“I tripped and fell,” Patrick jokes. “That’s what I always tell people. I literally tripped and fell. I had no intention to get into coffee.”

Thirty years ago, Patrick was studying to be a winemaker and was working in Hawaii, running a wine/ice cream/sandwich store. He says tasting Kona coffee was his first experience drinking coffee “that didn’t taste like asphalt,” and changed the way he thought about coffee.

The shop’s long hours had started to wear him down. “I talked to the owner,” he recalls, “who I got—out of pure selfishness—to sell the beer and wine license so that we could close the store before midnight or one o’clock in the morning. So we started doing coffee instead.”

Patrick is true serial entrepreneur, running four different coffee operations. He’s the owner of Infusion Distribution, a multifaceted business that offers a wholesale inventory of brewing equipment and beverage supplies business consulting, and equipment repairs and servicing. He’s also the owner of Infusion Coffee and Tea Crafters, his roasting company and cafes in Arizona, and the founder of the International Barista Coffee Academy (IBCA), where he offers courses and consulting for coffee professionals.

He’s also the owner of 3 Coffee Guys, a company he runs with two of his friends and fellow coffee educators, which offers “on-site coffee education” by organizing origin trips that allow coffee professionals to learn about the process of creating coffee, from farm to cup, and he’s working on producing a forthcoming documentary, Brewsed, that offers a window into the economic, social, and environmental impact of the coffee industry.

Patrick says the part of his job he enjoys most is his role as an educator. In 2010, he became the 43rd person to receive an SCA Diploma, and two years later, he first became involved in coffee education when he was invited to help design the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe’s (now part of the SCA) education program.

Being so closely involved in that processed showed him the importance of offering greater coffee education: “It’s something I saw a need for, and its something I really enjoy. I think that’s what I enjoy probably most, is doing the education.” Patrick is an award-winning coffee educator, and through the IBCA, he offers courses in everything from roasting to latte art to equipment maintenance.

Patrick wants consumers to stop being hyper-focused on getting the freshest roasted whole bean coffees, because coffee roast dates do not tell the full story.

“We actually did tests where we tasted coffee roasted last week and we tasted a coffee we saved for over nine months, and you could hardly tell in the bag. … Coffee doesn’t have to be roasted yesterday and drank today. It can actually age quite nicely, up to about thirty days, depending on the bag, depending on the situation.”

How can consumers educate themselves about whether or not their coffee is fresh? Patrick says to ask the roaster. “It should be something that the roasters should communicate,” he explains. “If they can’t communicate with you, they’re not very well-educated. They really need to be able to educate you.”

“I had always had this dream to take coffee people, or people that wanted to get into coffee, and do a seed-to-cup educational program,” Patrick says, which was the inspiration for 3 Coffee Guys, the company he runs with friends Ricardo Viellegas and Damien Burgas.

Patrick says the goal was to offer coffee professionals the opportunity to get a hands-on, immersive experience that showed them the entire coffee journey, and educated them on the entire coffee value chain. Over the past five years, 3 Coffee Guys has organized trips to numerous coffee-producing countries, which include shadowing coffee producers, cuppings, and SCA-certified coursework.

Patrick sees this work as an opportunity to educate roasters on the full value chain of coffee and create an understanding of the importance of sustainable pricing models: “What I love most about it is the people [at origin], the people are…what inspires me to continue to try to help and do whatever I can in my little corner of the world.”

Infusion Distribution: https://www.infusiondistributionusa.com

Infusion Coffee & Tea Crafters: https://www.infusioncoffeetea.com

IBCA: https://www.ibca-usa.com

3 Coffee Guys: https://www.3coffeeguys.com

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Scott says he grew up a “Midwestern coffee drinker”—brewing pre-ground, canned coffees. After he graduated college with a degree in chemical engineering, he worked as a research engineer at Kraft Foods. When his wife decided to pursue graduate work at University of Washington in Seattle, Scott found a position as a process engineer in what was then a “little expanding startup company”—Starbucks.

Today Scott is the Chief Sales Officer for PROBAT, the leading global manufacturer of high-quality roasters, and he’s proud to be part of the company’s 155-year legacy of excellence. An owner-managed, family-owned business, PROBAT is considered by many roasters to produce the gold standard in equipment. Scott estimates that PROBAT roasting machines account for 30–40% of shop roasters and 60–70% of commercial roasting machines in use today worldwide.

