Candice’s father was living in an apartment just off Portobello Road in London when she was a teenager. “It was very much the golden era of Portobello Road,” she says. “Lots of independent stores,” including an established coffee shop where she applied for a job.

When the manager asked about her experience—with things like using a portafilter and steaming milk—Candice admits she bluffed her way through. “Never ever ever ever touched anything but a Mr. Coffee before in my life,” she recalls.

She got the job but says her lack of experience became quickly apparent. The first time she attempted to steam milk, her boss, who was sitting on the other side of the café, called over to her that the milk was burned. Candice jokes, “I was like, ‘Does he have cameras in the milk jug? How does he know what’s going on?’” When she asked how he knew, he told her he could hear that she hadn’t put enough air in. “My mind was blown from that moment,” she says. “I wanted to know everything about coffee.”

Today, Candice is a renowned coffee roaster and consultant, a highly respected educator, and a passionate advocate for equity in the coffee industry. She serves as the Chief Coffee Officer at Rosta Caffe and is the Founder & CEO of her own coffee company, Kandake Boutique Coffees. She is a Q-Arabica Instructor for the Coffee Quality Institute and a trainer for the Specialty Coffee Association.

Candice says her passion for learning shaped her approach to coffee, and being able to teach other coffee professionals continues to fuel her own growth.

Her curiosity shaped her career from her earliest days in the coffee industry. Nine months after she started working as a barista, she began experimenting with roasting, and eighteen months later she passed her Q-Grader exam—and became one of only 12 Q Graders in the UK at the time. Less than two years after passing her Q, she was invited to train as a Q Instructor.

For Candice, stepping into her role as an educator has been one of her proudest moments. When she started her Q-Instructor training, she recalls realizing, “Now I get to teach this. Now I get to help people. And it felt really good that all of the stuff that had been poured into me, I now got to pour into other people.”

Candice’s advice can be summed up in four simple but powerful words: “Drink what you like.” She says that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with just embracing the tastes you enjoy.

“Learn about what you like, and do it unashamedly. There is nothing wrong with having your Starbucks. There is nothing wrong. It means farmers get paid. That’s all I care about. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your Frappuccino. There’s nothing wrong with really loving a delicious single-origin pour-over. If you limit yourself, all you’re doing is limiting your experience in coffee.”

In 2020, when Candice was working as director of roasting for Royal Coffee, she organized a live webinar called “Race & Specialty Coffee,” and invited Phyllis Johnson, president of BD Imports, to join her in a discussion about the inequities Black coffee professionals faced. Thousands of viewers attended.

When Johnson launched the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity (CCRE), an organization dedicated to creating a more equitable and racially diverse coffee industry, she invited Candice to step into a key leadership role. As part of their work, the CCRE spearheaded NKG PACE, an internship program designed to “bring more Black Americans into coffee.”

Candice says that she hopes her experiences will help more people recognize that “coffee is for everybody.”

“I just want to keep giving back and keep showing people that people like me have just as much right to be in an industry that is founded on the labor of Black and brown people,” she explains. “I think it’s really important that people like me exist and do things and are visible, because I get it all the time now, get people of color come up to me and be like, ‘I saw you years ago’… It didn’t really resonate with me how important my story was until it started to come back to me.”

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

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.

“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.

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.

Jen moved from the Bay Area to Portland in 2004 with the goal of starting her own roasting company, but she ran up against numerous barriers—the secrecy around roasting recipes and tips, the difficulty of finding a roaster to rent, and the costs of starting a roasting business.

So she applied for a job with McMenamins—an internal posting for a roaster assistant. And to her surprise, she landed the gig. She says the entire interview may have come down to one question. When the head of the roasting department asked Jen to name her favorite coffee, she said a Nicaraguan Peabody. Jen says that was what sealed the deal: “I guess everyone else … said ‘mocha’ or ‘I don’t drink coffee.’”

Fourteen years after Jen first set out to start her own roasting business, she founded Mother Tongue Coffee, back where she started in the Bay Area. Today she’s the owner and head roaster for Mother Tongue, and just last year she added “café owner” to her resume when she opened her Mother Tongue Café & Bar in North Oakland. Jen was the 2019 US Tasters Cup Champion, and in 2022, she won second place in the Roasters Championship.

Jen believes the strength of her company and her brand comes from the trust she’s engendered—with her suppliers, her employees, and her customers. One of her highest priorities is ensuring that people are paid fairly for their work and their products across the entire value chain. “This company is a giant experiment,” she explains. “Can a coffee company exist without profiting off someone else’s back?” Jen’s goal is to grow her business while making sure that everyone from her suppliers to her baristas are supported and compensated fairly.

