Why me? Why us?

Those who think they can’t change the world probably won’t.

I opened my first coffee business on Leap Day 2016 with little more than a passion for coffee and a vision. That vision was to bring a little more diversity to the coffee culture of Whanganui.
A selection of beans, different flavours of coffee, single origin coffees and soft brewing.
Enter, “The Village Snob”.

A coffee cart is one of the less likely places to expect to find boundaries being pushed and new things being offered. As a result, conversation was vital to selling the concept that coffee could and should naturally taste like purple grape, passion fruit and christmas cake and not “just taste like coffee”.

Our first real opportunity to start the conversation presented itself in the form of El Fenix, A kick starter project launched by Raw Material, Flight coffee’s sister company. Their goal was to honour the direct trade principals of creating better opportunities for the farmers, their families and the community alike, by crowd funding a community wet mill at their farm, El Fenix in Colombia.
Learning about the plight of the farmers, the state of the commodity coffee market and the fact that the previous three years production had cost more than the return on harvest, I felt compelled to act. We purchased naming rights to a tree, and received a kilo of coffee from El Fenix, roasted by our boys at Flight coffee.
A one time offer coffee for our customers, and we told the story of why it was so special. The coffee and conversation went down a treat and paved the way for sharing the individual stories of the single origin beans we were serving.

A small cog, turning the wheels of awareness.