Scott says PROBAT is committed to building enduring machines that not only stand the test of time but also adapt to the ever-evolving needs of coffee roasters. By investing in innovation and supporting their customers, they aim to help their customers produce consistently delicious roasted whole bean coffee. “We’re increasingly getting the ability to do things like remotely join you and watch you roast and help you improve the situation, fix something, diagnose errors,” he says. “We’re becoming as much a technology company as we are a roasting company, because it takes technology to run these pieces of equipment.”

“I get really excited about helping customers get the product at the quality and cost that they want and being environmentally compliant and being labor compliant and all the other things they need to do,” Scott explains. This passion for supporting coffee roasters drives his work at PROBAT, and Scott is especially proud of the company’s reputation for producing roasters that stand the test of time and for their sustainability efforts.

Despite the coffee roasting process contributing only 2-4% of the industry’s carbon footprint, PROBAT has taken proactive steps to minimize its impact. They’ve set a goal to be carbon neutral by 2030 and have implemented initiatives like shifting to solar-powered manufacturing at their German plant and pioneering recirculating roasters.

We should celebrate coffee’s ability to unite people and make their days better. As Scott puts it, “[Coffee] brings you joy, a little bit of comfort, a little bit of relaxation. It brings people together. … I am really happy to be working for a company in an industry that brings people together in a positive way.”

And while specialty coffee is gaining traction in the market, Scott thinks it’s important to remember that all coffee has value when viewed from this perspective. Scott points out that “90% of the people on the planet are getting their daily joy out of not specialty coffee. … There’s a place in the whole value chain of coffee.” Whether you’re indulging in a single-origin gesha or a packet of instant, Scott says the most important thing is that it makes you happy: “If that’s where coffee goes, and that’s what brings that person joy, then that’s great.”

Scott’s dedication to mentoring future engineers is a cornerstone of his commitment to fostering a vibrant coffee community. He regularly visits high schools and universities to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering by highlighting the diverse career opportunities available. Scott explains, “There is no kid in school that has a clue what a coffee process engineer is, right? And of course, I want to create more coffee process engineers, but mostly I also want to create engineers that want to create things.”

Scott’s role at PROBAT offers students a unique opportunity to explore their interests through paid internships, and PROBAT’s partnership with the UC Davis Coffee Center allows him to mentor future engineers and help support innovative research that can inspire more students to pursue engineering careers. That not only creates opportunities for students to further their research, Scott explains, it also advances the coffee industry as a whole: “When we seed entities like UC Davis and they develop this knowledge, sometimes we sit in their research presentations and go, ‘Wow, that has some amazing commercial applications. What kind of further seed money can I give you in order to tie that up?'”

PROBAT website: www.probat.com

Scott’s PROBAT page: https://www.probat.com/en/company/about-us/management/scott-stouffer/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

“We found that some people were putting a lot of pride into their work,” he explains. In spite of being paid the same as the other producers, these farms were investing significant time and energy to create quality coffee. Jake saw an opportunity to help these kinds of farmers see a financial payoff for their efforts by helping these deeply invested smallholders bring their products to the specialty coffee market.

Ben, on the other hand, started working in coffee straight out of undergrad, leaning into his entrepreneurial spirit. At the time, saccharine-sweet bottled coffees were dominating the market, and Ben saw an opportunity to ready-to-drink coffees that were “a bit more intentional and probably back off the sugar just a smidge.” Jake co-founded Bean & Body Coffee with a focus on healthier coffee options. After seven years, Ben found that he could step back from the constant cycle of fundraising and invest energy in learning more about “how coffee actually happens.”

In his quest to educate himself, Ben joined a supply chain forum at the University of Chicago, where he met Jake, who had returned to the States and was working on building Crop to Cup Coffee Importers. For more than a year, their two businesses ran out of the same incubation space, until Ben officially joined Crop to Cup as a co-owner in 2013.

Today, Jake serves as CEO and Ben is Director of Sales for a people-first importing company that serves more than 110 coffee producers from a dozen countries.

On the producer side, their team provides market insights, pre-harvest recommendations tailored to their unique position in the market, assistance with the export process, marketing that leverages each farm’s coffees and story, and transparent reviews of their yearly strategy and recommendations. For roasters, they not only offer an opportunity to identify unique specialty coffees and connect with the producers behind the beans, they also run their operations centered on transparency—focusing on traceability, consistency, and financial accountability.

Jake and Ben say that one core belief underpins everything they do: “Good coffee comes from good people.” Their focus is on helping those good people—specialty coffee producers and roasters—connect to create incredible coffees while maintaining transparency across the supply chain.

