Stephanie Alcala Loves Bats And Coffee

My guest today is Stephanie Alcala, a green coffee trader specializing in sustainable coffee supply chains for RGC Coffee in California. Stephanie studied environmental science in college while working at coffee shops, and was able to connect her love and interest in sustainable agriculture and coffee through her master’s work at University of Michigan—funnily enough, through her interests in bats. She mentioned to a professor that she loved both bats and coffee, and that led to learning more about coffee plant genetics, biodiversity, and the complex intersection of environmental, social, and economic sustainability.

Stephanie has taught classes on sustainability in coffee at Whittier College, and still works to raise awareness about the critical need to invest in sustainable systems. This episode is big—we talk about a lot of big question, like what does it mean to measure the impact of a sustainability plan and is something actually sustainable if you expect to receive personal gains, but we also zoom in and talk about individual career moves, accomplishments, and self-actualization for all members of the supply chain.

Sustainability often gets talked about solely from an environmental perspective, and that forces us to think sustainability is about big ideas and systems. But in this conversation, we also talk about sustainability from a personal wellbeing lens and how a truly sustainable supply chain aims to provide a meaningful and fulfilling life for all its members. Here’s Stephanie:

Ashley: Stephanie, I was wondering if you could start by introducing yourself.

Stephanie: Hi Ashley. My name is Stephanie Alcala. I work for a green coffee importing company as a trader, and I also work in sustainability. That's my during the day job.

Ashley: What do you do not during the day? I love that you prefaced that as your daytime stuff. I don't think I've ever had anybody introduce themself in that way, so now I'm like, what do you do [during your] off hours?

Stephanie: Off hours, I am a family woman—got my parents nearby, brother and sister and their families. I like to ride my bike, I just got really big into mountain biking. I just like to be in nature. I love to eat, whether cooking or eating out—that's off hour stuff.

Ashley: I love that. Now I'm gonna introduce myself as like daytime/nighttime Ashley, even though that doesn't quite make sense, but I think I'm gonna go with that. Speaking of your family, did you grow up with coffee in your life?

Stephanie: I did with my dad. My dad is a dark roast, creamer, sugar, he's adding it in, tasting it—it's gotta be that perfect ratio, but I didn't start drinking coffee until I was 19.

Ashley: Do you remember any formative experiences around coffee as you were getting into it?

Stephanie: The first time I started drinking coffee was during a study abroad trip. The first time I ever left the country, I went to the Netherlands for school, and that was my first exposure to cafe culture. I don't know what they call them, but essentially [I was exposed to] lattes. Then I went on a mini vacation right after—I met my dad in London, and that was our first trip together.

I remember him walking at this nighttime market in this borough, and he was like, I could really go for a coffee. It was already evening, and we go to this stand and [the barista] is like, “I don't have coffee, but I can make you a flat white.”

We were like, “What is that?” And he's like, “Oh, I'll make it for you.”

So he makes my dad this flat white, and it has the most beautiful rosetta. We had never seen anything like that, and we're like, wow, that's so cool. So right after I came back, that was when I was like, I wanna get a job at a coffee shop.

Ashley: I love that. That's such a descriptive memory, and it's also really touching that you got to share that with your dad. What was it like when you were back home and you were like, “Hey Dad, I'm gonna go work at a coffee shop now?”

Stephanie: He thought it was it was a good place to be social outside of school. But then he would always say like, oh, it's that hipster coffee, or he's like, “I don't really like the type of coffee you drink”—that still holds true.

Ashley: That's really funny. So you started working at a coffee shop—at what point did it become clear to you that this could be something that you could pursue more seriously? Or was that something that you knew immediately when you started working at the coffee shop?

Stephanie: No. I really enjoyed my time at that coffee shop. It was called Dripp in Chino Hills and I met one of my best friends there, like that place is just, it was such a special shop.

I really enjoyed my time there, but it wasn't until I graduated college and started working at another coffee shop, Groundwork, where I had a similar experience, and they really invested in employee education.

It was at Groundwork where I realized, “Oh my gosh, I've been studying sustainable agriculture and been really getting into this topic and now, through this education, I'm realizing coffee's a plant and there's all these environmental challenges,” and it was working there that I made that connection that I can apply my academic studies to a career in coffee through this agricultural route.

Ashley: Yeah, you're one of maybe a handful of people that I know who have a really academic story around coffee. You were able to connect what you were learning about sustainable agriculture in college to what you were doing in coffee, and then you went to school to learn about coffee some more, right?

Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

Ashley: Can you tell me about that?

Stephanie: When I realized I wanted a career in coffee, an important part that played into that was somebody at Groundwork gave me a book. They said, “Okay, you want a career in coffee? You say you wanna maybe do green buying because you like to travel you wanna work in sustainability in coffee? Read this book: read ‘God in a Cup.’”

I read it and I was like, “Yeah, I wanna do this. I wanna go be a green coffee buyer.” This book painted a really like, lavish traveling lifestyle—the exploratory aspect really attracted my attention.

At the same time I was still on this track of, I like science, I like environmental science. Do I go to more school? What do I do with this career? Trying to find opportunities, internships, I was really trying to get a bat research internship—

Ashley: What’s that?

Stephanie: The animal, the…

Ashley: Oh, the bat! I thought that was an acronym for something.

Stephanie: Yeah, I did some research during undergrad on the bat's roles in ecosystem services.

So essentially I was trying to figure out my career and what I wanted to do, and then I got a real amazing opportunity to interview at the University of Michigan in the ecology and evolutionary biology department.

I had just finished reading this book, ‘God in a Cup,’ working at Groundwork and also still had my love and passion for bats. I show up to the interview and during lunch—all things good happen during lunch—I was sitting next to this guy and he was like, “Okay, tell me about yourself.”

All the interviewees are there, faculty, students. And I was like, “Well, I really love bats and coffee.” And it turns out that this man studied plant genetics in tropical ecosystems, primarily in Central and South America. And he said, “Oh, I know Price Peterson from Hacienda La Esmeralda. If you get in and you wanna join my lab, you can do your master's research on Price Peterson's Farm, and we can create a master's research study on it.” So that's exactly what happened.

Ashley: Wow. That's so cool. I love that story. So can you talk a little bit about what your master's research entailed once you actually got to school and were able to pursue that?

Stephanie: Yes. Oh, plant genetics.

Ashley: Plant genetics. First of all, coffee's a plant.

Stephanie: And second of all, genetics is really hard!

I did not have a background in genetics. I took this on primarily because I thought it would be a great way to have a career in coffee. I quickly learned that genetics, genetic biodiversity is the most important aspect of environmental sustainability in our industry.

I thought it would be a great way to gain that baseline knowledge in an academic setting and have that as my foundation of understanding. And then [I could] use that to get back into working in the industry and maybe learn more about economics in a job role versus going to school for economics.

Ashley: I thought it was interesting that you said that genetic diversity is one of the most important things—but I think you even said the most important thing—to sustainability, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what that means specifically in coffee, because the way that I understand genetic diversity in coffee is that there is very limited genetic diversity in coffee, and that is a big problem.

Stephanie: There are roughly 124 known species of coffee, Coffea, the genus. Primarily only two out of the 124 species are commercially cultivated, maybe three, but two: canephora (robusta) and arabica, and within specialty for the longest time until most recently it's been primarily arabica.

In the world of specialty coffee, you're only working with one species. The history of how the arabica plant was distributed around the world—because it only started with a small subset of plant material then that was used to spread and be distributed—you're working then with a very small and narrow base.

So all of the different varieties we have now that are being grown more widely have a very small distribution and genetic diversity. But now there's breeding and we've introduced new varieties, and so it's expanding, there's introduction of robusta into some of those varieties as well there's a lot of potential.

So the long answer is: we're working with a limited narrow base, but there's a lot of potential.

Ashley: Right, and the problem with having a limited narrow base is that when there's a problem with one of the species, like it becomes susceptible to disease or it's incredibly delicate and climate change is affecting its ability to grow places, we’re kind of—I don't wanna say we're screwed, but we're kind of screwed.

Stephanie: Pretty much, but luckily there's some good diversity and then it brings all into the question the quality aspect. I know one of the greatest organizations I'm such a fangirl of is World Coffee Research. It's an organization that is entirely dedicated to coffee genetics, and I've been reading about their new updates for some of their projects and where they're taking the organization.

They're primarily focusing on arabica, but there is plans in the future to start breeding and working with other species as well—and there's a researcher named Aaron Davis, who's really been advocating for the integration of other species. I think we'll be okay. We'll figure it out.

Ashley: Okay. That's good to hear because I think a lot of the listeners of this show are coffee folks like us, people who work in the industry, and then a lot of people who just are excited about coffee and are interested in coffee. And I think one of the questions that I get from that latter group is, “Oh, I see headlines that are like, ‘In 50 years we might not have coffee by 2050.’”

