Tech Is Changing Sourcing for Roasters With Kat Melheim of Algrano

🟡 Transcript created with an AI tool. There may be errors.

Garrett Oden (00:01.41)
All right, Kat Milheim, welcome to the podcast.

Kat Melheim (00:04.44)
Thank you so much for having me. Glad to be here.

Garrett Oden (00:07.532)
Alrighty, well, I really appreciate your openness about your role and expertise in roasting. You’ve been very generous with giving us peeks behind the curtain. know, starting at black and white is where I first encountered that, but you’re still doing that. You’re still being very open and transparent with a lot of things that have not been accessible or open in the past and props your employers as well for being open to providing that transparency.

I know if I told you the story, but I used to work for a coffee shop that had two brother owners and one of the brothers also owned a roastery and a coffee shop in another city. So I went to visit this other place to get training. They were more established, know, they were higher skill. So went there. Had a great time. I was watching some people roasting and, know, was trying to sort of wrap my head around what was going on, what, know, what kinds of things they were, they were trying to signals they were trying to pick up on to impact how they were, how they’re roasting.

And I was asking questions and I got a very straightforward answer back, was that’s a trade secret. And it just like, it wasn’t a joke. It was very serious that you were going to have to learn this the hard way, the trial and error phase. Like I’m not going to tell you this, like our secrets. And it just felt a little bit odd partially because the owner of your company also owned my company. So are you sure you’re withholding from the right people? don’t know. The incentives were a little bit strange there.

Kat Melheim (01:13.635)
Yeah.

Garrett Oden (01:29.85)
But also it just seems like a strange thing to say to somebody unless you’re like truly on like a frontier scientific field or something like that. You know, it’s like, I don’t really understand what this accomplishes because there’s a lot of coffee roasters around and there’s going to be a lot more, you know, it’s pretty obvious that that roasting was gonna become more common at that point. See, it really really struck me and gave me sort of bad taste in my mouth. And you know, when I encountered you and if people don’t follow you, they should follow you at RoosterCat.

Kat Melheim (01:35.556)
You

Garrett Oden (01:57.956)
When I encountered you, was such the opposite experience of having that openness and transparency that it was really a breath of fresh air. So maybe that’s a good place to start. I’m curious, how have you seen this evolve over time? Do you still encounter a lot of the like hush hush that’s a trade secret type people or do you think that attitude is going away?

Kat Melheim (02:18.36)
Yeah, well, I’m sorry that happened to you in the first place because yeah, there’s nothing that kills curiosity like saying, you know, this isn’t for you, go elsewhere. Maybe there are some people who would hear that and be like, but what do you mean? But I think for most people being unwelcome is an immediate turnoff. Yeah, I mean, I…

feel like I’ve been very, very, very lucky in my coffee career and especially in my roasting career that I haven’t run up against a lot of people who have come at me with that energy. And that’s also part of what fuels me to continue sharing what I learned and to spread education because I feel like I’ve been one of the lucky ones to kind of sneak on through for some reason.

My first roasting job was in 2017. I got a job as a barista at a coffee shop that also had a roastery. basically through Pure Volume, they needed somebody else to help in the roastery and I was the first one to raise my hand. And my boss at the time just was like, okay, great. You’re gonna like do it all. I’m gonna teach you. And then I shortly became the primary roaster because he was also the…

business owner, a cafe manager. And so really I think, yeah, I was in the right place at the right time with the right person to guide me into the roasting industry. Those attitudes still persist, I think, but you know, when a door is opened and the, when the current starts flowing in that direction, it’s really hard to keep.

keep things as the status quo. So I think as education becomes more available, as there are more YouTube videos and Instagram accounts and blogs and publications that are sharing information, it becomes harder and harder to guard that. I also have the opinion, I hold the opinion that

Kat Melheim (04:42.446)
Keeping roasting to yourself really is kind of like a scarcity mindset sort of thing. Like if you think that, if you think, if you’re a roaster and you think that telling what you do to one other person is going to like destroy your ability to be a successful roaster, then like maybe you should develop your skills a little bit more or like look.

You know, gotta get take some perspective. Yeah, I don’t know. I think that the people out there who want to gatekeep and withhold information can surely continue to do that, but they’re gonna be surpassed by people who are willing to talk, connect, communicate, open up. And roasting is such a huge, like every coffee is different. Every machine is different. Even within a manufacturer.

every machine is slightly different. The temperature probe is like slightly different placed in a different spot. So there’s nothing really to guard in my opinion.

Garrett Oden (05:54.788)
That’s really interesting and yeah, think it makes sense that at one point you might have been able to withhold the competition, know, keep them at bay by withholding. But at this point, yeah, I think there’s got to be other ways to build your moat and stay different.

Kat Melheim (06:10.19)
Totally, and it’s more fun. I think the specialty coffee industry, think some, we like to think that we’re big or better or special, but the specialty coffee industry is so small in the grand scheme of the special, in the grand scheme of coffee, in the coffee industry, and then in the grand scheme of trade, commerce, the world, retail, that,

Garrett Oden (06:13.474)
Yeah.

