Welcome to The James Quandahl Show the space where I interview the world’s experts and share how you can live your life to the fullest, be present and connect deeply with others, and build the life of your dreams.

On today’s episode I had a chat with Andrew Salisbury the founder and CEO of my favorite coffee company, Purity Coffee.

During this episode we discussed the major differences between clean coffee and the already ground coffee on the grocery store shelf. 

The discovery that lead Andrew to build Purity Coffee. 

And finally, we discussed the new Purity Coffee farm in Columbia and their plans to experiment on a soil level and cultivar level to take their products to another level.

Not only is this my favorite tasting coffee, but they are also the cleanest. Their coffee is organic, contains zero contaminants such as heavy metals, mold and mycotoxins, and is roasted to have two times the antioxidants of other coffee brands. I also love that they ship coffee as soon as it is roasted. When I receive my monthly bag of Purity medium roast coffee it was roasted less than 48 hours earlier.

As a special treat for the listeners of this show, Purity Coffee is offering 20% off your first coffee order at PurityCoffee.com with the special coupon code JamesQ

Please have a listen and discover if the coffee you’re drinking is the best option. 

Also, if you’d like to ask any questions for future guests or just say hello— send me a note on Instagram or Twitter AT JamesQuandahl.

Welcome to the James Quantel show the space where I interview the

world's experts and share how you can live your life to the fullest.

Be present and connect deeply with others and build the life of your dreams.

On today's episode, I had a chat with Andrew Salsbury, the founder and CEO of

my favorite coffee company, PRD coffee.

During this episode, we discussed a major differences between clean

coffee and the already ground coffee on the grocery store.

The discovery that led Andrew to build purity coffee.

And finally, we discussed a new parody coffee farm in Columbia and

their plans to experiment on a soil level and cultivator level to take

their products to another level.

Not only is this my favorite tasting coffee, but they're also the cleanest.

Their coffee is organic contains zero contaminants, such as heavy metals mold

and mycotoxins and is roasted have two times the antioxidants of other coffee.

I also love that they ship coffee.

As soon as it's roasted.

When I received my monthly bag of purity, medium roast coffee, it was roasted

less than 48 hours earlier as a special treat for the listeners of this show.

Period, coffee is offering 20% off your first coffee order@puritycoffee.com

with a special coupon code, James Q that's one word James, and the letter

Q please have a listen and discover if the coffee you're drinking is the best.

This episode might sound like it was sponsored by purity, but

this is all natural WRAL because they're my favorite coffee company.

And I begged them to have this conversation with me.

If you'd like to ask any questions for future guests or just say

hello, send me a note on Instagram or Twitter at James Quandl.

And as always, please sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

So the story I wanted to share with you and I left you on pins and

needles was I actually never drank coffee before in my life, before I had peer

to coffee for the first time in 2018.

It was the first coffee I have ever had.

And since then maybe have tried one or two other kinds and been sorely disappointed

at the standards that I set for myself.

we set a high bar right from the beginning.

I had an issue with caffeine.

Like I never drank, pop as a kid.

If I had a sip of soda, kept me up all night.

And so I just thought coffee would do the same thing.

And when I started writing and podcasting, I noticed I needed a little

boost to focus and to really tap into the creative side and parody, coffee

really helped him with me with that.

And now it's become a ritual.

I have a cup of coffee almost every single day.

My wife and I , we were just on a vacation.

We brought PRD with us and we're grinding it in our Airbnb

with a manual hand grinder.

We travel with the pocket purities.

We've made pocket PRTs in rest areas in on the interstates, in the United States with

just boiling water from the tap there.

I mean, we've, we've become quite advocate.

So I just wanted to thank you for speaking with me,

cause I love your product.

Fantastic.

That's great.

You, you set yourself a high bar, a starting point with purity because

I mean, that's sort of what we, we advise people to do is, you know,

drink than regular coffee, but.

Drink house for like three days and then go back to the regular coffee.

Cause that contrast is that thing that, that really shows you how

you're feeling in your body.

But if I don't know anybody who started with purity, I can imagine

this a bit of a disappointment.

Maybe my daughter, my daughter is only drunk purity and she's

now 15 and she's an avid fan.

I just don't understand.

You know, I've had Starbucks now, and I don't want this to be

a conversation about Starbucks.

Cause this is there's really no comparison between period of coffee and Starbucks.

It's different markets at different people.

It's different everything, but just the flavor and everything

is just not there for me.

And I know that it's not tested and held to the same quality centers.

So I'm like, it's a lose lose for me to drink anything else.

it's a different business model.

I mean, you know, Starbucks has done a very good job in, in the sense of creating

a third wave of coffee, where people are starting to recognize that coffee can be

very high quality, but their problem is.

They're trying to deliver the same product, like a

McDonald's around the world.

So wherever you try it, whether it's in Seattle or Singapore,

your coffee tastes the same.

So one of the problems with that is the only way to make an

organic product tastes the same.

That's coming from farms from all over the world is to override.

So you're tasting this burn sort of astringent coffee, and

that's why Starbucks tastes the way that it does weight.

A lot of major changes.

The coffee tastes the way it does, because the lens they're looking

at is how do we get a uniform homogenous product across the world?

They're not looking at what can we do to provide the most

health benefits from this?

Why do you think people want the same taste and profile?

Every time they drink their car?

Yeah, I think it's just, there's certain people it's like the, the sort of

Steve jobs always wearing a black shirt.

There's a certain sort of level of consistency of one less thing

that you have to worry about.

It's a shame because it's such an amazing product.

I mean, If you try, if you try coffees from all over the world, I mean, different

flavors and tasting notes, but also different health benefits based on the

coffee, but they're sort of the low bar.