That's kind of one of those big benchmarks. Half of the world's coffee is gonna be gone. And I wonder for people like that who see headlines like that and are like, “Whoa, that's really alarming,” what should they be asking? What should they be looking for right now in 2023 they're looking at at coffee?

What issues should they be asking questions about?

Stephanie: That's a good that's a good question. I think that the idea of the educated consumer is something that's been really at the forefront of my mind recently because if consumers are asking or are seeing these headlines and it's causing concern, how can they support and do their part?

That is a very new and a recent topic we've been bouncing around—one of the major takeaways from the pandemic was the realization that if each of us does our part collectively, we can achieve a goal. I wonder how we can start to really work together with the consumer to really start to make the necessary decisions and changes now so that we don't run into a future that doesn't have coffee.

I would also say that humans innovate on demand, so it'll be 2049 and then we'll be like, “Okay, we have the solution. We'll save coffee next in the next year.”

Ashley: That's a funny way to put it. Like we're the world's best procrastinators and we'll figure out a problem or we'll figure out the solution to a problem at like 11:59 before something's due at 12.

Stephanie: Yeah, exactly.

Ashley: I mean, that's an optimistic view and I think that both things can be true—that we can be cautious and really concerned about the future of coffee while at the same time hopeful that we'll figure out a solution and we'll innovate. And there is time still for innovation.

I wanna continue on the theme of sustainability. And I think that we're gonna go into some directions that maybe don't feel like they're about sustainability, but they're definitely about sustainability.

I was wondering for you, how did you start to converge your interest in coffee with your interest in agriculture and sustainability? Did that always seem obvious to you?

Stephanie: No, it was during my journey that you meet people, you learn things, and it just takes you in different directions. I was interested in sustainable agriculture, then I made the connection that coffee is an agricultural crop, which led me to Michigan, which led me into reading all these papers.

I was trying to understand genetic diversity, and what I ended up really researching was coffee sustainability. So I read all these peer-reviewed research articles about the topics of social, environmental, and economic sustainability.

I ended up trying to get back into the private sector. So I attended the SCA Re:co Symposium as a fellow. I applied and gave a background of what I was researching in school, and it was during that presentation that I was then approached by an academic from Texas A&M University, and again, it was another book. He said, read this book. You're talking about genetic diversity. You're talking about sustainable agriculture—read this book.

So I did, and that was a book about ending world hunger and poverty and economic and community development. That book sent me on a journey for expanding sustainability beyond environmental sustainability, to really include the people and the business behind sustainability.

Ashley: I wanna talk about the people behind sustainability, because I think you're right. When people hear the word ‘sustainability,’ they often think of environmental issues, and obviously that's a huge part of sustainability. It's why we're talking about climate change. It's why we're talking about if we’ll figure out a solution to coffee in 2049, the year before it's supposed to all go extinct? Or how do we get consumers asking questions about this now?

But on a people perspective, coffee also struggles a lot with the idea of what sustainability looks like on that end. What have been some of the questions that you've been asking yourself about sustainability from a people perspective as you look at different actors involved in cultivating and making coffee because there are so many people that are involved in this system.

Stephanie: Yeah, I have a hard time wrapping my head around the amount of people involved to bring coffee from the soil to the waste basket, I guess the end of cup user.

Ashley: I think I saw something that's like, 90-something hands touch a coffee before a consumer gets it.

Stephanie: Physically touches it? Or touches the paperwork around it too.

Ashley: I think physically touches it. So even that’s a good point, considering the paperwork that's surrounded and all the other actors who never even actually interact with the physical coffee cherry itself, but are still involved in getting that coffee from point A to point B. That's a really good point.

But I think I saw somebody talk about 90-something hands.

Stephanie: That's a lot of different people in a lot of different places. When we think about so many people it's easy to generalize and group them together, but we each have our own stories and challenges and aspirations and desires, and we're all unique human individuals all working in coffee in different capacities.

But also in different circumstances, in different regions of the world, born into different situations. It's all of these different people in different places—how can we create an industry that allows each of them to be valued for the work that they're putting in their role in the coffee supply chain.

Ashley: Right, and something that we kind of talked a little bit about before we started recording, and I'll just bring it back into this conversation, but I recently interviewed Brendan Adams, who owns an importing business called Semilla, and one of the things that he talked about was the idea of opting in and opting out of coffee and how certain actors get to opt in.