Kat Melheim (06:40.172)
Like, I think we have so much more to gain by learning what we know and then sharing it with other people and then learning from them than we do by just all staying in our own silos and being quiet and not talking to each other. Plus, that’s no fun. It’s more fun to talk with other people.

Garrett Oden (07:00.834)
Yeah, I saw I saw pictures you posted from I think it was a roast summit this or this year or late last year and you know, there’s like there’s like 12 people crowded around a roaster and you’re all like sniffing and That just looks fun and it looks like way more fun than doing it alone. So yeah, I think that’s a great point

Kat Melheim (07:07.597)
Mm-hmm.

Kat Melheim (07:12.206)
Yeah

Yeah, yeah, it was at Roast Summit. They had a number of different machines set up and like, yeah, it was like only, only at a roasting conference would you see like a dozen people not talking, huddled around a machine, staring at a screen and like having the time of their lives.

Garrett Oden (07:32.666)
Yeah, yeah Well, that’s great. Thanks. Thanks for your perspective on that so, know, know that you you recently made the move away from black and white and towards Al Grano as as your your place of full-time employment and you know, that’s a really interesting shift and and I’m super curious to hear your perspective on what it’s like to buy coffee these days because there’s a

bunch of different ways to do that compared to a decade ago, you when I first got into coffee. And, you know, I recall, you know, the sort of the dream of, you know, among my friends who would open roasteries and coffee shops was to do a direct trade and to go to the origin and shake the hands of folks themselves. And, you know, it was such a complicated ordeal and things have really changed a lot, especially with

platforms like El Grano. so yeah, I’m super curious to hear what you think. let’s do this. Can you give me a sense for what are the options now? What sort of capabilities do I have? If I’m a buyer and I want to source coffee, what can I do now that’s different than five years ago?

Kat Melheim (08:42.872)
Yeah, totally. Well, I’ll start by saying that I’ve never been a coffee buyer myself. I’ve pretty much been a production roaster. I’ve been a head roaster into capacities or into companies, but that there was somebody else who was doing like the sourcing and green buying. So I’ve luckily not had to deal with the, I’ve helped pick what coffees we want to buy, but I haven’t had to deal with the.

financials of juggling the terms of contracts and everything like that. But there are definitely a lot more options now than there have been in the past. And I think it really has to do with the openness of global trade with technology. mean, WhatsApp, like all producers that I know have WhatsApp.

and a lot of them have Instagram. And so the space between a producing country or the space between Origin and a roastery is collapsed in the space of the internet, the World Wide Web, in a way that it used to not, there used to be more intermediaries that you had to go through. From what I understand, from where I sit, there are kind of

Two ways to, two main ways to buy coffee as a green buyer. There’s spot lists, which usually come through importers and they have a list and list of coffees that they have purchased from producers that they work with. And then there’s a forward buying or forward contracting, which you can do through an importer, but you can also do…

bit on your own now as a roaster and that’s kind of what El Grano allows or facilitates. There’s still somebody who needs to like coffee is very complicated. Coffee trade is very complicated because it’s still the coffee still needs to go from the where it was produced to where it will be roasted so it still needs to be transported. Somebody needs to cover

Kat Melheim (11:04.866)
the cost of that transportation. Somebody needs to cover the risk of that transportation. Somebody needs to fill out the custom forms. Somebody needs to, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that goes on in the middle. But yeah, there are, and I guess I’ll add a third, which is there are ways in which like a roaster can directly, well, it depends on.

who you ask if direct trade is real or not. Because again, all of that middle stuff has to happen and most roasters aren’t set up, least most specialty roasters aren’t set up to be exporters, importers, customs agents, financial bodies to cover the cost and everything. I guess, okay, backtracking. Different ways to purchase coffee.

Garrett Oden (11:36.543)
Hahaha, yeah.

Kat Melheim (12:02.592)
Spot coffee, where you’re basically ordering off a menu. Forward contracting, where you’re buying a coffee before it’s available. Most times, as far as I know, that’s when, like a roaster and a producer talk together about what that coffee will be, how much, quantity of the coffee that will be, when the shipment will leave and everything. I guess that that’s…

I’ll say that those are the of the two main ones that I see.

Garrett Oden (12:36.79)
My impression is that the process for forward buying that coffee has changed dramatically. I can recall having conversations with folks 10 years ago and they were just getting into this and they were like, gosh, I’ve got to pick which shipping company, I’ve got to pick my insurance, I’ve got to pick who’s going to drive the truck from the farm to the… And it’s like, there’s all these steps.

Kat Melheim (13:01.699)
Yeah

Kat Melheim (13:05.517)
Yeah.

Garrett Oden (13:05.59)
But it seems like the ability to sort of simplify those things with the internet and with more intelligent platforms to help connect those dots is able to really change that.

