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Joan and I started out as two Hippie migrants running from the urban fast lanes of the East Coast. I was 34 and Joan was 23 when we started Thanksgiving Coffee Company in 1972. We met in Mendocino and together we came to the conclusion that roasting coffee was a better way to support ourselves than stringing beads, making leather items or candles. The newly emerging "alternative" culture of the early 70’s supported this urban migration to rural America and Joan and I lived in a little cabin under the redwood trees with gas lights, a wood burning cook stove, and a 150 pound Newfoundland dog named Panda and our fresh romance. That year we set up a 100 year old twenty-five pound capacity coffee roaster at the Mendocino Hotel and began a journey that we never expected to last nor could we dream up if we had tried.

Joan and I were not looking to save the world when we founded the company. We just wanted to supply California’s north coast with the best coffee possible. At the time that meant bringing a spirit of craftsmanship to a stale-coffee-in-a-can industry. We had no models to follow; there was no "specialty" coffee industry back then. People did not walk around in the streets sipping Lattes. There were no "to go" cups with lids that could take the heat for very long, and whole bean coffee was almost no where to be found. The idea of coffee sprang from my decade long residence in Greenwich Village during the 60's. I hung out in Coffee Houses at night and got the itch to be in that environment. I did not know that it was the magic of coffee that had attached itself to my unconscious. I did not know yet what Amanda knew so well in Tom Robbins book, Another Roadside Attraction. That "logic gets you what you need, magic gets you what you want." We were just wanting to do something to pay the mortgage so we could stay Hippies Forever.

But life has a tendency to take off on you. The big things can’t be planned, they just happen. And 13 years later, something happened that changed our lives forever. By 1985 we had built a major coffee company. We were the largest small scale artisan coffee roasting company in the country. We had been around for 13 years before Starbucks existed. The artisan coffee trade was well defined. It was clear that our point of difference was the quality of taste. And being in an environment of the early stages of the new California Premium Wine industry and the Fresh Food California cuisine and Fancy Food industries, we became buried in the service of department stores like Macy's and Bullock's, and following the Fancy Food trade shows around the country looking for new business opportunities. It was a sorry story; we had fallen from grace. From free spirited Hippies living in a cabin and waking up to the small of the Redwoods, we had become business people chasing after the next possibility. We were famous (in small circles) for the great quality of our coffees, but that was no longer our special point of difference. Others in the hundreds had joined the specialty coffee trade and quality was bountiful. And then it happened! Life changed.

I went to Nicaragua in April of 1985 to chase down some fantastic coffee that had been sent to me by a nurse from Sacramento who was there working for the Sandinista Movement. I had never seen a coffee tree nor met a coffee farmer. Nicaragua was just another "Banana Republic" to me. Part of an undifferentiated group of Central American countries I knew nothing about. What I saw changed everything. The poverty that I saw and had built my business on, the working and living conditions of the coffee farmers, the hopelessness of plantation life, it was just too stark and raw for me to absorb. On the plane ride home I changed the company motto from "In Search of the Perfect Cup" to "Not Just a Cup, But a Just Cup". 

For the past twenty five years we have informed all our decisions with the knowledge that our responsibilities must include the coffee farmers, their families, and their communities, as well as our own. From that work, we have discovered that there is a relationship between quality of life of the farmers we buy from and quality of coffee they produce. So we are in the business of elevating the quality of life of our suppliers. We do this by purchasing their coffee, paying well, respecting their cultures, establishing long term contracts that bring security to the farmers and enables them to plan, and by a grand measure of transparency in our business relationships. In the process of playing fairly, we have been the recipient of great doses of love and affection. What better reward for doing the right thing.

When thinking about a family-run business and how to define one, what comes to mind as a guiding light for all decisions is a line from Carlos Castaneda’s cult classic book written in the early 70’s, “take the path that has a heart.” This is what we have done to the best of our awareness. Our hope is that the values imagined in that thought will permeate all the work we do — including the creation of coffee products that imply the kind of excellence that any family would be proud of.