UPDATE, 10:56PM CT: THE POWER OF THE INTERNET SAVED THE DAY. All of the bags of caffeinated coffees sold out. That’s approximately 24,000 bags of coffee. You all are amazing! We are overwhelmed with gratitude and will update tomorrow. Hopefully we can find these lonely bags of decaf a good home, too.

We’ve had a story we’ve wanted to tell for some time now, but had to wait to see how it would end before we could tell it. We had hoped we would have really exciting news when this time came. It has indeed, to our dismay, ended in just about the worst case scenario and we are now ready to share. It is really hard for us to be publicly vulnerable like this, but here it goes.

TLDR: We got grifted by a multi-billion dollar distributor for $250,000 and now we’re over $200,000 in debt and need your help to move 5,000 cases of coffee at half price. You can find that coffee here.

You all may remember a rather large order that we were working on over the summer. That order was 34,000 bags and was supposed to be our big break. Everything went very terribly and now we need your help. Here’s the story:

In January 2021 we hired a grocery consultant, known as a food broker, to help us transition into nationwide distribution. This was someone we’d worked with before and someone we thought we could trust. At the time, after exploring various options for growth, working with one of the largest distributors of specialty goods made the most sense. Self distribution locally in grocery stores was becoming a lot for us to manage and this transition would not only alleviate us of that in order to focus on other aspects of the business, but would also help us expand into new markets. 

Throughout the course of 2021, we went through the process of becoming a vendor with this distributor but had not yet transitioned any customers as of spring 2022. It is important to note for a later part in this story that we had not transitioned any existing customers over, so put a pin in it that we are still considered a new vendor.

In April 2022, a representative from this distributor reached out to us to see if we would be interested in participating in an online specialty coffee program for a major nationwide retailer. The opening order would be approximately 6,000 “units”. At the time we knew that 6,000 bags of coffee would be more than we had ever done in one order but we knew that we could handle it. Us, with our food broker/consultant’s support, agreed to participate. Again, note this 6,000 “unit” figure and that our food broker, who was hired to guide us through this transition into larger orders, was on the same email and helped us accept this proposal. We were so excited for what we thought would finally be our big break. Coffee is a hard business and so full of challenges, but we have always optimistically felt that hard work begets big accomplishments. 

We were told to expect the order in June 2022 and we were also told that the distributor would need to receive all the coffee that they ordered, every last bag, before they could ship it out to the retailer. A side note to make, the grocery business is a difficult business. One challenge is that vendors guarantee their products. That means we are responsible for returns, product that has aged past its prime, etc. Distribution is this on a much larger scale. This is where the point that we were a new vendor becomes important. With this distributor, that also meant that as a new vendor, we were subject to payment hold. Payment hold means that we would not get paid on our first order until it leaves their warehouse in its entirety. After that first order leaves we are subject to normal terms for all orders, even if they haven’t sold through yet. Since this was a rather large order, we asked our food broker if this applied and he said “no, this order is a [grocery world term for exception] so you will be paid right away.” Turns out he was wrong.

June 2022 comes, and the orders for this retailer start coming in from the distributor. This coffee was shipping to five distribution centers so we were receiving multiple orders. The orders were large but we thought we could handle it. Then the orders kept coming, spread apart by days. Soon we were well past the 6,000 units we thought the order would be and we were starting to freak out a bit. We were frantic looking for help and frantic trying to figure out what was going on. The food broker just advised us to keep on going with the orders but was generally unconcerned. Then, 3 weeks into the process, with the orders still coming, Marcus pointedly asked him about why they were ordering so much more than the 6,000 bags they had originally predicted. The food broker laughed and said “I wondered why you’ve been so upset and concerned. When they said ‘units’, that was cases. They’re right on target so far.” You can imagine how we felt in that moment, realizing that the person we hired to make this a smooth transition and to guide us and to tell us the things we don’t know failed to ever ask us if we were ready for a 36,000 bag order. This is equivalent to a year and a half’s worth of coffee for us. We would NEVER have agreed to this had we known. It was more than we could physically or financially handle. We immediately severed our relationship with this food broker figuring at this point we were better off figuring this out without him.

So, we are midway through this order when we learn that it’s going to get much more difficult for us. Meanwhile we can see in the distributor’s system that payments for the first orders have been approved for payment but there is a hold on the checks. We reach out to the distributor and are informed that we are indeed on payment hold and that the food broker was incorrect when he told us that this order was unique because it was for a specific retailer and supposedly had a place to go. We were now in too deep to stop and we knew our only way to get paid would be to finish the order so it could leave the distributor and go to the retailer. 

Mid July, after 6 weeks of roasting 21 hours a day on the roaster in 3 shifts, working 12-16 hour days, regularly working until 11 pm to finish bagging and boxing, bringing in every friend, young and old, to help get this order done, we sent off the last pallet. In the end we produced 34,000 bags of coffee, an insurmountable feat. We were exhausted, mentally, physically, and emotionally, but we did it. We figured it would take a couple of weeks to move to the retailer’s warehouses and then the payments should be released. To make this order happen, we had to take $45,000 in personal loans from friends and family, $65,000 in business credit card debt, $35,000 from a business loan, $60,000 in personal credit card debt, $20,000 in outstanding invoice debt, and $11,000 in loans from us personally to the business, for a total of $216,000 in debt. We maxed out every credit card and depleted our personal and business savings. We had no other choice but we reassured ourselves that the $250,000 that this opening order would pay us and continued future orders from this retailer would be w