Photo courtesy of Confident Coffee Roasters, which came to life with a new shop this year in Northwest Arkansas (see story below).
While the COVID-19 pandemic made 2020 an unspeakably brutal year for many existing coffee roasting companies large and small especially those that leaned heavily on wholesale a fresh crop of roasting startups managed to sprout up through the trampled dirt.
A number of these new roasters are leveraging their founders’ personal and familial connections to specific coffee-producing farms, resulting in near-direct connections between consumers in the United States and certain producers in Kenya, Guatemala, Panama, Honduras, Colombia and more.