we're going to start this business together.”

Crystal: So like, that's gonna make us sound old. (Laughs)

Before this, I've actually moved around quite a bit. After the University of Illinois I actually went to Atlanta to attend Clark Atlanta University—so shout out to all my HBCU grads. I switched majors from communication to education, and I finally found my thing, which was—which is—marketing. So after Atlanta, I moved to New York and had—have—a pretty successful marketing career before coffee.

Toni: I finished school at the University of Illinois—Crystal left me and went to Atlanta. My background is in sales. So I have been that telemarketer, straight out of college, asking people for their social security number on a one-call close. That person asking for alumni contributions. It was tough directly out of college, trying to get a job that I didn't hate going to every day. I've done medical sales. And I do sales for On The Go Jo. And that has been my career since 2005.

Ashley: What made you decide to start a business together?

Toni: It was very random, I would say.

My husband and I were on vacation. We just had to get away. So Michigan is kind of in the backyard and we were at this really cute little eclectic community coffee shop. And I remember doing a Marco Polo or something random with Quiana and Crystal and I'm like, “Why can't we have something nice like this? The community needs it. It will be amazing. We should open up a coffee shop.”

Ashley: And what did you think when you heard that idea?

Crystal: I'm an entrepreneur at heart, so right away, I was like, “Yup. Okay. What do we need to do?”

I'm a big researcher. So like, right away, I feel like we got on it. It wasn't something we sat on. It was immediately [us] on Google researching, “What's the cost?”

We quickly learned that it is very expensive at the time—more than we thought. I think first you have these big ideas and then you don't really see how much is an espresso machine. How much is the build-out? How much is all of this?

And we really wanted to fund it ourselves. We didn't want to go the loan route. And then one day I was just walking home from work and it just came to me that we should have a pop-up—like a pop-up cart or something to that effect. I had never seen it before, but it literally just came to me. And then I Marco Polo-ed the girls back and said, “I got it. We should have a cart where we just pop up at different events. Toni, you like events. And I like this and we can do events at random places—at bookstores, at weddings.” And then that's kind of how the mobile coffee cart idea started.

Ashley: Do you remember that first event you did together?

Toni & Crystal: Oh, yes.

Ashley: Tell me about it.

Toni: It was 800 people at a wedding, the first…

Crystal: No, that wasn't our first event.

Toni: You know what? We did a festival in Cantigny Park. I think that was the very first event that we did was in Naperville at Cantigny Park.

And I remember we had so much stuff. We didn't know how to scale down initially. Now we do an event and we really just have one little to-go-ready bin that we bring with us. But I just remember having an exorbitant amount of things. It was just ridiculous, now that I look back on it. Essentially you're bringing your cafe to a location with you, so you have to have things, but that particular event was beyond! We had maybe three cars worth of stuff at that time, and we didn't have a van and it was just, it was ridiculous how much stuff we had.

Crystal: I still kinda like having a lot of stuff because I don't like doing store runs or Instacart mid-event.

Toni: But no! Now we know what we're supposed to have at the event—just like that checklist and it's good to go. But that first event was overboard for sure.

Ashley: You wanted to make sure you had everything.

Crystal: That’s true. We did have a small launch event in Toni's backyard. And we kind of like to remember that that was our actual first first event, even though it was for family and friends. It was a lot of work and that's where we learned to [decide] who's going to do what, because sometimes if you don't map everything to who's going to own it, you can all just run around in chaos. And I think that day was the day where we were like, “Okay, we just gotta make sure we know who's doing what.”

But I like that we have this little backyard story [of how] we started out because Toni just recently said, “From the backyard to Bloomingdale's” and we're claiming that. We're going to be from the backyard to someone's shelves soon. We're going to claim that. So that was our very, very first event.

Toni: That's true.

Ashley: I love that phrase, “From the backyard to Bloomingdale's.” I just wrote that down.

Something that you said in that answer that I really liked as well—and you even started the conversation with what specific roles each of you has at On The Go Jo—is that you were able to really delineate positions. Like, “You're doing this, you're doing that,” because as you mentioned, if you don't delineate who's doing what, it can kind of devolve into chaos. So I was wondering: You folks are friends, but being business partners with someone is very different from being their friend. I was wondering what was that process like of learning an entirely new relationship with somebody?

Toni: It's a work-in-progress. I think we're still learning, because we are evolving as women and friends and business owners, that I think it is ongoing. I really can't say we have to figure it out, because that would not be the truth, but we are continuously working towards a goal and we're a team. So we know that everyone has the best interest [of the business].

Crystal is the most organized person that I feel like I know. So she definitely keeps on task, like organized Google Docs … she’s like [the person who keeps us] organized. So I think that has helped us structure for sure.

Crystal: Yeah. I mean, Toni and I met when we were in college, so we are totally different people than when we were in college. So I think it's learning who each other are as adults now. Now, we're mothers, we're wives, we're totally different people. So I think as we're growing, we're learning each other more as friends and as business owners. But I think now, even though it's still a learning process and we're still learning each other and ourselves as well, I think we pretty much know each other's strengths, and we're able to play off of that.

Like Toni, I know she's a morning person. If I asked her to do something late at night it's maybe a little quirky. I'm a night person. I'm a night owl, I can get things done at night. I'm the marketer, the brand person, and Toni’s gonna sell it. So I think it was more so learning each other’s skills from a partnership level, because we had never entered in that space before, but I think the friendship is kind of what keeps us grounded.

There have been many times where I'm like, “I would not be doing this or staying up this late if it wasn't for me knowing that at the end of the day, these are my friends. I know I gotta have Toni's back, so I'm going to do it.” So I think that kind of strengthens us in a way as well.

Ashley: I love partnerships just because I think that they force you to really learn someone's skillset outside of traditional ways that we think about partnerships, right? We think about partnerships as our spouses or significant others. But when we think about the friendships that we form and how they evolve and change … I don't know? I just find those things to be really exciting. So seeing that you folks have known each other for so long and have had different phases of your friendship evolve and change, I think is really fascinating.

So let's talk about the name, which I'm going to cut out obviously, but I already flubbed it up at the very beginning. It's one of those ones where if you say it five times fast, I feel like it'll be [a tongue-twister], but On The Go Jo has an origin story. So can you talk a little bit about the name and where it came from?

Toni: With the fact that we were mobile, we had a couple of names that we got family and friends to vote on. At the end of the day, we kind of felt like, “That's it. On The Go Jo? Yeah!” It goes with a theme, it's a brand story. And we went with it.

Crystal: Toni definitely came up with a name. I remember we had like “Rise and Grind” and some other ones that we all felt were strong. And then we got to the last three and I do remember Toni being really strong about On The Go Jo. And I was like, “Okay…” What sealed it for me, and we kept going back and forth, was taking the “e” off. I remember she did not want to take the “e” off.

Toni: Crystal, I feel like she has such a bad memory, but then she remembers all the stuff that I don't remember. I promise you, I don't remember not wanting to take the “e” off. (Laughs)

Crystal: You didn't want to take the “e” off! And of course, I'm this researcher, right away, I'm going to Google and I'm like, “Well, ‘Joe’ means ‘an average man.’ We are not average, and we are not men. We want to be more than average.” That's why I was like, “Let's take off the ‘e’ and then the ‘Jo’ represents a female voice as well. So that's how we took the “e” off of the “Joe.”

Toni: And I think that came into our catchphrase too. Like, “Not your average cup of joe.”

Crystal: Exactly.

Ashley: It's funny how those things can fall into place. You make one decision and then it's like, “Oh wait, all of this makes sense now.”

Toni: Yeah. That is true. Now my memory is coming back! (Laughs)

Ashley: If I'm doing my job as an interviewer, then that's good that you're remembering things. It's always fun to hear stories that people were like, “Oh, I didn't think of that,” or like, “Oh, that's right!” I actually had one of those sense memories yesterday because I was telling my mom about a true crime podcast that I like, and she was like, “Yeah, of course you like true crime, we watched ‘Dateline’ all the time.” And I was like, “Oh yeah!”

So tell me a little bit about the idea of leaving off that “e,” because it does represent a lot of your brand identity as women and as a coffee company that focuses on women producers.

Toni: I think that was really the start. And that's what I just love about Crystal so much. Because—(to Crystal) no seriously—because she is thinking ahead, an idea that she might come up with six months down the line, it just weaves into our brand story and the women-produced, women-roasted, all of that symbolizes On The Go Jo, and taking that “e” off is a part of the brand story.

Crystal: That's true. A lot of things we were just led … part of it is definitely a marketing background, but a lot of it we were led to do. And that's why I just feel like this has always been like—this is just our destiny. I feel like how we met, how things just kind of come together, we were just kind of led to do this.

Of course, before it was just like, yeah, we're women, we are females. We don't want to have a typical cup of joe. And if anyone's ever seen our mobile coffee cart events, we really step out of the box with coffee. Of course, we sell your traditional black coffee, but we have honey lavender lattes, we have On Cloud Nine, which is a cotton candy coffee. We have 24 karat gold [coffees]. So that's kind of where that not-traditional cup of joe came from.

But then as we started researching and really hearing more about female farmers and how they're doing a lot of the work … and on our quest to find more [information], we would see that a lot of women in some countries can't own land or have a hard time owning land.

So it was just like, “Wow, we really need to focus and bring more female coffee producers to the limelight. Why aren't they highlighted more? Why haven’t we heard more about their stories?”

A lot of times you're just drinking a cup of coffee and you don't think that much. I mean, I can't say the first time I had a cup of coffee, even as an adult, that I thought about, “I wonder who got these beans and who roasted them and what is the work that went behind it.” I'm just enjoying it from a consumer level. But as we learned more about this industry and did a deeper dive, it is so many amazing women who make things happen behind the scenes, and why not highlight them? Of course it limits us because there’s not a ton—not as much as it would be male ownership—but why not highlight the amazing work that these women producers are doing?

And it's a lot of women importers as well. When we got on the call with you, Ashley, we talked about the amazing work that Phyllis Johnson is doing. And that was the first person I can say that I looked to as a mentor. Just watching from the sidelines, just being on Instagram and seeing the way she inspires people and the way she started her business. So she was the first person that I reached out to as an importer. I said, “Phyllis, do you have any women coffee producers that we can work with?” And of course, she had someone, and someone that we started working with that we have now, which is our Burundian coffee.

Ashley: I think that that's a good point. Something that you just described is this idea of women throughout the supply chain—and not just working with women farmers, which is incredibly important work, but thinking about the importer, is that a women-owned business, the purveyors that you work with … So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you made these decisions. At what point did it go from, “We're three women who own this business,” to, “Oh, that message of women empowerment and sharing the stories of women really translates throughout our entire business.”

Crystal: I think it was because we couldn't find a lot. When I was researching, it wasn't readily available about women farmers. I didn't even think that—we're here in the United States—I didn't even think that it would be an issue for someone to own land or that there are certain jobs that women can't do and in certain countries.

The more I researched and learned, the more important it was to highlight. We work with various different importers, not just women importers. Phyllis is definitely one, but we definitely only focus on women coffee producers. And I can't really say initially it was … it was definitely more so our mission because we are female. But I don't think we realize how difficult and hard it would be until we got into it. And I think for me, that made it even more important.

There were definitely times we were like, “Oh man, this coffee tastes great, but it's from a male producer,” and not to say that we don't support men, because we do, we have a lot of mentors who are men. It was because it's not seen as much, and because women are not highlighted as much in coffee.

It was more of a, “Why not? Why not empower women through coffee?” And then I think the roasting part just took on another arm of it. Toni definitely has more experience on the roasting side. I pretty much do all of our sourcing and working with our importers and getting our female-produced coffees. And then Toni handles the roasting side and had some experiences with that as well.

Ashley: How do you make decisions about the coffees that you source, Crystal? Obviously, you talk about women coffee producers, but when you're sitting and cupping or looking at different coffee profiles, how are you making decisions about what you put on your menu?

Crystal: I love a good story. So a lot of times I do a deep dive into their story. I want to hear more about the women coffee producers, so I'll either talk to the importer about them, Instagram, Google, just find out as much as I can because a lot of these women are doing great work in their country.

They are sending women to school, putting daycares on the farm so that the women can work and take care of their children at the same time. I like to focus on the story, but then I just kind of present it to the team. A lot of times I don't tell them so that it doesn't skew when they're tasting. But I always, in the back of my head, will say, “Oh, I hope they liked this Burundi,” or, “I hope they like this Brazil because I know the story of that woman.”

Toni, I would say, is our cupper. We all taste it, but Toni can pick out the flavors and say, “Oh, I taste this blueberry. I taste this chocolate.” I am still a work-in-progress there. I'm like, “I just tasted good coffee.” But she is our go-to cupper and she selects—she's the final voice with our coffees.

Ashley: We kind of transitioned from Crystal sourcing and looking into all the different coffees that you're thinking about bringing in, and then it goes to Toni, who makes the final decisions and roasts the coffee. So I was wondering, Toni, if you could talk a little bit about how you approach that process—what are you trying to look for in each coffee when you’re thinking about roast profiles and how each coffee is going to be served to customers?

Toni: I think that there are a few different tiers. One aspect of it is how do I respond to it? The aroma, the flavor profile, the taste—does it excite me? And then I take it on a journey. We have so many mentors, as Crystal mentioned, that I try to do a couple of blind tastings, see what they think, get some input from family and friends as well. So I do a couple of different stages and hopefully, it leads me back to my favorites, but I hope that people like different things as well.

Fortunately, we have had so many options of just really delicious coffees that have such amazing stories behind them as well that it's made the job a little bit easier—time-consuming, but I'm happy with the few coffees that we've selected thus far. We've gone through maybe 20, 21 different coffees to get us to the three that we have currently that we're offering.

Crystal: Definitely over 30.

We started this journey last year. I would get green beans and I bought a little roaster, a home roaster, and then I would roast it and then I would send it to Toni and Quiana. But then we restarted this year.

The pandemic really allowed us to focus in on the coffee line. We had a really great year with the mobile coffee cart last year, as much as we were trying to get the coffee line off the ground, we had a ton of events. And this year allowed us to really hone in on the coffee business, on the retail coffee line, and sample some more, revisit … I think we tried Phyllis' coffee last year. We tried the Burundi from her last year. So we had to revisit a few, but we've tried a ton. It's crazy. Yeah.

Ashley: I was about to say I'm glad that you talked about COVID, because as you mentioned, you had to pivot your business because you can't really do as many in-person events. But it seems like instead of languishing, you folks are thriving because you've been able to focus on a completely different aspect of your business. So I was wondering what that looks like?

Toni: No, absolutely. We had to cancel weddings and different things to stay aligned with the restrictions and keep our staff safe and just comply. But it's giving us the opportunity … I've been busy! We've been extremely busy! Not necessarily doing events, but we've been working with the packaging, the labels. We also have simple syrups and different products—just executing them from the beginning to now seeing them online is amazing because we know how much time has gone in during the stay-at-home orders. We've been on it, just really trying to execute and launch.

Ashley: I mean, for me looking at how coronavirus has affected coffee shops, it's almost like you either pivot or you perish, which is a bit of a grim way to look at it. But it's interesting to see folks who say, “Okay, this is an opportunity to do something else,” or, “This is an opportunity to focus on a part of our business that we've always wanted to focus on that we maybe didn't have time to do.” And as you mentioned, you folks are busy! You're selling coffee online and you're able to focus more on that aspect of your business. And I was wondering: Was that part of the plan, or have you learned anything new about yourselves being able to focus on a completely different aspect?

Crystal: I wouldn't say start over. I would say the only reason I don't call our retail line a pivot is because it was already in the works last year, but I think the stay-at-home orders and this time has afforded us more time to focus on it.

Our mobile coffee cart business is still our baby, and we look at them like they're together, but they're separate entities as well. So, I mean, I just literally woke up to a text message this morning from someone saying, “Hey, is the mobile coffee card still available? We're having a tree-lighting ceremony in Washington Park.” So right after this, I'm literally gonna talk to someone about that. We have someone that we've been working with in the past, who has residents, so we've been pitching virtual offerings. Maybe we can't serve customer to customer, but we can have that experience virtually now.

So I would say that's been more of the way that we've pivoted our mobile coffee cart, is thinking of virtual offerings, thinking of how do we package a barista in a box? How do we deliver our experience safely?

But the retail line is so new and so different. And that's why I don't call it a pivot, because it's a completely new baby. It has different needs. It's stepping into new territory—e-commerce—because with our mobile coffee cart, we're only in Chicago right now. So we have built relationships with event planners and caterers, and now with e-commerce, this is all over the world.

It's not that one-to-one where we can call an event planner and go and sit and have a cup of coffee with them and build that relationship, and they're going to have multiple brides throughout the year. This is every single day trying to find new customers, trying to get people to go to the website, trying to tell people our story and why it's important to support women-produced and women-roasted and our women-owned coffee line. So it's a completely different strategy and movement. Of course they're sisters, but they are completely different.

This time has definitely allowed us to just focus on this baby, but then also see what's next. What do we do? How do we reinvent ourselves if this does continue to go on for another year, God forbid?

Ashley: That's a good point that I didn't even think about—you did events and you have these relationships with event planners and a lot of it's very local. You do local events because you're based in Chicago, you have a cart here, but having an online business and focusing more on, “Okay, we're online, we need to ship coffee more. We need to build relationships with customers.”

I imagine that last part, building relationships with customers, isn't new, obviously, because you're selling coffee out of your mobile cart or you're doing events, but I imagine it's probably a different relationship with customers, right? You have people who maybe are repeat buyers, or you have people who you maybe are not going to see in person. And I wonder what the response has been like on that end. Because I imagine it has to be different.

Crystal: Definitely. I think we treat it the same way. A lot of people love us because of our customer service with the mobile coffee cart. When you are talking to someone with our card and you're working with sales, you're working with Toni, you're working with the owner of the company. So far, I mean, we'll see once we grow larger, but so far we have been able to talk directly to customers.

We have a coffee club and each month customers get coffee, you know, freshly roasted coffee to their door—I've been taking that same approach. We have a number where you can text us. So I will literally talk to our customers and say, “How was your coffee?” And then they'll text me back and say, “Oh my God, I woke up and I'm smelling the brews and you already know how good it is.”

So I'm taking that same approach with our customer service for our retail line, where we want people to feel like we're right there with you. Of course we can't have a cup of coffee with you. We want to, but we're right there with you. You're not getting an automated service. You're getting real people.

We want to build relationships with people. We want to hear how they liked the coffee, see them unboxing their box. Every time we see one of those, it just warms my heart. I can't get enough of seeing that black tissue paper open. Then I see the bag underneath it—I'll never get tired of that. I feel like we're building that same experience with our retail line. Of course, hopefully we grow really, really big. We may not be able to do that, but for now we want to have that one-to-one interaction with our customer. That's important to us.

Ashley: So I'm in Chicago, you folks are in Chicago. I'm so thrilled to see more folks opening coffee shops in Chicago because as we were talking about before we recorded, for a long time, there weren't really a ton of options for great coffee in Chicago, especially owned by small businesses—which is wild because Chicago is the third biggest city in the nation. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what it means to be a Chicago business.

Toni: I would say the first thing that popped into my mind was community. Yes, we're all selling coffee and we want customers, but I don't feel the sense of competition that you might feel in other industries.

I can maybe count on one hand the number of people that I've reached out to that may not have returned my call. People are ready and willing to give you resources, information, direct you to a path. That has been so warm and welcoming. And we do the same thing. Someone from Atlanta reached out about their mobile coffee cart, wanting to be mentored—we're going to give that same advice and those same resources that we've received because we've been embraced by different coffee shops, our mentors, people who are doing this every day. They have skin in the game, maybe 10, 20, 30 years of experience that they're willing to share their experiences with us. So I would say Chicago coffee equals community.