They're the lowest common denominator, meaning that they might provide a

consistent taste across geography.

So there's actually different health benefits based on the actual

coffee fruit that you're using.

Well, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, the thing is all of the tests and has been over 19,000 studies on coffee and

help all of the tests that have been done.

We're we're really sort of observational studies where work consumers

were asked, do you drink coffee?

Yes or no?

If it's yes.

How many pots of coffee or how many cups of coffee do you drink a day?

And you would fill that out and move on to the next question.

So the problem.

They're not talking about what is a type of coffee, the quality

of coffee, how you brewing it.

And all of those things have a big impact, but then even on a sort of like cultivar

level, the compounds that are inside the coffee vary from cultivar to cultivar,

and then the way you roast coffee dramatically changes the profile of.

I can go into a lot of details about the roasting, but you know, what

happens is, think of it almost like a curve as you as you roast coffee, the

antioxidants drop off in the coffee.

So the darker it gets, the less antioxidants you get, but in the early

stage of roasting, you'd think, okay, let's have a really light coffee.

Well, a really light coffee has acrylamides.

And a really dark coffee has been called pH is polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

So, , there's a sweet spot that you need to manage so long answer

to your question is yes, it does make a big, big difference.

If you, if you don't pay attention to the health benefits, then it's

just sort of a, it's a crap shoot.

It's a luck game.

So I know purity started out with a medium roast and that kind of seems

like you'd get the best of both of those, the highest antioxidants for your value,

but the lowest amount of impurities.

And through that, or the other substrates, is that kind of why you started off with.

It is, we started out.

So a commitment right at the beginning was every decision based on health.

That was a north star.

And then we weren't going to compromise.

So the health benefits come from the chlorogenic acids in coffee.

They don't come from caffeine, which is present in the coffee, but they

come from the cGAS, the orogenic acids.

The most chlorogenic acid that we could roast for was an, a round, a medium roast

without having bad levels of acrylamides.

So that was the reason we started.

And then later on, we said, okay, we need you to caffeinate this.

So we did Swiss water.

And that was the same coffee, Swiss water, the Katherine agent.

And then the third level is we actually realized from our scientists

in Brazil that chlorogenic acids turn into chlorogenic laptops.

So the darker you roast the coffee.

Although you lose antioxidants, you actually get a thing called

chlorogenic lactones, which is very good for stomach health.

So people who have pooped up stomach sensitivities, they're better

off drinking the Docker coffee.

Which is interesting because I would think I've had dark roast

from purity and it tastes a little heavier to me, almost like you

would think it was going to be more difficult for your stomach to process.

Now it's actually easier in the sense of because of the chlorogenic

acids, as they say at the acid pod is, is for people who've got intolerances.

That's also a little difficult for people, the higher, the Cogenic

acids, the more likely that you're going to be intolerance of it.

So the Docker roasters for those people that are, that that have stomach issues.

Okay, so backing up.

I am curious, I think period has started around 2017.

Why?

I mean, there's so many coffees you go to Publix or Kroger or whatever your grocery

store is, and you're overwhelmed at the sheer number of coffees that are there.

Why did you think we needed another one?

Yeah, it wasn't even a business for the first couple of years.

I didn't really even think of turning this into a to a business necessarily.

The main motivation or the catalyst for this is that my wife was

having some health issues and we couldn't figure out what it was.

And we were doing the normal sort of barrage of tests and that sort of thing.

But meanwhile, she was drinking a lot of coffee because like a lot of us, she

needed that extra boost in the morning.

And so she was drinking caffeine.

So we had lots of fights about, you know, I was a tea drunk.

You say you went drinking coffee.

You know, I was a tea drinker in sill, maybe seven, eight years ago.

And that's what I did.

I drank green tea, black tea and white tea every single day.

That's right.

So, so she was very resistant as you could imagine, giving up her coffee

and she said, okay, prove it to me.

I'll do it.

If you can prove it, that it's bad for me.

So I went on this journey, it just sort of like trying to get information.

And I was lucky to meet two professors at the Institute of coffee studies

in Vanderbilt and in national.

And they said to me, look, there's a huge disconnect between what the

scientific community knows about the health benefits of coffee and

what the general public knows.

Coffee is very good for you.

And they gave me the shopping list of all these health benefits.

And I started working with one of the top professors in the world just to sort

of as a consultant on coffee and health.

And I said, well, what happened if we made every decision based on health?

And then we spent about 18 months in research and development.

And I honestly didn't know if there was going to be a business at the

end of it, because I felt like.

People weren't buying coffee based on health.

And we didn't even know if we can actually make a difference.

And if we made every decision based on how would we be able to make a difference?

So that's sort of how it took me 18 months of research and development.

Then we tested against 49 of the top brands of coffee in the us.

And we were anywhere from two to 10 times higher in antioxidants

than any other coffee.

So that was the moment I said, ah, there's people who are helping.

Who happened to be coffee drinkers, not people who are just like that.

They'd gone more go months of coffee.

And they're just focused on having a lot of variety of coffee.

Their main focus is health, and we felt like there was a good market for that.

And so, you know, at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017, we saw a first

couple of bags and it went from.

And how quickly after that, did you realize that?

Like at what point was it okay, we actually do have something here.

People want this.

I think it's it, it felt like a slower curve than it actually was.

If you look at the graph it felt like a slower.

Because it's exponential growth.

It's, you know, it's the whole idea of one to two and two to four

and four to eight and eight to 16.

It's only until you get 16 to 32, you suddenly go, wow.

We're really taking off.

I think that the point for me was when we reached about 10,000 five-star tests.

When our customers, the feedback from our customers was so strong.

Now we're at about 18,000, we're adding a thousand a month or so.

That probably is the biggest indicator I've got that, you know, and our

product is incredibly well received.