That believe in the power of intentionality also inspires their own approach and work. “Most coffee flows down a mountain and is weighed out, tared out on a truck, and then the good stuff is sorted through and that becomes specialty,” Jake explains. “That’s not how we work. We work with very intentional coffees, and they’re separated from the community level on out.”

For Ben, the best thing coffee drinkers can do is lean into their curiosity, dig deeper, and ask questions about the stories behind the coffee they drink.

“The reality of coffee is that a lot of people are going to pretty great lengths to make this whole thing happen,” Ben says. “Yes, it’s our job, but a lot of people are in an industry that doesn’t really pay them as much as they might make in a different sector.” Those stories are worth knowing. You can learn a lot by just asking questions of the people you buy your coffee from, which will help you better understand and appreciate the work that goes into producing your daily cup.

Crop to Cup connects producers and roasters, building relationships beyond business to foster mutual understanding. When producers understand what roasters are looking for, they’re better able to shape their planting and harvest plans; when roasters understand what new, unique green coffees are available and can count on consistency, they’re better able to plan their offerings. That helps both sides work together to create delicious coffees.

But most importantly, the Crop to Cup team serves as invested ambassadors, connecting underrepresented coffee-producing communities with roasters who are excited about their offerings. For Ben, the most fulfilling access of their work is being able “to support farmers that weren’t already being supported, people who were smallholders in situations that wouldn’t allow them direct access into a specialty coffee market. … We’re able to work towards greater access for specialty producers in that way.”

Crop to Cup website: https://www.croptocup.com/

Crop to Cup Instagram: croptocup

Brick-and-mortar offices: Chicago and New York

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Tim’s coffee journey began as a teen and spanned over two decades in restaurant kitchens, from Italy to the legendary Spiaggia in Chicago, Illinois. Though immersed in the culinary world, his passion for coffee never waned. In fact, he was an avid home roaster, graduating from stovetop experiments to a full-fledged garage operation.

For Tim and his wife, Patricia, who is also an incredibly accomplished leader in the restaurant industry, the love of coffee ran deep, But they saw it as more than a beverage—it was a social unifier. “We love coffee as a catalyst for what it can do for couples and communities,” Tim explains. “Coffee houses, cafés, historically, have been places where people gather together, and the conspire and create revolution and enjoy a really wonderful beverage and have conversation.” 

Fourteen years ago, when Tim and Patricia were starting to think about their own coffee business, there were very few cafés in Chicago that were as focused on customer-centered service as their restaurant counterparts. So they set out to change that. Big Shoulders Coffee was born—a hospitality-driven roasting company and café that prioritized their customers, their team, and their producers. The name, a nod to Carl Sandberg’s iconic “Chicago,” perfectly captured their vision for a Chicago institution.

Today, Tim is co-founder of Big Shoulders Coffee, an award-winning coffee roasting company with six cafés across Chicago, a booming online retail shop, and a thriving food service wholesale. Their long list of accolades includes being named Small Chain/Franchise Champion in the 2024 Golden Bean World Series and being named the #1 Independent Coffee Shop in the US by USA Today in 2023.

Tim emphasizes that their original mission—connecting people, nurturing relationships, and serving their community—has stayed at the heart of their coffee business, even as they grew from a small roasting operation and a single café to a leader in the coffee industry. 

Tim says he and Patricia wife have never lost sight of what brought them to coffee in the first place—a focus on bringing people together and caring for both customers and their team. “So really, to this day, coffee is second or third,” he says. “People are shocked to hear me say that. Coffee comes well after guests and employees. We are a people company.”

If you love coffee and want it to be available for the foreseeable future, Tim says, you have to respect the intense labor that goes into farming it. Coffee farming is hard work, and the financial instability of the global coffee market means that many young people in coffee-farming countries are leery of careers in coffee agriculture. In Tim’s words: “Coffee can be cheap, it can be fair in some cases, and it can be good—it can be delicious—but it’s not going to be all three, and certainly not at the same time. We need to find a way to reward farmers that are doing really hard work and pay a fair price for that.”

 “The best cup of coffee is the one that brings us together. I really believe that,” Tim shares. At Big Shoulders, that sense of community extends from the customer to the roasting and café team and the farmers who grow their beans.  For Tim, that means Big Shoulders’ coffees have to taste great—based on their customers’ tastes, not what the professionals deem to be good—but also push toward positive change in the supply chain. 

As just one example, the beans for his current favorite Big Shoulders roast—Manos de Mujer—come from a co-op in Tolima, Colombia, made up by a collective more than 100 women coffee producers. “We’ve really worked hard to figure out a way, with this coffee, to move the needle for women farmers,” Tim says. “So I think this is a group that has been given less opportunity at origin, and we’re trying to move the needle as far as that goes. But it’s a delicious coffee. … It’s a chuggable, delicious coffee.”