Ashley: That's awesome. And I think that makes me very excited to be part of this coffee community. Because I know for a long time, I felt a little bit out to sea and I think in the last year or so, many people have shown up for the Chicago coffee community and it makes me excited to be part of it.

Toni: Right. Because sometimes you don't know what you don't know—that's where it's helpful to have these various mentors to just ask questions. And not even just in Chicago—I have a mentor in California that I can call and ask questions and they are willing to give me time and Zoom and really be there. So it's really been so much love and we've been embraced, and it's awesome.

Ashley: So I want to try something a little bit wonky. It might not work. (Laughs)

But because you both are here, and like I said, I love partnerships. I really love thinking about how people relate to one another. And there was this thing on the New York Times a couple of years ago called “The 36 Questions To Fall in Love.” And it's not just an experiment for people who are in romantic relationships, but it's a set of questions that people use to foster closeness.

I think one of the questions was, “Say something nice about your partner,” or “Say something nice about the person next to you.” And I was wondering if you don't mind, if both of you would be able to do that for each other.

Crystal & Toni: Yeah. I think we do that all the time.

Ashley: I'm excited. I'm excited to be part of this!

Toni: I would say what I love about Crystal is that she is always saying thank you and pointing out things that you did right. I have to feed off her. She does the marketing, she does the branding. She has the final say when it comes to—we know our roles and we know our lanes—so in that sense, I can say you've done an excellent job with XYZ, and it's just a part of our weekly—like it's just a part of who we are with regards to those positive affirmations.

We kind of know each other's love language a little bit. Mine is more action. Hers is more words of affirmation and things like that. So we give and take because that's how we feel good with regards to what we're doing for the business. Because sometimes we can feel beat up just with all the things that we have going on. And when you say, “You're a good partner. Oh my gosh, you've knocked this out of the park.” That's helping me, you're giving me life right now. And I think vice versa.

Crystal: I would say with Toni, I know she's gonna execute. I know I can count on her to execute. Even if she doesn't know how to do it, she's gonna figure it out and she's going to try to figure it out and she's not gonna stop until she figures it out.

And I think I'm really big on that, just in life, let's just figure it out. My school's motto is, “I'll find a way or make one.” And I live by that. I will make a way, I do not care if someone says, “I don't know how to do it,” or, “I can't do this.” That just motivates me to do more.

I love the fact that she figures things out and she gets it done. I know I can rely on her. And that's a big thing for me, is knowing that I can rely on someone. So yeah, that's what I love about her.

Toni: There's a lot. I'm not being funny. There are so many things as a business partner that I just am so in awe of Crystal—seriously, her creativity, this girl is like a think tank!

She just cranks out ideas that I've seen come to life. It's beautiful to see. I mean, she's going to get it done. I would have quit so many times if it wasn't for her, like legit—it has been a lot at times, because we handle everything from A to Z with the business, but I think, “Okay, I have to get it done. I can't let Crystal down,” and we execute it. But I feel her all the time. If it wasn't for you, girl, I would have quit many days. And that's the truth.

Ashley: Is there anything that you want our listeners to know about On The Go Jo that we didn't talk about?

Crystal: We're behind the scenes, we're doing a lot. I had someone who DMed with me yesterday and said, “Do you guys make your own coffees?” And I was like, “Yeah, where would we get them from?” And I think sometimes if you don't understand what goes on behind coffee, you may just think someone is just scooping up some beans and throwing them in a bag. And that is not the case.

You know if you're in coffee, you know what goes behind it, what goes behind the scenes. But we are researching coffees. We're building relationships with importers, we're sourcing, we're tasting, we're doing the bag designs, we are packaging, we are shipping. We are truly behind the scenes working, and we hope to grow to where we have a ton of people that can help us with this.

But I think it's important that we are touching everything. I was watching Shark Tank last night, and I heard Lori [Greiner] say that she was actually glad that she touched every aspect of her business because then when she was able to put people in place, she was able to put the right people in place.

A lot of times, you've gotta say you don't know what you don't know, and I'm glad that we've been on this journey of learning and that we've been able to learn from some amazing mentors and we're still learning. So I would say a lot of times people, because we're not at the forefront of the business, you don't see us a lot. You may not understand that it's because we have our head down and we're in the thick of things and we are working.

So I would say I want people to know that we are truly passionate about what we put out there. We will go back and forth for months on packaging and how thin a line on the lips should be a part of the person on the bag and how the gold should stand out and how the beans are roasting in a profile—taking it down 1%, taking it up 1%. We are really passionate about what we put out there and we know the impact of it.

One of our farmers, Angele Ciza, who is a farmer from Burundi, she said, “When you're drinking a cup of coffee from Burundi, you are developing the women of Burundi. And when you develop the women of Burundi, you're developing all Burundians,” and understanding that impact—when I drink that now, it is so much bigger and deeper than these girls who just came up with this idea to have a coffee line. It is impacting people way beyond Chicago, way beyond the United States and understanding that impact, I think you'll understand what we're trying to do a bit more.

Ashley: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. This has been an absolutely incredible conversation. So I thank you so much for joining me.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Header photo photography by J Lauryn Photography and styling by Golden Style Consulting.

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What makes a great coffee?

When we talk about food, drinks, and other agricultural products, our metric of goodness is typically based on visceral experience. We can taste it, smell it, and otherwise perceive markers of quality through our five senses. In coffee, quality is also equated with the experimental and the rare—a coffee processed in a new way, or a highly-sought-after varietal, is imbued with value.

But what if we were to shift our understanding of goodness, and what makes it? What if, for instance, we prized a coffee that was sustainably sourced? I don’t just mean that the coffee was sustainably grown: I mean that the coffee, throughout the lifetime of not just the bean itself but the relationships built between buyer and seller, was bought and sold in a way that was fair and equitable to all involved.

Coffee is an incredibly risky plant to harvest. It is highly dependent on the environment, so a late rainfall or unseasonably warm weather can wreak havoc on the flavor of a bean. For most coffee professionals, this isn’t news. But what might be revelatory is thinking about how to redistribute the risk involved in growing coffee across the supply stream.

Much of the risk in growing coffee is assumed by the farmer. If a crop fails or a coffee underperforms, that almost always translates to a farmer getting paid less—or not getting paid at all.

Michelle Stoler works for Shared Source, a green coffee importer, purchaser of parchment coffee, and exporter who works in Portland, Oregon. She thinks a lot about risk, and how it might be shared. In this episode, we explore what it means for more actors within the coffee supply stream to assume risk, and the good that can come from taking that unique burden off farmers.

We also talk about the coffee industry’s obsession with pricing—not just paying farmers more, but its focus on where the money goes. If we pay a farmer a set price for coffee, why do we need to justify that price by pointing to the investment they made in their community? Why isn’t the work put into cultivating the coffee justification enough?

After listening to this episode, I hope you take a moment to set your values, and to probe your own assumptions. What makes a coffee great? As Michelle points out, the default is to fall back on quality—but there are a million other ways to gauge, and reasons to buy, a coffee.

By setting clear values, more roasters and importers can help assume the risk that we almost singlehandedly put on farmers, which is unfair, unjust, and a relic of the colonial roots of coffee’s past. Here’s Michelle:

Ashley: Could you introduce yourself to everybody?

Michelle: Sure. My name is Michelle Stoler and I work for Shared Source. We're a green coffee importer, a parchment coffee purchaser, and an exporter.

Ashley: How did you get into coffee?

Michelle: I got into coffee through cacao actually. I moved to Quito, Ecuador for some postgrad studies. I did a research project, a master's thesis about the advantages and challenges of fair trade certification for cocoa farmers. Cocoa is the third-largest export in Ecuador after petroleum and bananas. And a lot of cocoa farmers in Ecuador happened to be low-quality coffee farmers. They had cacao or cocoa on the lower parts of their farm and coffee on the higher parts of their farm, which is pretty unique to this one part of Ecuador.

And so as I was kind of kicking it with cacao farmers, talking to them about the ways that they commercialize their cacao and the ways that they were able to keep the most profit and learning about cacao, which has a very intense, long, very important fermentation step, I learned a little bit about the way that they process their coffees and their coffee was almost always sold kind of as an afterthought on the local market because it was usually lower-grade coffee.

When I moved back from Ecuador after four years there, I moved back to Portland, Oregon, and I wanted to work either in chocolate—which is obviously the product that you make from cacao—or I wanted to work in coffee. And I got a job in coffee. And here we are.

Ashley: Here we are.

Michelle: Yeah. I worked for a roaster and I worked for a different green coffee importer. And now I'm working for Shared Source doing green coffee purchasing, managing our relationships with producers, and managing operations and sales in the U.S.

Ashley: I would say, as a coffee professional, probably the weakest point of my knowledge in how coffee works as a whole entity, as a whole system, is how coffee gets to us.

I can describe how to extract this, what flavors you might expect from that—I can do the song and dance of, “coffee comes from a cherry, and this and that happens to it …” But I think there's a part in the middle—a farmer growing coffee, a farmer processing coffee, and the coffee physically getting to a roaster—where I feel like my knowledge is pretty limited. I would imagine for a lot of baristas, there are some gaps there. I think we have pretty broad understandings: There's an importer and there's an exporter. I don't know that everyone could maybe tell the difference. I barely feel like I could right now.

So I'm really interested to get into the nitty-gritty of how coffee gets to us and what those steps look like because there's just so much to learn. And there's a lot of differences from country to country, there are differences specifically to how Shared Source does it, so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit, just really generally, about how coffee gets to us and talk a little bit about how Shared Source does those things a little bit differently? Very broad question, I know.

Michelle: Sure. No, I am happy to talk about that because I feel so lucky that I get to see and be a part of that. So much of my coffee career has been really kind of centered around that.

When I say that Shared Source is a parchment purchaser, an exporter, and importer, that means that we purchase parchment coffee directly from producers. And we do that in Colombia and Guatemala, specifically. Colombia and Guatemala both mostly have washed coffees. And for a washed coffee, its final step from a producer means that it's coffee in parchment. So that usually means that the producer has taken the cherries, they've depulped them, they've fermented them—sometimes using really interesting and exciting fermentation techniques—and they have washed the coffee and left it to dry in any number of drying contraptions around patios. And that is the point that Shared Source comes in.

We purchase the coffee directly from the producer. That means that we pay them in the local unit of purchasing—in Colombia that's the carga and in Guatemala it's the quetzal—and we pay them in their local currency directly to their bank account.

From there, we take physical possession of the coffee and transport it to a mill and we have the parchment removed—that means that the coffee is sorted and any sort of insect damage or other damage or poorly … poorly nutriented beans? How do you say that beans that are—that aren't fully formed because they didn't get enough nutrition?—they're all sorted out.

We're partnering with mills who are then responsible for putting the coffee in GrainPro bags and jute bags. We are contracting another freight provider to take the coffee to the port and at the port, it gets on a container ship.

I think this is interesting because I didn't know or think about this before my career in importing coffee, but most coffee, especially if it comes in a full container, is just usually sitting in the jute bag in the container. It's probably stacked up in there. Then it gets to the port, there's another truck driver who takes the unloaded container, which has been unloaded off of the ship, takes it to the warehouse. And there, people at the warehouse physically unload the coffee and it's green coffee at that point. Usually, at that point, an importer is selling the coffee to a roaster. I'd say that's the very brief supply chain of events.

Ashley: That overview was super helpful in understanding how coffee gets from a farmer to eventually being sold as green coffee. And I think that it was helpful for me to hear when the importer comes in because I'm guessing, based on that response, the importer is generally the person who's like, “I am bringing coffee into this country and then selling it to roasters or selling it to people who are going to use green coffee for something.”

Michelle: Totally. Yeah. A lot of importers are buying from any number of different actors. You can buy coffee from a cooperative, you can buy coffee from an exporter. In that case, the exporter is usually a local agent who is purchasing coffee in parchment form directly from producers. You can even purchase coffee directly from a producer if that producer is large enough to have a dry mill maybe on their farm or to own a mill somewhere else where they mill their own coffee. So they bring their coffee to the green stage, they're responsible for bringing coffee to the port and then the importer takes possession and pays the producer or the co-op or the exporter from there. And then the importer is always the one who's providing both the financial upfront cash—they're paying for the coffee—and they're also providing the logistics steps of coordinating with a customs broker, or maybe managing the customs step on their own and getting the coffee physically from the container where it's from, its port of export, into its port of import and then the logistics of getting it to the warehouse as well.

In Colombia and Guatemala, we are skipping that step of purchasing from an exporter. Rather we're working directly with producers to purchase coffee in parchment form from them and to pay them straight into their bank accounts to make sure that we know exactly how much producers are making. We are confident that we are paying fair and meaningful prices.

Ashley: So when someone gets, let's say, a coffee offering from Shared Source specifically for coffees from Guatemala or Colombia, where you have this importer/exporter dual role, that price is like, “Yeah, look, we paid this. Let me show you the text message I have with this one.”

Michelle: Totally. Yeah. We do, I don't know, 90% of our communications through WhatsApp and so there's usually a text message with producers to say, you know, “We've cupped X number of samples that you gave us from your harvest.” [We usually give] detailed cupping notes or information about the coffees that we weren't able to purchase. “We found a defect in this cup,” or, “This really wasn't a clean coffee. It tasted like this had happened in the processing. Can you share a little bit more about that?” And then there's [usually] an offer saying, “These coffees tasted great and we love them, and we'd like to offer you this amount of money for the coffees. We hope that this is a good price for you, and we hope that you accept.” And from there, it's almost always a message from a producer saying, “Great, I'll start storing the coffee for you,” which is exactly what we want.

But of course, that relationship and that dynamic between the two of us is always kind bound by the inherent power dynamics of buyer and seller, especially buyer and seller in this coffee market, where the buyer is often assumed to have a lot of power. We get to set prices that determine their livelihood—how much money they're going to make for the crop that they've spent a year, or in Colombia, maybe six months since they have more frequent harvests, that they've spent a lot of time preparing for. So it’s a big deal and it's not something that I tried to take lightly for sure.

Ashley: I think it's interesting that you mentioned that oftentimes when you are having that conversation of, “I cupped these coffees, I determined them to be of this quality. We'd like to buy them at this price,” that oftentimes is met with, “Yeah, sure. That's great.” As opposed to what I would maybe imagine. I mean, haggling is not quite the right word for it, but the idea of there being an inherent value to the coffee that's inherent to the coffee.

I don't believe that there is any inherent value—obviously, value is created—but the idea that there are two equal actors coming to a bargaining table being able to set parameters that meet both of their standards. Not to say that you aren't trying to do the best that you can do when you offer a farmer whatever price that you can. But I think it's interesting that you called out specifically that oftentimes people say yes to your offers. And I was wondering: How do you start to think about bringing more equity to that table?

Michelle: It’s tough. I would like to say that everybody says yes to our offers because we're offering them the very best price for a great product and that we are offering them a very fair price that they have no need to ever consider negotiating. But I think that would be blind and foolish to assume that that's the only reason why they're saying yes.

There's obviously a huge historical precedent of who has power in the relationship of buying and selling coffee. And it's almost always the buyer. So thinking about that, there are all sorts of ways that we can try to attempt to restore equity. Some of that is just making it really clear that this is an offer and not a contract. This is not, “You must sell us this coffee at this price,” but it's a question. “This is your coffee. We think it tastes like this. And we would love to purchase it at this price, is that acceptable?” Framing it as a question and a negotiation.

We also think about that when we're thinking about pricing. We think, “Is this a fair price? Is this a producer that we think will tell us if not?” and I definitely don't want to discount the super helpful work of my colleague, Frank Torres, who is Colombian, who provides really helpful context when we're talking about pricing to say, “Do you think this is a fair price?” And he lives in Colombia and he is a coffee producer and he is our field agent whose job it is to be kind of a liaison, and to manage relationships between us and producers on an ongoing year-round, constant basis.

So a big part of the way that we're approaching pricing and communication and power dynamics now is really trying to involve Frank and say, “Please help us make sure that these prices are fair and meaningful. And that when they're presented to producers, they're presented as what they are, which is an initial offer.” If they need more then let's start that conversation, not in a way that's going to mean we will always pay more if someone asks, because we are very thoughtful in the prices that we set out initially, but in the same way that any sort of business relationship often has an element of negotiation if you want or need. I want to make sure that that is clear when we communicate pricing to producers as well. But I think it helps to be cognizant of the inherent power that we have and to take that into thought when we're making our initial offers.

Ashley: I'm just imagining, thinking about producers as the people who have the thing you want. Simply put—you want to buy coffee, they have coffee. And I have to imagine based on what you just said, a lot of farmers aren't necessarily shopping around. That's not really what's happening when people are buying green coffee.

Michelle: Yeah. A dream world would be that they can shop around with a lot of buyers paying really good prices. That would require us all to do our very best as buyers to put forward good offers. And hopefully, that offer includes both a good price, but also, maybe there's some longevity to the relationship that producers know that we're going to pay them on time, that we're going to pay them quickly, that they know that when local market prices slip down, that we are a consistent buyer who has consistently paid a high price. So maybe the market prices are spiking right now, but they're going to continue to offer their best coffees to us because they know that next year and the year after and during the flight crop harvest, we'll be there to purchase coffee then at the same fair prices, even when the market inevitably slips.

That's not always the case. Many producers that we work with don't necessarily have a lot of other contexts with buyers who are going to pay good prices, but when they do, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking of it as a bad thing. Like, “Oh, now we have competition,” but I think for the future of coffee and for what we want, which is to see producers thriving and economically independent and living lives that are comfortable and happy, it's definitely a good thing when there are multiple buyers that force everyone to put their best offer forward, because this is a product that demands a lot of value in the U.S. or wherever it's consumed.

Producers, as you said, are responsible for adding value to the product from its very inception and taking on the risk and deciding to grow it in the first place and all of the risks that come from dealing with climate change and processing and drying coffee—all of the steps that require us to have a delicious green bean that we can then offer to roasters who are going to add even more value to the product.

Ashley: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the producers that you work with, because Shared Source specifically works with people who maybe don't have that market access. So you're not necessarily working with the superstar producers that maybe are on Instagram, or maybe dominate coffee competitions. You're really working with people who maybe don't have that foot in the door to get to that specialty market. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about why you do that and how you do that.

Michelle: Sure. I mean, we, I am very excited to say that some of the producers that we work with do enter coffee competitions. For example, some producers that we worked with in Colombia just entered the Cup of Excellence. And I just heard today that they moved on—they were in the top 90.

Ashley: I think this illustrates just how different your perspective versus my perspective is because I immediately thought of barista competitions and you went to Cup of Excellence. And I was like, you're on the different end of the supply stream.

Michelle: You're so right. That's true. None of the producers that we work with are familiar names in the barista competition circuit. And many of them do not submit their coffee to other competitions, like the Cup of Excellence. But some of them do because they know that they have a quality product and they know that we've been really happy with the coffee that they have and they've improved their processing over many harvests. And it's exciting to me that some of them think, “Oh, I have a good thing. And I know it now, and I'm going to submit my coffee to the Cup of Excellence.”

But you're right. None of the producers that we work with have had their coffees featured prominently in any barista competitions. And that's a little bit by design, I would say, because I see the value that we add to this whole stream is connecting producers, specifically smallholder producers who might not have that access to a roaster, who don't have the English skills, who don't have the land size, to have enough coffee to regularly offer to a roaster.

We are able to purchase that coffee and kind of act as that middleman. I feel like the word “middleman” has deservedly become a bit of a bad word. But you know, in this case, I hope that what we're doing is providing a real service and connecting smallholder producers who otherwise would really find it challenging to meet roasters. And we're connecting them to roasters who would otherwise find it really challenging to develop meaningful long-term relationships with coffee producers and at the same time maintain the same varied menu that many of them want to maintain.

Ashley: So how do you do that? How do you find producers? Because the idea that they don't have market access, I imagine makes it tough because you're looking for people who you don’t know.