Kat Melheim (13:19.086)
Yeah, well, and that’s exactly what El Grano does is kind of act as that intermediary to take care of all those logistics without being the importer in control of the coffee, or I’ll say it like without making the decisions on behalf of the producer or the roaster. So yeah, El Grano is a platform. I think there’s a lot of…

like confusion about how a grano is different than like a traditional importer. And the way that I kind of simplify it is that for a traditional importer, people who work at the importing company go to the coffee origin or they have people on the ground in the coffee origin and they purchase coffees from farmers.

producers, co-ops, and then so they purchase it and then they ship it to their warehouses and sell it to their customers, their roaster customers. For El Grano, it’s a platform basically meaning a website. That’s the like the front-facing kind of manifestation where a producer can create a profile, list their coffees that they’ll have on the website.

a roaster can go onto the website, browse those coffees, and they come up with an agreement for quantity, quality, price, everything together. Then El Grano takes care of, El Grano charges for the logistics, for if either of the parties wants financing, and for basically getting the coffee from the one place to the other. But the goal is that the producer and the roaster

talk directly to each other rather than Algrano kind of facing outward to both. We like face inward to each other.

Garrett Oden (15:24.624)
I like that a lot. Okay, so I’m curious. Let’s talk about direct trade. Is this what direct trade means? Does it sort of change how we have to think about what direct trade might be or is it?

Kat Melheim (15:38.254)
Yeah, I mean, I feel like in Specialty Coffee, we use words a lot that sometimes mean what they mean and sometimes mean what we want them to mean. You know, I think there’s no doubt that sustainability has kind of become one of these words that is greenwashed. Sometimes it means something and sometimes it doesn’t mean a whole lot, but it sounds nice. I think…

from where I’m standing, direct trade has kind of become one of these concepts where if a roaster purchases coffee from the same producer or the same co-op multiple years in a row, or they can put the name of the producer on their bag, they assume that’s direct trade. But.

I’ve heard a producer say, it’s not direct trade unless the producer says it’s direct trade. And that’s kind of what I, where I kind of tend to sit in that if you’re not talking, if the roaster and the producer aren’t talking and agreeing upon pricing, then it’s not direct trade. You can know each other, you can have met.

you know, the roaster can have visited the farm, but if you’re not talking about pricing, if you’re not doing business together on a direct level, then personally, I don’t think it’s direct trade. And there are some people who will say there literally is nothing direct trade unless you own both the farm and the roastery because somebody has to…

import the coffee, somebody has to take ownership of it while it’s on the boat, you know, but yeah. I think it’s a conversation we haven’t had enough yet in the specialty industry. And I think a lot of that is because historically roasters have held the power and the control over language, over the entire supply chain and

Garrett Oden (17:39.674)
Hmm.

Kat Melheim (18:04.362)
I hope that, again, as lines of communication are more and more open due to technology, due to the ability to travel, both roasters going to visiting producers, but also producers visiting consuming countries like coming to Expo or going to World of Coffee or other events, that allows people to talk

to each other more. So I hope that the conversation shifts and to it being more driven by producers. Cause I’d like to hear what more producers have to say about what does direct trade, what is it to you?

Garrett Oden (18:51.8)
Yeah, absolutely. That’s a great point. You know, I’ve seen others use terms like like farm sourced or relationship coffee, things like that. Do you have a term that that you like or default to or that you you tend to favor?

Kat Melheim (19:05.975)
Sure. So on El Grano we use direct sourced rather than direct trade because it’s about producers and roasters directly talking with one another. trade, yeah, there are intermediaries. There are different people who take, you know, technically take ownership of the coffee at different levels depending on the contract and everything. So I like direct source. like, conceptually I like

the term relationship coffee, but I think that also can get really opaque, especially because it seems that it’s the roaster most often saying, I have a relationship with the producer and that relationship might be, I visit their farm once a year or every other year and they host me and they pay for my stay when I’m there and then, you know, I buy their coffee.

Which, you know, if that’s what, like, I know a lot of producers who love to host. Like, I don’t, you know, don’t want to say that that’s a bad thing in general. Because I know a lot of producers who absolutely love having people come visit them, love hosting origin trips, especially for roasters that they work with. So yeah, anyway, that’s an aside. I don’t want to, like, demonize that at all or paint it with a broad brush, but.

Yeah, I think relationship can get dicey because then there’s also, well, what kind of relationship is it that you have? Do you have a like friendship? Cause that’s fine. Or do you have a business relationship that is year over year that has longevity, that has, you know, mutual risk, that has aspects of…

like yeah, mutual benefit and mutual risk. Because that’s different than being buddy buddy with somebody.

Garrett Oden (21:09.754)
Okay, so let me make sure I understand how El Grano works. So there’s essentially a marketplace of producers and I can go and explore them, initiate conversations and come to agreements with people. And then El Grano on the backend will facilitate the shipping, the insurance, the logistics and the nitty gritty details of getting coffee from point A to point B.

Kat Melheim (21:14.232)
Yeah.

Kat Melheim (21:24.006)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Garrett Oden (21:36.366)
Did I summarize that correctly or is there anything else you’d add that’s part of the core experience?