Big Shoulders Coffee website: https://www.bigshoulderscoffee.com/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

After decades of working toward a position as a restaurant executive, Michael’s perspective on his career shifted after he lost his father, who’d had a career in the clergy. “When my dad passed away,” he recalls, “I had thousands of people coming and telling me, ‘Let me tell you a story about your dad…’ … I didn’t want [my] legacy to be, ‘Your dad was great. He got the stock from $4 to $22.’”

So two days before his wife gave birth to their first child, Michael took the leap into entrepreneurship with a close friend who worked in coffee and tea distribution—with a retail concept Goddess and the Baker, a café in the Chicago Loop.

Running Goddess and the Baker gave Michael new insight; he realized that while he loved third-wave coffee, there was a lot about the industry that he didn’t like—especially the lack of variety in choice. There simply weren’t venues where customers could order chef-crafted food and choose coffees from a variety of coffee roasters. In spite of a lot of naysayers, he set out to build a café where customers could choose from different roasting companies, roast profiles, and brewing methods. What started as a single café in 2016, today is an award-winning, with cafés in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Dallas.

Fairgrounds also became an integral piece of Michael’s contract food service company, Infuse Hospitality. “Fairgrounds was really our showcase [of our] capabilities in creating and executing and growing super-cool on-trend concepts,” he explains. Today, Infuse services 40 million square feet of custom food and beverage solutions across North America—from cafés to corporate dining facilities to resorts.

Michael says that when he started to think about the legacy he wanted to leave behind, he knew it was about creating change and designing systems that would make the world better. For Michael, “…every single thing that I do, the return on my investment is, maybe if I do this, someone will come and tell this story to one of my children one day when I’m gone. The diamonds in this world, for me, that I spend time seeking out, are the ability to repair the world and make it better while I’m here. To make people feel good, to give them opportunity, to give them something that provides an opportunity for a better life for them.”

For Michael, our daily cup of coffee extends beyond the caffeine boost. It’s a sacred self-care ritual, and you should embrace it, because you take that renewed energy and turn it into a positive impact on the world in the rest of your day.

“Money, you can make more money. Time, we don’t know how much of it we have and once we spend it, it’s gone,” Michael says. “And so taking time for yourself to take a moment, no matter what’s going on in the world, to take that first sip of a hot beverage and have a calming moment or that cold beverage or to sit in a café that makes you feel like you’re on vacation for a couple of minutes.”

Community is at the very heart of the concept behind Fairgrounds. When he was considering names for his café, Michael said the idea of the fair resonated deeply with him. Fairgrounds are venues that embrace choice-—choices of food, activities, experiences. But fairgrounds are also venues where communities gather and unite. He wanted the name Fairgrounds to evoke nostalgia and memories of “a time that we remember all kinds of different people coming together.”

That’s what he wanted to build with Fairgrounds—a place where people could gather and come together. Fairgrounds, he says, is “really a place where anybody, no matter what you believe in, what you look like, whether you’re a coffee novice, you’re a coffee expert, you’re the coffee farmer, you can come there and just enjoy being around others in a really curated space.”

Fairgrounds Craft Coffee and Tea: https://www.fairgrounds.cafe/

Infuse Hospitality website: https://infusehospitality.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-schultz-1291515b/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Ana grew up in a family of coffee producers. Her grandfather was a pioneer in coffee farming in their region of Brazil, Cerrado Mineiro, in the 1970s, and her father left his career in engineering to join him when Ana was three years old. But Ana had a different vision of her future. “I didn’t want to live there on the farm in this small city,” she recalls. “I wanted to have the experience in the big city.” So Ana left for college and spent 10 years working in her field as an architect. 

Her brother, on the other hand, opted to study agronomy and came home to help run the family farm, including focusing more on specialty coffee. In 2013, when their estate received a first-place award for best coffee in their region, Ana says it was the beginning of a domino effect that brought her back to her family’s farm. “When we got that award, it was amazing because I couldn’t believe that we had this great coffee and that it was sold as a commodity coffee.” She says it was then that she saw herself as part of her family’s coffee legacy, explaining, “I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to help my family and to take care of what was going to be mine someday.”

Today Ana is co-owner of her family’s coffee estate, which is a true family business. Her brother focuses on the agricultural side of the business, while her father still handles some of the financials, and Ana runs the commercial end of the business. 