Michelle: Yeah, you totally nailed it. Some of this comes from longevity. We've had relationships with many of these producers for, I don't know, probably upwards of eight years, and producers always know more people just like us. They have friends and neighbors and family members to introduce you to, to say, “Hey, my neighbor saw that you paid me a great price for coffee last year, and they have coffee. Would you be interested in receiving a sample?” So we're always expanding our network that way. That's by far the most common way.

One of our most long-term and cherished relationships is with a producer who just happened to be working during a cupping, a local company competition in Colombia, who happened to say, “Hey, you guys are cupping these auction coffees, I have some coffee. Can I bring it down?” And we cupped it and it was great. And we have enjoyed working with him for many years since then.

So it's kind of serendipity, but a lot of it is just network. It's families, neighbors.

We work with some associations that are loosely organized friends and neighbors who commercialize their coffee, I guess, kind of as a group and say, “We have a buyer contact. And so anyone who's a member of this group is welcome to submit their coffees and their samples.” And that's always a great way to meet new producers. But honestly, we're a small importer and exporter, and we purchase from the same producers year after year, harvest after harvest. And as we slowly and intentionally grow, we're able to expand the network of producers that we purchase from. But we're not aiming for rapid-fire growth either. So the question of how to meet new producers has yet to be one that has been challenging.

Ashley: What would you consider a success when you cultivate these relationships and market access isn't really a challenge anymore? Is there a point where—I wouldn't say the relationship ends per se—but it's almost like you don't need this from us? Does that make sense?

Michelle: Kind of. I would say that success is when we're able to cultivate a relationship where risk is mutually shared.

Ashley: Talk more about that! Talk about risk.

Michelle: Yeah. I think about this a lot when I think about who are the customers that I enjoy selling coffee to. It's the customers who make a real commitment to a group or an individual and say, “I understand that growing coffee is inherently risky and that a lot of that risk is placed upon those at the bottom of our supply chain. And I want to take on some of that risk.”

And what I mean by that is [for example] climate change happens. And sometimes that means that the yield of your coffee farm goes down significantly, or you have to figure out a new way to manage fermentation, which is affected a lot by temperature, or sometimes the rain doesn't come when you expect it. Or sometimes the rain comes right when you're drying the coffee and suddenly you have a mold problem or a phenol problem, or sometimes for totally unexplainable reasons, a coffee from a specific parcel of the farm that last year tasted great that this year, under the same meticulous care, just doesn't taste as great.

And the success for me is when we are able to cultivate a relationship with a roaster who understands that and can take on some of that and says, “I will still buy this coffee and I will find a home for it. Maybe it's in my blend. Maybe we're just going to showcase the coffee on its own and talk about the fact that coffee is an agricultural product that is cyclical,” and who takes on some of that risk so that it's not all on the producer. Being a middleman, we are in a place where we can buy some coffee and take on some of that risk, but a really successful relationship to me is when roasters are able and willing to share in that risk.

Ashley: That's a really interesting point. And perhaps this is just on my mind because I listened to a different interview of a podcast that's not published which is so insider-y it's ridiculous. But I'm helping edit something, and I was listening to somebody talk about the idea of the value stream and who takes the least amount of risk in the supply stream. And it's oftentimes roasters.

Which I'd never thought about. But hearing you talk about what it looks like for roasters to share some of that risk committing to buying coffees—not necessarily regardless of quality—but regardless of undue circumstances that can't be predicted like climate change or maybe the [coffee] yield isn't as big. Because I can imagine for a lot of roasters perhaps who are maybe risk-averse, that might not be a risk that they're willing to take. Saying, “Oh, that's not the amount that I need, so I need to move on to somebody else.”

Michelle: Yeah, yeah. I would just push back and say, “What does it mean to be a roaster that touts relationships with producers when that relationship does not mutually share risk? It’s challenging for everyone, risk is tough!

No one wants to take on the risk. I understand that many businesses, and small businesses especially, really don't have great ways to manage that risk and to deal with what do you do with expensive coffee that doesn't taste as great. I understand that that's a legitimate problem, but it's no less of a legitimate problem for producers who say, "What do I do with this coffee that doesn't taste as great for reasons that are largely outside of my control?" or "What do I do when roya comes in—or coffee rust comes in—and decimates the large part of my production? And I've been managing my farm organically because of a certification that a larger importer requested of me?”

Those are risks that producers take on all the time. They're also small businesses, also with few financial tools at their disposal. So I would just hope that we can all recognize that and try our damnedest to share in it.

Ashley: It's really illuminating to hear you talk about the idea of risk and what that looks like in practical terms, like “The coffee that I paid maybe a couple of bucks more than I would for a blend because I intended it to be a single origin isn't performing at that level. So the risks that I took there was to pay more for that coffee,” because I think it's hard to really understand what risk looks like at that level sometimes.

And again, it feels sometimes roasters do have to take the least amount of risk because we're so quality-focused. I think the way that we talk about coffee in a way that might be kind of shooting ourselves in the foot is that we talk so much about the importance of quality. And we kind of ignore anything that takes away from that narrative.

Michelle: I agree. That's why I often think of my favorite coffees being the workhorse coffees because they do their job and taste really great, and coffees that have been purchased under really sound conditions of partnership, hopefully. And oftentimes what you get from a partnership is really great quality. That means that if you're paying a high price and sharing in the risks, that means that producers can sometimes feel more confident taking on risks with riskier processing or planting a new variety or something if they know that someone else is going to share in that. And if you share in that, that often means that you get to reap the reward, you get to have some really delicious coffees where you get to consistently have high-scoring coffees because a producer being fairly compensated for those coffees and is able to fertilize at the right time, et cetera … sharing and risk doesn't mean to me only that you have to wallow in the challenges. That often means you get to reap the rewards and delight in success alongside producers as well.

Ashley: It seems from listening to you talk about how you work within the supply stream that you're also vetting roasters as well. You're making relationships with farmers and you're saying, "These are the people that we want to introduce you to," but you also have to be really careful about who those people you choose are.

Michelle: It's true. But I also think of that as part of the value that I hope that we're adding. If I sell a producer's coffee to a roaster and for whatever reason that roaster does not purchase the coffee again next year that doesn't mean that producer doesn't have a buyer—it means that I find a different buyer for that coffee, right? So I hope that's where we're adding value, but certainly, we're a small company and I feel very lucky to be able to work with almost exclusively roasters that I really like, and that I enjoy and who often seek us out because they want those kinds of relationships with producers. And because they share the same values.

Ashley: I have a couple of questions that are really big. So I want to make sure that we have time for those, but one thing I do want to circle back on—because you mentioned it earlier and I've heard people mention it recently—is that you pay producers in their local currency. I was wondering if you could talk about why that's important.

Michelle: I mean, there's a lot of reasons why it's important. A big reason to me is that we're working with smallholder producers who live their lives in local currency. There's really no context for navigating a price that is in a currency and a unit that is not familiar to them. It's just not how I want to do business to say, this is the way we're going to negotiate. And because we're purchasing locally that means that we should be working in local currency and local units.

It seems awkward to come to you and say, “Oh, Ashley, I love this thing that you're offering. I'm going to offer you X number of Euros or Canadian dollars for this many kilos or some other unit.” You would be pretty confused and the burden would be on you to look up the exchange rate and to say, “Does this make sense for me? Is this something that I want to do? Why are they doing this?”

The nature of the way that we're purchasing coffee is that we're not purchasing it on the international stage. We're purchasing it locally and we're paying those producers in their currency, into their bank account. The value that we're adding, in that case, is taking on the risk of currency fluctuations. We are transferring money in U.S. dollars into our local bank accounts in Colombia and Guatemala and taking on the exchange rate of the moment.

I don't want to mislead and I don't want to overlook some very valuable partners. So I should mention that in Guatemala, specifically, we do not have an export license. And so we use the export license of a good friend and partner there who provides the service of lending us their export license. And he happens to also own the dry mill where we mill the coffee. So he's a good partner to us, and I don't want to make it seem like we have an export license in Guatemala because we don't. But he follows our instructions and we're very grateful. So just wanted to point that out as well.

Ashley: One of the reasons that I wanted to have you on this episode is we've been talking a lot about pricing and we've been talking a lot about how we build relationships with producers.

You gave some quotes for an article that my partner Jesse wrote about essentially the parts of the coffee supply stream that we don't see—which is kind of the theme of this conversation as well. And something that I really appreciated that you pointed out is that we really talk a lot, when we talk about the justification for the price of coffee, about how a farmer spends that money.

We talk a lot about investing in communities and things like that, which seems good. But at the same time, no one asks me how I spend my salary. No one's like, “What are you doing to invest in the community?” I mean, a little bit, but no one's judging me for buying a $20 bottle of wine versus a $5 bottle of wine and saying that I'm not investing. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about some of the ways that we talk about producers and the way that we talk about pricing and why that might be a little bit misguided.

Michelle: I think there's a desire to share the price and the amount that a producer is able to reinvest in their farm. Sometimes maybe it was just a way to make ourselves feel good to say, “Look, we're paying good prices,” but that shouldn't be why we're paying good prices.

The reason why we're paying good prices should be because it's the right thing to do. And because we want to see an industry that allows producers to thrive, and that allows producers to continue growing a product that we all really love. And I think it's really great when producers can reinvest in their farms. And oftentimes they certainly do, because their farms are their businesses, and many people also choose to reinvest their own profits in their businesses. But those who choose not to reinvest their profits in their businesses, in the U.S., and to buy fancy bottles of wine or to do any other number of things that make you happy and comfortable with money—those decisions aren't really criticized or even discussed or asked about.

And I think that's what I want for our relationships to be more equitable with producers, where the expectation isn't that we are a parent who is going to ask all sorts of questions about the way you spent your money—it's that we're equal partners, both running businesses that we hope to be successful and that we can enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Ugh. I hate that I said that phrase.

Ashley: I love it.

I love cheesy coffee-related or coffee-adjacent puns, like “fruits of our labor.” I'm gonna brand something with that.

But I think just to push this point a little bit further—I like making analogies—and I was thinking about, okay, perhaps someone can be critical of my spending habits, let's say, but they would never use it as a justification to renegotiate my salary. It would never be like, “You were spending too much money on frivolous s**t. You're going to get paid less this year.” And it seems like we are still caught up in this idea that we have to know where all this money is going versus like, “No, they're doing a job that we've asked. We're setting the standard for how much that should be paid and we don't need to justify the payment based on how it's spent.”

Michelle: Yeah. I certainly hope not. If your employer is making you renegotiate your salary based on the way that they think that you're spending, that's bonkers and should be reported directly to HR.

Ashley: Right, but it feels like that's the way we talk about coffee.

Michelle: Yeah. I'm not sure. I feel very lucky to be very divorced from circles that are having those kinds of conversations about pricing. I can't imagine having that kind of conversation with a producer. I will say, I'm human, I'm curious. I want to know how producers spend their money. I want to know how my friends spend their money, but I tend to either ask in a business-appropriate context or to close friends and to producers that I work closely with. I want a producer to be able to buy a new TV because I want to buy a new TV or to buy a new car because I wanted to buy a new car.

A new car is going to help me get to my job more easily. And a new car is going to help producers do their job more easily. We all have our own personal justifications for spending. And I certainly hope that we don't adopt, as you described it, an infantilizing or paternalistic relationship where we want to or deserve to know how money that we pay is being spent. We're paying for a product that we think is valuable. And we're paying the people who have that product and who create that product.

Ashley: Right. Yeah. And the idea that we pay for—there's like a lot of threads that I want to pull at, and I know that they almost … I'm mixing two different metaphors here, pulling at different thread but they all kind of fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.

But not quite because I think there's also this idea of value, and we've kind of hinted at this throughout this conversation. And we've pretty much named it explicitly that value’s not necessarily inherent, it's created, and it's often determined by these other outside factors that have absolutely nothing to do with the product in front of you.

So when I'm thinking about you talking about value—value just feels like a term that I … don't know? In the coffee industry, it seems like we put so much value on quality, but does that really mean anything? I dunno, this is again, a very 90% thought-out idea I have, and then maybe when it gets to 100%, I'm like, “Oh, that doesn't make sense.” But I think there's just this idea when we talk about quality and coffee and we put so much importance on quality, we forget what value really means.

Michelle: Yeah. I think that value should be determined by our values and by how well perhaps the specific coffee meets our values. And if you have not taken time to identify your values, then I think it's especially easy to land on quality and to say that's what's important.

And certainly quality is a value that is important to me. I want to drink delicious coffee, but I also want to drink coffee that is farmed in a sustainable way. I want to value the way that coffee is farmed. I want to value specifically smallholders who have much less access to markets. So I think that value is created by your own values. And when you don't have really clearly determined values, that's when it seems really easy to fall back on quality.

Ashley: I appreciate that you mentioned that because one of the notes that I wrote to myself as we were talking about what Shared Source does—it seems that Shared Source is very value-driven. You know exactly what you're looking for—or looking to do, not necessarily what you're looking for—but you have an idea and a mission in mind and you execute based on that. And that drives the decisions that you make.

Michelle: Absolutely. For the reason that I mentioned before, which is that producers always have more coffee. We are operating in an industry that is not meeting the needs of producers. And so there are always producers with more needs who want you to buy their coffee.

For me and for the company, I think it's been really helpful to have a set of values to turn to, to say there's a million good reasons to buy coffee: to buy a coffee from someone because they're from a region that has historically faced a lot of violence or they're actively resisting an extractive mine in their area and you want to support them by purchasing coffee—there are a million good reasons to purchase coffee.

There's always going to be more coffee that's available and it's really helpful to have a clear set of values to say, “How are we going to decide who we purchase coffee from and in what way? Let's turn to our set of values that we've established so that we can try to meet them.”

I would certainly encourage any roasters to identify their values. I don't think there's any right or wrong answer. It's just a really helpful framework when making coffee-purchasing decisions to be able to turn to, to say, “Does this coffee meet my values, and are my values going beyond just quality?” Or maybe quality is the only value that you have, in which case go forth and seek out delicious coffees from many, many sources.

Ashley: Right. But be clear with those intentions, because I think one of the reasons—making everything come full circle here—one of the reasons that we're even here talking about this is that it's easy to conflate quality with like, “Oh, look at these partnerships and look at these relationships we have…” Which is fine and great … Okay, I'm just b**********g now. I just don't have a fully formed thought. So I think I might just…

Michelle: To wrap up what I think … I kind of see that connecting to risk, right? If you're sharing in the risk, then you can have ideally great-quality coffee and if you're taking on risk, it's because you are sharing the values of the person that you're purchasing from.

And so to me, that's how you get quality and success at the same time. It's certainly not a way to only pursue quality, but if you're only pursuing quality, that means that you're not sharing in the risk. You have to make it really clear to yourself what is important to you and what the future of coffee looks like based on that.

That sounds really…

Ashley: Nope, that was great. You took a thing that I said that sounded like word soup and made it sound like a beautiful and eloquent point that puts a bow on our conversation. So thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and for answering my questions.

Michelle: Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I really enjoyed thinking about it and chatting about it with you.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Ask anyone here: If you come to Chicago, you have to go to Loba Pastry + Coffee. For the coffee, but also for the food: Loba goes well beyond the typical muffin or croissant options that you would expect to find at most coffee shops. Instead, it boasts a pastry menu that is both highly creative and technically ambitious.

Valeria Taylor is the owner and baker behind Loba. “Loba” is Spanish for “female wolf,” and Valeria named the shop after a particular wolf, the ’06 Female. Scientists studied the ’06 Female after releasing a pack in Yellowstone Park for observation, and were completely baffled by her behaviors. She refused to settle for a mate, at one time courting five potential suitors. She outsmarted packs of rival wolves. Instead of hunting for prey in the shadows, she faced her opponents head-on, rushing towards her intended targets. She could take down an entire elk by herself.

Like the ’06 Female, Valeria defies stereotypes. In a way, she’s the ultimate MacGyver, taking whatever situation life hands her and finding a solution. Her story is full of twists and turns, and moments where she chooses to confront a problem with the full force of her personality. Throughout it all, Valeria trusts herself—she knows her worth and talent, and doesn’t back down. That isn’t to say that she hasn’t confronted challenges and failures, but Valeria is the first to admit that she’s better because of her mistakes, and the moments that have offered growth and change.

Valeria is refreshingly confident, joyous and funny, and bracingly honest and transparent. You’re going to have fun with this episode.

Ashley: So Valeria, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.

Valeria: Thank you for having me.

Ashley: I was wondering if you could start by explaining what “Loba” means.

Valeria: “Loba” is the word in Spanish for a female wolf.

Ashley: Where did that name come from?

Valeria: It’s sort of my guide in this business. A long time ago, I read this paper and I listened to this podcast about the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park. And I mean, if you want to listen to it, the podcast is [from Snap Judgment and it’s called the] ’06 Female— it’s a, I want to say a short story, but it’s based on a bigger study.

It talked about bringing wolves back to the park and scientists track them. And it was like an experiment. Wolves used to belong to the park, but they were never studied this closely. And it just changed everybody’s knowledge of what wolves were actually like. The idea of the lone wolf was thrown out. The idea of the alpha wolf was also thrown out because of this amazing female who just did whatever she wanted, and she led a pack and she didn’t take a mate. She just took helpers. I was just so inspired by her, by this study, by this powerful animal that I decided to name the shop after it.

Ashley: The name is a pretty good description of what your business actually is like as well, which is pretty cool foreshadowing in a way. So let’s talk about that a little bit. How did you get started in the baking world?

Valeria: It’s a very long story. It happened by accident. I’ve been cooking all my life, but I get involved in it professionally shortly after I moved to Chicago.

I was so confused about what I wanted to do with my life. I had just turned 21. Just a little bit of background—I moved to the States when I was 15 years old. I lived in Florida for some time. I actually moved to France for a semester. So I did the whole study abroad [thing], and I was just so confused, had no direction, ended up moving to Chicago because my circle of academic friends were at the University of Chicago. That was sort of the goal, to just pursue academia. But it was just not working out and I was not adjusting to city living very well.

I was working as a nanny in the suburbs and I don’t know, I just needed more. I went on Craigslist and I was looking for any sort of job that I could do in the city. I wasn’t even spending time in the city. I saw this Craigslist ad for a pastry intern and I was like, “Well, I’ve baked before. I’ve worked in a restaurant before. I can totally do this.” I just showed up to the interview ready to learn, starved for something new. And they hired me—well “hiring” is a funny word because it was an unpaid position…

Ashley: Right, it’s not like you were getting paid.

Valeria: It was one of the best restaurants in the city, now that I know: Blackbird, the now-closed Blackbird. And I don’t know, they took a chance on me and I sort of never looked back. That was the only place that had felt like home since I had left home. So I just dove head-on and never looked back.

Ashley: Yeah. Because right after that, you really just went full out on baking and pastry, right?

Valeria: Yeah. I … let’s see, this is in 2010 and I was working—for free—about three to four days a week. I was pulling some crazy shifts, maybe 40 hours a week, and just learning everything that I could learn in this very, very hard … like [this] classically trained chef was my boss and he was terrible, but I think it was a direction that I needed at the time.

I very quickly forgot about going back to school and I just, I don’t know. There’s really no other way to describe it. I learned everything that I could, I worked there for nine months, and after that went to another restaurant, stuck to fine dining, and did that for a few years until I burnt out—because there’s only so many years that you can do 13-, 14-hour shifts, five days a week.

Ashley: I think that’s a really … that’s like a stopping point I want to talk about, because I think for a lot of folks in coffee, and a lot of whom listen to this podcast, their experiences probably mimic yours pretty precisely. You can go all-in on coffee, you can work a minimum wage job—for you, it was even more extreme because you were working unpaid internships—and you can kind of run on those fumes for a while.

But then there’s this moment where it’s almost like you hit a wall. So I was wondering what was that moment when you realized, “I can’t do this anymore?”