Kat Melheim (21:40.236)
Yeah, so that’s one huge chunk of what El Grano does. And also I’ll say that El Grano on the back end, El Grano on the back end does do all of that, but it’s also front facing. Like all of the charges, all of the, like, all of the money aspect is shown to both producer and roaster. So they all know how much El Grano is charging for each different service and how much.

producer is getting paid and how much the roaster is paying. So both roaster and producer have that transparency. They both know how much money is moving where. So yeah, El Grano does it on the back end, but everybody knows about like all of the details. And yeah, that’s, I would say we call that at El Grano the shipping service. Or no, sorry, we call that the discovery service. So that’s where

producer roaster, I think of it as like a tinder for green coffee. And then there’s also what we call shipping service. So that’s if a producer and a roaster already know each other. They don’t have to go onto our platform to find each other if they’ve already been working with each other for years through an importer or if they’ve been talking about working with each other because they met at SCA.

but they haven’t yet purchased and traded coffee, they can pretty basically like use Algrano’s shipping service to move the coffee from point A to point B. So there’s kind of those two realms. If you don’t, if you’re a producer or a roaster and you don’t yet know who you want to work with, you can find them on the platform. If you’re a producer and a roaster and you do know you want to work together, you can…

basically do that through the services that we offer in the middle.

Garrett Oden (23:41.24)
So, Algrano is this lovely interface that takes all this complexity and simplifies it, makes it almost self-serve. So, I’m curious what you think about this. It seems so easy to order coffee now online through platforms like this, and I there’s some others as well. Does this sort of become the interface to rule them all, because it’s so easy and straightforward? Do you see other ways of working with?

with importers and traders sort of getting phased out that are more hands-on and less self-serve and less digital. I don’t know, what do think about that?

Kat Melheim (24:20.972)
Yeah, I think it depends on what you’re looking for as both a roaster and a producer. Of course, I work for El Grano, so I think, I mean, I work for them because I believe in the platform and I think it does the best for especially producers that we’re capable of in the industry right now. But I also, as a person who,

consults for roasters can realize some of the limitations, especially in terms of it is self-serve, but in order to be self-serve, you need to have a baseline knowledge of the internet. A producer needs to be able to upload photos, they need to be able to upload the lots that they have available. And so,

there are some producers who maybe don’t want to be in charge of their own sales. They want to work with an importer who takes care of finding like specific, or they want, I guess they want to work with an importer that’s gonna buy their coffee anyway, rather than them having to find kind of their own customers and their own clients. So I think, I don’t know, it’ll be interesting to see what happens, especially with like,

coffee prices being higher than they have been in the past years. I know I’ve heard that a lot of importers are reducing their spot offer lists because it’s very expensive to purchase coffee at this point. So yeah, I don’t know. That’s kind of a non sequitur, but I think Algarano does, provides a really valuable service for producers who want to…

drive their own business rather than relying on an importer. But not all producers want to do that.

Garrett Oden (26:27.578)
I heard from from friends that you know when they were getting started they’re buying low volumes and you know, it’s they’re in the trial and error phase the recommendation was Just buy some spot coffees. Don’t make it complicated, you know focus on growing your skill you know developing your your roasting sense and But it seems like you know, it’s just there’s so much extra extra steps for doing Doing the other work, you know other risks involved

But it seems like with something like this, you know that might not be the default recommendation anymore because you you’ve simplified So many things about the buying process. So I don’t know. How do you feel? How does this change? You know, you’re the new roaster. You’re getting started You know, what can you do differently now that you couldn’t do a few years ago? And you know, is it still smarter to buy spot coffees first and just you know, and learn that way? I don’t know. What do you what do you think about that?

Kat Melheim (27:21.368)
Yeah, guess for me it would depend again on what are your goals? Do you want to stay in the learning phase? Like do you wanna stay, I don’t wanna use like small and big as comparisons, because that can mean a whole bunch of things to a whole bunch of different people. But I think roasters have the ability now to build relationships.

from the very, very get-go. And I’m talking business relationships, like year on year purchasing coffee and having direct connections, direct communication with producers in a way that they didn’t five, 10 years ago. Because yeah, on El Grano, the producer can set their minimum order quantities, but some of them are one bag. Like you can buy, you can direct source one bag of coffee now.

So like, why not get started kind of at this? I don’t, yeah, it’s, it’s hard to say. I don’t want to say like advanced level because I don’t want to like say that anybody who isn’t doing forward buying isn’t advanced, but also that’s kind of the reality. Um, if you’re buying spot coffee, you are reliant on someone else first having identified that coffee and bringing it in.

you’re relying on the importer. And if that’s what you want to do, if you want to rely on someone else for to kind of bring you a, again, bring you a menu of what is available, then that’s all right. But if you want to, I guess I will say more advanced, if you want to…

Kat Melheim (29:12.874)
operate your business in a more advanced way. And I would say a more secure way, because if you’re talking to the, if you’re talking to a producer yourself, you can ask them, Hey, how are your volumes looking for this coming harvest? How is your quantity coming this coming harvest? you can anticipate a bit better. You can.

lock in prices and quantities ahead of time so you can plan your own business better. I think that that’s…

That’s where I would recommend most people to start because if you grow to a certain volume, you’re going to be forward buying. if you are a roaster and you grow to a certain level, you’re gonna be forward buying. So why not learn it at the beginning and set yourself up for success. And then by the time, you know, maybe three years in, you have a three year long relationship with, again, business relationship with a producer.