Recently she and her husband also dove into the consumer-facing side of the coffee industry. As he traveled around Brazil for work, he noticed that there was a niche market in the booming Brazilian café industry. People wanted to be able to just quickly grab a cup of great Brazilian coffee on the go. So they started working on an plan to fill that demand. Ana says, “The idea is [for each shop] to be operated by one person, in a small place. The idea is to show that you can drink the best of Brazilian coffee for a good price. … We want to reach all the customers in Brazil with a very good coffee.” They’ve recently opened their flagship store and are working on building out through franchise opportunities in other big cities in Brazil.

Ana says that she’s proud of the relationships she’s developed with buyers and roasters and the way those connections engender trust in her family’s coffees. Those relationships began with learning, in some cases from scratch, everything there was to know about her family’s coffees. “The first [Specialty Coffee] Expo I went to, I learned a lot,” she recalls, “just when I had the opportunity to talk with someone about my coffee, because I got to figure out what they want to know about me and about my production. And many times, I couldn’t answer, and then it helped me when I came back home, to figure out what I had to know to sell my coffee.” 

Those relationships have developed over time and are founded in trust in São Luiz Estate’s products. “When you find a client that’s looking [to buy] directly from my farm, it allows us to make a relationship,” she explains. “It’s really the relationship that he keeps buying every single year, even without samples…, and it makes us feel proud.”

While it’s only been in the last decade that Brazil has really been recognized as an origin for specialty coffees, Ana hopes that more consumers will try Brazilian coffees and recognize the value in what Brazilian coffee has to offer. “Many consumers, they don’t expect to have a Brazilian micro-lot. When they try it, they are always surprised.”

As a member of the Regulatory Council for Brazil’s Designation of Origin (DO) (which certifies that coffees are grown in a particular area, meet quality guidelines, and reflect the characteristics that region is known for)  and the ambassador for the Cerrado Mineiro DO region, Ana is committed to ensuring that their region continues to impress the world with their outstanding coffees, but also to help the world better understand the people who make the coffee great. 

As part of those efforts, the Cerrado Mineiro DO developed a system to ensure greater transparency and traceability in the system. Each bag of green coffee is marked with a QR code that connects buyers to information about the region, the farm, and even the sensory notes of the coffee itself, highlighting the unique flavor profiles of different regions across Brazil. That information helps exporters, importers, and coffee roasters connect to the farms and the producers behind each coffee.

São Luiz Estate Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/saoluizestatecoffee/

Julia’s diverse career path included time as a DJ, a band manager, a consultant at Price Waterhouse Coopers, and a serial entrepreneur who has founded numerous successful companies. When she was working for United Airlines—where she helped develop the first airline snack-box program—she got her first taste of the food industry, which eventually led her to found her own company that produced ready-to-eat meals.

Julia says she realized that while “consumers love better-for-you foods” and plant-based options, many products exploding in the market weren’t sustainable long-term or scalable to meet increased demand. She and a group of other experts in the food industry set out to create a milk alternative that was both scalable and provided a protein-packed, nutrition-dense alternative to dairy, which led them to create the first commercialized sesame milk, Hope and Sesame. They realized that the best way to gain traction in the market was to build up demand with a group of industry professionals who were interested in an improved plant-based option—baristas! They designed a formula specifically for coffee beverages, which they called their Barista Blend. They set to work designing coffee recipes that would catch coffee professionals’ attention and build demand for their product and started attending coffee events like Coffee Fest.

As the CEO of The Planting Hope Company, an award-winning company focused on plant-based, sustainable foods, Julia says she’s excited by the opportunity to leverage both her entrepreneurial experience and her creativity while making a meaningful impact. “Combining creativity in business, such as what we’re doing with The Planting Hope Company, is very fun and very exciting,” she explains, “because there’s the ability to take and expand and scale and change the world on a whole different level that doesn’t interfere with that creativity. It actually supports bringing that to fruition.”

Hope and Sesame, their flagship product, is proof of how powerful that synergy can be—creating a product that fulfills the demand for plant-based milks while keeping an eye toward long-term impact. Sesame is a sustainable crop that requires very little water and no pollinators or pesticides and is actually a staple of regenerative agriculture and permaculture.  Not only that, Hope and Sesame is made using two “upcycled products”—sesame pulp produced by the sesame oil industry and aquafaba, a byproduct of hummus production.

Julia says that she’s focused on making a meaningful positive impact by being informed, intentional, and realistic about the future of food. She says that between climate change and population growth, the food industry needs to come to terms with the reality that we will need to feed 10 billion people on the planet by 2050 in an increasingly precarious agricultural system. While there are incredibly nutritious crops being promoted—like almonds, quinoa, and avocados—none of them are scalable or sustainable in the long run.