I would say that probably you and I get to opt in and there are certain actors who do not get to opt in, maybe on both ends of the coffee supply chain. You have farmers who maybe this is their livelihood and this is what they have and this is what they have to do. And then maybe baristas who are working for minimum wage jobs and don't have a lot of options.

One of the things that I think is a really interesting way to think about sustainability is how do we make it so that everybody who's part of the system doesn't feel like, not necessarily that they're obligated to be part of it, but is self actualized in a way where [they feel] like I am living like the best version of my life in this role that I occupy, if that makes sense.

Stephanie: Yeah, that's a really difficult to even fathom. I've never thought about that the opting in, choosing versus really having a choice to be working in this industry or something you're born into and, it's again, going back to this idea of how can we improve and improve our industry so that everyone can—maybe this isn't your passion and or maybe this isn't something you wanna be doing or having a long career in, but you find yourself currently working in. How can you still feel valued, appreciated, fulfilled, and with your basic human needs met while in the industry?

It would be for the individuals who opt in and are in positions of change making positions to really address this reality.

Ashley: How do you see your role in the industry? Where do you see yourself in this complex web of coffee?

Stephanie: I feel so fortunate to have the career and the position that I'm in, and I always tell everyone I have the best job in the company: my role is to be a connector, to be a bridge, listen to what other people are experiencing and do my best to integrate solutions into my day-to-day operations, which is for an importing company.

I'm trading coffee. I'm buying and selling and working with suppliers. I'm working with roasters, so right there, I'm just trying to better understand where we're at as an industry, how we can improve and use my role to help.

Ashley: So you said a couple things in there that I wanna ask some more questions about.

Initially you talked a little bit about solutions and some of the solutions you've learned along the way, and I was wondering for you, as you have been on this end of the supply chain, as you've learned more and more about the different gaps between buyers and sellers and the private sector and the public sector, academia…what are some of the things that have impacted you, that you've learned along the way that you were like, “Oh, actually, this is super important and I wish more people understood this,” or, “I wish I had known this sooner.”

Stephanie: Well, at the most basic level, I had no idea—I've been working for RGC for the past three years. I had no idea what the role of an importer was or what they did.

Ashley: I still barely understand it, so—

Stephanie: It's been a steep learning curve. I started my role March 16th, 2020. I saw it at the beginning [of the pandemic] and I experienced it during, and I'm coming out still so much to learn. It's been a wild ride.

Ashley: I've interviewed a fair amount of importers, mostly because that is probably the part of the industry that I understand the least, and I have some broad understanding that an importer is essentially the person who is bringing in coffee into markets where people are going to consume it.

They're kind of the bridge between the people who are growing coffee and the people who are going to consume that coffee. And that's a very broad way of looking at it. And I think for a long time I imagine that job being like a person who tastes a lot of coffee, and decides, ‘this one, not this one, this one, not this one.’

They're kind of this big nexus point. At least that's what I thought. As I talk to more and more importers, it's been really interesting to hear them talk about what their responsibilities are versus what their job is.

I feel like more and more importers are talking about, like, “My responsibility is to work with farmers and ensure that they're getting the best price for their coffees and to find buyers that are really gonna understand what they're doing and what they need,” and to be able to bridge that gap between people. It's almost like a matchmaker in a way. And I wonder for you if that's the way that you started to see your job—how has that shift and how has that morphed?

Stephanie: You're exactly right. We're matchmakers. And it's the delicate dance of mitigating risk. I work for a family owned importing company. We just celebrated our 55th year in business. With 55 years comes long-term partnerships where the supplier, roaster, and the importer—we've grown our businesses together over the years. You're mitigating the risk by bringing in and cultivating these long-term supply chain partnerships.

There's accountability, there's reliability on for partners that they're gonna be producing the coffee and you're gonna have a seller.

Ashley: How do you think of your job from a sustainability perspective? You talked a little bit about that, you talked a little bit about ensuring long-term partnerships—that's part of it, is ensuring that farmers and roasters can work together for a sustained period of time.

Because coffee is a thing that you grow and it grows once a year, sometimes two if you live in certain parts of the world. People need to know where that coffee's going, pretty much from the get-go. So sustaining long-term partnerships is part of that sustainability equation, but how else do you think about sustainability in terms of your role?