I mean, I don't think there's a coffee company in the U S

with as many testimonials.

Wow.

And that's really something because.

As far as affordability goes, I think period coffee is quite affordable,

but it's definitely not the least expensive bag of coffee you can buy.

No.

I mean, it's like most quality products.

If you think about it, when you, you know, if you think you need to

buy a car, Ferrari is not going to be the cheapest car you can buy.

I mean, did there's going to be, there's the Louis, Vuitton's the Chanel's of

this world, the level that we have to go to that other coffee companies

don't is dramatically different.

Most of their job is to take.

You know, green coffee, turn it brown and that's, it it's really,

there's nothing deeper than that.

Apart from creating the best flavor profile we have to lab test coffee

from all over the world for the highest end antioxidants, the farm

needs to be organic regenerative.

We fond hand grow.

Oh, sort of handpicked hand-selected shade, grown coffee.

And then we have to roast it to keep the antioxidants in the

coffee, which is another step.

Plus we lab test all of our coffee for heavy metals mycotoxins

mold, that sort of thing.

So it's a, there's a lot of extra steps in making a coffee based on.

How often do you do testing on the finished product or the Rabin?

So if we're going to get a harvest, we'll test the harvest,

but we'll we'll spot test containers of coffee that we'll bring in.

It all depends on if, if anything changes typically we won't spot test any.

If it's staying in the same, meaning you bought a harvest and we're getting

an additional container that that's all going to be passed through,

but, but we'll, we'll spot check for anything that could be contamination

has brought in a local level, like you know, yeast or those sort of things.

and as your grow and continue to catch on with people.

If anyone's like me, they, they start with a bag and then before

long they're on a subscription and then they're on to subscriptions.

And then they're telling their friends and family, which is

exactly what happened with me.

How will you be able to find enough of the raw material as you continue to do?

So what about challenges?

And the reason why you see the occasional stockouts of the property

is we have to predict how much coffee we're likely to serve.

In in any given year, because there's two harvests, we buy from this multiple

farms, but for you mainly farms, typically what we do, which is different

than any other coffee company is we find a coffee that fits our criteria

and we buy out all of their harvest.

So the problem is.

If that coffee runs out there, coffee runs out.

So, I mean, there's not another, it's not like we're just selling and now

we're selling Ethiopian and this one's a Guatemala and we've got this wide

range of coffee for you to choose from.

It's the king of the castle.

It's the single coffee that meets our criteria at the highest level.

That's the coffee that we buy.

And so supply is always an issue and it's one of the reasons why we encourage

subscription, because that gives us some sort of headlights and visibility

in how much coffee we're going to need to work, procure over the but you

know, I mean, I was going to say this for a football later on, but one of

the things we're doing is we're, we just bought her own farm in Columbia.

So that's actually a big move.

I really that's something I want to know more about

whatever you're willing to share.

Why did you buy a farm?

Our focus has always been every decision based on health.

And so one of the problems in you identified it as well

is what happens with supply.

We've got this very high criteria that we're looking for.

Coffee.

What if the coffee runs out?

And so the coffee is scarce.

Because it reaches a very high standard too, is our standards

are improving all the time.

So what we initially said was a great coffee for purity.

Now doesn't make the cup.

So we're improving our standards, which means that the places we could

buy it from become less and less.

So buying the farm in Columbia, what we've done is we wanted to start experimenting

on a soil level to find out how we can improve the nutrients in the car.

And also we want to experiment on a cultivar level about the sort of

cultivars and coffee to give them the sort of nutrients that we want.

So we can troll the first mile.

And there's two reasons for that.

One is so that we can have our own supply of coffee, that we can predict a hundred

percent that we have enough coffee.

And then the second reason is doing it is to create standards, which we can then

sort of expand on with our producers.

So now.

We'll encourage them to adopt those standards.

And in return we buy their harvest.

That is so cool.

And I envisioned just from what you just said, some type of.

Apprenticeship program where someone can come and work on your farm and learn the

proper way to do this the purity way.

So to say, and then go back and do that on their farm.

And then you have, they have a new.

That's exactly it.

And we're actually starting looking at, you know, building properties on

the farm right now so that we can house visiting professors or people who are

experts in coffee and health and also in regenerative organic agriculture

so that they can actually spend some time on the site, on the farm and

guide us and how we can improve.

That makes a lot of sense.

And I would imagine that the producers would be lining up.

'cause you're probably paying more for your raw material than other folks are

that don't care about the quality as much.

Absolutely.

So there's a lot of talk about fair trade and, and, and spot prices in New York

for coffee and just the farmer, you know, get a fair, a fair deal out of this.

We pay top, top dollar.

We're probably one of the best one of the best customers for

coffee growers in Latin America.

If they meet our criteria because we don't negotiate with the farmer it's affecting.

They're telling us the price they want to sell the coffee for.

And we're saying yes or no.

It's not a negotiation.

It's not they're not limited by spot pricing.

So we pay well above whatever fair trade would normally stipulate.

That's great.

We actually had a coffee company on the podcast before and it's

cafe Creel, and I met them at expo east and he explained Fairtrade is.

Not fair trade necessarily.

And that there's so much more in that than like the basically

fair trades, like the minimum.

And it sounds like you are way beyond what is the minimum with these folks

because you need their product.

You, you would probably buy more if there was more available.

I actually would.

Absolutely.

And so that is one of the problems is we talked about with supply is just,

how do you find farmers that, that reached this very high criteria for.

Now is it just luck on some of these farms that you found that they

were able to produce this product, like the right amount of rain and

sun and then the, the right bean, or are they being deliberate about.

So this is actually a very good question because it

goes right to the roots of one.

We bought the farm in the first place.