Valeria: It was a lot of ups and downs. After leaving this internship, the job after that, I was hired under a pastry chef and she ended up leaving soon after. So with the little experience that I had, I sort of stepped up to the role of pastry chef and it felt good. It felt a little validating that I was on the right path, but I was just not ready for it, you know?

I succeeded and I failed in different ways. I still kept this job for a whole year, but it was hard. I don’t know if I was ready to be humbled yet. So I don’t know if I recognize that as failure. I did know that I needed to gather more experience before I could lead a kitchen because that’s the one thing, you know, maybe you can have the talent, but being a manager or like heading a department, that’s a completely different set of skills that I didn’t have.

Ashley: Yeah. And I think that your experience probably mimics a lot of people’s experience in coffee where you’re a barista, you’re barista for a while, and then there’s a management position and you’re like, “Of course, I’m going to take this. That’s more money. It’s more responsibility.” And it feels incredibly validating, but we don’t train anybody about how to be a leader.

Did you find that tough, being a leader? Suddenly being propelled into this position? Because you mentioned, “I didn’t know if I was ready to be humbled yet.” And I think that that’s a really powerful thing to realize.

Valeria: It’s also a little bit more complicated than that. I was the youngest person in the kitchen altogether, aside from the dishwasher. I was one of three women that worked in this big kitchen.

So there was, even though I was supposed to have a place of power, I had none, I had zero leverage. So the experience was quite miserable, and I actually ended up getting fired, which really upset me at the time. It was right after Christmas. I had just finished a Christmas banquet, or like a New Year’s Day banquet, and I had worked so hard to have this be perfect.

And then they let me go in the middle of winter in Chicago. Ugh. I mean, they didn’t even fire me. They were just like, “Hmm, we think that you should take a break.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m outta here.”

Ashley: What was that like? I mean, I love a firing story. Don’t get me wrong. But what did you feel at that moment?

Valeria: Oh, I was so incredibly angry. I was so stressed out and I was so mad that I had a little capillary burst on my toe. I left their office and I changed and my shoe was filled with blood and I was like, “You know what? I need to get out of here. This is not normal.”

But I’m a very intense person, you know? I think that’s part of what made me thrive in this industry is that if somebody gives me a challenge, I’ll be like, I’ll do it better and then some more. It was a good time to step away. And you know, my living situation was fine. I was in a house with plenty of roommates. I got smart and I asked for a severance package and a week paid vacation.

I took one month and I went to New York City to see what the fine dining scene was out there. And it was great. I just, I’ve only heard that the scene was different, but I didn’t know how, and I brought all my tools and I brought my shoes and I was ready to work. I just knocked on every fine dining kitchen that I could see if anybody would take me.

I was embraced by the industry. It was really great. I was able to walk into the kitchen of Del Posto. I was able to go into Jean-Georges, the kitchen at Daniel gave me a little tour. And what I kept hearing is that, “We would love to have you, but we don’t do this thing of internships.” I don’t know if it’s true, but they told me that the city of New York would not allow stages or they had to be approved in a different way in a timeline that didn’t fit my stay in the city. So I sort of kept it in the back of my mind that maybe I will do this eventually. Instead, I got a short gig at a chocolatier shop in Soho called Jacques Torres. So I tried a new thing.

Ashley: At what point did you start thinking, “I want something of my own. I want to open a business or I want my own bakery.”

Valeria: The first week that I started at Blackbird.

Ashley: Oh, so it was immediate.

Valeria: Immediate, yeah. I was like, “This is it.”

Ashley: What was the turning point for you to realize, “Oh, this is the time?”

Valeria: I think it’s one of those things of having the stars align and perfect timing.

From the time that I started training in pastry, I spent six more years working in the industry in different positions. I was lucky to have a “pastry chef” position very early on, but I tried lower-ranked positions in order to learn more. I figured that I ultimately would work up to be a pastry chef again, but every opportunity that I had since, I understood very quickly that that was never going to happen.

Nobody was really taking me seriously. It didn’t matter how hard I worked. I was just this … I don’t know how to call it? I just wasn’t a dude and I wasn’t white, so nobody was going to take me seriously. So I stepped away. I stepped away from the industry and I always wondered what the alternative life would be like. What if I just had a regular office job and what if I had finished college and what if I could do all of this differently? I pulled out the Rolodex of all the former contacts that I once had and I landed this gig as a … [laughs]

Ashley: I love that you’re laughing about it. Because I know what you’re going to say, but it’s just so funny for you to be like, “This is ridiculous! Why’d I do this?”

Valeria: Yeah, yeah!

Ashley: Sorry. Go ahead and say what you ended up doing.

Valeria: I landed this gig as a project manager for a software company in the suburbs once again. And it’s funny because there was this—the ranking that I wanted, the value that I wanted. For the first time, in a long time, I had a reasonable wage. I had insurance and I had PTO and I had all these benefits. And I hated every single minute of it.

The idea of being in front of a computer—and my job was so easy. I woke up in the morning. I had a Slack meeting with everybody, like a video meeting for like 30 minutes, and then I would jump on the train, go to the suburbs and just tell 40-year-old men what to do. And it was terrible.

I hated it. I hated it so much. Every day that I was away from the kitchen, I just wanted to go back. I knew that I couldn’t be back in the restaurant industry. I tried the fine dining. I tried the regular dining and it was just not working.

So—I kid you not, I think I also had three days off. I had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. I had no idea what to do with my life once again. It was a Friday and I woke up at like, 5 in the morning, and I lived in Humboldt Park at the time. I just started walking. I was so sad and miserable with my life. I started walking and I remember somebody once had told me that there was a really good small bakery in Lakeview. And I just decided to walk there from Humboldt Park.

Ashley: Just for people who are not in Chicago, that is not close.

Valeria: What is it? It’s like six miles?

Ashley: At least. I live in Humboldt Park, and for me to drive to you—I mean, this is a little foreshadowing, because where you walk to would end up being where Loba is now—it’s a 20-something-minute drive.

Valeria: It was like a miserable death march!

I finally made it there and I had some coffee and, typical—there are no chairs. I just started talking to the guy behind the counter and the pastries that he was making were what I was familiar with in these fine dining establishments. But I noticed very quickly that everybody who was in at the shop at this time had never heard of these things. And I was like, “What do you mean, a canelé? It’s so easy. I could do it in my sleep.” And that’s why this guy got so much praise—because he was making these like, fancier versions of pastries for this very ordinary coffee shop set-up. Before I left, I cornered him and I was like, “I’m going to work for you.”

And he was like, “I’m not taking any employees right now.”

And I was like, “Okay, so I’m going to work for you. See you tomorrow. What time do you get in? Like, 4 a.m.?”

And he was like, “No, no, no, I’m not taking any employees.”

I was like, “Cool. So what, is it later? Is it 5 a.m., is 4 a.m. too early?”

And he was like, “Oh, well, can you be here at like 3:30?” or something ridiculous.

And I was like, “I'll be here.”

And I just showed up the next day, Saturday, the busiest day of the week. And I was like, “All right, what do I do?”

I don’t think he thought I’m going to show up. But I did. I was there early, 15 minutes early, just ready to work with my shoes on, all my tools, like, “What’s up chef?” I just picked it up within weeks.

Ashley: It’s just amazing that you just made this decision. You were like, “I’m doing this thing. Welcome. Like, hello.”

Valeria: At first it was just going to be for Friday and Saturday. I had that time off and I figured, “I’ll work Monday through Thursday at my boring office job and I’ll do this Friday and Saturday—for free—and I’ll be happy.”

I think two weeks in, he’s telling me that he can’t hire me, but if I know any barista he’s looking for a barista, and I was like, “What is that? I’ll do it. Whatever it is just hire me already.” He’s going over how you steam milk, and I’m like, “Oh, okay. So like a milk meringue. Gotcha.”

And I kid you not, I’m not even trying to toot my own horn, but I poured—on my first try—a perfect flat white, like I got it right. I was just like, “Oh, okay. So what, like it’s hard?”

I like to tell everybody—I’m not trying to diminish a barista’s ability, but it’s just that when you work in pastry, everything is so precise—gauges and thermometers— frothing is something that you do constantly with not just one but multiple ingredients at the same time. So the idea of making an emulsion with a syrupy oily mix into something light and frothy that has to be at about 68 degrees, I was like, “Cool, I’ve done this. It’s like a mousse, but easier.” I basically had been trained to be a barista in many different ways.

Ashley: That’s wild how bold that is, but also incredibly inspiring to feel like, “Oh, there’s a thing that I want to do and I’m going to do it and I’m going to make it happen.”

So obviously at some point, you decide to leave your boring job—which I think there’s some interesting tension there, this idea that to have stability, you had to do this boring job, but then you had the sacrifice of the thing you love. Eventually, it seems you kind of start to go back to the thing you love. So at what point did opening a shop come into focus?

Valeria: It was also by accident. I can talk concrete numbers if you want, but I opened up the shop with a $5,000 loan.

Ashley: That’s wild.

Valeria: That’s all.

Ashley: That’s nothing.

Valeria: I also knew that I had some savings and I knew that at the very least I was going to give it my all. I had nothing else going on and this was going to be the thing that I was going to do for the next five years. And that was my goal. I was like, “For five years, I’m just going to work hard as hell and go all in and we’ll see what happens.” Maybe in five years, I realize that it wasn’t worth it and I figure something else out.

Ashley: What were those first couple of months? You were Loba’s only employee for a long time.

Valeria: I was. So the shop was open six days a week from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. On the weekends I had my business partner help. So Saturday and some Sundays he would come in and give me a hand, but otherwise it was just me.

It was stressful … kind of fun? I don’t know.

Ashley: Do you even remember it?

Valeria: I remember the feeling. I just spent so much time there. I basically almost lived at the shop. In fact, I had a little cot that I would sleep in sometimes for like anxiety, for nervousness, for tiredness, but I just spent so much time there trying to prep, trying to organize, trying to clean, trying to figure out what to do. Because it just felt so urgent that I couldn’t even give myself any rest.

I felt that if I rested too long, it would all go away. I also couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe that I had managed to do my goal of opening this bakery that I had thought of on my first week of working pastry as an intern in this very professional kitchen. The original thought was that, maybe, after I’m 30 years old, maybe I’ll be able to do this in a smaller town, not a big city like Chicago. So I think the first two years I kept pinching myself, I just couldn't believe it.

Ashley: At what point did you decide—or did you realize—that you could start hiring people? That’s something that you talk about a lot too, that you want to hire people and give them jobs that don’t suck, essentially. So I imagine you had to think a lot about what it means to hire somebody?

Valeria: I had no idea where to start. There was a girl from the neighborhood that would come in sometimes and she was young. I remember the first time that she came in and she wanted like a vanilla latte, something sugary and full of milk. I remember the next time she came in, she got something smaller, like a flat white. And then the next time she got a cortado and, then she finally was brave enough to try a shot of espresso just straight up.

She was developing her palate as she was coming in. And it was very exciting. If you come to the shop, it’s very small; there’s one big counter. You can’t hide. If there’s one person in the shop I’m like, “Hi, how are you? What’s up?”

And especially back then, I just talked to everybody cause it was fun and there was nothing else, there was nowhere else to hide. And this girl who was probably only 16 at the time, [and she] was telling me that she was looking for a job and if I knew anybody hiring. She was like, “Oh, I’m thinking about maybe applying to Dinkel’s,” which is an old-school bakery down the street.

I don’t know why, but I was like, “Why don’t you work here?”

And she was like, “What?”

I was like, “Yeah, why don’t you work here?”

She didn’t know anything about coffee, but one thing that she was willing to do is she wanted to learn. She just wanted to learn everything that there was to learn about coffee, and she could appreciate that the pastries were not frozen or coming from a box from miles away. She could appreciate that they were made in-house.

And I was like, “Okay, you’re hired.”

She was homeschooled at the time. So I think she worked two days a week and then three days a week.

And before I knew it, she could do my job, too. She wanted to learn more. She learned everything that she could about coffee and being a barista and pour overs and grind size. And she was like, “What else? Can I learn how to bake?”

And I was like, “Sure, let’s do this!”

So we started baking together and it was a huge help. It allowed me to sort of grow. It allowed me to grow the business since I didn’t have to be there all the time anymore. It gave me the time that I needed to breathe, the time that I needed for myself, not only that—this is when I first hired her, and part of the reason why I hired her is that at the time, I was buying my business partner out, so I needed some extra help for the weekends.

It was once again make-it-or-break-it time. It relied on me once again, and I needed to learn how to do all of the business stuff that my business partner had been doing. Because that’s the thing, I handled everything on site, the food preparation and the coffee and the cleaning. And he took care of bills and permits and compliance.

Ugh. I had to learn all that and it was … it was interesting. I did a few things very wrong in the few months that I feel like I almost lost the shop. During that transition, I feel like I was just not paying bills on time. I couldn’t figure out the tax rate that we needed to pay to the city. I was starting to accrue a lot of debt and I was so overwhelmed and I didn’t have a line of credit. It was all these things. Anyway, I made it, I will never look back.

Ashley: That’s wild to hear. But it’s also important to hear it because I think it’s easy to be like, “Yeah, and it all worked out,” but there are moments where you're like, “I don't know if this is going to work.”

I want to talk a little bit about Loba now. You talked a little bit about what the shop used to be when it was Bad Wolf before you bought the space and kind of the classic pastries that they would do. Because I think what makes Loba so special, besides the fact that you’re amazing, is that the pastries are like a singularity. You can’t get pastries like what you make at Loba anywhere else.

I think it is this really interesting combination of these fine dining things—like when you mentioned canelés, I'm like, “F**k, I eat the s**t out of a bunch of canelés.”

But you never find that at other coffee shops, because they are maybe a little more associated with fine dining. But then you infuse your heritage and your background into the pastry. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you designed your pastry menu, or how do you think about the pastries you make?

Valeria: I think it comes down to—to be completely honest, inclusivity. Whenever I make something at the shop, I want to make sure that it can be enjoyed by a lot of people. One of the things that pushed me out of fine dining was the elitist attitudes that it had. While French pastry is very well respected, the terms and the ingredients of fine dining can be a little bit alienating for regular people. And that’s one thing that I never wanted to do. I wanted anybody who came to the shop to recognize what they were eating and maybe enjoy something new. There were no rules except that there’s always something savory, something vegan, something gluten-free. I try to use, of course, local and organic produce or products as much as possible. I don’t want to shock anybody.

I want everybody to enjoy what they’re eating and not feel bad about it. [I want them to] feel good about it and not be like, “Oh, you don’t know when a kouign amann is—get out of my shop.”

I want it to be more like, “Yeah, this is basically a caramelized croissant. There’s nothing weird about it. It’s delicious. Try it.”

So the French technique I think is helpful because it’s a good way of making pastry. It’s not even refined, I dunno, it’s the standard in the pastry world. But I’ve always considered what I like to eat, what ingredients I like to consume. Like I mentioned before the interview started, my grandmother was the kind of person who would rather do things herself. If she went to the store and the chorizo wasn’t the way that she liked it, she would make chorizo by hand and cure and then have it just the way that she liked it for the rest of her life. So I think a lot of the inspiration comes from my grandmother too.

Ashley: Yeah. It seems like you balance both making things accessible and doing exactly what you want, which is hard.

Valeria: Yeah. I think a lot of the pastries just come out by accident. I don’t know if I ever have a plan of like, “Let’s make a brand-new pastry that doesn’t exist before.”

It’s usually like, “What if I put this with this other thing and then mix it and see what happens? That might be good.” And there’s been a lot of failures. I think earlier I was looking through my Instagram feed, seeing the pastries that I used to make before. And obviously, I’ve grown so much as a baker. I continue to learn every day, the journey never ends. There’s always a new ingredient or a new technique or a new way of cooking things. And that’s also exciting.

Ashley: I want to talk a little bit about the store, because the last time that I went to Loba you had, you had a vigil to Breonna Taylor and to Vanessa Guillén and that is incredibly powerful. I was wondering if you could talk about, how do you imbue yourself into the space? Because it feels very personal when you go into Loba, it feels like it is your coffee shop.

Valeria: I think it’s because it’s been my home—it is an extension of me. I’ve spent so much time there that it’s part of me, too.

The vigil was an altar for Day of the Dead. It’s popped into the pop culture here in the U.S., but growing up, it was a very regular thing to do. Even though it’s super traditional, I never saw it as something antiquated. We would make them at home. We would make them in school, it’s part of my life and the way that I grew up.

It’s another thing that also centers on food. And I don’t know if you can tell, but I love food and food is so important to me. It’s definitely my love language, if that one exists. Day of the Dead is an important tradition that I want to keep alive the same way that I did growing up.

And for anybody who doesn’t know, you make an altar for someone who has passed away either a long time ago or recently. Some people call it ofrenda because you make an offering for these people because, for this one night, it is believed that there’s a portal that opens in between this world and the other worlds. And for one night people that have passed can visit their loved ones, if they are only guided to where they should be.

And it’s a joyous occasion. Of course, Breonna Taylor and Vanessa Guillén were murdered in the worst possible circumstances. And that’s why I wanted to celebrate their spirits in whichever way that I could. I don’t think it’s about what is real and what isn’t and this mystical thing. It’s just a celebration and respect for anybody. And hopefully they found the little altar and had some pan de muerto and a bite of the avocado and everything else that I put on the altar.

Ashley: What do you want people to know about you listening to this?

Valeria: Oh, I don't know.

Ashley: I have to imagine that you know your story in and out. Maybe this is me getting—I have Areli from Little Waves in my head, so I’m just going to get a little meta—I have to imagine, listening to you talk about your story and tell your story, you’ve told your story, you know it in and out.

And it feels like you seem to identify very specific parts of your story to the current moment that you’re living in. So I feel like you understand its importance very deeply, and that’s why you feel so comfortable telling it. So I wonder, you must know that people look to you as an inspiration and could feel kind of uncomfortable to reckon with, but that’s kind of just like my meta assessment of this moment. But I wonder, as you tell your story and as you are on a platform like this, or you give an interview for a magazine or an article, like when people look at you, what do you want them to feel?

Valeria: Maybe a little bit of hope. And also a little bit of anger and resistance, because as much as I’ve had this opportunity, it wasn’t easy. It was not easy. There were a lot of people that stood between me and my goals and my desires. So, the angst—I like to joke that a punk is a punk and I’ll never get old in that sense. But the angst does shift course, and I’m still angry, but I am not directing that anger to myself or to people—maybe to the establishment.

And there’s hope. You can’t lose hope, you can’t give in. It is difficult and it is hard, but what else are you going to do? Try and maybe try harder and give it your best.

Ashley: I think for me, that’s one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned from this conversation, to just try—because you never know.

Valeria: Yeah. You never know. Now I can say that you have to be open to failure and it’s not the end of the world. The biggest lessons that I’ve learned in business and in this life have been through failure. Like I’ve failed miserably and massively in making recipes and running a business, and every time that I fail, I learned something new. And that also keeps me going.

Ashley: Valeria, thank you so much for taking time to talk to me. Before we end though, because you said this off the air and I want you to say it on the air: Can you say your full name for me?

Valeria: My born, given name is Maria del Socorro Valeria Rebeca Ballado Velazquez.

Ashley: Thank you. I wanted to make sure that that was on the record.

Valeria: A story about that: I became a citizen a few years ago. My stepdad, I call him my dad cause he’s been my father figure. He’s an American-born person and he married my mom when I was 15. That’s why I ended up in the U.S.—I never wanted to. But since he is my dad, I decided to take his last name when I became a citizen to honor the respect that I feel for him. So I didn’t mean to whitewash my name so much. I didn’t realize the repercussions. And it’s funny, everybody, a lot of people, think that I maybe am not Mexican when I feel so, so Mexican. But yeah, that’s where my last name comes from, and you know, I’m not ashamed of it. I love my stepdad. And I don’t know, that’s where I’m at.

