We’ll go into why altitude matters, and how the flavors change depending on the country of origin. We’ll provide a Coffee 101 class, which includes where coffee comes from, how it’s grown, processed, roasted and stored. It’ll always be an experimental center: a tasting room, an experiential area. How could we pass that onto our customers?Ī: This will never be a walk-in cafe. Eventually, we kind of had a brainstorm: we’d learned so much about coffee. The more we learned, the more we realized it was a very complex process.
We even put an offer to buy a coffee farm in Hawaii during that span, and we’re very fortunate that didn’t work out. In the meantime, we just kept trying to learn more about coffee. We decided to keep the roastery going and wait it out. By March of 2020, we were ready to go with that business model - and of course, that was the worst timing possible. By 2019, we had a good sense of roasting, and good ways of finding great beans. Originally, we wanted to roast fresh coffee, turn it into cold brew, and deliver it to offices. We thought that was interesting, so we bought it. By that time, we were looking for something that the two of us could do together, and we found a coffee roastery for sale. Vance had just sold his company, and I was getting a little burned out in tech. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.Ī: Vance and I met in 2015. We talked to them about their venture and love of coffee. They’ll be doing so alongside machinery that turns coffee-making into a science, allowing people to measure the strength of their brew with a handheld meter, or the acidity in their cup on a mathematical grid.īaker and Bjorn - who are both business and life partners - see The Coffee Lab like a wine club, with exotic blends delivered to their members’ doors, classes for learning the basics of coffee growing, brewing and drinking, and tastings for people to try out their favorite combinations. It’s a mix between “a science lab, a home economics room, and a startup company,” and a place where people can take classes to experiment with coffee and learn what they like best. Importantly, Baker and Bjorn say, the business is not a coffee shop. Late last month, they opened The Coffee Lab, a Menlo Park space for people to gather, taste and learn about coffee. But shortly after meeting in 2015, the two decided to start a company of their own - and though they now concentrate on coffee, Baker and Bjorn didn’t leave too much of the tech world behind. Baker was a product manager at multiple tech companies, while Bjorn was the founder of a leading biometrics firm. For most of their adult lives, Matt Baker and Vance Bjorn fit within a classic Silicon Valley mold.
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