So the way purity started is we started by saying.

What we cared about is that the coffee needs to be clean.

It needs to be mycotoxins free.

It needs to be free from heavy metals, but it needs to be more than anything.

Very high in cGAS.

So coffee various in CGA is from from harvest to harvest crops, crop

regions, region, altitude, altitude.

And so we said, okay, the only way to find out who's highest in the cGAS is to

allow test coffees from around the world.

But after a couple of years of doing that and then picking that coffee and buying

all of that harvest on that coffee, we started to recognize that there was

certain behaviors that happened on the farm that results in high CGA coffee.

So we started to recognize the fact that all the coffee that

we were buying was coming from.

Regenerative organic agriculture, then the coffee was shade grown.

We looked for things like being bird friendly.

So bird friendly means Smithsonian bird friendly means that migratory birds

would land on the coffee and build their nests and then move on while

we one, one that focused on the birds themselves, we were focused on the.

That, that was an indication that the coffee was grown

in his natural environment.

So cut a long story short, the more the coffee is grown

in its natural environment.

So it's not rows and rows of coffee trees like an industrial farming,

which makes it much cheaper.

But the more it's grown in shade, grown, natural environment, deep

root systems, cover crops, you know, very sort of rich organic soil.

Then that coffee was higher in the nutrients that we wanted.

And so that was the thing that led us to say, okay, we're going to buy, not only

are we buying from farms that follow these practices, we're going to start to develop

and improve the practices as ourselves.

So these farms sound a lot, like the types of farms that we'd want to

get our fruits or vegetables or our meat from as well to where we basically

interact with it as little as possible and let it just do what it's supposed

to do naturally, instead of trying to industrialize the whole process.

That's exactly it.

I mean, you know, it all plays into the conversation about the

difference between dirt and soil.

So the problem we've got is that so much of our planet,

there's not converting soil into.

And the reason we're doing it is these inputs like fertilizers and pesticides,

which are not only bad for the food , in the end product, but are also bad

in terms of converting soil to dirt.

So all of the microbes,, the easiest way to describe this is industrial

farming tries to feed the plants.

Regenerative agriculture feeds the soil, and that creates the

nutrients that feed the plants.

And that's what we focus on.

The pushback that you hear a lot, and I'm pretty well connected with

just the health and wellness industry.

I actually sell grass fed grass, finished beef for a friend of

mine at a local farmer's market.

But the excuse you hear is, oh, that's great.

And all, but you can't feed the masses with that technology.

Like you've got.

Industrialize it, if you want to be able to feed everyone and I always push

back and say, well, that's not true.

We just need more small farmers doing it the right way.

Instead of 1% of the country being farmers, we need more like

40% or some number like that.

And looking back back, the pre 19 hundreds, the statistics

were like 80 to 90% of Americans were involved in agriculture.

And now we're talking two, 3% are involved in agriculture.

So we it up.

And I understand that argument.

I mean, I've heard the same argument with GMO foods, you know, GMO allows us to

produce more food, less insect damage, and therefore, you know, it's going to feed

the people who would be starving, but the problem is, you know, at what expense.

So luckily I don't have to make those sort of global.

Answers or, or considerations for, you know, how do we feed

the masses or do we go GMO?

I just have to worry about my family and I have to worry about

the people that are close to me.

And what I want to do is produce the very best call, quality coffee

for help that I can produce.

And I know that it may not be accessible to everybody just like buying a

Ferrari isn't accessible to everybody.

But what I'm trying to do is legitimate.

Create standards that are the coffee companies or other farmers can adopt that

and improve the quality of their coffee.

Not everyone will adopt it.

I mean, margins are always, you know, important.

You've got to, but, I think the trend is we're not really helping the farmers.

We're not, we're not helping the soil.

And over the years, I think the outputs from these farms that are

industrial farms and not really, as they're not living up to the promise.

And I don't want to diss on the big agriculture too much, but I do find

it pretty telling when was, was sitting with someone not too long ago and

they, they farm a few thousand acres.

Monocrop.

And they said, yeah, we're trying to get healthier.

We're actually trying to figure out how to do a garden in our backyard.

And we're, we're learning how to grow.

Like you grow on thousands of acres, you better than anyone should know how

to grow, you know, for your family.

And they really didn't know how, because it's a lot it's different.

It's not the same skill set.

It's it's much different.

I am curious if you've noticed any behaviors in those farmers themselves.

Why do they grow it this way?

Because up until you came along, could they have really gotten any more money for

having all this better quality product?

That's the big problem.

No, the answer is I sort of see it as a virtual circle in

terms of, if people start to recognize coffee as good for them.

And then the last, the next question is, okay, coffee is great for me.

What makes it great.

Then they'll start to recognize there's a shopping list of things that you need

to have present in your coffee and the way that it's grown in the way this

roasted, that will make it better for you.

And because of that, they'll pay more for that coffee.

So the farmers will get more money and there'll be encouraged

to do better practices.

Up to this point.

The only thing that farmers get concerned about is volume.

If it's, it was based on New York spots, they weren't, it's a commodity product.

Or if it's very high end specialty coffee, it's taste.

If that's the only lens you're looking through, if it's volume or if it's

taste, you're not going to make the decisions that a lot of our farmers

make to improve the quality of the soil.

So it's more nutrient dense for the coffee because no one pays

extra for that apart from us.

How did you find these farms then?

Like, cause they weren't where they even aware that they had

a more nutritious product.

Did they know.

No, absolutely not.

We lab test it.

So we had a great importer called allied coffee.

They do our, all of our imports for us.

So they've got a team of people who really traveled the world

to travel around Latin America.

They didn't know exactly what sort of farms purity is looking for.

