Leatherback Roasters started as an idea in our 400 sq ft apartment in Yellow Springs, OH, while Grace and I were finishing our senior year of college. We both spent high school and college working as baristas, and visiting just about every coffee shop within 60 miles or so. The shop I worked at in college was a cafe and roastery. It was a rather transitional time for the roaster position, and several roasters came and went. I took an interest, and this is where I learned more about roasting and did my first batches.
After being inspired by coffees from Heart Roasters, Blue Bottle, Onyx Coffee Lab, and others, I wanted to experiment with roasting again. Grace bought me an 80-gram air roaster from Amazon. It had three controls: time, roast, and cool. This was enough to get us started, and we began our first experiments with buying green coffee. We were buying 1lb at a time, learning about different characteristics of origin, variety, and process.
This was enough to get us started, and we began our first experiments with buying green coffee.
In the summer of 2021, we graduated from college and moved to Orlando, FL, where Grace is from. We both took jobs in graphic design and settled into our new city. After a while, I decided I wanted to get the roaster back out and start experimenting again. I would roast, and we would give coffee to friends and family to get feedback. This is where we bought our first packaging from Amazon, and started selling our coffee on Instagram. It gradually grew to the point that we needed a larger roaster. With what was a large investment at the time, we bought our first 300-gram drum roaster. We moved our setup to the garage, roasting with propane over a fish fry stove. We quickly outgrew that roaster and bought an even larger (600 grams :O) roaster.
We moved our setup to the garage, roasting with propane over a fish fry stove.
This stage of our journey deserves a ton of credit and kick-started Leatherback into what it is today. We created our website, which became our means of selling, and we began doing markets and other various events. We also started buying new green coffees, in larger quantities, and figuring out our sourcing and roasting philosophies.
We had enough volume at this point that we jumped in and bought a 3 kilogram roaster from Mill City Roasters. This was super crazy scary for us, a micro-business buying a 21-thousand-dollar machine. Fortunately, we were naive and also confident in our ability to scale our business. We had the roaster shipped to our house, which confused both the freight driver and our neighbors. We set it up in our garage, with plenty of anxiety and fear of our HOA.
We had enough volume at this point that we jumped in and bought a 3 kilogram roaster from Mill City Roasters.
In December of 2022, we were a vendor at a market in Longboat Key. We were selling bags of coffee and giving out free samples of hot coffee. It was December, and we thought for sure the weather would be nice and cool for hot coffee. Florida being Florida, was a cool 80 degrees. Even so, we committed to serving our hot coffee, and we got to meet with someone who was in the stages of building The Fox Mercantile, with a coffee shop inside. We had a good connection, and they loved the coffee, and we had a conversation about being the coffee vendor for their new shop. We had numerous conversations after that, and we prepared ourselves for having our first wholesale client. Internally, this was a lot of panicking and stressing. But we were stoked, and saw this as a real opportunity to take the business to the next level.
We quickly scrambled to find a space to move our roastery to. We looked at several spaces, retail locations, odd hole-in-the-walls, and warehouses. We decided that, for what we were trying to do, a warehouse would be our best option. We found a location in Longwood that fit our needs, and quickly signed a lease. Again, we were a bit naive in this decision. The space was as-is and needed a lot of work to get up and running. We were still working our day jobs, so we spent evenings at the new warehouse cleaning, patching drywall, painting, and renovating with the help of Grace’s parents. We then needed to get it up to food facility standards, which included adding 3 additional sinks in a building with limited plumbing, hot water, and hooking up our roaster to proper exhaust ventilation. I’m sure there was more that I’m missing; it was a whirlwind of a process. But eventually, we got it done and passed all of our inspections.
We found a location in Longwood that fit our needs, and quickly signed a lease.
It's been about 3 years since then, and we’re now into our second lease at this space. We are still on our 3kg roaster, with our new roaster being built at the moment in Prague, Czech Republic. We have grown a lot here and made many new friends and meaningful relationships with customers and wholesale partners, as well as farmers and importers. We are always evolving, learning more about coffee and roasting, finding new ways to serve our customers, and creating meaningful relationships with the people who grow our coffee. We have a ways to go. But it’s important to look back and reflect on where we’ve come from, and be grateful.
