We started in the coffee business when we opened a small cafe in North Berkeley called Guerrilla Cafe in 2006. That led to opening a second cafe Chasing Lions at CCSF which sparked an interest in digging deeper into the coffee production side of the business. There was a specialty coffee movement that began gaining momentum, and we hopped on for the ride.

I'm interested in roasted coffee for the artistic and culinary experience of it--I find the whole process fascinating. I mean if you think about it, how does a single ingredient produce so many different results in taste? Just a single coffee bean, with the addition of some variables, creates a world of flavor and complexity.

On the business side of things, the whole business model of roasting as opposed to operating a cafe is also equally interesting to me. With a cafe, a brick and mortar location, the world revolves in and out of your door. When you get on the wholesale roasting side of the industry, however, you get much more movement. You’re in and out of other people’s doors, other local businesses, and eventually other locations worldwide. We’re sourcing our coffee beans from beautiful places where they’re grown to create a beautiful experience for our customers.

We believe in transparent sourcing where consumers are aware of where these coffee beans are coming from, the farm conditions, and the human and environmental impact.

To ensure excellent quality, we continuously work on R&D (research and development) to achieve delicious coffee. There’s a lot of evaluation, scrutiny, and quality control involved in this process. We have a lot of comparison tasting to consider new coffees and to check out the landscape of the local coffee competition. The people we include in these tastings come from all over--we have a diverse set of taste testers that come from different backgrounds: both the experienced and the inexperienced are included.

We do a lot of hand-holding for our accounts, especially for folks who are starting a new operation. They may not know anything about coffee, but they have passion and a vision, and we want to help them succeed. These small business owners are folks who want a coffee company that’s going to support them from from the very beginning, from designing their cafe and espresso bar to helping them buy equipment, train their staff and select which coffees to serve. We just had a couple of brand new cafes accounts open that are serving our coffee. We completed an entire ramp up and on-boarding of this process to help them build high quality coffee programs, which has been exciting.

In terms of social impact, we’re doing a lot of work in direct trade with farmers, fair trade, obtaining better prices, and building a company that offers positive social and environmental impact. We’re setting up a profit sharing model with the goal of helping our employees resist some of the displacement that’s occurring in our community, as well as hiring and training some formerly incarcerated team members.

We have strong direct trade relationships with several companies from different countries including Tanzania where we’ve partnered with a farm called Sweet Unity Farm. It is a co-op founded by David Robinson (the younger son of the famous baseball player Jackie Robinson) who has been growing amazing coffee for around 25 years in Africa. We’re really interested in the stories of communities like that, where farmers have a livable wage. We actually send back a share of the retail price on top of the original price we paid just for the crops.

In Indonesia, we have partnered with a co-op there and met farmer named Foster who’s doing some amazing work in high quality beans. Historically, farmers in the region have been exploited by coffee buyers. It becomes difficult for farmers who are trying to create a better product in these situations because they don’t have the resources necessary to experiment, innovate, and do new things. It takes much more than what they’re being paid (rock bottom commodity prices) to grow coffee to make a real living and to generate enough incentive for them to experiment. So we agreed to pay this farmer a higher price, probably triple his normal price, for higher quality. He’s quadrupled the quality and now utilizes environmentally responsible practices taught to him by a USDA certified agriculturalist.

Even in our name, Red Bay coffee, we chose the color red to represent us because red is the color of the coffee cherry (coffee is a fruit which grows on a shrub and its fruit is called a cherry). These cherries are even similar to tomatoes where they start green and go through the whole kind of spectrum development. What most coffee farms do is, when most of the cherries are ripe, they'll just harvest them all with either machines or by hand. You'll get this spectrum of ripe and almost ripe and passed ripe cherries which turns into coffee. What we do is incentivize these farmers by paying them only for the ripe cherries. We know that this is extra work because they have to go pass the same tree on multiple days. We have them do this to ensure the highest quality possible. That’s the big difference on how we get our coffee.

Coffee is measured by taste and it’s also scored. Taste is, on one hand, a very subjective experience. You could take something and like it or dislike it but you and I are both tasting something that is, for example, clearly salty. You may or may not like salt, but what we try to do in our coffee is calibrate our palettes to that of the general scoring guide. It's kind of mind blowing that there is this scale 1-100, but in specialty coffee, it's 80-100. If it’s not above a score of 80, it doesn't even qualify. Specialty coffee by definition is higher quality coffee.

By scoring coffee, you place a serious financial consequence on that product. Depending on what score it was given, the whole the value chain is impacted: the farmer, the exporter, the importer, the roaster, the cafe, etc. They’re scored based on quality, taste, after taste, mouth-feel affinity, and each of these scores add up. The more experience you have in doing this, remarkably people's’ scores come down to within a few points of each other. That’s how this process becomes more objective.

When people try us once and then come back, buy another bag or another cup, or choose our coffee over another coffee, we can quantitatively see the success. Up to now that's been our main gauge of how we're doing in the public competition arena. We have over sixty wholesale accounts, some of which are pretty big office accounts in the tech world. We’re the coffee supplier for Uber headquarters in San Francisco, in rotation at Salesforce, Twitter, Facebook, Ideo, and Sungevity. We have a few more that we’re negotiating with.

There’s two different paths to closing these office accounts. We basically approach the food and beverage director of the company directly (internal approach) or the food service company that provides their food and coffee for them (externally). So the company can either tell the beverage/food company that they want Red Bay Coffee or we pitch the service company to convince them to use our product.

We introduce who we are, and then we try to get them over to our place for coffee tasting or we submit samples. We use our network to find a way “in”. We try to find connections within those companies to help get us an introduction to the decision maker.

We lead with quality. You can develop a great brand, a great story, and a great social mission which will get many people to try your product once, but if the quality’s not really stellar or up to standard, you are not going to have repeat business. Brand and CSR will only get you so far. We strive to lead with excellent quality coffee, great service, and social mission--in that order. With that being said, I do think that customers come to us because of a combination of those three things.

I would say about 85% is wholesale and 15% is retail (online sales, farmers market, new markets, popups, and catering). Of that 85% wholesale, approximately 40% specialty markets, 30% cafes/restaurants, 30% offices We have pretty diversified channels.

Our prices are more in line with companies like Sightglass and Blue Bottle because I didn't really want to compete with those companies in terms of price. We are going after the same segment as those companies, but we are smaller than most of them (we’re not buying nearly the same volume of beans) so we don't really have the same price advantages. We’re charging as much as they are.

I’ve already talked about the importance of quality, brand, and impact, but I want to emphasize social impact. We value the idea of inclusivity and diversity in the workplace, and I’m starting to see other companies catch onto the idea as well in their hiring practices. We need people who come from different backgrounds with different talents in order to make a company like this be the best it can be. We’re not just impacting the world on an environmental level, but a social one as well.

At our only retail space, we raised that capital to build the coffee bar from crowdfunding.
Our agreement was that, if the public got behind and funded this campaign, we would turn over profits to the workers in order to provide a livable wage.

Traditionally, retail coffee shop employees are paid low, minimum wages. There normally aren’t big margins in this industry so this was my idea to raise the needed capital and establish the cafe. We had 822 folks get behind this campaign to make it a reality. We’re in a very high profile location so it was a very high profile campaign. We’re trying to be an example for other industries and companies that there can be a different way. We would like to find a way to create an even bigger sharing model.

Our projections are $5-6/hour in addition to our local minimum wage which is $12.55 and tips. We’re seeing these workers making upwards of $20/hour. We’re really trying to push for economic empowerment both here and overseas where we’re sourcing our beans from.