And what we do is we sample and we lab test you know, right now we understand

what the criteria is, regenerative, organic agriculture, all the things

that we're looking for, but then we lab test the highest in antioxidants.

And then after we'll tell them the farmer would say, Fits the bill.

And we want you to do more of what you're doing and increase your, your yield.

And you know, they're surprised and they're surprised that they'll

the one coffee company will bike, basically buy all of their products.

And can they maintain that level full of quality for harvest after harvest?

Or do you have to eventually find new.

Well, I mean, it hasn't happened yet so far.

They've all maintain their quality, but there are quality controls that we have.

Basically if there's a new harvest with testing the coffee for the

criteria that we've set and they've got to reach those standards again.

That is extremely promising to me because that proves.

That the inputs matter on what output you get from the coffee.

So that to me, shows that you can create a blueprint that farmers can use to

create the best health product they can.

And I think why it's important is we all sort of understand, or

maybe a lot of people don't understand that if you go to a farmer's

market and you have this tomato and it's, you know, it's organically

grown, it tastes so much better.

Isn't it fantastic.

But because we're measuring the health benefits or the compounds

inside of the cough, We've got a great poster child for what regenerative

agriculture can do on a product.

In other words, you're not going to do that with a tomato.

You're going to say, ah, skiing was great.

It tastes fantastic and you'll move on.

But if that, that food product actually had a health benefits attached to it,

and you are measuring the compounds of those, the amounts of those compounds

in that tomato, then you would a lot more about the soil quality.

So I think what's interesting is We're doing it with coffee and it's going to

be great, sort of a validation of soil quality and how it affects the coffee.

And I've worked on an organic farm and the practices that you're

describing that create a quality coffee, created the best tasting tomatoes and

potatoes and spinach that I've ever had.

And I have been that person that wanted to walk around the farmer's

market and cut into the potatoes and test the contents of them to.

My, what I already know, my, my body can feel and taste the difference

between this farm and that farm, but a customer that doesn't know that

it's just walking through the market, sees a tomato, it's a tomato to them.

It's a commodity.

And that's always a struggle with the small organic farmer is how

they differentiate their product.

That usually costs more money.

Versus the, the bigger farm that stands right next to them.

Now you try their spinach once and you're convinced.

I agree.

It's a sort of happy coincidence that food is very good for you

actually tastes like the best food.

So in other words, the tomato that's organically grown is

the best body you've ever had.

Same thing with coffee.

I mean, one of the reasons why there's so many people who are just

big fans of our coffee is not only is it good for them, but it also takes.

It to me as it cools, it reminds me, and this is the medium roast and I'm

drinking some right now as we're talking.

It tastes more like a hot chocolate to me than what I would imagine a coffee was.

Cause I did say I had never had coffee before PRD, but I did have

one sip once when I was young and I never wanted to drink it again.

It was awful.

It was bitter.

It was strong.

It was just not good.

But when you drink a coffee, that's brewed correctly with the right bean.

It just it's enjoyable.

And I think that's what a lot of people are missing when it's just.

Caffeination like, if caffeination is just a goal, you can go on Amazon and

order caffeine pills and you can skip all the work of brewing the coffee.

And it's not where the health benefits come from.

I mean, you know, caffeine is, is sort of is an instrument in the

orchestra, but it's just one instrument.

So I mean, you know, really, there's a lot of things at play

that you have to pay attention to.

If you care about health things like progenic acids, Shagana lean

cafestol, carry-on, there's just a list of things that you want in

your coffee, but because most most know, coffee company, and I know.

Measures those sort of compounds inside of the coffee, then it's just a bit

of a crap shoot about what you do.

How does a consumer take this knowledge that you're

giving and survey the coffee?

They like, is it possible for them to take the coffee they're drinking?

Maybe it's a Dunkin donuts, K cup or some something popular like that.

How do they then say, Hey, how does this compare to like a peer to peer?

It's very difficult.

If the company isn't willing to do the tests necessarily.

So, you know, part of the problem is there's a, there's a big motivation

in the industry not to do these tests.

Like why would you want to test for mycotoxins and mold heavy metals?

Is it just a as a gating system for people buying your car?

Not everyone is asking for it.

And if they're not asking for it, in fact, the consumer is asking for it.

You just don't want to do it.

And so that's really what's happening is, is there's a resistance in the industry.

You know, there's a lot of pushback about the idea is the mycotoxins,

ochratoxin a are other problems with coffee if it's poorly handled.

The quickest solve for that tell the coffee company spend 50 bucks.

And that makes sure it's tested to be free of microtoxins instead of more, this

arguments of this there is, or there isn't mycotoxin and coffee just prove it to me.

It's going to cost you $50 for a container of coffee, then let's move on,

but they don't want to do it because, you know, it would sort of exclude

coffee that doesn't pass the test.

That's interesting.

And when you started out, I know this, this journey began for your wife's health.

What was the result of that experiment?

It's one of these things that she's healthy now.

It's, that's a great, great thing about it, but, but, and

I won't put it down to coffee.

It was so many things we did from changing her supplements to even

having the house remediated for mold.

And there's just lots of things that we did, but she's,

she's doing really well now.

I mean, it's, I think it more than anything, it just made us recognize.

The food that we are racing was incredibly important that we

needed to pay even more attention.

So the quality of the food, because on that journey, as you started

eating better and better food for our health, I think that was the, probably

the , biggest reason for change.

That was the same transition.

My wife and I went through is you start with just improving one thing that you

eat and then you feel a little better.

So you're like, well, what else can I do?

And before long, your pantry is completely different.

A few years later than it was.

And the foods I eat now that me 10 years ago wouldn't even recognize my pantry.

And then my diet now it's just becomes an addiction.