Whereas if you had been purchasing spot coffee, you have to kind of restart over or reset your supply chain at that point when you’re ready. And that can be a little bit more difficult.

Garrett Oden (30:40.122)
How does it feel to be an importer right now without a platform that’s so easy to use like this? You know, what are they experiencing? you know, cause I could imagine that, you know, this is almost like the Airbnbification of coffee buying. can discover very easily, you know, I can facilitate transactions, you know, from my phone and a lot of the difficulty is handled in the backend. you know, I am less incentivized to go, you know, seek out hotels or, know, other

Bnbs, you know just in a Google search, you know the hard way and where there’s it’s it’s harder to compare It’s harder to to message people, you know, so what do you see is happening to the the more traditional trader?

Kat Melheim (31:14.03)
You

Kat Melheim (31:23.854)
I mean, I have heard, this is all like things that I’ve heard, because I don’t work for a traditional trader, but I’ve heard that it’s quite difficult at this moment because, I mean, I guess I kind of, this is like circle back to the beginning of the conversation where, know, traditional importers kind of rely on some level of opacity, like old roasters used to rely on some level of opacity.

to continue operating how they do. But with technology, with the ability of people to connect with each other and talk directly to one another, it becomes harder and harder to maintain the old way of doing things. I think also with the sea market price rising as much as it has been in the last couple of months, weeks,

and the volatility that we’re facing right now, it’s becoming a lot harder just financially to be a traditional importer because you need to have liquid cash and money to pay for the orders that you have open. I don’t know. I don’t purport to be an expert on trading. I know a bit, but yeah, I’ve just heard more and more people who are involved in…

more traditional importers that it like you need to have a lot of cash and a lot more now than before. And that’s not always feasible. I’ve heard that there’s more consolidation. Some are at risk of defaulting. And so. Yeah, sounds very stressful. That’s also like at El Grano, we don’t hold like market positions.

So we’re luckily not at risk from what I understand of like the market volatility aside from, you know, producers being, you know, stressed out that they’re trying to sell their coffee and roasters being stressed out that they’re trying to buy coffee. But we don’t have like financial positions in the market that are affected by this. As far as I know, I’m also like, you know, my job at Algarano is…

Garrett Oden (33:27.342)
Hmm.

Kat Melheim (33:48.462)
on the marketing team. So I’m not in the conversations that’s talking about all of the finance and the logistics and that stuff. hear, yeah, that’s not my realm.

Garrett Oden (34:01.656)
Well, you know, I’m not sure how much exposure you have to producers through your marketing work, but I know you visit producers frequently and I want ask you about traveling to Origin in a bit. what kinds of things do you hear from producers about selling on platforms like El Grano? Who’s it a good fit for? What kinds of things does it enable for them or maybe are there new challenges that they have to overcome by selling this way?

Kat Melheim (34:30.402)
Yeah, I mean, I’m in touch with a good number of producers on the platform and off, but specifically folks who are on Algrano’s platform. I’ve heard that it allows them to take care of their farming and they don’t have to take care of all of the rest of the stuff because Algrano takes care of the shipping, the finance, the, I mean, and finance is a huge deal.

in producing countries. know, especially if you’re buying one bag of coffee, it’s a couple hundred dollars, whatever. It’s not that bad. But once you get into dozens of containers or dozens of bags, hundreds of bags, that’s a lot of money for both a roaster to put up at once and a producer to, you know, try and try and manage. So El Grano has a program called Grower Capital.

that funds, finances the producers. So I’ve heard great feedback from producers about that, that they’re able to paid upfront. They’re able to get paid a lot earlier than from traditional models where they have to wait months and months after harvest, but they have to pay their pickers. They have to pay for their coffee to get processed. They have to pay for the…

storage service and things like that. yeah, I’ve heard really good feedback and especially for producers who have some level of like who already have some level of relationships, business relationships with some roasters. They’ve had a lot of success on Algarano’s platform because our, I said before,

El Grano’s fee structure is visible to all parties involved. And so there’s a level of trust you can build together both from roaster and producer when you both have the same numbers that you’re looking at. Yeah.

Kat Melheim (36:48.654)
Yeah, I’ve heard very mostly positive feedback from the producers. mean, like Mountain Harvest is a really great example of someone who recently moved to El Grano’s platform and they’ve been able to really focus on connecting with their customers, roasters. They’ve been able to focus on their initiatives at Origin and in their own facilities and

kind of not worry about all of the middle bit that El Grano takes care of.

