Why Coffee?

This is the most common question I get when people hear about Favor Coffee. Here's a bit of my backstory and reason for being a coffee roaster.

In 2016, I left a 5-year career of working onboard cruise ships. During that period, I travelled a lot and always found great comfort in coffee shops no matter where they were in the world. In my return to land-life, I aspired to open a coffee shop that would act as a community space and hub. I’m sure most people understand – and even share – that romantic, idyllic dream of cafe ownership. I wanted to start something that could serve as a third space but I needed to build a foundation in coffee before becoming a cafe owner.

I started as a barista and worked in a few shops, eager to learn as much as I could. After a couple of months, I segued to the roasting team at one of those shops. This is where I got a larger idea of coffee sourcing and what traceability truly meant while getting reps turning green coffee brown. In early 2018, I got the chance to go on a sourcing trip to Oaxaca, Mexico with Crop to Cup Importers where I met and interacted with coffee producers in a meaningful way for the first time. 

Mission and Vision statement of a producer group we visited in Oaxaca, Mexico in 2018.

Their stories were compelling; my impressions from this trip were vast. I was discovering this area of the coffee supply chain that felt way more impactful than serving large flavored lattes in a cafe. While I still had the intention of founding my own coffee company, I began to consider a roasting company rather than a coffee shop. With a roastery, I’d have more agency in deciding what coffee producers to buy from and whose stories I’d be able to convey. Meanwhile, I was delving deeper into the techniques behind better, more consistent coffee roasting.

Lowkey, I incorporated Favor Coffee in 2019 while I still took on more responsibilities at the company that I was working for. I was the Head Roaster, Wholesale Manager, and Trainer until the world changed in 2020. The first week in March, I was in Costa Rica on behalf of this company on a green buying trip. Two weeks later, I was out of a job. Like many others, I had to pivot and luckily it was to a path I was already starting to carve out. 

Favor Coffee officially launched in July 2020 and we roasted our first batches out of Regalia’s Roasting Collective. Thanks to the shared roasting model, we’ve been able to supply coffee to subscribers and wholesale clients while popping up at markets and events and growing at an organic pace. Not having our own brick and mortar comes with its challenges which I’ve been navigating a lot lately. This is another blog post which I promise to write and share soon.

Reflecting back, I would not have been able to predict this trajectory of operating a roasting company and not a brick and mortar cafe, but in many ways, it doesn’t feel like I could be doing anything else.