That's exactly the opposite is also true in the sense that if you, if

you're conscious and you pay attention to your body, you recognize what food

is good for you, but you also start to recognize what food is bad for you.

So, you know, that that sort of heaviness of just eating

something that's bad for you.

If you pay attention, that's also a great litmus test to.

so you've got the farm and you're going to start doing experiments

there and tests there and how much, not, not specific numbers, but.

Well, this farm be able to grow enough product to have served at least some

of the customers that you have now.

Probably maybe 20 to 30% is the goal.

It's going to take us a year or so until we reached the criteria that,

that we would buy from our own farm.

So in other words, you know, we're basically changing

it from an organic farm.

It's a regenerative, organic agriculture and certain things.

There's tree planting is cover crops.

There's lots of things we do.

Make the coffee meets our criteria, but the intent was never really

to have our own supply of coffee.

The main intent behind it is what can we do on this lab farm to

learn about coffee and health.

So we can start planting cultivars.

Like I'll give you an example.

There's a cult of our coffee called Marilia Lauria is a

naturally, almost a caffeinated coffee, meaning it is caffeine.

It's natural.

So out of the ground, it's a natural coffee that has maybe 5%

of the total caffeine that you would normally get in coffee.

So we're going to measure that against our decaf and say,

is this one better than this?

And if it is better, if naturally coffee that has caffeine free is better, then

we've got the ability to increase supply.

Wouldn't that be something amazing.

To be able to just skip the whole Swiss water or I think there's another one

that's mountain mountain purity, something that removes the caffeine from the bean.

And you just find one that can do it on its own.

And you think of every other coffee company in the world,

they don't want to do that because they only care about taste.

And so why would you pay a premium for a coffee that is a naturally decaffeinated.

If you could just say, I'm going to send it off for the

caffeination and I'll save money.

And that's one of the reasons why this cultivar isn't wanting to use.

And this is one of the reasons why we'll be able to start

building an app on our phone.

That does make me wonder why does PRD tastes so

good if that's really wasn't?

The initial goal was taste wasn't the goal has that become part

of importance in the process of.

I won't say it's an afterthought, but it is not our north star.

So we agreed right at the beginning to make every decision based on health,

without compromise and what that meant.

If a bag of coffee turned out to be $200 a pound and it tastes like ditch walls.

That's what it would be because we wanted to at least start at the high point and

say, every decision based on health, it looks like this and this an amazing

coffee, or it's not a good coffee.

How could we improve it?

How could we improve the blend and still keep the health benefits?

We were just very, very lucky that, you know, when we talk about organic

produce, we were just very lucky that the best coffee for health had

to be a great taste of coffee as well.

That is in the top 1% of all coffee.

How amazing is that that's pretty lucky that it worked like that.

I would say.

Yeah.

It is.

And this whole journey started just as experiments for you in a way.

What were you doing before PRD?

Yeah, very different.

So I had a software company in Latin America, so we were.

We will set in large software systems.

Basically it couldn't be more different.

It was always an a million dollar sale.

Plus it will take about 18 months to sell a customer.

And I would know the top a hundred customers in Latin America.

Th that I cared about us.

And so we would geographically spread over five countries and we

had offices in five countries just couldn't have been more different.

And then I sold the business in 2011 and took some time off and I was

looking for something new to do.

And I knew it had to have some contribution side to it as well.

But when I first fell across the sort of coffee pot, I mean, it was.

It took a long while for me to be convinced that I could turn this

into a business because my skillset was not from that background.

So it wasn't million sales, 18 months to sell just selling a $20 bag of coffee was

not a good, was not a good business plan.

I knew that I didn't have the experience.

It's a real drinking from the fire hose sort of thing.

As we've been building this.

And I happened to find a video on YouTube.

That was pretty fascinating of you jumping from 9,000 feet above the

ground with a bungee cord attached.

So it doesn't seem to me like you're that afraid of risk necessarily.

So it doesn't surprise me that you ended up turning this

into a a fledging business.

Yeah, it was, it was fun.

I mean, honestly, this was something that I just genuinely enjoyed though.

Every step of the journey has been just really fun.

As I've been learning about coffee and health and learning about,

you know, the, the health benefits of coffee , there's been a lot of

inflection points where I felt like we could really fall with this hurdle.

Like we could follow the hurdle of designing our coffee and then

sending it out there and people just don't buy coffee based on health.

Then we could fit.

We could follow the hurdle that if they bought coffee

based on how do they just stop?

They go, okay.

I tasted that.

That was great.

I'm never going to buy it again.

And if they buy it again to they refer their friends, or do you have

to spend a lot of money in marketing?

There's a lot of, sort of like points where I feel like we

could have fallen at that hurdle.

And luckily we didn't.

So I think this was a, we had a lot of wind at our backs with this business.

I never noticed that you actually had sold out of coffee.

So I would imagine that would have been.

Something people didn't quite understand like, well, what do

you mean you're out of coffee?

Like I've never seen anyone else run out of coffee.

How are you running out of coffee?

Right.

Right.

And we hear that from customers.

It typically doesn't happen.

It has never happened before with coffee in general is happened with

things like pocket purity or K-cups.

And the reason for that is because there's extra steps in the logistics of those.

So we're taking the coffee, we're roasting it.

We have to have it fulfilled, then we're having inventory.

So there's like a two month delay on that.

So it doesn't happen or has never happened with coffee in general, but

it's a, yeah, it is a, it is an issue because typically you would see.

As a representation of bad management of just fast supply chain, you know, and

then not case it's just, it's very, very difficult to predict because we also

can't overbuy our coffee because then we'd have a stone problem with the coffee.

To me.

It's a great opportunity for you to dig in on the story of how you're different.

Well, yeah, well we're out because of this and it makes people understand

that there's not an unlimited supply of this product out there.