She’s passionate about building a company that’s focused on products that are delicious and healthy using systems that can account for the changing needs of the global population and planet. “Our mission at The Planting Hope Company,” she says, “is to take really scalable crops that we can grow, and currently grow around the world, with few resources…and make them the core of great tasting food that are easy swaps for everyday food people eat all the time around the world. With that type of food, we can feed 10 billion people in 2050.”

Julia says they designed their Barista Blend sesame milk with coffee lovers and coffee drinks in mind—a process that took a full two years of additional research and product testing.

While many of us love lattes and Americanos, 75% of the global population is lactose intolerant. Sesame milk offers a plant-based alternative that’s nutrient dense and, per serving, delivers the same amount of protein as cow’s milk. It can be frothed, foamed, and steamed as well as dairy, which makes it an easy swap for baristas or at-home brewers, but it’s also smooth and creamy enough to pair beautifully with cold brew and iced coffee drinks.

Julia says The Planting Hope Company embraces every opportunity to make sure their organization reflects the communities that have helped shape its success. Julia says that they’re a woman-led, woman-managed company by design. Eighty percent of their advisory board is women, and Julia says she hopes to add even more women to their board of directors. “Let’s face it,” she explains, “90% of the people that make decisions about what new food products to bring into the home are women. And what we’ve found consistently is that there are hundreds of well-qualified women who are under-boarded right now. They’ve got the capacity and the kudos and the bona fides to be able to perform on boards, and they’re interested in joining boards that align with their interests.”

They’re also proud to be a Chicago company, not just because they are embedded in the city’s thriving startup ecosystem, but also because of the centrality of Chicago, and the Midwest, to the American food industry. Julia points out that while so much infrastructure and support has focused on companies located on the coasts, “this is where we grow the food. A lot of the staple food is in the middle of the country. This is where we have a lot of the centralized food processing. This is a great place to do distribution because you can hit the coasts. Food entrepreneurship needs to be in Chicago.”

The Planting Hope Company: https://www.plantinghopecompany.com/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Laura is a 30-year veteran of the coffee industry whose career has one clear unifying thread: finding ways to support other coffee entrepreneurs. In 1993 she founded Espresso Supply, Inc, which provided cafés with the equipment they needed to thrive. At the time, coffee-shop culture in the States was just starting to gain traction, but Laura explains, “[equipment] was hard to get.”

Laura saw a unique opportunity to start a business that could support that burgeoning industry while also taking care of her young family. “The primary driver for starting Espresso Supply was I had a young child and was having a family,” Laura says. “So I needed employment that allowed me to have more flexibility… And I found a way to help people by giving them the tools that they need while providing me the lifestyle that I needed.”

Laura says there were a lot of naysayers when she was first starting her business—many people truly believed that cafés would never take off in the States and that her supply company was simply too niche to be successful. Of course, neither assumption proved true. Laura stayed the course and ran that business successfully until 2021!

Laura’s latest venture is her contribution to helping the specialty coffee market grow—by making it easier to brew the perfect cup of coffee at home. As CEO and founder of SimplyGoodCoffee, Laura’s on a mission to bring barista-worthy results to home brewers. Their one-of-a-kind brewer cuts through the complexity, allowing the true character of the roast to shine through.

This isn’t your average coffee maker. The SimplyGoodCoffee brewer adheres to the rigorous standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)—think precise temperature, optimal wattage, and even a dedicated bloom phase for perfect coffee extraction. Laura hopes that more brewing-equipment companies will start to embrace those same standards, for the good of the whole coffee industry: “I want to make that the rule, not the exception.”

Laura said that designing SimplyGoodCoffee’s brewer was her way of supporting specialty coffee roasters. While they were roasting up perfect whole beans, their coffees didn’t always have a chance to shine because many American coffee drinkers were using subpar brewing equipment at home, without every realizing it.

Laura says that presents a huge challenge for specialty coffee roasters because when someone brews a subpar cup at home, they tend to assume the problem is the coffee. According to Laura, “It’s very challenging if people buy [specialty coffee] and they brew it on an underpowered brewer, and it’s sour because it was under-extracted or bitter because it was over-extracted. They don’t become repeat customers. We’ve got to [help] them get good results in their cup.” By designing a coffee brewing system that took out the guess work, Laura hoped home brewers would be able to recognize how special the coffee truly was—and why it was worth the price.