Ashley: That’s where you’re at. And you shouldn’t have to justify the choices that you make. So f**k that. Do whatever the f**k you want. Thank you again for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it.

Valeria: This was great. Thank you for giving me the time and the platform.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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Life is especially hard right now. We’re in the ninth month of a global pandemic, the days are getting shorter and colder and darker, and the dread of the current moment can sometimes feel paralyzing. Against that backdrop, how do you take a step forward in any direction—and how do you know if that step is right?

The short answer is that, even though you can’t know the results before you start moving, taking a step in any direction is often enough to shake something loose. Carlos Sims Jr. believes in action—in forward motion, in building momentum, and in taking steps to actualize the vision of the world he wants to create.

Carlos’ enterprising attitude is not without consideration. He’s the owner of Happy Home Coffee Roasters, a business centered around his identity as a family man. His children are on the bags of coffee beans, his family proudly displayed on the company’s homepage. He’s had to make a lot of careful decisions about who he is and how he wants to share his story, eschewing trends or fears about what’s “cool” to create a business that feels true to him.

Carlos is a fanny-pack-touting, minivan-driving dad, and you’ll hear us talk about what it means to be your authentic self. We spend this episode swapping stories, waxing poetic about the less-than-glamorous aspects of a shared childhood in Florida (him in Jacksonville, me in Miami), and talking a lot about action. We also discuss how to make your dreams and projects tangible. Risk is scary, life is uncertain, but the exciting thing about action—about taking a step in any direction—is the guarantee that something, that change, is about to happen.

Ashley: Carlos, I was wondering if you could describe where you are right now.

Carlos: I am in Jacksonville, Florida, the home of where my coffee journey began.

Ashley: Is that the official banner that you see as you leave the airport? (laughs)

Carlos: (laughs) I'm not that important.

Ashley: I remember, just because you’ve lived in Florida too—so I feel like this is Florida people talking Florida, but when that Will Smith song came out, every time you’d go to the airport, you’d see like this big banner that said, “Welcome to Miami.”

Carlos: Yeah. That's so funny. Big Willie Style. I had that on cassette. That’s so fun.

Ashley: I think I had that on CD, but that might’ve been one of the very first CDs I ever bought. Like, I bought it for myself because I was an “independent kid” and I was like, “Yeah, I'm buying this.”

Are you drinking anything right now?

Carlos: Just had some coffee and right now I’m drinking some water. I’m trying to get better at that. My wife gets on me all the time. So yeah, trying to. It’s actually nice natural Florida spring water too. So Zephyrhills, shout out.

Ashley: I do love that Zephyrhills. Oh my God—I miss Florida so much, which is a phrase I never thought I’d say as often as I say.

Carlos: You know, we were driving down the beach the other day—we were social distancing and so we had a little car picnic in the car down near the beach and I was telling my wife, I was like, “Man, I am kicking myself for not coming down here more often. It’s like 30 minutes away from where I live and right at my fingertips, and I never came.”

Ashley: Yeah, same. Growing up in Miami, I lived pretty much as far away as possible from the beach. So when people are like, “Oh, did you go to the beach all the time?” I was like, “No, I lived like almost in the swamp. I lived almost right by the Everglades.”

I lived only a couple blocks from Alligator Alley and I just never went to the beach partially because I didn’t have a car until the summer right before I left for college. But every time I go back to Miami now—obviously I haven’t been back in a couple of years—but every time I go back now, I’m like, this place rules.

It is pretty weird. There are no rules here. Everyone’s just, like everything that I would never do—like I have a thing about flip flops. I don’t like wearing flip-flops, but I’m like, nope, there are no rules here, my toes are out. Which is great. I love Miami so much and I love Florida so much.

Carlos: That’s so funny. Flip flops: Never in Chicago, but always in Miami.

Ashley: This is actually the second time that we have recorded a podcast together. We did the Matchbook Coffee Podcast together and we talked about a lot of really interesting themes but at a very surface level. I wanted to have you back and talk about some of these bigger ideas on this show.

So, just to give folks some background, can you talk a little bit about Happy Home [Coffee Roasters] and your roastery and how you got started?

Carlos: So my background is in hospitality. I was a hospitality director and catering sales director for Chick-fil-A. My path was to own one, owner operatorship, whatever you want to say. Basically, I was going to own my own Chick-fil-A. That was my path.

We had just moved to a new city. We were in Des Moines, Iowa at the time. I got plugged in with my local church and was really just loving the city and this path was just going to take me away from it. As I was looking for opportunities to stay [in Des Moines], a non-profit coffee shop was opening and they needed an assistant manager and trainer. And I was like, well, I don’t know that much about coffee, but I know I’m really good with people. I think I can figure it out.

And I think I would love to start roasting. That was the caveat: If I came on, then I would have to eventually take on the head roaster position. Two weeks in, I was behind the roaster practicing. It was a Dietrich IR7. I was practicing on some really old stale beans and I just fell in love with the science and the process. Fast forward three years later, that actually ended up being one of my worst jobs I ever had.

Ashley: We don’t ever talk about bad jobs here at Boss Barista. That's something … no, I’m kidding!

Carlos: I mean, I’m not going to go down that rabbit hole. I don’t want to offend anybody. I just recognized that I needed to make a change. I had been trying to stay at that company, having negotiations about my salary, just really trying to figure out ways that I could retire there.

Because I really loved what was doing. I was in the Blackest part of the city. I was rubbing shoulders with people. I was introducing this community to coffee and I love what I was doing. But the organization that I was working for was mainly upper-class white men and [I noticed] a lot of the things that I was like, “Hey, we shouldn’t do this, we shouldn’t do this,” and it was just ignored.

At the end of the day, I was just tired of being silenced. Then I was like, I’m going to start this on my own. I’m going to create a company that I can be proud of that really reflects my values and who I am.

And there was one day over dinner where me and my wife were just spitballing and I was like, what should call it? We thought about Legacy Coffee. We thought about Heritage Coffee. And I was like, “I just want to create a happy home—happy home!”

Our eyes got super big. And we were like, that’s it. I felt like it was super simple, but also profound. So that was March of 2019.

We applied for the LLC, and around that time we were debating on moving to Hawaii. I was a pastor at a church and I’ve always had a desire to start a church in Hawaii. And so, we were like, “We’ve got one life—I don’t want to live my life with regrets and what could have been.”

And I was like, the worst thing that happens is we try to move to Hawaii, we move there and all this fails and we’re stuck in Hawaii. So we just pulled the trigger on that. In June of 2019, I left that job, making about 43 grand a year salary, benefits, and started working two baristas jobs and building my business on the side.

That’s where I’m at now. I’m not working those barista jobs anymore. We’ve since moved to Michigan where my wife’s family graciously allowed us to stay in their basement while we plan to save for our move to Hawaii, which we bought tickets a couple of months back for August 16 of next year.

Ashley: There are so many amazing nuggets in there about forward motion and taking advantage of the one life that you have. I think when I talk to people about mistakes, and not to say that there are any mistakes that you’ve outlined or anything like that, but the idea that … what’s the worst thing that can happen if you move to Hawaii and it sucks?

Carlos: I don't know where I get that from. I am a visionary, I am always five years in the future and which sometimes is to my detriment. I just really … I want to not just passively let life pass me by. My faith informs a lot of that but a lot of it too is just my personality. I want to pursue things and I want to make a difference. I want, at the end of my life, I want people to look at me and the things that I’ve accomplished and see that the world is better because of the things that I’ve tried to pursue.

These moves don’t seem as daunting to me as probably my wife, who is like, okay, I trust you. Like, let’s just talk about this a little bit more. But she’s super supportive as well.

Ashley: That’s really cool. I love that.

You talked about the idea of wanting to look back on your life and think, “Look at what I’ve accomplished,” or, “Look at the things that I’ve done,” because I think it’s easy to forget that we look upon moments of action rather than moments of inaction.

Carlos: That’s really good. I don’t know if I've ever thought about it like that. I’m going to write that down.

Ashley: I think I might write that down too. You know, when you say something, you’re like, where’d that come from?

This reminds me of this moment when … I was living in New York and then I was offered a job in San Francisco and I really debated if should I take this job? And I was like, “What’s the worst thing that could happen? What’s the worst thing that can happen? Could I come back to New York?” Absolutely. “Could I maybe love San Francisco?” Absolutely. “Could I hate San Francisco?” Yes.

And I actually really hated it. I ended up leaving that job within a year, but you have to remember that the things that happen in your life, everything’s like a series in motion. If I hadn’t moved to San Francisco, I wouldn’t have met Jasper, who was the first co-host of Boss Barista. Would I be doing what I’m doing [now]? Would I be here in this moment right now if I didn’t make that decision to do that—and not to say that another pathway isn’t valid. Maybe I’d still be in New York doing barista work that I loved, because I left a job that I really loved when I was in New York. But I don’t know. I think about all the paths. I always think about the timeline.

Carlos: Yeah, I know. Have you seen “Community?”

Ashley: Yes! (squeals) Sorry. I love that episode.

Carlos: It’s like, what timeline are we living there right now? Oh man. We can nerd out about that stuff all day.

Ashley: I know. I agree. I think about that episode maybe once every 36 hours. I’m like, “Oh God, what timeline am I on?” I think a lot about the hundred thousand ways your life can unfold. And in certain ways, I think about the one that I’m on and I think this might not be the right one—there’s no way to objectively determine what’s the right timeline—but it’s kind of cool to think that life can just unfold in so many different ways. So it’s exciting sometimes.

Carlos: I think that’s why living with intentionality is so key, because all of our choices, all of the decisions that we make or even the decisions that we don’t make, they all have an effect to some account, and they all always affect someone else. Even the posts that you put out, the “we are not family” joint, those actions have repercussions and not being active has repercussions as well. It’s a ripple effect.

Ashley: I’m glad that you brought up the “we’re not a family” thing because one of the reasons I wanted to revisit our conversation [from the Matchbook podcast] is that we touched very briefly on the idea of family. I think you and I have perhaps a different perspective on the way that family language is used and it’s not necessarily an opposition.

Because something that you mentioned is that you want to build family and you want to build community. It seems like those words are kind of tied together. But when I posted that message on Instagram, I posted a graphic that just said, “We Are Not a Family.” You mentioned that some of that language has been problematic for you in the past. So I was wondering if you could talk about your relationship to that kind of rhetoric.

Carlos: I think when it comes to the workforce, as a Black man in the workforce and especially in service jobs, I think the whole notion of upper management using the term, “Hey guys, we're family, let’s all unify,” it almost feels like this like slave/master mentality of like, “Hey, stay in line. I have this job for you here.”

I don’t know. It just rubs me the wrong way when it comes to employment, because it’s like, “Hey, you’re providing me a service, but I’m also providing your service as well.” It’s not like it’s different from actual family. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m being as clear, I apologize.

Ashley: No, I think you’re being super clear, because there is this idea when you use familial language in the workplace where it obscures what’s actually happening. Labor is a trade. I’m trading my labor for money. And when you use that kind of language like, “Oh, we’re a family,” you’re trying to change that relationship a little bit, I think. And I think it’s almost always to the detriment of employees, and then adding the layer of who is often at the bottom of the employment rung—it’s often people of color and it’s often marginalized people. So it’s used as a way to manipulate the most vulnerable.

Carlos: Yes, yes. I understand there are going to be people who would disagree with me on this, but I’m just going to say: I think that, especially as a Black man, like me building my family is how I think the Black community as a whole is going to move forward—because so much of American history has been, “We’re going to annihilate the family.” We’re going to separate the fathers from the family, which we still see trickles from that now. Not a lot of … a lot of concerns. I’m sorry, I’m just thinking through like, you know…

Ashley: No, but you’re totally right. The idea of mass incarceration. I think it’s one in every three young Black men—I’m not sure exactly what the age range is—but I think it’s something like one in three will be in prison at some point in their life.

Carlos: Which is nuts. We’re 17% of the population, right? Like this is nuts. So I really do think that the cultivation of the family is what is going to continue the Black legacy in America. But I also recognize too that when it comes to employment and all this stuff, it’s just different. It’s not family. I mean, what you said is true is like that familiar language is used to … what’s the word I’m looking for? To say in a nice way, bend someone from your will, to leave people not asking questions, to leave employees just to stay silent when issues come up and it’s just straight-up bogus.

Ashley: Absolutely. Yeah. But I love that you’ve identified this need to almost reclaim it as part of your narrative and your identity, because when you look at Happy Home, number one, it talks about home, which lends itself perhaps to talking about family. How did you start to think about what you wanted your business to be? Because you go to your website and there’s a picture of your family right there. Your kids are on your bags.

Carlos: I think it all kind of stems from growing up. So growing up without my father, raised by my mother and my grandmother, I’ve always said this: I want to start a family. When I transitioned to my business, I just recognize that in order for this business to thrive and to be life-giving for myself, I have to be authentically who I am—and I drive a minivan. I have three kids, I wear fanny packs for diapers and wipes. That’s just who I am. I love my family. I guess representing that in my business was pretty easy because it’s just who I am.

I’ve thrown around the idea of, when I first started off just trying to be more minimalist, because, as an art form, I leaned toward that. At the end of the day, my family is so important to me, and so integral to who I am as a man, as a person—I just felt like I had to be authentically who I am.

It was kind of easy in that regard, I had to embrace it because I wanted to be taken seriously as a company. I want to be taken seriously as a coffee roaster. I had some hesitations of being this family coffee business because I didn’t want to just market to soccer moms. I didn’t want to just have my coffee be for people who only watch HGTV and all this stuff. At the end of the day, I just had to be like, “Okay, I’m just going to be who I am and then just trust that the coffee will speak for itself.”

Ashley: That’s an interesting debate that you had to have in your head—that you leading with family or you leading with how important your family is to you might disqualify you from being taken seriously, which shouldn’t be the case, but clearly you thought it could.

Carlos: Yeah. I mean, you don’t see it, right? You don’t see a lot of—I shouldn’t say “you”—I didn’t see, and I still don’t, see a ton of celebration of family. And a lot of that is just sometimes family sucks. Family is hard, but I didn’t see a lot of them, especially when it came to products, not just like coffee, but like excellently roasted coffee. Coffee that was ethically sourced. I didn’t see it.

It was more like most people will have a bag, and it’s no shade to anybody who has this as a coffee business, but as I would survey, especially coffee roasters and especially coffee roasters that I loved and admired, it was like a black or white bag, some sort of color coordination with the region where [the coffee is] from. And I was just super … man, I do not mean to offend anybody when I say this. So I apologize.

But it felt to me super sterile and that was my experience walking into coffee shops, too. It didn’t really feel like there was any life here. When I thought, “Man, I think I want to put our kids on these coffee bags,” I was like, I don’t know how this is going to be received because it’s not what I see, but it has been received really well. I’m so glad that I took the initiative to do that.

Ashley: I think you’re identifying this descent into sameness that coffee has where you go into any coffee shop and it could be anywhere or done by anybody because they all look the same. And that’s not necessarily the fault of the people designing coffee shops, but it’s the fault of—this is me getting a little social commie—but it’s this idea of quality being prized above all else. The idea that we celebrate these capitalistic endeavors to be one version of what is good. There is no celebration of diversity in a lot of different ways. That’s why we see coffee shops that look [the same]: repurposed, reclaimed wood and, like, wrought iron pipes.

Carlos: I know what you mean. Me and my wife have been having this discussion because part of us wanting to Hawaii is we want to start a church out there and we’ve been having a discussion of, for us to be truly successful, we have to be super local. Everything that we do has to make sense for the context in which we’re trying to reach people or the context we’re trying to serve coffee to. I would love to see coffee shops incorporate that too. You got a coffee shop in a super suburban place, which is all dope, like good for you, but I would love for coffee shops to reflect their local communities.

Ashley: There’s this book that I read called “How To Do Nothing.” And at first, I read it because I need to do less. But as I was reading it, the author talked about the idea of bioregionalism and how it applied to nature but took some of the lessons from nature into the way that we operate in the world.

Perhaps I’m misconstruing the argument a little bit, but I’ll take it for what I need it for. But it reminded me that the things that we love often are unique to us and they should serve the community. So the coffee shop that I love, for example, it’s called Four Letter Word. I love it because it’s a reflection of my community. And if you put Four Letter Word somewhere else, it wouldn’t make sense. And likewise, let’s say you came to visit me and I said, “This is why I love this coffee shop,” you wouldn’t love it for the same reasons I do.

Carlos: Yeah. That’s so good. Even when I thought about starting my business, I was like, this business makes sense for who I am. It’s like a happy home. I really believe it does. It is who I am. I love dancing to “The Lion King” in the living room with my kids. I love cultivating family rhythms. We do a Shabbat dinner every Friday night where we get the kids like sparkling wine or grape juice but like sparkling wine. And we just celebrate family and we can talk about the week and things that made us happy and the things that made us sad. That’s just who I am. Apart from coffee. I need to get that book. I’m gonna write it down right now.

Ashley: I feel like I need to send it. I like sending books to people. So maybe after this, I’ll get your address to send it to you.

I wanted to talk to you though about that—the blurring of those lines. Because I can imagine with your business being so entrenched in your family and the way that you operate your life that it can feel kind of muddy sometimes. Where’s the line between work and home? Where’s the line between roasting and family? I wonder—does that ever feel overwhelming?

Carlos: I think COVID has intensified it because mostly I’m working from home. My in-laws built us a roasting facility on their property, which has been really dope, but it’s like, “Daddy is home all the time,” so, that’s been hard for the kids to see me, but they can’t be with me.

So that's been tough, but I try to set pretty clear guidelines. So on voicemail it says, “Hey, my name is Carlos. Thanks for calling. If it’s after 4 p.m., I am with my family. I will call you tomorrow.” I have to set those boundaries because I failed at that in the past, when I was at the coffee shop that I mentioned earlier.

I would be screening phone calls at 9 p.m. and on the phone trying to make my coffee orders at 10 p.m. or I’d need to put my kids down, but I go and take a phone call and it was just super unhealthy. I’ve made pretty clear parameters on family time. The biggest part is nighttime, after 4 p.m., I worked from 8 to 4, and then from 4 to when kids go down, I’m on dad mode. After the kids go down, I’m there with my wife, and then she goes to sleep. And if I’m not sleepy, then I’ll maybe do [work] stuff, but most of the time I just fall asleep.

Ashley: Those are boundaries that I need to hear because I’m, if I’m being totally frank, I’m struggling with that right now. I’m not sure 100% what that looks like, and I’m sure that you probably grapple with this in your mind to this idea that if you’re not working, you feel … bad. I was wondering how do you deal with that? Because I haven’t figured it out.

Carlos: Honestly, a lot of my faith informs that. I mean, if you don’t mind me sharing, I can share.

Ashley: Go for it.

Carlos: So as a Christian, the Bible teaches that God created the world and on the seventh day he rested and it’s not because dad was super exhausted and he’s like, “Oh my gosh, I need to take a break. I need to put my feet up a little bit.” It was like God looked back on to his creation. And he marveled at the work that he did. And so when God chose to create us, I believe that he gives us rest so that we can be reminded of the goodness of his blessings in our lives. And that’s not to say that life is all peachy keen, right?

The reason I’m in Florida right now is because my grandmother’s going through chemotherapy, and it just sucks. I haven’t been able to see her because of COVID. Um, so it’s not to say that life is like peaches and cream or whatever, but rest really is a gift to remind us that God is looking out for us that he cares for our wellbeing and our mental health.

There have been a couple of books I can share with you when we get offline that have really helped inform me of that. A lot of spiritual practices, like meditation and the art of saying no, that really helped me. I’m an overworker—I can work 60 hours, 60, 70 hours, like it was nothing, but it’s not healthy for me. Everyone hates me when I work [too much].