In fact, her commitment to being a business owner others can trust is at the heart of the name she chose for her company—Mother Tongue. “A mother should be someone who stewards you, who takes care of you, who guides you to the correct things,” Jen says. “[The] tongue is how we taste everything, how we enjoy food, drinks, everything. I think [the name] signifies trust that we will always give you delicious things.”

Jen says that the beauty of our increasingly global culture is that more people in the coffee world—including consumers—can now connect directly with producers. That means producers have a greater platform to share what they do and what they need to sustain their businesses. And Jen points out that “all of them will tell you that they need $3 a pound minimum to just break even.” For Jen, understanding the economic realities of the coffee industry can help coffee drinkers better understand the price of their coffee beans.

Jen says when she’s working with producers and exporters, she’s not interested in groups that focus on charitable projects; she wants to know that they’re paying workers fairly, rather than gatekeeping funds to fuel initiatives that may not even be what workers need. “Just give them the money,” Jen says.

Jen is the original organizer behind #ShestheRoaster, which promotes, supports, and inspires women roasters. Jens says the idea for the hashtag campaign came six years ago when she was part of the competitions committee for the Roasters Guild. “They called all the contestants on the stage, so there’s 40 roasters up there, not a single woman, not one,” Jen recalls.

She realized that many of the incredibly talented women roasters she knew felt they didn’t have the expertise to enter competitions, in spite of their years of experience and deep knowledge. “So I wanted to do a hashtag campaign that highlighted the fact that not only do women roast coffee, they’re already roasting your coffee and probably some of your favorite roasting companies,” she explains.

She knew that many women would feel uncomfortable promoting themselves, so instead, she focused on having women roasters champion one another. “We did the first hashtag [as] us doing pictures of some of our friends that were roasters and then writing a little story about them, about how badass they are and who they work for and how amazing they are,” she says. Over time, as the movement grew, they started to offer scholarships, supporting more women having access to the industry.

Learn more about how Jen’s #ShestheRoaster movement continues to thrive and support women with scholarships and mentorship from the current managing director, Baylee Engberg.

Website: https://mothertongue.coffee/

Mother Tongue Coffee Instagram: @mother.tongue.coffee

Mother Tongue Café & Bar: @mothertongue.cafebar

Keri was in high school when coffee first caught her attention. “Kids at my school would be walking in the first period with a caramel Frappuccino,” she recalls. “There was something about Starbucks that was like, man, if I could work there, I’d be really super cool.” After she graduated, she got a job as a barista at a drive-thru Starbucks, where she first started to explore different coffee regions and flavor profiles.

Years later, after she’d become a mom, someone encouraged her to reinvest in a hobby she loved, something she was really passionate about, and she landed on coffee. “So I started my journey, and I listed to one podcast called The Coffee Podcast. They did an episode on home-roasting coffee. I was like, ‘What is this? Home roasting? Now my curiosity is piqued.’” She bought a bag of green coffee from a local store and started experimenting with roasting coffee on her kitchen stovetop.

Keri says tasting that first cup of her home-roasted coffee was a pretty incredible moment (in spite of the fact that the amount of smoke it produced came as a pretty big shock), something that she wanted to keep chasing. She founded her coffee company, Elliott & Murrey, in 2019. Today, five years and a rebrand later, Keri is the owner and head roaster of Roasted by Mom, her specialty coffee roastery and café in Hillsboro, Oregon. The Roasted by Mom brand is a reflection of her unique connection to her business—a woman-owned coffee roasting business that celebrates and empowers women and mothers.

Find Roasted by Mom’s Bad A** Mama roast in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Keri says she’s inspired by the craft of coffee roasting and the creativity that’s inherent in being a roaster. “You can give the same coffee to five different coffee roasters, but they have different interpretations of that roast, right?” she explains. “And there’s a sort of artistry with that.” She says that as she learns more and continues to grow as a roaster, that passion fuels her resilience and persistence as an entrepreneur.

That had to start, though, with learning to accept and embrace the positive feedback she received: “The more that I really started to really take in and soak in how much appreciation people have of the coffee that I roast, because of the artistry, the craftsmanship that I put behind that, …that’s where that drive [comes from] to keep going.”

While decaffeinated coffee often gets a bad rap for being laden with chemicals, Keri wants coffee drinkers to know that there are healthier, more sustainable options in decaf. Keri’s Cool Mom Decaf uses the sugarcane decaffeination process, which reduces its carbon footprint.