Garrett Oden (37:23.436)
Yeah. Where do you see the biggest gaps in knowledge among roasters when it comes to leveraging these new tools?

Kat Melheim (37:33.42)
I think there’s a big level of fear of forward buying because with Spot Coffee, it’s at the warehouse in the country that you’re in, at least nearby if you’re in Europe. But you can order Spot Coffee and have it delivered sometimes within days or…

you know, it’s short, short period of time with forward buying forward contracting. You’re purchasing coffee. That’s sometimes still being processed in the moment. And after coffee is picked, processed can take, somewhere from weeks to a month. Then it sits in the, outgoing port. Then it has to go across the.

in most cases go across the ocean, which can take months. So sometimes you’re buying coffee that you won’t see for three, four, five, six months. and that I think for roasters can be very scary because we don’t necessarily know what our businesses are going to look like in six months. however, I think that that’s almost a, I don’t want say a false fear, but it’s something that

we don’t have to be afraid of. Because I think with proper planning, we could really get over that fear. If you do it a couple of times, if you forward by a couple of times, if you project out, you’re in control or you’re at least aware of how your business is doing, how your business is growing, you should be able to project in six months what’s gonna happen, what your volumes are gonna be.

pending, you know, natural disaster or like outrageous growth for whatever reason. Yeah, I think that fear of like not wanting to commit or not knowing how to commit six months down the line is something that keeps roasters kind of like stuck in the old ways. But I think, yeah, it doesn’t have to be scary. If you…

Kat Melheim (39:57.782)
I mean, yeah, shameless plug for El Grano. If you talk to any of the sales folks at El Grano, they’ll hold your hand and walk you all the way through it.

Garrett Oden (40:09.794)
It sounds like going from zero to one on forward buying is, it feels like a big leap in the moment, especially when you’re probably a newer business and it’s probably quite a substantial change from what you’re used to and comfortable with. Well.

Kat Melheim (40:26.786)
Yeah, for sure. And I mean, there is the aspect of, as I said, if you wanna rely on someone else to kind of give you a menu, then spot coffee and like spot lists might be comfortable for you. But if you want to take a little bit more control of your business and take a little bit more, have a little more autonomy.

and self-direction, that can be really scary, but can also pay off in bigger ways.

Garrett Oden (41:06.316)
Absolutely Well, okay. So let’s talk about Grano a little bit more You know there are other platforms and tools for for sourcing this way or at least in similar ways But what makes out Grano different what’s what’s unique about your platform?

Kat Melheim (41:20.194)
Yeah, I mean, I’m not super familiar with a bunch with like many of the other platforms, but one thing that I love about El Grano’s platform is that we have a direct messaging feature built into the platform. So even if you haven’t bought coffee through El Grano before, you can create a free profile. You can go on browse whatever coffee’s producers have listed and you can like click on it.

and write a message to that producer right on the website. To me, that’s just an example. It’s both a useful tool and an example of what El Grano does, which is just allow people to connect with each other. Yeah, and then again, as I said, all of the fees, all of the like…

pricing structure is listed for both producers and roasters to check out. So there’s not a level of opacity or question of like, where is this money going? I’m sure there are like plenty of other things, but those are the main things for me is direct, allowing people to directly connect and.

allowing or sharing all of the information from the get-go with everybody. I mean, one thing that we address a lot that we talk about is information asymmetry in the industry. And kind of, as I said earlier on, and I think a lot of us in the specialty industry know, like the consuming countries, historically consuming countries have held a lot of the power and have controlled the narrative and have controlled business and trade.

Garrett Oden (42:54.446)
Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Kat Melheim (43:12.27)
for the dawn of the coffee industry’s time. and part of that is because information has flown from one place to the other in one direction. It’s gone from the producing countries to the consuming countries. It’s gone from the producer to the roaster, but there hasn’t been a flow back to the producer. And what Algrano really…

does is allow for that to be a two-way street. that information, not only information and power and control and business goes in both ways from roaster producer, but also from producer back to roaster.

Garrett Oden (44:06.542)
Well, what are you excited about in this world of tech enabled coffee sourcing? You what’s coming up that you’re pumped about?

Kat Melheim (44:17.463)
I think.

That’s a really good question and a really broad question. I think one thing I really like about being at El Grano, and maybe this kind of answers your previous question as well of how we’re different. I’ve heard time and time again that we aren’t traders. Like El Grano is not a coffee trading company. We don’t.

We don’t sell coffee, we sell connections. And we have a team of developers who are constantly working on like new products that allow for more connections and more like trade to happen for producers and roasters. Also our primary focus is on producers because they’re…

They need services, they need the ability to connect with their customers, roasters. They need the ability to sell coffee for what it’s worth because if not, they can’t have viable businesses. So yeah, mean, don’t even, again, I’m not part of those teams that are building those services, but I know that they’re being worked on.

So you’ll have to watch and see, I guess.

Garrett Oden (45:48.986)
That’s great to hear. Well, okay, let me hear about your Hawaii experience. I believe you worked on a farm. So curious to hear how did that happen and what you learned during that time.