And that's what makes it special when my friends that have farms have a freeze

that comes a little later than planned and destroys the entire blueberry crop.

Yeah.

They don't have blueberries that year.

And that just sometimes happens.

Unfortunately.

Yeah.

And, but you're right.

It is a story we need to do a better job telling the people needed to

understand that, you know, to find coffee that meets our criteria.

There's some inherent problems in supply in that.

And it's one of the reasons why we appreciate the subscribers, because

that gives us predictability.

So what we say.

If you're a subscriber, you're always prioritized first.

. So you, as a subscriber, one round of coffee, we may go off sale on

our site for one of our products, but subscribers will always get it

because we anticipate them first.

So if we're running out subscribers, we make sure they have, you know,

four months, five months worth so that we don't want to add.

So I do have another question.

I noticed that you basically ship the bags like a day or

two after they were roasting.

Is that intentional that it comes to me.

And it's that fresh?

It's our turnaround time is a day and a half for averaging a day and a half.

So but yes, it's intentional.

I mean, it it's We want to make sure that if you get your coffee, you're

getting it in that sweet spot of opening the bag within like 15 to 20 days

where it says at its maximum freshness, but we also nitrogen flush the bag

it means that there's enough gas in the bag.

So the coffee doesn't stale.

So it only stays when you open the bag, but we wanted to just make sure

that every decision based on health pressure's better than the stale.

Of course we want to improve the time that the coffee comes.

That makes sense.

I, when I first started buying parody, we would buy a bunch of bags

at one time to try to when there was a sale or something, and then

we would freeze them or store them.

And I go, you know what, I'm buying this amazing coffee.

I need to be enjoying it shortly after I'm getting it.

Even though I knew with nitrogen filling the bags that the bags were good for what?

Like seven, eight months after I got it.

That's right.

But there's nothing better than a fresh cup of golf and there's being

bruised, you know, a couple of days ago that, that all the roasted a

couple of days ago, I mean, it's.

but the most coffees in the store I find are already ground even.

So if you go to a grocery store and you buy a bag of coffee off the shelf,

and it's, pre-ground, couldn't that have been roasted and ground months

and months ago and potentially.

Absolutely.

And one of the problems and one of the, one of the first issues that we

had is that that 70% of the coffee market people buy coffee ground.

So there's a huge market.

Now we don't sell coffee ground.

And the reason you don't sell coffee ground is because we made a decision in

the early days that every decision based on health we weren't going to compromise.

Well, the problem with grinding coffee is you could have your coffee could arrive.

It could be ground you open your bag as nitrogen flashed.

Your first pot of coffee is perfectly fresh coffee, but the next day what's

happening is the surface area on that coffee because it's now . Ground

means it oxidizes the coffee quicker.

So the lipids on the coffee, , the oils on the coffee turn around and

say, And those oils like Kapha stolen caviar, which are that lip is on there,

on the coffee, the good for health.

And so rancidity causes stomach problems and also causes sort of like a rancidity

and those, those compounds we care about.

So yeah, we don't sell ground coffee for that reason.

And that, that is a compromise.

I actually did not notice that you didn't have ground coffee and it's partly.

My morning ritual.

And for the longest time, it wasn't until like two months ago that we actually

got a automatic, like a machine grinder.

I was hand grinding coffee every morning.

Cause it just felt like I was earning this and I know how much work

and time it takes to grow coffee.

My thought was, if I didn't care about the ritual, I might as well just get

an IV , or just get a pill, but I wanted to enjoy the entire process.

So.

I would, you know, heat up my water to exactly 195 to 205 degrees.

And I would heat up the French press too with warm water.

And I would grind my coffee by hand and right when the coffee

was at that temperature, I would finish and dump that in and pour

it over slowly for like a minute.

And like, it was a ritual, it was an art.

Yeah.

I loved it, but I eventually realized that hand grinding.

I couldn't find a very good hand grinder and I was replacing them.

I think I bought like four of them since I started drinking coffee.

So I actually sent a message to purity on Instagram, which I always

get all my questions answered there.

And they're like, oh, you know, our coffee guy says, you know,

these couple of different coffee grinders would be good one.

So I bought.

And it's, it does take it up a notch.

It's much more, even a it's quick.

I didn't really care about the speed, but it, it did make the flavor more

consistent for me having a more unified

Yeah.

People don't understand that the grind size makes a huge

difference in the coffee.

So we can do everything, you know, in the first mile where we're buying

coffee, that fits our criteria.

We can roast the, maximize the antioxidants.

But if you put it in a blade grinder that chops up the coffee, which a lot of

people do, you have uneven particle sizes.

And that means that the coffee compounds don't extract at the same level.

So if you can get a bird grinder, like a good quality coffee grinder,

all the coffee drops through those those conical grinds.

And it means that there are an even shape, which means you get a

perfect extraction on the coffee.

So not only does it tastes a lot better, but it also has better.

That's what I discovered.

And I was using, I think this Java press from Amazon and it was great.

It worked fantastic.

And I definitely am going to keep.

On hand because when we travel, we still want to take it with us and bring our PRD.

And but I definitely appreciate the uniformity of the, the

professional style grinder.

Now,

Yeah, it's worth it.

what does your coffee ritual look like as the founder

and CEO of a health coffee company?

It's not it's, I, I've got a couple of different ways of book

coffee, so I've got an espresso machine.

But I also just do a regular pour over.

That's sort of like my more normal sort of standards.

So I use I've got a coffee.

I don't even know what the coffee maker is called now.

Give you the name, but it's but it's just basically does a pot of coffee and I'll

I'll take the first I'll grind, the coffee beans, and then I'll do a pour over.

We using a sort of like a Hario capital.