Sugarcane decaffeination happens on the farm, rather than requiring the coffee to be shipped to a processing plant, and uses water and ethyl acetate, a natural compound derived from sugarcane, to strip out the caffeine from the coffee beans. According to Keri, the ethyl acetate also adds “a sweetness to the body,” which makes it even more special.

Keri engages coffee lovers through her playful and educational TikTok account, where she shares a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to run her business but also the magic of coffee. She strives to show people what it looks like to be “a woman-owned solopreneur, but also trying to have that balance of highlighting the coffee and doing more coffee-making videos … to show people different brew recipes and how to make different drinks.”

For Keri, it’s all about bringing fun and joy to the learning process. “I’m a Gemini,” she says. “I always have to have a party. I like to have fun. … That’s the people pleaser inside me. I want to have people be smiling, be happy, be genuine, be awesome.”

TikTok: @roastedbymom

Instagram: @roastedbymomcoffee

Website: roastedbymom.com

While on deployment in South Korea, Stephanie came to a realization—while she’d loved her time in the Navy, she was ready to start something new. She circled back to the dream she’d had since she was a teenager and started to wonder if she could make it a reality. With Bryce’s support, Stephanie dug into the coffee industry and started her first experiments in roasting while still serving full-time in the Navy.

Initially Stephanie and Bryce had envisioned Stephanie running her roasting business full-time while Bryce worked in software engineering after his time in the Navy, but when the business started to take off, they quickly recognized the advantages of running Pinup as a team.

Today Stephanie and Bryce co-own Pinup Coffee Co. in Virginia Beach, VA. Stephanie serves as their head roaster, while Bryce focuses on logistics and operations. Together they run a successful roastery, with a focus on sustainably sourced small-batch blends, single origins, and limited run roasts. In 2023, they were awarded the silver medal for Best Coffee by Best of Virginia Beach.

Find Pinup Coffee Co.’s Slightly Dangerous blend in the U3 Exchange.

Stephanie says that she was always interested in specialty coffee but that she wanted to find ways to make it more accessible to more people. While she’s excited by the intricate details and science behind specialty coffee, she knows that customers—especially ones who are just starting their coffee exploration—can sometimes find all of that information and jargon overwhelming.

She and Bryce are committed to meeting customers where they are and helping them gradually learn more about the world of specialty coffee. Stephanie says they keep one guiding principle in mind as they build their brand: “Stick to what you are trying to portray at all times. And being welcoming is our number one. Be kind. Be welcoming.” Bryce echoes that same sentiment: “Just be with people. Help them in their journey. That’s the approachable part.”

Bryce says that hearing customers recognize and appreciate that commitment is the best compliment they can receive. “We really love to know that our mission is coming across in a way that we were hoping it would,” he says. “The brand isn’t what you say it is. The brand is what other people say it is.”

Stephanie says one of the best pieces of advice she can offer coffee drinkers is for coffee lovers who use an auto-drip coffee pot. “Turn your burner off,” she recommends, “because there’s an acid in coffee that will taste great when it’s hot, but if it sits on a burner and continues to be warmed, it’s going to get extremely bitter, and it’s actually a chemical change that’s occurring in the coffee.”

Stephanie and Bryce both say that the support they received from the military community and programs for veterans was absolutely invaluable to them in starting their business, and it’s something that they’re committed to paying forward.

Stephanie received business mentorship through the Veterans Business Outreach Center (VBOC), and her mentor is still involved in helping grow and sustain her business. Near the end of Stephanie’s Navy career, she also participated in the SkillBridge program, which offers service members the opportunity to participate in training and internships at select industry partners, to help them prepare for the transition out of the military and into the civilian workforce.

Today, Stephanie and Bryce embrace opportunities to give back to those same communities. They regularly speak at veterans conferences, remain involved with VBOC, and have just recently been approved to be an industry partner for SkillBridge.

Website: pinupcoffeeco.com

Instagram: @pinupcoffeeco

Facebook: Pinup Coffee Co

When Firaol tells people that he grew up in a family of coffee farmers, he knows they might assume he started a roasting business to carry on his family’s legacy. But he admits that it was only in retrospect that he fully connected the dots to his family’s century-long coffee legacy.

Firaol, a student-athlete at Saint Louis University, was recovering from a stress fracture that left him unable to train and felt he needed something to fill his time. “I kind of saw that people like Ethiopian coffee, so I figured I would just launch it,” he recalls. “So within a week, I started working on it.”