I think to sum up everything I’m saying, rest is hard. It’s work, you have to work to rest. You have to intentionally plan to [rest], but I’ve seen the benefits of it, and it’s been hard, and I’m still trying to get better at it. But recognizing that if I’m not rested, I’m not really going to be that helpful to anyone that I actually want to help. So, um, yeah.

Ashley: That’s a good point. I feel like the last book I read on work and spirituality was in college. I read “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” which is kind of the opposite. It’s like, God loves you because you work hard. And it’s like, oh—this is how America was founded.

Carlos: That is not—that is false. Oh my gosh. I hate that.

Ashley: Oh, I hated that book. And I still hate it, but it was one of those books that they made you read in college and then you read the “The Communist Manifesto,” and you’re like, “Oh, this is the opposite.”

One of the things that I love to talk about is money and how people start their businesses. Something that you mentioned before we got on the air is that you wanted to build your business debt-free. So I was wondering if you could talk about what that meant for you.

Carlos: It means a lot of—it means a slow, slow growth, is what it essentially means. Because of systemic racism, the Black community as a whole is not well educated in finances. That’s why I love, you had her own here, @coffeeandtax.

Ashley: Tiani, yes!

Carlos: I love that account and her business because it really is a need, especially in Black communities. Because of that, I didn’t grow up hearing about savings and investments or any of this stuff, like this stuff I heard in college. I’m like, “What do you mean? You’ve got a savings account?”

I should say we didn’t start debt-free. When I started my business, I didn’t even know how to go about gaining capital and this … I mean, I feel so embarrassed to even say this, but maybe it’ll help somebody else. I took out a couple of credit cards and that’s how we paid for green coffee. That’s how we paid for my small, I had a Huky 500 [roaster], and that’s how we paid for that when we first started.

I was seeing the toll that it was taking on my family, the first six months of our business, I was like, man, I gotta do something different. I picked up this book by Dave Ramsey. I don’t agree with everything he said—oh, well, a lot of what he says—but a lot of the meat and potatoes of what he’s saying is you don’t have to be in debt to be financially literate.

I was like, okay, let’s just try to do this. And so we paid off all the credit cards. We live off of whatever we make from the business, the business lives on whatever we make from the business. I’ll just be transparent. I think being transparent about numbers is really good.

We’ll take home like 65% of our monthly sales. I say take home, but I mean that’s our model: We’re going to take 65% of our monthly sales and 35% will be thrown back into savings. For us, what we did was we saw our tax return from last year, [we saw it as] an opportunity to reinvest into our business. So the full tax return that we got, we just threw it right back into the business. So that’s how I bought our coffee roaster. That’s why we got a smaller coffee roaster because it’s all we could afford. We’ve just kinda been like, “Hey, we’re gonna grow this thing slow.”

Which has been really hard because a lot of the people in the coffee industry that I love—you’ve got Favor Coffee with Christina, who was a Glitter Cat, you have Ethnos Coffee, which I’m really cool with. You have Bartholomew [Jones] with Cxffeeblack—all of these people are growing. And we are not growing as fast because we’re just committed to being debt-free for the sake of my family, but also for the sake of just stewarding our money well.

I feel like I’m rambling a lot. I just don’t want to be a slave to credit card companies, debt companies. We recently just got approved for a bigger roaster, and I was so tempted to be like, “Let’s just do it. We need this. We need a bigger roaster.” I’m spending 10, 12 hours behind our little roaster now.

But our philosophy has forced me to be creative, right? And so to say, “Okay, we said we weren’t going to be in debt. So how are we going to get a bigger roaster?” And then I was like, “Oh, well let me just reach out to some people and see if they can rent their roaster.” Now we’ve partnered with Stovetop Roasters in Grand Rapids, Michigan. They’re allowing us to rent their roaster, shoutout to them.

It’s hard. I wish that I could say that it’s not, because I would rather just take out this loan and just keep moving. I think in the long-term we will love what we’ve done as far as being debt-free.

Ashley: I think you’ve identified something that I also really love: the idea that you’ve had to get really creative. I think creativity actually really flourishes when forced into confinement. If you set rules for yourself like I can only do these certain things … the rules you have are, I can only move forward if I can do it debt-free. And in those moments, even though they feel like you’re really limiting your ability to do certain things, it actually forces you to do other things in a completely different way.

Carlos: It’s a huge issue in the coffee industry, right? We’re the second-largest industry behind oil. And yet, it’s predominantly dominated by not people of color. There’s a huge issue of getting funding. That’s why I love getchusomegear. I love what they’re doing with those grants. These organizations that are recognizing that there’s a gap between … it’s not because there’s a lack of people of color who have the skills in our industry. It’s really a lot of times funding and information. A lot of stuff is held tight and in secret. Like man, that’s not how the industry gets better. Any industry gets better as ideas are shared and people are challenged. Creativity has to come along.

Ashley: Absolutely. Number one, I’m glad you identified getchusomegear, which is doing some amazing things with redistributing wealth and providing resources. But two, it’s not for a lack of talent and it’s not for a lack of people who want to be part of the conversation.

So much of coffee’s forward movement right now seems to be people who have access to capital, and we’re leaving out so many people who would contribute so beautifully to the industry by saying, “This is the only way.” I feel like your business model is showing that there are other ways to do this, and this is how I’m doing it.

Carlos: And it won’t be as fast. Like, I’m a millennial, as a millennial, I want things right now, I want to go viral, I want this thing to happen, pop off real quick when in reality, that’s not realistic, things take time. I’ve been trying to intentionally step back from social media so that I can have a realistic view of what is a realistic expectation for a business. Being in my second year … I’m in a good spot.

Ashley: I mean, that’s a pretty good place to end, that you’re in a good spot. Carlos, thank you for taking the time to talk with me. I appreciate it.

Carlos: Thank you for having me on—this was, this was a blessing.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

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This interview was originally published on October 25, 2020.

“Sonder” isn’t a word that you hear often, probably because it was only coined in 2012, as part of John Koenig’s Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. It’s one of hundreds of melancholy neologisms, and Koenig defines it as: “The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness.”

Of these many bittersweet feelings, “sonder” might align best with the experience of going to a coffee shop. After all, coffee shops are universal meeting places—places where you can sit and contemplate, where you can see friends, where you can watch others come and go during breaks from your laptop screen. They’re places where you’re likely to bump up against many new people, and where you have more time and space than usual to reflect on those encounters.

Shanita Nicholas and Amanda-Jane Thomas are the co-owners of Sip & Sonder in Inglewood, Los Angeles. They chose to incorporate “sonder” into the name of their business because their space is much more than just somewhere to get coffee. It’s also a neighborhood meet-up spot, a local hub, a shop that residents can claim as their own. It’s meant to reflect the needs of the community it’s in.  

I first chatted with Shanita and Amanda in 2018, when they shared their initial mission for Sip & Sonder. The two first met in New York, when they worked as lawyers in Manhattan. Quickly, they discovered that their dreams, although seemingly dissimilar, actually aligned perfectly. Ultimately, they decided to combine their visions, take the leap, and open up their own place in California.  

Well before they ever served their first coffee, Shanita and Amanda focused on community and place-making. They started the LA Black Investors Club, bridging the gap between Black creators and access to capital. They partnered with local businesses, including with folks who later become their neighbors. And they continue to operate their space with an ever-evolving lens today, focusing on what their community needs, right now, in real time.  

“Sonder” really is the ideal word to attribute to them. They’re both always looking outward, always discovering something new—even in this conversation. This is an interview that should leave you feeling rejuvenated and motivated. Hopefully, it’ll encourage you to look outward, too, and spend more time wondering about the complex lives of others.

Ashley: To kick us off, can you both introduce yourselves?Shanita: My name is Shanita Nicholas. I'm one of the co-founders of Sip & Sonder.

Amanda: I'm Amanda-Jane Thomas, also one of the co-founders. So happy to be talking with you, Ashley.

Ashley: I'm so excited to talk to the two of you. And I've been thinking about this word a lot. What does “sonder” mean to both of you?Shanita: Yeah, it's such a special word—so special that we named our entire shop after it. The full definition—how it’s colloquially defined—is the realization that everyone around you is living their own unique lives, have their own ambitions. Really the sense of being both an individual in this moving world but also being connected to each person that we encounter, whether it's an actual physical connection or just an awareness of one another.

You know, that was an energy and a feel that we really wanted the shop to develop and to be part of the experience of walking into Sip & Sonder. You can be here and you can be by yourself, or you can meet up with friends, or you can really just engage in the community at large in such an open way.

Amanda-Jane: And it's really cool because, you know, we're all so different, right?We all are living different lives. We live across different places, different routines, different … just everything! And even in me saying that the focus is often on just how different everyone is and we all are.

But you know, it's really about, “What does it mean to have empathy and what is that point of connection?” And I think that it's like, even if someone living across the country appears to have a different life on paper—I may not know the specifics of their story and their ins and outs, but I can relate to the fact that their life may be busy. They have different obligations, they have different passions, and whatever that is, I might not know it intricately, but the point of connection where it's like, I can empathize with someone that has a life that's full of their own worries and routines and craziness and ups and downs. It's that realization itself—that's sonder—that is that starting point of connection. It's such an awesome concept because it really is that entryway to like, OK, how can you connect to folks? Even folks that maybe, on paper, might seem so different to you—it's that entryway. And that's kind of what we, with Sip & Sonder as a space, a physical space, this is that entryway to connect. And how are people doing it? They're doing it over amazing coffee. Just the word was something that resonated with [Shanita] and I so much, um, so much so that we named a coffeehouse after it! Ashley: It’s such an evocative term. Like you can imagine somebody in your coffee shop sitting and looking around and being like, “What is everybody else experiencing in their life?” It's so easy to visualize what that feeling is.Shanita: Yeah, absolutely. We've done that ourselves when we were fully open.

I think of that first day that someone walked in to come to this coffee house that we didn't know. They were not connected to us in any way. And then it became like, “What's their story? what are they doing here today?” And that just continued to grow as we were in the community for longer and longer. I kept looking around and seeing people who were drawing amazing artwork or on their computers and doing music with their headphones on, or reading … one of the things that I know I miss a lot about being open is having those moments of just seeing how other people are being.

Amanda-Jane: And coffee shops are so amazing for that.

A coffee shop is somewhere that you can go by yourself if you so desire. Just grab a seat and completely be lost in your own world, observing, taking in everything, or you can meet with people or connect or what have you. But the opportunity to just sort of have a moment where you are by yourself and you’re gazing around and really, you know, you're seeing people … it’s such an awesome experience.

And then with the thought of, you know, “sonder” specifically, if someone's in our space, it's like, you're just scanning the room and you're like, “Wow, everyone is just completely up to amazing things on their own.” It's this kind of awesome moment where you're just like, “Wow, there's so much happening,” but it's also this almost weird feeling where you feel connected in a way because you're part of it as well. Someone might be gazing at you and being like, “You know, I wonder what they're up to. I wonder what they're up to, I wonder what’s going on in their life.”As much as you're doing that yourself, you're part of that collectively for other people as well.Ashley: I was just thinking about moments in my own life where I've sat at a coffee shop or worked at one because I've worked in a couple of coffee shops in my time. And I'm thinking about those moments where you give a little bit to somebody else—just a little bit of a thread and it almost unspools as an entire story. That's how friendships are created. That's how partnerships are made. That's how these big things that feel small [start].

I was wondering if there are moments in your own lives, that “sonder” moment that really affected you or something that you can think back on and say, “Oh yeah, that actually did transform my life or did make a big change for me.”Shanita: I'm thinking in my head—one thing that I know led me to even talking with Amanda about my dreams and my goals even before Sip & Sonder was even a Sip & Sonder, was the idea of talking about our passions and what we were interested in. We were both working as attorneys—we still work as attorneys—but at our respective law firms, taking that moment to connect with another person [was important].

And that in that conversation, there was no way we would have imagined that that would have ended up where we are now and the partnership that we've been able to build and the space that we built together. But having that moment of connection and vulnerability to one another, to talk about what those passions are. That alone has changed my trajectory in so many ways.

To have created a space where others can continue to have that option, that connecting points … I’ve seen through scrolling on Instagram—more time to do that then I had before—but there are individuals that are posting up their new businesses or their networks and [I’m] seeing Sip & Sonder in the background. It's like, wow. Not even knowing that was something that was happening behind the scenes and hearing about other people connecting in that way—it's certainly impactful for them, but it's impactful for us too.

I think [it tells us to] keep going and that we're doing something right here. There are so many times when I talk to people who are in this space and they shape how I approach the rest of the day, and the same goes for them. There’s some momentum here. I'm encouraged, I'm inspired. I want to continue to inspire other people as well. Those little things can alter the shape of your day, your weeks, your months.Ashley: I wrote down this phrase: “We know that we're doing something right,” which made me think back to when I first started talking to you folks when you were first opening. So I wanted to go back a little bit and talk about how you decided to open up a coffee shop and what were some of the initial thoughts and concerns. What did you do when you've both decided like, “Oh, let's, let's do something together. Let's form this partnership. But what are we going to do? What's the next step?”Shanita: I kind of go back to that conversation I was talking about, musing about my coffee enthusiasm, talking about my favorite coffee shops and how cool it would be to own one or to be able to be in that space. And hearing Amanda [talk about] at the time initially, what felt like a completely disparate passion kind of—[I’ll let Amanda] speak on that and, but our passions kind of came together.

Amanda-Jane: It's funny because, you know, full disclosure, I probably never would have imagined—I always envisioned doing the kind of work that we're doing now but didn't see that and envision that it would be in the eyes of a coffee shop. When Shanita and I would talk about what we were passionate about she shared her passion for coffee and my history with coffee was a little different.

I didn't really frequent as many coffee houses growing up. And part of that was those not being present in the communities that I grew up in, in the ones that I did visit, I really appreciated having a space where I could kind of be lost in my own thoughts and gaze out the window.

I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and went to high school in Manhattan. That kind of bustle, really having the experience. I'd hear about other folks, even in talking to Shanita, having that experience to be in those spaces and wanting almost that experience for myself. As an undergraduate, part of what I studied was sociology, and I really spent a lot of time thinking about how societies develop and how communities develop and spent time thinking through the development of communities and urban development.The thoughts that go into when communities are created and planned out and the idea of place-making is one of the things that's on the table. What is our approach to the design of these communities with public open accessible spaces and why are they important? The reason ultimately is the way that they contribute to people's happiness and well-being.

The well-being and the health and joy of a community. You know, when someone's like, okay, “This is the design. We're going to have a park here, we're gonna have an open recreation area here,” coffee shops are part of those designs. They occupy this third space. There's home, there's school or work, but there's this other space outside of those two that's open, that's public access.We’re bought into this design because of all of the great things that can come from those spaces, right? Creation, connection, you know, it's just all of the above. So in use talking about our respective passions and my background within the creative space—art and culture being something that I wanted to be able to explore more—it was like this moment where even though they seem, at first mention, disparate—coffee over here, community space with art and culture on the other side—they really were, in us discussing more, completely aligned.

Coffee is such an amazing conduit to have that connection. That’s just the starting point for all the good stuff that comes out of having a space like Sip & Sonder. No matter where you're from—what town, what city—at some point in your life, you either said yourself or had someone say to you, “Let's grab a cup of coffee.” Whether they were a coffee drinker or not, whether they were into specialty coffee or just your run-of-the-mill coffee, that's a phrase. It's something, like that idea of “sonder,” we can all kind of relate to.In us talking and having that discourse and having that realization, I think between the two of us we realized that they're perfectly aligned and that it makes sense. Now it's so hard to see them divorced—coffee from the space we have. It's hard to see a world where we didn't see that.Shanita: I think it's so interesting hearing you talk about all the good things that compromise a space. I think with coffee as a conduit in particular—and going back to what you were talking about a little earlier in the conversation on what does it mean to open a coffee shop in a predominantly Black and brown community—those initial discussions around gentrification, what does it mean for someone who's not from the community to open this type of space, that really starts to get people thinking, “Hey, there's someone coming in to take over or a displacement.”

That was something that was important [to think about for] both of us, because we not only understood that intellectually, but we experienced that. That was our lives growing up—Amanda in New York and between Brooklyn and Harlem, and seeing that over the place in D.C. and then when I moved to New York as well—that feeling of eventual and then actual displacement. It was balancing, and in those early-on conversations between the two of us, that balance of understanding all of the good things that come from the type of space that we wanted to create, and also the potential impact, even just that verbiage, that kind of space within the community that reflected our identities could have.

That alignment, I think, one: Both of us being aware of that and taking it very seriously, and then and all the other things that we individually are excited about that we kind of mutually become excited about really aligned for us in that way of thinking about how we were going to approach opening Sip & Sonder, especially in such a vibrant community that we weren't initially from. You know, we're not originally from here.Ashley: It's a pretty big deal that the two of you were colleagues at work and had these conversations—Shanita, you’re passionate about coffee, and Amanda-Jane, you're passionate about art and community. And you start having these conversations, realizing that you're in alignment—and then you decide to move cross-country together and open up a coffee shop. I mean, you must realize how big that is.

(Laughter)

Amanda-Jane: We're laughing because hearing it like that…

Shanita: No one has ever said it quite like that.

Amanda-Jane: I'm laughing. Like if someone told me that I'd be like, “That’s crazy!”

I think one of the things that Shanita and I also connected on was discussions of our passions and how those are actually one in the same. I think also a point of connection was—I think even to allow ourselves the time in this space to really discuss openly dreams and passions, I think that that came from a place of there being a similar sort of, “Think big and think boldly,” and kind of not really be confined by what is maybe thought of that we should be doing. Especially being attorneys by trade, where it's like, okay, being honest about having passions outside of the law and not being afraid to explore those.Part and parcel of that was like, well, while we're thinking big and while we're thinking completely outside the box, it goes even farther—imagining where this could be. It just so happened that in addition to having aligned passions, we both loved and wanted to be in Los Angeles. Shanita moved out to Los Angeles after we left the law firm that we met at. Actually, Sip & Sonder was born in one of her visits back. We’d keep in contact anytime she was in town, meet up, and just talk.So when we were like, “Okay, Sip & Sonder—so where do we, where are we going to do this?” I had been trying to move to California since I was in … well, before college, I thought that going to school out here was an easy transition into a new life in a new state. Didn't work out, long story short. I wasn't able to make it out for college. Then I moved back to New York after college, came, went back, didn't make it out here again for law school. So at that point, I was like, “Man, how am I going to get out there?”

It was complete happenstance that we both had this desire to even be out here. So when we were talking about where do we open Sip & Sonder, we were like, “Well …should we do it?” And I was just like, “Let’s just do it in Los Angeles.” And then we were like, “That's crazy … but okay!”Shanita: I don’t think we knew exactly when Amanda was going to move here. But yeah, it was a crazy idea.

Ashley: I think what you identified, Amanda, is this idea that it's not just about the two of you having this alignment of ideas. It seems a lot more … ethereal is not quite the right word. But it's like when you vibe with somebody immediately and it's beyond just interest—it's like an ability to think in a certain way. And it seems, like you said, you both allowed yourselves to dream big, and that's huge.

I think that that's not something to be glossed over, especially when you talk about relationships between people. There's something really beautiful about having complete openness and trust with someone where you’re like, “I can share my dreams with you and you won't think that's stupid,” or whatever. You're instead like, “That's cool. Let’s talk more about this.” I think that that's why I wanted to talk about this idea kind of being born between you two and then moving across the country to do this thing because it speaks to your partnership really beautifully.Amanda-Jane: I'm so grateful for Shanita. Something we can all relate to is that in whatever job we're in and we're working but maybe we have other passions, so how does that even start to crystallize and take form? I'm really just so grateful to have met Shanita and then be able to have that space to really just share.

