From Producer to Cup, How Driftaway Coffee is Changing Our Relationship to Coffee
Written by Ella Smit + Photography by Omer Kaplan
Ella Smit sits down with Anu Menon, founder of Driftaway Coffee, an AAPI / immigrant-owned independent business committed to ethically sourcing beans from small-scale farmers worldwide and working hard to make these relationships equitable and transparent. Driftaway champions the empowerment and collaboration of women in the global coffee industry and prioritize buying 50% of the coffees they roast from women farmers.
Tell us about your journey to Driftaway and what spawned your interest in coffee. How did you navigate your transition from marketing to coffee?
Anu: It started when I was a few years into my work life working in marketing and consulting. I was at this moment of asking myself: Is this really what I want to do with my life? I wasn’t getting the fulfillment from the project management side of things, and the type of work felt unfulfilling. I spent a lot of months trying to figure it out and being inspired by what other people were doing.
I was also getting into coffee more and more over time. Growing up, I had instant coffee in my teenage years and then moved on to Dunkin' Donuts in college. I didn’t truly appreciate coffee until post-college life when I started to play around with specialty coffee. I was gifted an espresso machine as a wedding gift. My partner, Suyog, had read the book “God in a Cup” in 2013––even a few years before that––where he learned about the importance of coffee being freshly roasted and whole bean, and that changed how we started to have coffee at home. We got to the point where we wanted fresh, whole-roasted coffee delivered to our home. When I moved to New York while on sabbatical, I was looking for a fresh, whole-roasted coffee, and it was during then that I discovered coffee stays fresh for roughly 2-3 weeks after roasting. Back then, living in Brooklyn, it was hard to find freshly roasted coffee from our local café, and I noticed the roast date on most bags could be around 2-3 weeks old, with grocery stores being the same. This is where the idea for Driftaway came from, which was around the same time when I got to the point of wanting to do something to learn from it. I didn’t want to keep thinking about [doing something]. Driftaway started by testing the idea of a freshly roasted coffee subscription.
Anu: One thing that blew my mind from the beginning was how much coffee was traveling and how many hands are involved from growing, to processing, and exporting. In many instances, you don’t necessarily know where exactly the coffees originate from. It’s not traceable to a farm, or the country. If as an industry and as roasters we can engage people a little bit more to think about how coffee tastes and how people like it, it would inspire people to learn more about their coffee. From the outset, we wanted to keep producers central to how we talk about coffee. Our coffees are traceable, which means we talk about where the coffees are from with the producers. The first few years were about figuring out the right product-market fit, growth, and stabilizing from a financial perspective. Slowly, over time, and once we got more established, we started to ask ourselves how Driftaway can evolve to be more conscientious and intentional with how we’re doing things.
A few years in, we worked on a few projects like making all our packaging sustainable and compostable. We also started contributing to organizations like World Coffee Research and developed the Farmer Feedback Report, which is something born from our first coffee origin visit, where we’d go to the farms and be asked what we thought about the coffee. It made Suyog and I think that because our model is entirely online, we could share this information from our producers to our consumers, who are ultimately the ones who taste, and rate the coffee. It started to make sense to share this feedback with the producers, hence the Farmer Feedback Report.
Relatedly, we learned that women make up so much of coffee production, yet don’t get as much revenue as their male counterparts, and that, in general, is because they work in the middle part of the production. That made us think to look at all the coffees we source to understand how many are owned and operated by women, and what’s a realistic goal for 2024 to source from women. We don’t need to only be about finding the best coffee, but we also need to be looking at sourcing coffee beyond cup score, which is how quality is defined for specialty coffee. Can you look beyond that score to market access and how it’s difficult for certain groups? One of our goals for 2024 is to have 50% of our coffee from women-owned farms.
We’ve also been looking a lot at living wages to make sure we’re only sourcing coffees from countries that achieve the minimum living wage. It comes down to being intentional as the first step to thinking about every aspect. A lot of what we changed happened in 2023, but it’s one of those things where we continuously evolve. Now we’re thinking about the kinds of importers and exporters we want to work with. For example, the ones who have small operations and are there all the time in that country, and who work directly with producers.
What does conscious sourcing look like for Driftaway, and what does it mean on a day-to-day basis for Driftaway?
Why did you make the decision to be price transparent on your website with the free-on-board and farm-gate price? Why is that important for consumers to know about, and what can we, as consumers, learn from Driftaway’s pricing model?