Firaol says that it wasn’t until he had his business up and running that he was able to recognize the thread that ran from his coffee roasting company—which he named Moii Coffee—to his family’s long, successful history of coffee farming. (In fact, his family’s farm, Alo Coffee, won the 2021 Ethiopian Cup of Excellence award.) He says it’s a living testament to Steve Jobs’s adage: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward.”

Firaol launched Moii Coffee just over a year ago, but the company has already achieved impressive growth. Not only is he roasting coffee for customers in the local St. Louis area and shipping coffee nationwide through his online sales platform, he’s expanded into the corporate world, providing coffee to clients through a national food service provider.

In spite of getting great feedback from many local cafés, Firaol realized that many local shops couldn’t carry Moii’s coffees because they had their own in-house labels. Instead of getting discouraged, he recognized a unique opportunity: start importing green coffee from his family’s farm to sell to local roasters.

Firaol’s entrepreneurship has quickly earned him recognition and accolades: He was selected as St. Louis University’s 2023 Student Entrepreneur of the Year and was named to St. Louis Inno Under 25.

In thinking about a name for his company, Firaol chose the Oromo word moii, which means conquer, and he says inspires his own personal mantra. “‘Moii the day,’” he explains, “which is ‘conquer the day.’”

He believes that embracing the opportunities that come from learning keeps him focused and moving forward with his business. “If you want until you have all the answers to do it, probably the opportunity is gone already,” he says. “You don’t need to know everything. You actually don’t need to know a lot. … The best way to learn is just by doing it.”

Firaol says that he wishes more consumers knew the stories behind their daily cups and connected to the farmers and people who create their coffee, and he’s heartened to see more companies, especially in the specialty coffee industry, putting greater focus on creating those connections. “I wish most consumers knew a lot about where exactly their coffee comes from,” he says, “because a lot of times there is a very unique story behind [your coffee]—whether it’s the village or the farmer himself or herself.”

Firaol’s long-term goal is to build a business “that highlights what Ethiopia is, that highlights what Ethiopian coffee is.” For him, Moii is about more than just sharing high-quality Ethiopian coffees with coffee drinkers in the States; he wants to create a brand that helps customers connect with Ethiopia’s rich culture and the individual stories of Ethiopian coffee farmers and producers.

He’s inspired by the opportunities for Moii to become “a brand that is known for carrying all kinds of Ethiopian coffee, and therefore not only carrying products, but [taking] our customers on the journey with us to Ethiopia, through the stories we tell and the products we have.”

Moii Coffee: https://moiicoffee.com

Business Blog: https://firaolahmed.substack.com

After getting interested in the art of brewing coffee, Brian was flipping through catalogs when he came across a home roaster. “And I thought, ‘Oh. It never occurred to me that all coffee was roasted by somebody,’” he recalls. Initially he thought roasting from home would be too messy and difficult for a beginner.

But the idea of roasting his own coffee stuck with him. He bought a fluid bed roaster and a copy of Ken David’s Home Coffee Roasting. He describes the first sip of his home-brewed coffee as an “epiphany”: “I’d never had coffee that wasn’t stale before that. So it was my first time having fresh coffee.” Six years later he opened DoubleShot with the goal of introducing other people to how amazing coffee could truly taste.

Click here to find DoubleShot Coffee Company’s Ambergris Espresso Blend in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Brian has served as the founder, owner, and sole roaster at DoubleShot since 2004. Brian describes the original operation as “bare bones”: “We had an espresso machine, a coffee roaster, and a brewer.”

Today, DoubleShot’s home is a nineteenth-century barn, which Brian purchased in Berne, IN, and had dismantled and reconstructed near downtown Tulsa. Brian says his staff of 17 to 20 people serves hundreds of customers every day while also running a successful wholesale business and online sales platform.

In 2023, Brian purchased his own coffee farm based in Nicaragua, and he’s currently working on a book about his experiences in the coffee industry. He also launched Native Design, an online platform for brewing equipment and accessories, including the Launchpad pour-over brewing station—Brian’s own design.

Brian says his mission has been the same since he first dreamed of his own coffee business: to show people what a truly incredible cup of coffee tastes like. That started with educating his customers, many of whom came in looking for sweetened, creamy coffee drinks.

Brian wanted people to learn to appreciate the taste of the coffee he’d worked so hard to create, not water it down with other flavors. He admits that focus made him a bit “rigid” and earned him a reputation for being gruff, even refusing to serve customers who didn’t understand his vision.