So I'll make sure that the beans are soaked and then I'll put it in

the coffee maker and let that finish off the last 10, 10 cups of coffee.

But I always had a cup of coffee, you know, a pot of coffee on the go and it's

at least until maybe one or two o'clock,

And have you found that the coffee, the caffeine or any of that is different

from parodied coffee, doesn't make you feel different when you're drinking it?

Like later in the day?

I don't know about the caffeine, but the coffee definitely feels different.

So from time to time to experiment without a coffee, so some other coffee

is coming out and either making it, making a move in the direction of.

Big mold-free and organic and I'll test their coffee just

to understand what it's like.

And what I've noticed is, and I don't think it's the caffeine I noticed jitters

nervousness you know, just sort of like that, that cold sweat if I drank too much.

Cause I always like to test the boundaries.

So the very best way to find out if the coffee is good for me, I'm not.

If I'm comfortable with three cups, four cups or five cups and see how I feel.

And those are the things that I look for.

I look for the nervous tension that irritability, you know, the cold

sweats, the, the stomach upset.

And I find that a lot before.

So my wife and I were just in Norway and we heard a bow,

a coffee spot in Oslo, and the owner's name is tin Wendell Bo.

And apparently like we went in there and he had all these cupping

awards year after year after a year.

And we were told it was.

They were the best baristas in the world.

And they had more awards for those at the national or the international barista.

So we had to go try it.

And it was such an experience and they had coffees from all over and

it was really interesting , but I had more coffee in that one hour

than I've ever had in my life.

And it felt like I drank.

Five glasses of wine, like the side effects from that much coffee where

maybe worse than alcohol side effects.

I had never experienced that before, because I generally have one or

two cups a day and that's it.

And I did not like how that made me feel.

The coffee was great though.

And, you know, because tastes is the only lens that are looking at

the coffee through, you can be tasting a fantastic, I don't know, Ethiopian

coffee, Guatemalan coffee, or getting a chair, great coffee, but it's not

been tested to be absence of the bad staff and it's not tested to be you

know, high in, in chlorogenic acid.

It will taste great, but the way it makes you feel, that's really

the thing that defines where the coffee is good for you or not.

The taste, the experience, the presentation, the stories,

all that was a home run, but the way my body felt it was one of the

worst experiences from that lens.

It made me feel awful.

I I've just thought, oh, I just overdosed on caffeine, but you're right.

It was probably a lot more than that, that I'm not used to in the coffee because

I've only ever drank my, period coffees.

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

And it's unfortunate.

I mean, standards will increase over time.

I mean, you know, and, when they increase because the consumer demands them, then,

the inputs will demand that from the farm or the roast will demand that for the

farmer will be willing to pay a little bit extra for coffee that meets that criteria.

So that's, that's sort of, all of our job is to improve the

standards and improve the demand.

When we asked, offer a cup.

so I did talk with your partnerships team before this episode

and secured a special discount for anyone that's listening to this that wants

to try to coffee for the first time.

They go to parody coffee's website, which I'll put in the links and they

type in the discount code, James Q and they'll get a discount on

. Your first order of coffee and.

You know, this is not a sponsored podcast.

This has been a hundred percent driven by me begging to, have this

conversation because I just loved the coffee so much and wanted to learn more.

If you buy this coffee and you brew it correctly, which they'll more, they're

more than happy on their website to educate you on the different ways to brew

coffee, which is where I learned that.

That I learned about brewing coffee.

You'll, be super excited and you'll probably be a subscriber just like me,

but I am curious before we end this call, what else do you have on the

horizon or what are you really excited about in this space that you can share?

Yeah.

I think the farm is probably the thing I'm most excited about.

The way I would sort of talk about this internally is that,

that this is a new category.

The idea of coffee and health is a new category.

When I, when I first started so six years ago there was a mixed bag of

some people saying, oh, I'm going to give up coffee for the new year.

And I don't want to cut down my coffee intake.

Coffee's bad for you.

And there was a whole shopping list of things that people would say.

Dehydrates you or it's, you know, it's addictive.

And now it's gone.

The other way people are starting to recognize the coffee is really

just this amazing health food.

The now starting to ask why or what, what makes it so healthy for you?

And I think what we're doing now is the next level.

And of course we want the absence of bad stuff.

I mean, of course you want a coffee this free from mycotoxins and

mold, pesticides, heavy metals.

I mean, that's just a natural, that should be a given based

on just playing food standards.

But what really matters is how do we improve the nutrient quality of the car?

That's what we're interested in.

There is no other coffee company that is focused on health that is,

investing in the farms to improve the quality of their coffee to improve

those standards across an industry.

So that's super exciting for us.

I would watch a documentary about your farm and the learnings that you have.

And I definitely encourage you to take as much material from that farm as possible

and educate other people, because I just think that the world is understanding

more about their bodies than ever before.

Right.

They're eager to hear these types of things that some of the myths that they've

heard over the years, maybe aren't true.

And there's a lot more nuance to it than just good or bad.

Started like every food that we consume it, it's no longer possible to

say fish is good for your bad for you.

I mean, is it farm raised or is it wild-caught salmon?

Is steak good for you or bad for you?

Is it animal, you know, is it an industrial farming

or is it grass fed steak?

You know, everything is dependence.

Everything now is you just have to dig a little bit deeper

and say, well, it depends.

Is this corn GMO or is this.

So same thing is true of coffee.

We're already starting to realize that when you say coffee is good

or bad for you, then you already need to sort of dig in a little

bit deeper and say, how's it grown?

How has it farmed?

How's it roasted?

And it's worth the effort.

well, thank you so much for coming onto the show and educating

us a little bit more about.

And I'm going to continue to be a uh, an advocate and a customer