Anu: Fundamentally, the thing with coffee is most producers, in fact almost all, don’t get paid based on their cost of goods and cost of production. The commodity market and price, based on NYSE, influence the price for specialty. With the way coffee is priced, it has become more and more financially unsustainable; it’s a really complicated problem with many players. Our approach as a small coffee roaster is we ask for the farm-gate price, which is the price the producers were paid. In many cases, some won't want to share that information. In turn, it’s important for us to work with farmers, producers, and exporters who will share that information, although it’s not enough because how do we know if that farm-gate price is actually fair? That’s something we’re trying to solve in our own way because we work with roughly 21 origins, and there isn’t an easy way to answer that. What we can work with in terms of data is asking for that level of transparency to give us more faith that is more fair.
There are countries conducting living wage studies with organizations like Fair Trade, which are creating benchmarks for price to track against a living wage. Whenever we’re sourcing from those countries, we make sure that we’re only sourcing from producers where the farm-gate price matches the living wage. Our reasoning for sharing all of this is an attempt to create a new benchmark for specialty coffee that is not tied to commodity coffee. We want to contribute to a growing body of work that’s being done to bridge the gap in living wages and farm-gate prices.
On another level, there's trust and transparency knowing that we’re trying to do as much as we can with the data and knowledge that we have. As small roasters, the work that we do will have a limited impact. But if we’re advocating for these things, hopefully, this will translate into consumers asking for these things to ask of bigger corporations. Our part is to advocate and talk about it for the benefit of consumer education.
How do you approach new relationships with growers, producers, exporters, and importers? How often do you change partnerships?
Anu: One of our goals from the beginning was to have repeat relationships and forward contracts with our growers, producers, and other partners. We had a high rate of doing that for a long time. Since last year and re-evaluating our business strategy in terms of who we partner with, that’s when we had a big shift in terms of looking at them beyond cup score and to other attributes. Last year was a major change to rethink our relationships, and there were many new relationships made.
We’re very intentional in starting a relationship, but once it’s been successful, we try to think about how we can continue the partnership years into the future. The beauty of our model is in the fact that we have so many coffees, roast levels, and profiles, and being able to move things around to different roasts is dependent on external factors. That way, it helps with the risk for the producers and importers that impact crops on a seasonal basis. Coffee is an agricultural product, so there are variable things we can commit and know to fit in coffees year-over-year fairly easily given all of these circumstances.
What does community and community-building mean for you? How does Driftaway sustain community year after year as you expand and grow?
Anu: Our virtual coffee tastings began in 2020 with the idea that people could taste different coffees. We wanted to demystify the coffee industry. The coffee industry can be alienating with prescriptive boundaries in terms of how coffee should be enjoyed. We wanted to create a new way for people to taste coffee without preconceived misconceptions. The tastings were meant to be fun and an easy place to make coffee really accessible––that was one of our main goals. People didn’t need any previous experience to partake.
Community is thinking about coffee beyond caffeine and a little beyond taste. We’ve been trying to do more in-person events. As an online brand, community has meant so far online-only interactions. Coffee is personal and everyone has their own way of drinking coffee. It’s hard to define what the best coffee to exist is, and we wanted people to decide what they wanted to drink, rather than us being the decision-makers. That means being accessible in terms of the coffee flavors and profiles we have available. The personalization element from the beginning became the subscription service. Part of community is learning from everyone who comes to the events. I love hearing from other people about coffee. When you work in coffee and hang out with coffee people, your world gets smaller in terms of how you think about coffee. We get to learn from other people as we grow and evolve to listen to our community, and we’ve realized more and more how important their feedback is in terms of how we launch new products, such as steeped bags with coffee in them. We got such amazing feedback from our community, and we’re continuously blown away by how excited people are about it. For a small business, community is the best way to build the business, get feedback, and hone your direction.
What are your aspirations for Driftaway? Ultimately, what kind of impact do you want Driftaway to have?
Anu: Doubling down on what we’re already doing. One of our recent steps was to understand things better from an origin perspective, so continuing to do that and working on projects that help reduce the inequity in coffee is my dream, even outside of Driftaway. All of this started from wanting to do work that would be impactful, so growing on that side of things is one of my dreams. The other part would be doing the producer and consumer advocacy work, which is really important; there’s a huge knowledge gap between coffee consumers and those involved in the industry, so constantly doing work to talk about coffee in an approachable, accessible way to reduce that gap is also a dream. And, lastly, increasing our brand awareness. Community and community-building is a big, big part of it, so continuing to build that over the next few years is central to our vision.