Stephanie: One of the biggest lures that got me to this job I have now is just everything in our company's values and mission is about elevating and supporting our supplier partners and the communities that we source coffee from. And so they have a wonderful, amazing sustainability program that is all centered around the implementing and managing community development projects with our supplier partners.

They have this amazing program and all of these projects that we developed collaboratively are part of our sustainable coffee program, these sustainable supply chains. They're sustainable because they have these community development projects actively working in them.

And so that is where I really see my sustainability focus, my interests play into part is I'm trying to really grow and develop the demand, as well as the supply, of sustainable coffee supply chains.

Ashley: I wanna hit on something that you also mentioned too, that these community projects are often developed within the community. I have to imagine, maybe I'm assuming and you can talk more about this, that a lot of the sustainable projects that look to improving communities, to improving coffee-growing communities, are homegrown and they come from the people who are actually affected by the communities, as opposed to a third party actor coming in and saying, ‘This is what we think your community needs.’

Stephanie: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ashley: So why is that an important part in sustainability? Because I think that that's not necessarily even that obvious, that sustainable solutions have to actively involve the people who it's supposed to involve.

Stephanie: Yes. What first comes to mind is from that book that first got me interested in community development—’40 Chances: Finding Hope in a Hungry World.’ We only see from outsider perspective, we only see what's going on very on the shallow term.

In that book, they talk about a recent natural disaster that happened in a tropical ecosystem. And so there was a humanitarian organization that sent aid. They sent clothing to give relief. And what they sent were snow clothes to a tropical ecosystem.

That's like the broadest stroke, that we don't know as the outsiders what the community needs. That is essential because we don't know their day-to-day challenges and where they see opportunity, what they view as a priority in addressing.

You need to listen to the stories, the perspectives, and go from there. And I think that also plays into the importance of—for something to be truly long term within a community, it must have a sense of ownership and then adoption by neighbors, neighboring communities. But that sense of ownership only comes from if you really do have a seat and a voice at the table and you feel heard and you see those translated into real action that aligns to what you said—that's long term that will provide long term adoption and input and that will make solutions that are implemented actually beneficial.

Ashley: One of the things that the RGC website says is that sustainability is not a fad for us. It's a critical business strategy. I think we are starting to turn the chapter where a lot of companies are starting to recognize the sustainability is not just like the 2021 buzzword.

It's critical. It's vital, and it's something that every company needs to address, but I think what happens when something like sustainability becomes part of a business model is that there has to be some sort of like proven outcome for it. Like there has to be something that you can go to a board meeting and kind of say like, “We implemented this sustainability project and it's helped our company whatever percent.”

I'm interested to hearing your thoughts on this. I think what actually needs to happen when we talk about sustainability and sustainable programs is that we have to untether ourselves, we have to untether the idea that anybody who confers a solution should have to benefit from it, it’s almost like…

Stephanie: Mm-hmm.

Ashley: Do you see where I’m going with it?

Stephanie: Yeah. What first came to mind was we implement these projects in partnership with cooperatives—and we don't buy all of their coffee. We are working on these projects. We're improving the resiliency of the supply chain, but not all the coffees coming to us, so others are benefiting. And at the end of the day, that benefits the entire industry. We're all in the same boat.

We don't necessarily have to directly benefit from our efforts because we're trying to do something that is for the greater good of our industry. If the industry wins, we win.

Ashley: I think you're right. There has to be some sense of like, we have to look at the bigger picture of where we are as a globe. There's something that I do like about looking at things globally because it's finite. That's the biggest we can look at something and say, how do we implement a system that's beneficial globally and not necessarily need to benefit from it?

This is maybe a little cheesy, but I read a lot of advice columns, people who write into like different newsletters and stuff, asking about like, “My daughter is having a wedding and not involving me and my wife enough, even though we're paying for it.” And it's like, well then that's not a genuine gift, that's not a genuine thing you're doing to make someone's life better. It's something that you're doing for reciprocity, even if you don't see it that way.

That's really made me think about why do we do the things that we do, and being able to claim like a benefit of like, “Oh, we helped a community,” or, “we helped somebody do this,” or, “we helped somebody do that,” is certainly a benefit to you, is a way for you to make yourself feel better and be able to share whatever idea, like at a board meeting, but when we're really looking at sustainability from a global perspective, we have to look at it beyond that. Does that make sense? That was maybe a little convoluted.