There was a long period of time where it was just, some of those conversations were like, “I'm so miserable” or “What's the next step?” and really not having that direction yet and not knowing. I can say for myself, having someone else with a bold idea to keep ourselves accountable and on a timeline [was pivotal]. If I didn't have a business partner, even that first time thinking, “OK, LA it is,” there are so many opportunities to start to second guess yourself, be like, “Ah, well actually, maybe not,” and talk yourself out of it.Having each other every step of the way where I'd be like, “Oh my gosh, what's happening?” or “Oh my God, I'm nervous about this,” or “Oh, this is wild,” I think having each other to keep us honest and pushing forward … I think, sitting here and talking to you, I think it really is dawning on me just how important that was. Left to our own devices, there's all this opportunity to get in your head, and we can all relate to all the doubt that comes in. Who knows what that timeline would have been—or if at all.

Shanita: I feel like every time we have conversations, something new comes up for us. But [I feel the] same as Amanda on having this energy that you connect with to create an even bigger energy. And that feels like what happened here.

I think with Amanda and me—and I think about even the other women at the law firm that we were at together—that was very special. I think it was really special to have that network that we were able to delve within, within the firm. It was that a group of Black women, and we would get together every Friday morning and it was our self-care moment. I kind of think about like, “Why do we feel so compelled to provide that to other people?Amanda-Jane: It was having that space! In corporate America, a big Wall Street law firm where you’re literally working around the clock, your life is tough. And I think that it was us having to intentionally carve out and fight for and maintain a space where we could just … be.

It's so funny because I don't think I really realized that actually, until now, it was that the effort of trying to find space and hold space and inhabit is something that I think we all have so many ways do and have done starting years and years ago, and I don't think that we necessarily see it as such. And I think that that effort has continued all the way through, to what we want it to do or continue to try to do at Sip & Sonder. We can definitely say the creation of that space was on the sixth floor of this 30 something, 40 something skyscraper in the middle of Midtown in New York City.

That carving out of that space literally was what enabled us to eventually be where we are now. So we know for a fact what can happen when you have a space where you can connect with folks, whether they're similar to you or maybe different, but even being able to meet, connect and have that space to share and to think big—or to sit still and be quiet. I think part of being able to achieve something—we were working around the clock—so actually being able to come together and it'd be like, “All right, we're just going to do some meditation or yoga and like have some quiet time.” That's also super important. So kind of that balance while everything else happening.Ashley: It's so wonderful to hear moments of … almost connecting the dots a little bit. I think Amanda, you mentioned that you were a sociology major—every time I interview somebody about connections and big themes, I find out they're a sociology major.I was also a sociology major … but I think that’s such a powerful moment to realize that something that happened, like holding space with this group of women and at your law firm almost helped propel this physical manifestation of actual space to connect, to be quiet, or to be creative and connect with other people, to see what your neighbor is doing or to just sit and read a book and just observe others and imagine the hundreds of lives that kind of come in and out.

So let's talk about the actual space a little bit because you folks moved to Inglewood and you opened Sip & Sonder, but not entirely as a coffee shop at first. So could you talk a little bit about what it was like to open up the space?Shanita: Our first endeavor together was through a nonprofit that we still operate called the LA Black Investors Club. And that nonprofit was and continues to focus on connecting entrepreneurs within the Black and brown communities, specifically in South LA and Inglewood, with access to business resources, legal resources, and capital resources. So identifying the privileges that we had and in our own professional lives and how we could act ourselves as a conduit through the nonprofit.

And we honed in on [asking] what community feels true to us. What's home for us, where can we really connect to and build on with other people and South LA and Inglewood just … I don't even remember making a decision about it. It just was.

We were hosting events on Market Street, with our now-neighbors on the street, utilizing their space and connecting with them on what they were building out and how we could be an addition to that within the community. Our initial connection to Inglewood, specifically Market Street, where we sit now, was through those events on at those spaces. They included pitch competitions, fireside chats, some larger panel events around business development and entrepreneurship and investment within the community specifically.

Before we ever even looked at the space to sign a lease, we had that, that connection-building.

Amanda-Jane: We were talking just a bit ago about energy and I think that there's something about … we chose to be in Inglewood, but I think also it was almost like we were pulled into Inglewood.There's something about when there's an energy, it's contagious energy, there's so much creativity and there's so much happening in Inglewood in terms of ideas and desire for connection and desire for creation—it's contagious. It's one of those things that makes you realize how important it is to be around certain environments where there's that kind of momentum. And that really was what we felt was happening in Inglewood.

Through our nonprofit, we just were here and doing our events. And then once Sip & Sonder kind of came to crystallization, it was literally natural, like, “Well, we have to be here.” This is a no-brainer. And it's so beautiful because now we're on Market Street, in downtown Inglewood.We're now neighbors with places that our nonprofit had programming with before we had a space. We'd have programming with a theater that's one block down and another with a gallery in the other direction. And now we're neighbors, where we were their clients, our nonprofit was their client. And now we're their neighbors.

Now, sitting here, we’re at Sip & Sonder now, it really is that full circle that sort of happened exactly in the kind of the way that it's hard to see it happening any other way. It wasn't our intention—when we were doing the programming with our nonprofit, Sip & Sonder hadn’t yet crystallized. So the minute that that did happen, it was like an automatic shoo-in. And it was like, “Well, we're here, we've been here and building connections.” So now having a physical space to actually tangibly house a community that we've worked on building was just that no-brainer.

Shanita: I think when we initially signed our lease in June 2017, and we thought we were going to be open in September of 2017.

We came into a blank space, you know, not only a blank space, but we came into a space that was something else that was completely different than what we were building. And so that build-out project took a lot more time and effort behind it.

What that did, though, was allow us to kind of go back to something Amanda said, to think big because we had this open slate of platform—that certainly created more work and more effort. But I do think that it's one of the reasons that Sip & Sonder and the way that it is now is so special, because it was born from those early events and the opening up the space well before we had coffee.

One of our very first events within this space was September 27, with Arlan Hamilton, who's one of—not as many as there should be, but there will be more—a few Black woman fund managers and directors.

We were able to have her within this space and this community that had all this vibrancy, but didn't necessarily have as many of the connections that it now has to add to capital and those resources. So to be able to open our doors, to look around and say, “Okay, we may not have walls, but we know where to rent chairs from for tonight and how to open our doors right now,” and people can come in and we can provide something right now. This was almost two years before we actually officially opened. All of that history and the people that came in during those early-on events from the community, they’re part of that journey with us. And there's a sense of ownership. And I love the sense of ownership that the community both has and feels when they come into this space. And I think a lot of that was because of that journey to where we are now.Ashley: That’s a really critical point—the idea of sense of ownership. I think one of the reasons that coffee shops are often seen as the first strike in a gentrifying neighborhood or in a neighborhood that's changing is that a coffee shop opens and it is clearly not for the people who live there. And there's no sense of community-building done in a lot of coffee shops, but it seems like, just by the foundations of what Sip & Sonder is, that was never a possibility—it was always going to be about community-building. And I imagine that that's proven itself to be both important and valuable, especially during COVID.Amanda-Jane: Oh, for sure. Everything that we do here is really in response to what the community wants and needs. In retrospect, we wouldn't want to ever undertake another several-year opening trajectory, just for business reasons, that’s not a goal anyone would have in opening a business, understandably. But that having happened, we look back at that and we think that was really the trajectory that we were destined to have for better or worse, because it really enabled us to create and be very sure about, foundationally, who are we, what’s our ethos, and what are we about, you know? And I think that having the opportunity to have the time to develop really set us up.Our tagline is “for the community, for the culture.” It's something that we had to take the time actually interacting with the community itself to be like, if that's what we're claiming to be about, what does that mean? Like how? How? Question mark, right? Figuring out that answer—and this is not past-tense, it's an ongoing effort.

It's something you alluded to earlier: What it means to enter into a community in your most authentic way, mindfully and authentically? Part of the experience that we want folks to have is that authentic experience. What does it mean to really just be your true, authentic self and have a space for that? And we can't say that’s what we want for people if we were to have entered into the very community we're in in any other way.Ashley: I imagine a lot of that authenticity comes from the safety the two of you have created between each other, as you were talking about earlier, having the safety to dream big and share your passions. And I kind of hate using this word just because it's one of those words that gets used in coffee all the time, but it seems like there's so much intentionality in the way that you have built Sip & Sonder—even from the name, like coming back all the way back to the idea of “sonder” like … this is almost a meta experiment on community-building. It feels like there is no possible way that you could enter Sip & Sonder or be, you know, the two of you without really thinking critically about walking into a space and saying like, “What's happening here? What is actually happening besides someone's coming to get a cup of coffee?” There's a lot more happening than that.Amanda-Jane: It's funny because we're talking and I'm thinking, Shanita and I, we would do yoga and meditation. It’s like, so fitting. I think that we’re thinkers … it’s ongoing effort to be ill about how we're feeling our emotions and being aware of just a larger energy around us. And I think that that's one of the initial reasons why just, pre Sip & Sonder when it's literally just like, two young women at this law firm, “Hey, Amanda,” “Hi, I'm Shanita.” And literally just meeting—I think that that was my connection. I guess that has continued, you know? I think that in terms of just how we approach Sip & Sonder, we try to be really mindful. It's something that is important to each of us in our personal lives, right? So that spilling over into Sip & Sonder [makes sense]—if Sip & Sonder didn't exist, it's still how I would work. And obviously, no one's perfect. We falter, but how we at least set out to try to live just more generally.

Shanita: I think about that phrase: The best way to be happy is to be happy. Easy to implement, but execute?

But it's that idea, like the best way to see what you want is to be it. And I think that's what we were able to be for one another. I know I've grown tremendously by watching Amanda and taking on as much of all the goodness she has and implementing that into my own experiences. I continue to watch her grow and I continue to want to be a better person as a result of that.

I think that's what we also put into the space, to Amanda's point here. And I do like the word “intentionality.” I think that's what it is. I kind of am probably thinking more of it in a spiritual way of like, “What are we putting out? What is that energy that we're exuding?” Because that’s the world we’re going to step into. And so to be able to envision with a partner that has that alignment, that forces me to think big—I don't know if I would have thought as big without our conversations—that our connection and past that right now and talk about what's the world that we want to step into and then create it.Ashley: What are you folks working on now? What does the future look like for you?Shanita: We are so excited. We have our newest addition to the Sip Squad, our roaster! Which we have aptly named Sage. So we started roasting in-house during quarantine. This was always part of our plan, to bring roasting in-house. It was a passion I spoke about a little earlier on, and we've really grown together to plan this out and get excited.

Being within this COVID environment has sped things up a bit and thinking innovatively. We weren't planning to do it until probably closer to now or entering into the new year. But we were able to get things together. I have been doing some sourcing. We have shipped across the country, I think almost every state. It's been such an amazing experience, from sourcing and cupping to come up with the profiles that we both are really proud of to provide to our community. To engage our team within that process and expand not only ourselves within the coffee industry, but also our team.

A lot of the individuals, part of the Sip Squad came to us, wanting to further explore within the coffee industry in ways that they hadn't been able to before. And it's just darn good coffee. Like, it's just really good coffee! And we're able to have that experience of designing, packaging, all of the above … it's just been one of those dreams come true, you know?Ashley: Cool. Is there anything else that we left on the table that you want to talk about before we close out?Shanita: You know, one thing I'd like to mention on and we kind of spoke about it a lot more in the summer, is the idea … I think a couple of things—intersectionality within industries that have historically not had representation. I think coming into the coffee industry from an ownership perspective, both as a storefront and now as a roaster, there's a lot that we bring to the table. I just want to express that out loud.Ashley: Thank you both so much for taking time to talk to me. I think it's hard to put this quite into words because I interview a lot of people and there are so many amazing and fantastic people, but there's something about talking to the both of you where it feels like we're almost making like a map together. We're making a connect-the-dots sort of thing. There are a bunch of dots everywhere. When I talk to you both, it's interesting to see you both connect these dots in real time. And that's really special. So thank you for taking time to talk with me.Amanda-Jane: Thank you for having space for us. It's been great connecting a couple of years ago and still being able to connect and it's just lovely.Ashley: I agree. It's so nice to see your story evolve.

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It’s hard not to picture it, once you hear the name: little waves lapping on the sand. Water rushing in between your toes. The warmth of the sun on your shoulders. An abiding feeling of calm.

Areli Barrera de Grodski came up with the name Little Waves in a text message. She’s the co-owner and founder of the roastery and its accompanying retail locations, Cocoa Cinnamon, in Durham, North Carolina. She’s admittedly shy, someone who describes herself as quiet and reserved, but she relishes moments of awareness and noticing—she describes herself as “being comfortable in the meta.”

When I think of Little Waves, I also think of a number: 230. That’s the number of retail coffee bags the roastery needs to sell every day to keep the doors open. After the novel coronavirus shut down coffee shops across the globe, Areli and her partner, Leon, went immediately into planning and preservation mode. They figured out exactly how much business they needed to do, down to the day, to keep their business going without laying off any employees.

In this conversation, we oscillate between the meta and the concrete. Some of the topics we discuss are straightforward, some are weird and obscure, and most land somewhere in the middle. Just to get a little meta here myself, breaking down assumptions is why I love interviewing people and asking questions—there’s always more behind every story. And in this interview, we do just that: we break down assumptions and learn more behind the story of Little Waves.

This interview is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Below is a transcript of our interview.

Ashley: Where does your coffee story start? Does it start for you when you decided to open a business or does it start earlier than that?

Areli: I would say one or two years before that, my coffee journey starts in 2009. After I graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill, I moved back to move with my parents in Cherokee, North Carolina. And moving back, having just graduated, I feel like that's like kind of the story of every graduate, right? It's like, “What do I do now? Cool, that was fun, now what?”

I studied Spanish. I wanted to be a Spanish teacher and when I moved back to Cherokee, I wasn't ready to jump quite into that yet. I wanted to do something that was in a creative mindset.

I applied to work at this coffee shop in Cherokee that was started, co-founded by my now-husband. For me, it was really more about the space and how the space was such a foundational place for people in the community. Having grown up in Cherokee, I got to really see the impact that it had on community members that didn't necessarily like, like weren't necessarily like church or football people.

Ashley: Right. So I imagine having space specifically away from those two things mattered a whole lot as you, as you said.

Areli: Yeah. Yeah. So it was nice. I was able to see the impact because I had been away for a while, like going to school and so coming back and seeing it in action, I was just like—I don't know, it had an impact on me and I wanted to participate in that and I wanted to learn more about what creating space like that look like.

Ashley: I think it's really fascinating to reflect on one's very first almost imprint of coffee in a way, because I think back to my very first coffee shop job. Part of why I'm kind of going back to that is we graduated the same year. I graduated in 2009 as well, and I was going to, and I was a teacher. I taught middle school math and science right after I graduated from college. And then I worked at a coffee shop because I, I couldn't do it. I was not old enough to assume the responsibility of teaching middle school math and science at that time.

And it was also, you know, you graduated in the same economy I did too. So you knew that was like. So I think about my very first coffee shop job where we were this really tight unit. It was a very, you know, Midtown Manhattan, super busy coffee shop. It was just like grab and go really fast-paced. And because of that, we were such a tight-knit unit.

I have this one manager who really encouraged us to be the best versions of ourselves. And she'd be like, “You're good at this, like, go do that. And you're good at this other thing, go do that.” And I think a lot about that now in my life. So it's interesting you reflecting on that first imprint of coffee, I imagine had a lot to do with what Cocoa Cinnamon looks like now.

Areli: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, very much so. I feel like even the coffee shop that Leon created with this partner at the time, I mean, the fact that Leon is, you know, the co-founder of Cocoa Cinnamon and Little Waves plays a huge role in how he—like his imprint in that coffee shop is also in this one.

Just like the whole idea of embracing culture and really kind of putting culture and history and the elements that sometimes get forgotten in history—and by that I mean, the people who get erased when history is being told, bringing that story to the forefront, I thought they did a really beautiful job, especially being in Cherokee. His partner is Cherokee as well. So I don’t know, I think that that concept really stuck with me as well. Trying to think about coffee and not just coffee, but chocolate—chocolate was also another aspect, learning the history of chocolate.

And that had a huge imprint on me and my older brother whose palate is like, that of a five-year-old's. All he wants is like, nothing green, no vegetables. And when we started Cocoa Cinnamon, we started in the kitchen, my mom's kitchen, in Western Carolina. And we started off with chocolate. We started messing around with making truffles and making tempered chocolate.

And this was after reading this book on the history of chocolate and getting to know that cacao is originally from Latin America, the Amazons, and it made its way over to the Aztecs and the Mayans. And that whole rich history just really infused … this wonder. Like, why aren't these stories being told, you know, in different formats and here we are working with these products, like why not highlight these stories through naming chocolates after these stories?

Ashley: That's so cool to hear because it seems like there's a lot of interconnectedness in your life and in the way that Cocoa Cinnamon looks and the way that Little Waves has kind of come to be.

I was reading that the names for these businesses came from dreams, or they came from like the ethereal world, the world of experience, which is really interesting. Because I imagine for a lot of people who open up coffee shops, it's like, “Oh, I just want to open up a coffee shop,” and they go do it. But it seems like you and Leon and the team around you have been able to weave in personal experience to not only highlight the stories of others but also, I don't know, I guess create more meaning as well, to add to that story.

Areli: Yeah. I feel like that's kind of the lens in which see everything, right? And how we approach everything. Our approach is pretty much heart-driven and also, like what I was saying earlier in terms of like, history-driven and culture-driven. It's all about honoring as opposed to appropriating and bringing things to light.

And I think that it's super important to see yourself even within the products. Sometimes, you know, we have specials that are created by some of our staff members and I think it's really cool. Like we get to explore. I mean, we gained so much from it because we get to explore somebody's iteration of their culture and their expression through a drink. I think for us it's really important to honor those stories.

And like you were saying, everything that we've done up until now has been guided by the universe. If it didn't feel good, if it didn't feel right, we wouldn't go forward with it. Everything that we've done up until now, like I said, has been heart-driven and it really does tell us when something isn't the right path for us.

Cocoa Cinnamon did come to Leon in a dream. Little Waves came from a text message while we were falling in love. It's like this visual of this calmness of little waves kind of like rushing up the shore. Leon is originally from Long Island, so he was thinking about those little waves. And he sent me that message and it was through this interaction—I was sending him like these random magic realism text messages of just like … I feel like living in the Great Smoky Mountains, I was just expressing this with my friends the other day that lately I've been feeling I've been falling deeper into my safety zone or my comfort zone of being in the meta.

I feel like I thrive in the meta and I feel like Cherokee is very much a place that has a lot of history. And a lot of like … basically, if you don't believe in ghosts, then you're the odd one out.

Ashley: You’re speaking my language. I feel like I've typed the word ‘meta’ seven times this week for very different reasons. Especially when it comes to podcasting and storytelling—we're going to get a little meta here, I guess.

Maybe I'm using that word wrong? I feel like I'm going to have an Alanis Morissette moment where I'm like, “Oh, ‘ironic’ … I wasn't using that right.”

When I think about these conversations, and I think about what I want to achieve when I have them, I'm always looking for that interconnectedness, right? I'm always looking for the ways that things that you've experienced in your life inform the experiences that you're currently having. And those are not always obvious.

That's why I really like doing these interviews because I think it really forces people, myself included, to reflect back on moments that were important and connect them to bigger moments that maybe, if you don't really sit down and think about it, you don't really have time to reflect on, but it seems like you do that pretty much all the time.

Areli: Yeah. I feel honestly one of the things that I love and appreciate about coffee is that it is a small cosmos of life lessons that literally like are a mirror to yourself. And I feel like you can literally learn how to ascend or how to connect to your higher self through coffee with all the lessons that you learn in this industry. There are so many beautiful lessons and so many hard lessons, and it's just a matter of literally paying attention and learning from them and letting go of your ego.

