Today we’d like to introduce you to Areli Barrera Grodski.
Hi Areli, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
My name is Areli Barrera Grodski and I am the co-founder of Little Waves Coffee Roaster in Durham, NC. I have been working in the coffee industry since 2009, starting as a barista and progressing to become a coffee shop owner with my husband, and now I am a roaster and green coffee buyer. Being born in Mexico and raised in the US has created a “ni de aqui, ni de alla” (neither from here nor there) experience and it influences our business tremendously.
Being an immigrant woman informs how I source coffee and how our business attracts people to apply. When I went to my first Specialty Coffee Expo in 2014, I was looking all around the room to see where I could find another Latina coffee shop owner, and I only saw one in a sea of many coffee shop business owners present. This experience sparked me to get out of my shell and be more outwardly present in our business to attract more people who shared similar backgrounds to mine.
My husband and I started dreaming up our retail shop idea, Cocoa Cinnamon, on our “accidental honeymoon” in 2010. We moved to Durham from Western North Carolina in 2011, started bikeCOFFEE in 2012, opened up our first cafe in 2013, our second in 2016 and our third in 2017 including our roastery Little Waves Coffee Roasters. All with a huge amount of community support, near and far.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I would say that the entire beginning of our story, while financially challenging, made us think creatively, outside of the box and figure out how to raise funds and develop a base in non-conventional ways. Starting off as the doers and transitioning into leaders was also hard. I am still learning a lot about myself, how to lead, how to be clear with my communication, how to be assertive, how not to abandon myself and my intuition. Another challenge is being a values-driven business and staying competitive in our market, especially when it comes to the B2B sector. We pay substantially more than fair trade per pound for our green coffee and more often than not we stand with our partners and customers through the good and the bad times regarding price fluctuations, which can, at times, create higher prices for all involved. Sometimes, like now, our business has to work to absorb some of the volatility. It’s about finding the right customer fit and finding a balance in pricing for some of our coffees to make sure everyone is winning.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Little Waves Coffee Roasters is an award-winning coffee roastery in Durham, NC. The makeup of our team is unique in that we are mostly made up of women with immigrant backgrounds and the tallest one of us is 5’4. We’re small but mighty. Beyond our team, our business model and coffee gained us Roast Magazine’s Micro-Roaster of the Year in 2022. Since then, we were also chosen as the roaster to represent the roasting side of the supply stream in René Redzeppi & Matt Gouldin’s Coffee episode in his AppleTV+ docuseries, Omnivore. We have also been featured in Issue 37 of StandArt Magazine with Rio Dulce Gesha as that edition’s featured coffee. This helped us gain worldwide recognition, which was pretty fun to see brewed and shared in over 100 countries around the world. The response to the coffee was amazing and we’re still glowing from it! Check out http://standart.littlewaves.coffee
Our specialty coffee program seeks to serve top-quality coffees that deeply and honestly connect quality, relationship, and impact. We offer an integrated array of offerings to express this ongoing work.
Peak: Our Peak series is a rotation of the most innovative, complex and delicious coffees featuring rare and future looking varieties treated with the highest levels of excellence at the farm and mill to create optimal and rare tasting experiences. These include competition, world class, and best in class present and future oriented coffees that are extremely rare.
Array: While our peak series seeks to source the rarest coffees that exist, we build the Little Waves sourcing program knowing that coffees and flavor preferences are as diverse as people. We offer an array of flavor experiences within the specialty range that connect quality as it integrates with relationships and impact. We believe that how the coffee is sourced and its impact on people and the planet affect the experience and flavor.
Integrated: Within this array, we use our day-to-day, year-to-year buying program to build relationships, trust, and openness that set the stage to enact our common values, create a degree of security that allows our producer partners to focus and build upon quality. We prioritize women and farmers of color, buying from many farmers year after year and building a farmers market-like trust across international borders that creates benefit in both directions.
We are interested in preserving the future of Coffea arabica L. as an endangered species, as humans living on an endangered Earth. We love experiencing the wonders of flavor, the experience of beauty in a cup knowing that this work is included in all that’s in the cup.
We see each source as an opportunity, including our peak coffees, to integrate the whole vision into a microcosm of the world of coffee that we want to see and in turn let the infinite nature of that microcosm create rooted reverberations to keep envisioning and embodying the world that we want for the future.
This work is imperfect, hard, and also beautiful, connective, and magical, as is life.
All of this work is not possible without our customers participating in this cup-to-crop journey with us. We offer our retail coffee online, ship globally, coffee subscriptions within the US , and wholesale and education to other businesses.
Alright so before we go can you talk to us a bit about how people can work with you, collaborate with you or support you?
If you have a cafe, a mobile cart, a startup looking to sell coffee, a restaurant, are a grocery store manager, a retail shop. a boutique hotel, etc, looking to sell quality, values driven, crafted coffee, we want to know you and see if we would be a good fit for your program!
You can reach out to our Director of Wholesale and Education at partners@littlewaves.coffee and fill out this questionnaire so we can know you better: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScjiX6NN7n-mnxVozY9D50AwlI57JWye1KOGrikTyttVJNYJw/viewform
You can also order our coffee online or become a coffee subscriber! https://littlewaves.coffee/
Contact Info:
- Website: https://littlewaves.coffee/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/littlewaves.coffee
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/littlewavescoffee
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/littlewavescoffee/
- Twitter: https://x.com/littlewavescr
- Other: https://tv.apple.com/us/episode/coffee/umc.cmc.5emuf42mp6chrcgwvwxb955dq?showId=umc.cmc.3m567dtk8qcawdjwnagsr1jbs