Laura hopes all coffee lovers will hear this message: “Bad flavors are not the fault of the coffee for the most part.”

Most home brewers simply aren’t powerful enough to brew the best cup of coffee. Laura explains, “There’s 69% of people probably brewing on a 900- to 1100-watt heater. You should have 1400 watts or higher,” which follows SCA guidelines. Laura says it’s one of the easiest things consumers can verify since wattage information is included on every brewing machine. If yours is below 1400 watts, Laura says, it won’t matter how spectacular your beans are; you won’t be able to brew a really great cup of coffee.

Laura hopes that SimplyGoodCoffee’s brewer will be a way to bridge the knowledge gap between coffee professionals and coffee consumers about how to brew coffee—and help bring more coffee drinkers to the specialty coffee market. Laura explains, “There’s been a lack of education for the consumer about what actually creates a great cup of coffee and what’s necessary. … I have a lot of friends in the coffee business, and I want to and every one of them to be wildly successful.”

She hopes that her brewer will help each side better appreciate the other. She says, “…there are a lot of people who would truly appreciate having [specialty coffee brewed] in their homes, and they’re just unaware of how to get it or how easy it is.”

SimplyGoodCoffee: https://simplygoodcoffee.com

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Experimenting with different coffees fueled her interest in the flavor profiles that came from various coffee regions, something she’s carried with her throughout her career. She explains, “My whole coffee journey has been driven by this curiosity about why is this [coffee] different from that [one]? And who did this? And where is that [place] even?”

That interest fueled Nanelle’s long-time dream of starting her own coffee bar. But when they originally started developing their business plan in the early 2000s, Andy originally wasn’t enthusiastic about running a café. In fact, he says he thought coffee was “disgusting.” So, instead, they planned to open a coffee and wine bar, where Andy could focus on the wines while Nanelle headed up the coffee side of the house.

Andy finally had his coffee aha moment at the Fancy Food Show in San Francisco. After taste-testing espressos all day, he was unimpressed. He jokes, “I was, like, ‘All right, they’re all equally disgusting. Who cares? I’m done.’” As he headed to the wine pavilion, one last coffee vendor caught his attention and convinced Andy to try his espresso. Andy says that one cup transformed his entire view of coffee—the taste literally stopped him in his tracks. He recalls, “I shouted at the top of my lungs, out loud, ‘Oh my God, I have to be the one that makes this!’…From that moment on, I was done. I was in a hundred percent.’”

Today, Nanelle and Andy consider themselves “coffee lifers,” with almost 25 years of experience in the coffee industry, in almost every field of coffee—from their first specialty coffee roasting company, Barefoot Coffee, to co-founding IPCoffees Mexico Exporters/Importers to co-founding the Barista Guild of America.

Their current business, Torque Coffee, is a specialty coffee roasting company in San Diego, CA. At Torque, they’ve embraced their unique interests and strengths, a balance that benefits their business. Nanelle explains, “He’s the frontman of this band. I’m more the bass player. I like the background stuff, forming structures, production, teambuilding, and he does the front stage…, sales, marketing, messaging, brand evangelism.”

Find Torque Coffee’s Dark Drop blend in the U3 Exchange!

When Nanelle and Andy started Torque Coffee in 2022, they had a key goal in mind—finding a transparent way to ensure their pricing supported greater equity across the coffee value chain. They’d started mapping out that work at Barefoot, but Torque offered an opportunity to put this tenet at the center of their business model. Nanelle and Andy realized that, in many cases, the system became opaque and complicated and often didn’t capture all the nuances of the market, which made it challenging to share with consumers.

Andy had the idea to base their pricing model around a simple ratio—producers received 20% of consumer price of each bag of coffee. Their Proportional Pricing model is their effort to establish equity in the coffee value chain. The goal was to make it as simple and clear-cut as possible while still having a tangible impact. They opted to reverse engineer their consumer price, starting with the cost of their processed green coffee rather than the Farmgate price (which can be opaque and difficult to calculate), because, according to Andy, “That is a definable point in the transaction.”

Andy says that one of the most impactful moments in his coffee journey happened during his first trip to Guatemala. While discussing a pile of green coffee, Andy commented that it didn’t look like the high-quality coffee he was used to seeing. Edwin Martinez (of Finca Vista Hermosa) replied, “Every coffee has a home.” Andy took that motto to heart in reshaping his understanding of coffee. While specialty roasters and third-wave coffee consumers might be focused on the highest quality green coffees, there was still a place for, and value in, every coffee yield, whether or not it was objectively “perfect.”