Ashley: I want to talk about that a little bit. I think in this current moment—if you're listening to this not necessarily live, this will come out in a couple of weeks, but if you're listening to this in 2020, COVID is currently affecting your life. And I feel like you've gotten a lot of attention specifically because you have been able to keep on your entire team. You've had a really specific goal of how much coffee you need to roast to keep your team on, and that's amazing.

There's so much good stuff to talk about there. And I definitely want to talk about that, but going back to something you just said about learning from mistakes, I wonder as somebody who's a leader, as someone who owns a business, what have been some of those experiences?

What are some of those hard lessons that you've learned through coffee? And they don't have to be tangible. They don't have to be, like, “I learned to do this. I learned how to do that,” but maybe some of the bigger life lessons that you've learned on this journey.

Areli: I’ve learned the importance of clear communication and learning how to clearly communicate.

I feel like I honestly, that's been the biggest one. I feel like communication is such a huge and broad topic. We do have a lot of younger people on our team and this is their first job. As I'm getting older, one of the things that I feel like is important and is tangible is that I can really resonate with a lot of our team members because we have a lot of women of color, a lot of Latina women in our business and on our team. And I see some of myself in some of their actions and in some of their like shyness.

I grew up with a very quiet family—in the sense of when it comes to talking about our feelings. But we're also very loud when we're together; like we're a very joyful bunch when we're together. But when we're by ourselves, we're … I dunno … I'm a very quiet person. And I see that in a lot of our team members. I feel like sometimes it's really hard.

You can't support somebody if you don't know what their needs are. And sometimes it's like, you don't even know as a person that you can ask for things or that you can express your needs because sometimes we just don't grow up knowing that, Or being told that that's something valuable.

From my own personal experience, I can see that playing a role in communication and lack of communication. One of the other things is realizing what I have to offer and what are my strengths and what are my weaknesses. How can Leon and I balance each other out or reach out to other people on our team?

So it’s really depending on each other to create a wholesome system and holding each other accountable. And doing that from a heart-driven … I think that communication has been the biggest learning journey for me as someone who has a very similar experience to a lot of our team members.

Ashley: That's a critical thing to point out because, and I think you said this as well, communication is so broad, so it's easy to kind of point to communication as a tool or a resource and to simplify it. But it really is about asking, “Does somebody feel comfortable saying to me that they need the day off or will they get nervous that there'll be some sort of retaliation?” Or if this is someone's first job, can they say to me and feel safe saying, “I need this,” or “I need that”?

I think is it's easy to assume that those things are obvious, especially if you come from a background where your needs are met.

Areli: Yeah. Without question. And then also just how people receive information. We all come from different backgrounds and different experiences and somebody’s louder tone might come off as too much, or not too much, but like offensive, or I don't know.

I don’t know what the right analogy here is, but Leon and I are very different when it comes to communication. His family and ancestry are New Yorkers, and he’s very much like the Italian side of his family. He can be loud and he talks a lot more than I do.

I think that's been a fun journey too, learning each other's communication styles and how that plays a role in our business as well. Learning how you take information in and, as leaders, how do we take all of those things into account and also take care of ourselves. It's this whole nuanced thing that has so many complexities.

Going back to the meta: I think about the book, The Conference of the Birds, and that whole book is about oneness, but it's also about how you get to this point, it’s about bringing yourself but leaving yourself. And it's just filled with these contradictions. And I feel like when it comes to communication, it's this fine balance of being able to be present and to be able to voice your needs and at the same time, leave room for the other person to be able to voice their needs of you as well. Does that make sense?

Ashley: That totally makes sense. You haven't said a single thing that doesn't make sense to me.

Areli: Yeah. I feel like that's been just a big eye-opener of the experience of communication. And a lot of the issues that ever arise are always around communication or misunderstanding of communication. It's just giving each other a little bit of grace and benefit of the doubt that even though [something you said] felt this way, it wasn't meant that way. And if it was meant that way, then that's a whole other issue, but that's something else to talk about.

Ashley: Especially as the leader or as the person in the position of power. I think it's always the responsibility of that person to step back and be like, “How was this conveyed? How did this other person take it?” Because you have that space because you're in a little more of a secure position, which is really hard to recognize.

But it seems like you have, and I want to talk a little bit about the way that you portray yourself and the way that Little Waves portrays itself. So when I was on the website it says Cocoa Cinnamon is a Latina-led company. And I was wondering if that's something that you've always led with?

Areli: I feel like yes and no. Right in the duality always. Yes, in the sense that being Latina has always been a part of my identity, being Mexican is something that I have held onto. Grippingly, I have. It's part of who I am to the core in the sense of being born in Mexico and moving to the United States at six years old, I felt like I needed to hang on to that identity, to not lose it because I did grow up in the United States.

I resonate so hard with Selena because even though I'm not Mexican-American, the role that she had to play in both Mexican and American culture is very similar to what I feel like a lot of young immigrant kids have to deal with.

And even if they're not immigrant kids, children of immigrants, speaking a language and being enough of that culture at home and with their family, but also fitting in at a predominantly white school or a white community. And just trying to figure out, especially as a child, if you're enough. How can I be enough in this culture that I don't see myself in?

I feel like that has always stayed with me and it's always been a part of me, but in terms of our business, I've never necessarily, like … I know that representation matters and it's always mattered to me. And I think at the very beginning of our business it was a part of who we were, but it wasn't necessarily at the forefront. We weren't necessarily using it to, I guess, market ourselves? And I think a lot of that just had to do with me learning how to step into the power of what that meant and being comfortable with it. Because like I said earlier I am much quieter and I don't like the limelight. And the fact that I'm doing this podcast with you, it's like, I'm ascending, yo!

There's been a lot of work from 2010 when we first started our business to now of being able to step into that power of being in a leadership position. It seems silly that it needed to take me that long to get there, but that’s putting metrics on aligning with your higher self. Let's not colonize that either.

Ashley: It's interesting to hear you talk about these things because I'm realizing as we're recording—which is also fun to connect the dots—that you and I are probably the same age. You and I graduated into a very, probably similar situation, had sort of similar goals to want to teach.

We both also idolized Selena for the very same reasons. I watched that Jennifer Lopez movie every time it's on TV. I remember this one scene in particular where she was giving a press conference in Mexico and she's like, “I'm muy … I’m really excited!” She doesn't know the word for “excited” in Spanish. I don't speak Spanish. I grew up in a very colonized mindset of like, “You are only going to speak English.” I remember seeing that and feeling so seen. I was like, “That's me like trying to talk to my grandpa!”

Along with this idea of trying to decolonize your mind and trying to figure out the ways that you suppress certain parts of your identity because of colonization. And then other ways in which, you know, I'm a white Latina. I have a lot of privilege because of that. And then there's a lot of colorism in my community that I need to contend with. So it's interesting to see all those different dynamics come into play. And it's really powerful for me to hear you talk about them. Which is wild because before we started recording, you mentioned one of the things that you were really looking for was representation in coffee.

Areli: Yeah.

Ashley: Small world, it all connects.

This is getting real meta now. We're just getting … I feel like we're just gonna start floating off the clouds.

Areli: Oh my gosh, yeah. The meta is where I hit my stride. Also having these conversations and having … I don't know. It's still hard to find representation. Like you said, there are many levels of representation. I don't know that I've ever had this kind of conversation with another business owner. I don't know.

I think there's a value to metrics and obviously, we need to have all kinds of metrics to be on the same page to talk about the same stuff, especially when you're grading coffee. But I don't know. I just feel like sometimes … I know I personally feel like my life experience and what I can bring to the table isn't enough in this industry sometimes, you know?

And I just feel like sometimes that's such nonsense and it's, again going back to that decolonizing and imposter syndrome. But I think it's mostly just learning that the senses [are powerful] beyond knowing the chemistry behind roasting coffee. You can actually smell the reactions happening. And that I just feel sometimes the sensory element of roasting coffee isn't necessarily as valued as knowing the physics behind roasting coffee, you know? I just feel like even just having this conversation about communication and understanding the cultural value of how somebody grew up and how that plays a role in creating structures within your business … yeah. I don't know. I dunno where I'm getting.

Ashley: And that's fine. I think that that's what I'm liking. Again—getting kind of meta in this conversation right now—that's what I'm liking about this conversation as we're having it in real-time. I think for the most part when I do these interviews and I think about, “Why am I here? What am I trying to do?”

I really want to let my guests talk and we're certainly doing that here for sure, with me asking you questions, but very rarely do I reflect back on my own experiences, because I really try to remove that. I mean, I have [shared a lot] in the past but as an interviewer, I'm trying to get a little bit better about removing my personal experiences. Because I don't want to editorialize, but seeing your light and seeing the perspectives that you have and feeling like, “Oh, this person shares a lot of perspectives that I grew up with as well, but is also vastly different.”

Which speaks to the importance of representation because, you know, Latinx folks are not a monolith. It’s important to see people from a variety of different backgrounds be successful and be able to say, “This is my story. This is how I got here. And you can do this too,” because you're seeing other people achieve it.

So let's talk a little bit about COVID-19. Something that I noticed pretty much right when coronavirus hit is that Little Waves had a plan. You folks were ready, you had a metric. And I know we just talked a little bit about metrics and sometimes how they can be not super useful, but in this instance, you were very public with your Instagram following or with the people who follow you folks. You shared that, “We need to sell 230 bags of retail coffee to keep going.” So can you talk a little bit about when you realized that something was going to have to change?

Areli: I think March 10th is such a clear date for us. Leon and I had just gotten back from our first trip in a really long time—we had gone to Puerto Rico for a really short vacation. And as soon we got back, it was like, COVID hit.

I remember feeling this sense of like, “What the hell?” We don't really know what the hell is happening, how long this is going to last, we were being told that it was going to last, I don't know, I can't even remember—seven weeks or something. Something like that, something really short. We were looking to see what other people in the industry were doing.

We didn't close our shops immediately. But the more we kept going without closing our shops, the scarier it got. I think that was sign number one that we needed to shift our model to pick-up only. We had all of our department heads meet and talk about how the hell are we going to weather this.

We were also caught in a time where we had invested in different things. We had invested a little bit of money into roles that we didn't necessarily have the money to have yet, but we were putting a timeline on it and then COVID happened. So we were already in the bank, we weren't in the best position. If we don't have any business tomorrow and from there on out, we're screwed.

So we were trying to figure out how do we stay open—but keep everyone paid and not have to lay anyone off. That’s where the metrics came in. Here's how much money we need to make on a daily basis to keep everyone paid. And Leon was the one who put that metric into [a number]: 230 bags. If we can't let people into our shops, we need to sell bags of coffee that we can ship. So we saw this huge spike in online sales overnight and, Mandy [the head roaster] and I were just like, “Okay, whoa, we're not ready for this production.”

I was literally staying until 1 a.m. stickering bags and just doing everything that we could to like stay open. And our messaging was out of hand—like not out of hand, but it was in this like mode of do or die where we were literally posting something every two hours on social media. Which reminded me of our days of getting started in 2011, 2012, when we did our Kickstarter.

One of the things that I really love and admire about Leon is that he will not stop until something gets done. It's a blessing and a curse because it can also be really bad for his health. But I don't know that I could have done this on my own without his leadership as well. But that's why we make a great team.

We were putting some ideas out on the table and saying like, “How can we cut hours?” We did end up having to cut our hours down, but even within that, we were like, “Okay, what can we afford?” We immediately communicated with all of our team members [asking], “How many hours do you need per week to survive? Be as honest as possible.” We basically asked that question out to our team. Some of them came back with, “I need 40 hours.” And some people said, “27,” or “35.” Within that, some people said, “I don't want to risk it. I'm gonna not work.”

So some people opted out. And the thing about our team is that we're a very big team, but we have a lot of part-time people. So some of the part-time people decided to opt out. And everyone who needed the work, we did everything that we could to keep them employed and to keep getting them those 40 hours. It's a lot better now, but in the very beginning, it was a little bit harder to get them the full 40 hours.

Honestly, it was just like overnight, we had to come up with a plan and we had to figure out where can we cut expenses. We immediately reached out to our landlords and figured out if they would be willing to let us pay rent next month or whatever. We could get some of the loans that we had that we were able to defer. We were just trying to figure out where within all of these massive expenses of operating three shops and a roastery can we cut down without putting our employees out of work?

Ashley: It seems like you had really honest conversations with people about what that looked like—if someone could maybe work less or if somebody maybe wanted to stay home. I know people who were let go from their jobs that day shelter-in-place started. That's the stark difference between what you did versus what, I don't know if a lot of coffee shops did, but I do know people who, the minute there is signs of distress, there was no conversation. They were out of work.

Areli: Honestly for us, it was just a no-brainer. Like I said at the very beginning, everything that we do is heart-driven and thinking about the whole and the common good. It wasn't even a question, it was just like, “How do we get it done?”

It's not like we're still in that same boat and we're still in that same situation. Now that things have opened up a little bit more we're starting to see a slowdown on online sales and it's starting to get scary. At this point, we're all exhausted from hearing ourselves say the same thing over and over. But I think one of the things that really helped was that everyone on our team was on the same page and we were all on board to like do whatever it took to stay safe and stay open.

Ashley: This reminds me of another Latinx business leader who I think you would get along with really well. Her name's Erica Escalante. She's been on the show before— and something that I think a lot about with her is that she is really good about naming needs—about saying, “This is what I need to keep going. This is what I need from you in this moment.”

Looking at you folks come up with that 230 number and blast it from the rooftops. That's you folks saying, “This is what we need.” You let the need be known, which is not natural. Sometimes it's really hard to name your needs and then put them out there. And then even if they can't get met, at least you know what the need is and there's a potential for somebody to come to meet it.

Areli: Absolutely. I'm very grateful and thankful that Leon was able to come up with that very specific need because it made it very tangible. It made it very accessible for people to know how to support.

Ashley: People want to support you. They just need to know how to.

I want to talk about a different metric that you also have. When I was researching Little Waves, I found a statistic that said that 85% of your team are women. And that 65% are bilingual, which is so powerful to put that into numbers. And I think it's really easy in the coffee industry—or really any industry, let's face facts—to say, “Oh, we can't hire for diversity. There are no people out there,” or “How do other people do it?” And it seems like it's very natural for you. So I was wondering what it meant to put that statistic together. What would you say to people who are struggling with diversity?

Areli: I feel like the only reason we really came up with those numbers and those statistics were when we're applying for things.

Honestly, we're at this point where we don't even think about it. It's just the way we do things. When we first opened our first location in 2013, we put out our application and it was all white men who worked at other coffee shops and we were like, “Whoa, okay, cool. We need to figure out how to put our application ads out in places that are going to be seen by people of color.”

We knew that we needed to do more work than just putting our application out. I think little by little, the more representation you see behind the bar, the more it kind of feeds itself.

People come in and they see themselves behind the bar and they know that it's an opportunity for them—that they can also see themselves there. So I feel like it's partially just being really intentional in where you're putting your application and being intentional. And if we don't get the results we like we go back to the drawing board and do it again. Don't settle for not getting the results.

The other thing that's really important is having representation in leadership because I feel like that really helps color where you can put your application out. Even just connecting to the community and to other leaders in the community about your application by word of mouth.

At our Lakewood location, which is our third location, it's a predominantly Black and brown neighborhood. We intentionally did churros at this location because, for me, it was a way of allowing the Latinx community to feel comfortable coming into the coffee shop. I want them to know that this coffee shop is for them as well—that this is not just a coffee shop. This is a space for them. Churros are such an important nostalgic memory of mine and growing up in Tijuana and being able to get fresh churros from a street vendor and moving to the United States and not having the ability to find the same style and the same quality of churros. Churros have like a huge, important power for me in being able to connect with the Latinx community here.

As we were building out this location, we put a chalkboard outside in Spanish saying, “We're hiring, come apply inside.” So really being intentional about hiring even from within the community that we're in. I think it's really not that hard once you get people in the door, like once you train … I mean, obviously, you're hiring people for their personality, and them being a person of color or from whatever background is just an added bonus in terms of representation.

Ashley: It seems like once you have the blueprint for what you need to do, the actions themselves are pretty easy to execute on.

Areli: Going back to your question about being Latina-led—it wasn't really until I literally looked around our business and saw so many other Latina women in our team and being like, “Okay, that's really freaking cool how much of an impact me being Latina has on who's applying.”

Ashley: I want to talk a little bit about your role with the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity (CCRE). How did you get involved with that?

Areli: I saw Phyllis Johnson's open letter to the industry and for me, it was a no-brainer. I contacted her immediately. One, I wanted to work with her. I wanted to buy coffee from her because it's really important to me, in my sourcing of green coffee, I also want to support women importers and especially women of color. I think that it's such valuable representation. It isn't just behind the bar, it's also who's buying coffee from who.

So I reached out to Phyllis and wanted to work with her. I was looking on her website and initially, we had a conversation and it was kind of related to us working together, and I wanted to know more about her business.

I was really interested and intrigued by this particular project that she was working on in getting coffees from Afro-Brazilians in Brazil. And specifically Afro-Brazilian women. And she talked about, or she wrote this really beautiful article about the history of coffee and the history of slave labor and coffee and how Black women in Brazil and Black people in general in Brazil don't have access to land ownership.

That was something that makes total sense when you think about the history of this world. But I had never thought about that. I have been buying coffee from Brazil since we started in 2017 and it never dawned on me I hadn’t seen a lot of Afro-Brazilian names or people on the roster in a lot of these like places that I was buying coffee from. To read that it was just really impactful. I got so excited about the idea of working with Phyllis and our conversation led to like saying, “I really appreciate your open letter. And like, I am so invested in participating in whatever form or fashion.” And then she wrote me this email saying that she was creating the CCRE, she was creating a board and she wanted to invite me to be a part of it. I immediately said yes.

Ashley: Again, to the power of reaching out, saying a thing out loud and making things happen.

I feel like we've done a lot of shifting and thinking about big ideas and going from big to small—there's a lot of movement, which is really interesting and compelling to me, now I'm thinking about just like the idea of movement.

Of course, I'm coming back to the idea of Little Waves—just little waves on the dock. I was wondering, as you've had this conversation with me and as you've reflected on all these different things in your business and your life, what do you want people to know about you?

Areli: Hmm, wow. What a powerful question. Oh, what do I want people to know about me?

Ashley: It maybe it helps to anchor it in the business. Maybe thinking about the business, and then thinking about you more specifically might be a better launching point.

Areli: It's so hard to distinguish ourselves in an industry that is so saturated and yet I feel like we're all in this for very similar reasons. I really love where coffee is shifting towards culturally. I love that there's this support of each other. This whole era of secrecy and trade secrets … I feel like we're going in the opposite direction now.

I have a really wonderful relationship with Kyle [Ramage] and Lem [Butler] of Black & White Coffee Roasters. When COVID hit, we reached out to each other and have been supporting each other through this whole thing. We've literally bought coffee off of each other when freight transportation has been backed up.

We ran out of coffee because of this crazy spike in sales, which is a great problem, but also what do you do when you don't have coffee to roast? It's been really nice to be able to have that kind of relationship with them

In terms of Little Waves itself I feel we're just a group of really kindhearted people who are … I don't know.

I like to call them “rooted reverberations,” which are these undercurrent vibrations that we're all putting out. I feel like everyone that has been attracted to working at Cocoa Cinnamon and Little Waves are people who are putting out these beautiful vibrations into this world who are all working towards like creating a better world, whether they know it or not.

At the end of the day, like they're all like planting seeds of like, I dunno, this love frequency almost, you know?

That is what drives our need and our urgency of having to sell 230 bags a day. We're still not out of that—when you're thinking about who you're going to support with your dollars, I hope people think of us. I hope people think of other Black and brown- owned businesses to support because I think this is the time.

It's always been the time, but this is the time like now more than ever.

Ashley: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me. I really appreciate it. And I think that this goes without saying, but this conversation has fed my soul in a way I didn't expect.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.