Explain what goes into sourcing coffee at origin.
Greg: I had some experience with farming, growing up working in a farm community. But we kind of accelerated origin trips with people who had been in the coffee industry their whole life.
Shelley: They thought we were crazy.
Greg: I had worked in restaurants before and Shelley had a marketing background, so those pieces of starting a business…that aspect wasn’t new. The coffee component, though, we were worried that would take years and years of experience. When we got to origin, it was like I was home. Farmers are farmers. They’re super hard workers, they put their life into their product. It didn’t matter if it was wheat or coffee or corn, you could talk to them and it was really neat to learn their story. Coffee has so many different techniques. We try to understand that background and showcase it here.
Your goal is to find the best coffee. Have you ever encountered a story from a farmer that made you want to buy coffee that wasn’t necessarily the best?
Shelley: One story that comes to mind is one of our producers from Costa Rica. We went to probably ten different farms over a couple days. One thing I noticed as we’re driving through the farms, there were a lot of migrant workers there and you would see their kids sitting roadside. I’m talking two- or three-year-old kids. They’re sitting there all day under the shade of a tree all day while mom and dad are out picking coffee. All the arabica beans are harvested by hand.
At the last farm of the day, I asked the producer “Where are the littles?” He said, “What do you mean?” I asked where are all the little kids and he said, “They’re in school.” Like it was a silly question. He provided his migrant workers a daycare for the little littles, school for the older children and computer training for the workers so they could have a skill to move on with. His coffee was exceptional. But when we realized what he was giving back to his community, it spoke volumes to both of us.
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