Kat Melheim (46:01.698)
Yeah, I was lucky enough to live and work on a coffee farm in Hawaii. Kona Farm Direct, if you, they’ve been like winning, I think they just recently got the like highest auction price for Hawaiian coffee. They’ve won a couple of different cupping competitions and things, but yeah, Kona Farm Direct. So I was in late 2020,

no, early 2021, guess it was January 2021, I visited a friend who was living in Hawaii because I hadn’t seen her for a while and I was living in Minnesota at the time and I wanted to get away from the cold. So I went to visit her for a couple of weeks and while I was there, ended up meeting a couple of people in the coffee industry in Hawaii and

shout out to Miguel from Paradise Coffee. He took me on a kind of tour of the island and we ended up going to Kona Farm Direct. And we just like got to talking. They’re a coffee farm, but they also have a coffee nursery. So they sell kind of the baby coffee plants to other farmers on the island. And yeah, we just got to talking and Craig, the owner, was saying that he was having a really hard time getting

any like manual labor. He was having a really hard time getting people to work for him because like people, I mean, I think it was, you know, January of 21, there was still little travel because of COVID and everything. And he was like, I have all this work. I’m just heading into the, you know, busy season that I have a bunch of like nursery tasks to do with these baby plants, but I don’t have enough time. And I like,

can’t find anybody to work. And I was like, well, I’m not really trying to go back to Minnesota right now. So like, if you, if you need a worker, I can do manual labor. and he was like, are you serious? And I was like, I mean, I’m serious. I just need a place to live. And he was like, you can live on our front porch. So I was like, okay, sounds great. So I,

Kat Melheim (48:25.6)
Yeah, just like lived and lived and worked on this coffee farm, living with Craig and Leslie of Kona Farm Direct. Their their front porch was like, I mean, it’s Hawaii is called the lanai. They call their like kind of patios. It was like a covered patio that had a bed and a desk. And yeah, lived there and worked there for like three months.

Garrett Oden (48:48.666)
Okay, I was picturing like a tent on like a little porch or something. Wow. What a special experience. That’s that’s incredible. So just to just clarify, this was like this is before black and white, right? And this was in between, you know, where does this situate you in your coffee journey?

Kat Melheim (48:55.019)
It was.

Kat Melheim (49:02.094)
Yeah, I started roasting. I started in coffee as a barista in 2013. I started roasting in 2017. At the end of 2019, I quit my roasting job to focus on my publication, Coffee Peoplezine. And then through 2020, I was kind of doing freelance here and there, but really just trying to focus on keeping Coffee Peoplezine in publication.

And yeah, again, yeah, was living in Minnesota, had moved in with my parents because in order to keep the zine going, I needed to not have any expenses at the time. So needed a break from both Minnesota and my parents. I love them both dearly, but yeah. And then that was beginning of 2021, then came back to…

the mainland in like March of 2021. And then November of 21, I moved to Raleigh and started working for Black and White.

Garrett Oden (50:11.93)
I gotcha, I gotcha, okay.

Kat Melheim (50:12.652)
Yeah, I was kind of in a hiatus from roasting and like direct coffee work, but was still involved in the coffee industry through my publication.

Garrett Oden (50:27.886)
Yeah, print publications are brutal. Yeah, I feel you.

Kat Melheim (50:30.774)
Yeah, you know, you know the life.

Garrett Oden (50:34.444)
So this, you know, when did you fall in love with Visiting Origin? Did this like visit to this Hawaiian farm, is that what spurred that or did you already have this like love already in you?

Kat Melheim (50:44.43)
I have a real atypical story in this respect as well. So three months into working as a barista, I visited Costa Rica because my best friend was teaching English in like a remote mountain town there. And I went to visit her and her next door neighbor just happened to be a coffee farmer. mean, kind of everyone in her area.

on her, on the mountain she lived on. Everybody was coffee farmers and it was pretty much like commodity coffee. A lot of them had other products as well and they coffee was, they each had like a little plot of coffee that was, you know, one part of their income. But yeah, I went to visit my friend three months, three months into being a barista. She was working for part of the time that I was there. So she was like, go to my next door neighbor’s house and like,

see if they can put you to work for a day. And so I ended up for a couple of days picking coffee with my best friend’s neighbor. And that really opened my eyes, especially as a new barista, into what all went into this product, you know, that I was making into lattes or making into, I wasn’t even doing pour overs back then. It was pretty much lattes.

But it gave me so much context and such a rich background to understand what my job as a barista was and such an understanding of how much work went into this thing that I was now working with in the United States. That, yeah, it…

Garrett Oden (52:09.53)
Yeah.