Nanelle and Andy say that the magic of coffee, at every stage, is the people. Andy learned this lesson early on in his coffee journey, when he optimistically entered the Western Regional Barista Championship. In spite of the fact that he was working with one of the best coffees, he couldn’t get his espresso right in the heat of competition.

Just as he was about to give up, another barista, Bronwen Serna, offered to help him troubleshoot the equipment. Andy recalls, “She didn’t do anything that I could see—no adjustments, no machine changes,” but somehow, she managed to solve the problem. Andy says, “I realized that it was the hands that craft the drink that made the difference…So it reinforced that it’s really hard to make it good, that it takes technique, but it also takes people.”

They’ve carried that lesson forward in all of their coffee ventures, including Torque. Andy explains, “We’re not really looking for coffees, like, we’re not hunting for cool, rare coffees. We’re basically hunting for amazing coffee people who want to make amazing coffee.” Nanelle says they both understand that the two things go hand in hand: “Well, great products come from great people.”

Torque Coffee: https://torque.coffee

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/torquecoffees

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TorqueCoffees

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

When Jeremy took the position as executive director of Vigilant Hope, a nonprofit that works to alleviate poverty in the Wilmington, NC, community, he set to work raising money to launch a shower trailer. But Jeremy admits that he ran into an immediate challenge: “I don’t love asking for money. So I was thinking holistically, how can we really fund what we’re doing just long-term?” His cousin, who was living in Nicaragua at the time, knew a coffee farmer and suggested that Vigilant Hope try selling coffee to raise funds for their shower trailer project.

The initial fundraiser was a success, which piqued Jeremy’s interest in coffee. But if they were going to continue selling coffee to support the organization, Jeremy wanted to make sure that they were selling truly great coffee, which meant roasting their own whole beans. He started doing research and approached his CPA to figure out how they could purchase a roaster under the umbrella of the nonprofit.

It turned out, his accountant not only knew how to make it work from a regulatory perspective, he had an even more important and surprising contribution: a coffee roaster sitting in his garage. The CPA had previously run a coffee business in Wilmington and had been looking for a new home for his roaster. Jeremy moved it into his own garage and started experimenting with roasting. “I always compare us to Apple,” he jokes. “We started in a garage, and now we’ll get there soon to be like Apple.”

Today, Vigilant Hope Roasting is a thriving specialty coffee business under the organization’s nonprofit umbrella, helping to fund Vigilant Hope’s services. They’ve run a successful wholesale business for the past five years, and now manage two café locations in Wilmington. Jeremy says their success hinged on having been embraced by their local community, who are proud to support their mission.

“We’re allowing our customers to be the hero,” Jeremy explains, “and we’re their guide to help them [understand], you’re changing our city by buying coffee.”

Shop Vigilant Hope Roasting’s Huehuetenango, Guatemala in the U3 Coffee Exchange.

Jeremy says that he’s honored by the support they’ve received in Wilmington, but he’s cognizant that he doesn’t want their coffee to rest on goodwill alone. “We have a saying. It’s ‘good coffee with good purpose,” he says. “We wanted to be a nonprofit that says, ‘We think the coffee should be good so that we can showcase the mission as well.’”

Jeremy is proud of the way they maintain that balance, delivering an exceptional product in order to fund their important work. As their website puts it, selling great coffee goes beyond a simple exchange, becoming a way for people to connect to the organization’s mission:

“It’s not just a transaction. It’s ending poverty in our city.”

Vigilant Hope’s mission is about encouraging and creating human connections, and Jeremy hopes that anyone who admires their work will keep in mind that those personal links build to big changes. In spite of Vigilant Hope’s success, Jeremy wants people to remember that you don’t have to have “this big grand coffee business to help your city…just be mindful of those that are in need.”

For Jeremy, that incremental approach is key to social change. “Anybody can start where they’re at,” he says, “whether it’s … looking for outreaches in your city and just going and partnering with them and going to one of their soup kitchens or meals, starting there and creating relationships.”

Jeremy is inspired by the potential to make a multilayered social impact through their coffee business. First, they’re supporting coffee farmers by working with a like-minded importer who prioritizes relationships with their farmers. That product is a vehicle to introduce Vigilant Hope’s mission to people who might not be familiar with their work, helping people connect to their work through their coffee, and all of that brings more support to the organization itself.

Jeremy says, “I love being this twofold kind of social change…we’re helping these coffee farmers create an excellent business where they’re at” while also making a positive impact on their local community.

Vigilant Hope Inc: vigilanthope.com

Vigilant Hope Roasting: goodcoffeegoodpurpose.com 

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.