Today he says he takes a more incremental approach to educating coffee drinkers. “People come in and try to order a mocha or something, and I try to get them to drink a latte,” he says. “And then I try to get them to drink an Americano, and I try to get them to not put milk in it. We’re trying to get them to taste what coffee actually is.”

Brian says if coffee drinkers feel like they need sweeteners or creamy additives to make their coffee taste good, he’s got one piece of advice: “They need to drink better coffee.”

Brian says his first visit to origin reshaped the way he understood coffee and his role in educating consumers. “Touching the coffee trees and the coffee cherries and smelling the coffee flowers and meeting the people who pick the coffee and the people who take care of the farm,” he says,  “changed my perception of coffee and the responsibility that I have as a roaster and a person who brews coffee, a barista, to take more care and to explain to the customers how much goes into coffee before we get it.”

Brian says it inspired his commitment to know the people he bought coffee from and understand the work of growing, harvesting, and processing coffee. That mission to connect the entire process from farm to consumer culminated in early 2023 when Brian got the opportunity to purchase his own coffee farm in Nicaragua. In 2023, they planted 5,800 coffee trees, and Brian hopes to have their first harvest in 2025. All of that gives him a sense of pride and gratitude for his loyal customer base and “…the things that we’ve been able to manage to pull off somehow from this little, tiny café in Tulsa.”

DoubleShot Coffee: doubleshotcoffee.com

Native Design: native.design

Brian’s book: purist.coffee

In 2009, Nathan’s sister, who was 16, was looking for more venues where she could perform as a musician, but her age was a limiting factor. Nathan’s family realized that not only were there limited venues for young musicians, but there also were few places in their community where people could gather in a focused environment to listen to live music. From that, the first incarnation of Dessert Oasis was born.

Originally, the business focused on serving desserts and creating a venue for their community to connect, and serving coffee was just one small aspect of their model. “That was really enough exposure to kind of get my interest piqued in the world of coffee,” Nathan explains. “I literally used to go to my parents with these profit-analysis charts as a 13-year-old, trying to explain why it would be financially feasible for us to being roasting our own coffee and actually improving what we were doing on the coffee end.”

Click here to find Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters’ Ethiopia Biru Bekele roast in the U3 Coffee Exchange!

Nathan says wears many hats in his family’s business, Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters, which has grown to a team of 65 people at four different locations, including an eight-person baking team specializing in their signature cheesecakes. He sources all of the company’s green coffee, heads the roasting department, and develops the company’s vision and financial strategy.

He’s also co-founder of Ace High Company, an all-natural-ingredient haircare company, which he founded with Dessert Oasis’s current director of finance in 2016. After friends in the haircare industry helped them discover their interest in experimenting with different hair products, Nathan and his co-founder started to play with creating their own. “We started brewing these little batches of pomade in our kitchen of the Rochester shop after hours, actually,” he recalls. Today they sell small-batch hair products worldwide, to haircare professionals and on their online platform.

Nathan is doing his part to create more opportunities for people who are passionate about making their careers in the coffee industry. “That’s one of the things that really drives me to want to continue the growth of this company…to create more of those career-type roles in our organization,” he explains.

Nathan wants to change how people think about working in coffee. “Over the years, we’ve met and worked with so many passionate, talented people who always have that compromise of that societal pressure to ‘get a real job’ or ‘get into your actual career.’” At Dessert Oasis, Nathan is proud that they’ve grown by finding driven people, like their baristas, who wanted to transition into full-time careers within the business.

Nathan says he hopes more consumers will come to understand the amount of work required to make a phenomenal cup of coffee. He shares with his regular customers all of the labor that goes into creating Dessert Oasis’s micro-lot coffees, but he says even they’re sometimes surprised by the amount of labor involved—from farming to sourcing to roasting to the art of brewing. “

“I think really the real craft of it is one of the biggest surprises to so many people still,” he says.

By forging long-term relationships with their importers and farmers, Nathan says that he’s able to better serve his customers, by providing high-quality, consistent, single-source micro-lot roasts.

After experimenting with blends, Nathan realized that his customers were truly drawn to their single-origin roasts, so that’s where he chose to put his energy: “Let’s just focus on really highlighting each origin, each lot.”

This model allows Dessert Oasis to provide coffee lovers with a seasonal rotation of unique coffees and serve as a market for small farmers, while also educating consumers about what makes each lot unique.

Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters: www.docr.coffee

Instagram: @desert_oasis_coffee_roasters