Kat Melheim (52:36.972)
I didn’t know at the time how impactful it had been on me because also in 2013, origin trips weren’t really as much of a thing. Like I think at that point, coffee buyers would go on origin trips and sourcing trips, but not a lot of roasters did. Certainly not a lot of baristas did. And so I didn’t realize how unique of an experience it was until kind of I got back and maybe…

like the next couple of years I was I got further and further into the coffee industry and talked to barista friends and roaster friends and realized like nobody else had ever seen a coffee tree nobody had been to a coffee producing country and I was like wow yeah this thing had a huge profound impact on me and how I think about and how I respect coffee as an agricultural product

Garrett Oden (53:34.414)
So what are you doing now? Tell me you’re orchestrating these Origin trips. You’re swinging the door wide open for people to participate. Who can join that? What are they gonna experience on one of those trips?

Kat Melheim (53:47.734)
Yeah, so I’ve orchestrated two trips so far. I don’t at this current moment have immediate plans for any more, but I would love to. Yeah, I just have realized through, I mean, that first experience of my own, but then also I’ve had the opportunity to travel to other coffee farms with other people, a lot of times with people who are roasters or in the coffee industry who are seeing

coffee grown for the first time. And I like see the impact it has on them as it did me on that, on my first trip. And I think that more of us should have that experience, especially roasters, because it like, you can hear a hundred times.

that coffee is, picking coffee is manual labor, that processing takes forever, that it’s really difficult, that it’s dependent on the weather. But unless you experience it for yourself, you really, I don’t think can understand what it all means. Unless you’re, I mean, yeah, unless you’re talking to a coffee farmer, a coffee producer on the land where they’re producing it, like there are things that you’re just never gonna learn.

So yeah, I started doing these, so far they’ve been kind of one-off trips. The first one was kind of half Columbia tour with a coffee focus. And pretty much anyone could join that. I geared it towards roasters, because again, that’s kind of, that’s my main, both my main audience, but also who I like to hang out with the most, because we can just.

geek out about roasting. And then I just recently got back from a trip with in coordination with El Vergel in Columbia. They had reached out to me Rosa, who’s a UK barista champion. She works for them opening the Europe market, but she reached out and was like, hey, I you’re doing this this other trip. I would love to host a trip with El Vergel.

Kat Melheim (56:06.316)
where we invite roasters to see coffee processing from like the picking stage through the roasting and cupping stage. And I was like, this sounds like an absolutely amazing idea. Of course, most of the time it takes a month between picking, processing, drying takes a long time until you can, you know, taste a coffee. But we were able to

through like a basically a dehydrator, we were able to dry our coffees quickly enough. So yeah, the goal and what happened was we brought a group of coffee roasters to El Vergel farm. We picked coffee together. We each chose a different like processing method that we wanted to do with a maximum of 24 hours of fermentation just because of our time. But we picked, we processed.

Garrett Oden (56:43.236)
Hmm.

Kat Melheim (57:04.354)
We dried the coffee and then on the last day we sample roasted and tasted everyone’s coffee. Yeah, which was super, super cool. That one was restricted for coffee roasters just because we wanted to have a very clear focus and kind of a baseline of knowledge and understanding so that we could build the trip on that. But yeah.

Those were both really, they were both really fun trips. I do hope to do more. I just want to make sure that I’m doing them with the correct partners. Elverhell was amazing to work with and we’ve talked about doing it again, so follow for more if we do another trip. And yeah.

Garrett Oden (57:52.248)
I can’t imagine there not being more trips with you. This is very much in your wheelhouse. So where can people follow you? Where can people follow you? Roaster Cat, Algrano, where else can people see your work and learn more about these trips?

Kat Melheim (58:08.066)
Yeah, on Instagram, I’m at RoasterCatcatwithakay. And I’m also RoasterCat on YouTube. I don’t do, I’m not as active on YouTube as I am on Instagram, so Instagram is definitely the best place to reach me. Yeah, follow Algrano, A-L-G-R-A-N-O on Instagram and check out their website because there’s a lot of educational materials on there, updates. Yeah, a lot of really good.

info. That’s mostly where I am. I mean, if you wanted to, I mentioned Coffee People Zine, my publication. If you want to follow that on Instagram, again, Coffee People Zine. It’s coffeepeople.org is the website. I’m currently on a indefinite pause in publication because a lot of other things are taking my time. I mean, and that’s, you know, I can’t, I also can’t imagine there not being more

kind of curated origin trips, but it really depends on my ability to set aside the time to orchestrate, to coordinate. It takes a lot of work to make sure that the trips are gonna be valuable for everyone. yeah. Anyway, because of that, have put, because of that and financial reasons, I’ve put Coffee People’s Zine on indefinite hold, but follow that in case it…

starts back up again in the future. Yeah.

Garrett Oden (59:39.876)
Kat, this has been a phenomenal conversation. I really appreciate how open and transparent you’ve been here and elsewhere in your life about all this. yeah, so thanks for swinging the door wide open for us and giving us a sense for these new possibilities and how buying coffee is changing with technology.

Kat Melheim (59:57.848)
course, thank you so much and yeah, thank you for having me. This has been great, lovely conversation.

Garrett Oden (01:00:02.861)
Absolutely. All right. Bye, Kath.

Kat Melheim (01:00:04.61)
Bye bye.