Stephanie: No, it does, and it also brings up this idea of how do you truly measure your sustainability efforts? If you are trying to get into these boardrooms and showcase your efforts and like, ‘we're making an impact, we're we're working in sustainability,’ how do you measure that and how do you measure the impact of one's intervention?

Ashley: I don't know. I have no idea. And it goes globally too. It's like, how do you measure something that's direct, something I can measure versus something that again is like good globally. If you go back to the dad paying for their child's wedding thing, the direct impact that you might feel by being able to participate in this fairly concrete way that you want to is direct. You see it and you feel it, but then the overall value of your child's had a beautiful wedding is like a lot more intangible.

And not to say that sustainability actions are gifts—they're absolutely necessary. We need to be engaging in them. But there is, I think, a similar mindset of like, we have to untether ourselves. And we have to untether our ego from believing that we're gonna get like a good job pat for doing what is essentially like the right thing.

Stephanie: And I also wonder how we can better communicate that we're doing the right [thing]—how can we better convey that without boasting what we're doing? But hey, if you want the information, here it is. But also if you just want your coffee, here it is. We need to improve our communication.

Ashley: Agreed. I think about this a lot too. I've written for my newsletter about certifications and I have a lot of feelings about certifications. I think that they can do a lot to signal to consumers, “Hey, this thing might be better in ways that you care about.”

But then again, one of the examples I looked at was B Corp and there are great companies that have B Corp certification and then there's like—I'm not sure if they've removed it, but then there's a beer company that has it, that has been accused of really weird and egregious things and they still have their B Corp certification [Note: I was referring to BrewDog, which lost its B Corp certification in December of 2022].

So what does it actually mean? And I think you're right—we haven't figured out a good way to communicate with people. What are ways that they can access things that they care about and actually learn things about companies that they wanna engage with, but at the same time not feel like it's being shoved down their throat.

We don't seem to have that line figured out.

Stephanie: Yeah, and I keep thinking what is the future of responsibly sourced coffee? I go back and forth between my thoughts, but really the future of responsibly sourced is whatever the consumer says, it's what they value.

If that consumer is buying that bag of coffee because 10% of the proceeds goes to saving giraffes, that's responsibly sourced in the eye of the consumer and trying to realize that we all have the different things that we appreciate and value and making it easier for consumers to identify their values with the cup of coffee…

Ashley: I like that idea of making it easier for consumers to identify their value. Because what I was gonna bring up too is that you're right: a thing is not responsibly sourced if a consumer doesn't think it is, if we can't get someone to buy into a thing that we say is responsibly sourced, then it really doesn't have any meaning.

If we do all this stuff with coffee and then it ends up nowhere, then it doesn't matter. I was reading an article written by Namisha Parthasarathy—and she was on the show, I wanna say she was on the show in January—and one of the things that we talked about was how much control that we have over like taste making.

It's no coincidence that the vogue trend of light roasted coffees happened. It didn't just come from consumers demanding it. It comes from us as the people in control of coffee or the people in the middle of the supply stream picking these things and presenting them to consumers.

So how do we do that? How do we curate the most important or the most vital interventions so that we can present them to consumers in a way that's compelling?

Stephanie: That's what I love most about specialty coffee. The specialty coffee industry is at the forefront of innovation. And it wasn't until I started working at my job now that I realize, “Oh my goodness, the coffee industry is huge and the specialty coffee industry is just a drop in the bucket.”

But what I then realized is how the specialty sector is the one who's really trying to innovate and change constantly find and tweak what is quality and then the larger industry takes from their findings. And the best example that I can say is of cold brew. Specialty coffee industry was like, “This is where it's at,” and now you see cold brew everywhere.

That's where I see specialty and that's the importance for us working in the industry to introduce new concepts and ideas to the consumer in a more approachable manner, meet them where they're at, and then push 'em a little.

Ashley: I asked you this question off the air—and I told you I would ask you at the end of the episode, and here we are. But what would you want somebody listening to this episode to take away from it?

Stephanie: Yes, I there's many ways to go about this. Ultimately I want to go back to what we talked about opting in and not having a choice. For those of who us who have opted in to a career in coffee, I hope people who listen to this episode and get to this point, that whatever you want to do in coffee is possible and you can find ways to fine tune and integrate your hobbies outside of coffee into your job, into your role.

Coffee's so multifaceted with so many interesting and creative and hardworking people, that there's so many ways to really create a career in coffee that you really can enjoy.

Ashley: Thank you for taking time to join me on the show, and I'm excited for people to listen to this episode.

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity