Agapao brews city's only farm-to-cup coffee

Homegrown

By: Candelora Versace | For The New Mexican
Published online: Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Agapao: It's a Greek word that's hard to pronounce and difficult to translate (essentially, it boils down to "love") but that hasn't stopped it from also being one of Santa Fe's fastest-growing coffee companies. Started in 2005 by Dave Black, Agapao (ag-ap-ah'-o) recently won the 2011 Business Excellence Award from the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce. But Black says coffee success relies on many different factors.

"You can have the best coffee in the world, but if you don't have the right grind or the right water, it's awful," he said during a recent visit to his crowded 1,400-square-foot warehouse on the city's south side.

Besides having consistently good coffee beans and proper brewing technique, Black said building the business also took his life savings, proceeds from the sale of land and his house, and several maxed-out credit cards. Eventually, even his marriage was a casualty of the process. He frequently refers to his father, Robert Black — who founded Blue Sky, the juice and soda company, in Santa Fe in the late 1970s — as his most important teacher.

"He taught me not to over-promise, to speak the truth, to do the best I can with my pricing and my product," Black said. "The price of green coffee beans has gone up 140 percent in the last few years; it's the second most traded commodity in the world, after oil. My coffee is expensive — it's about $2 a pound more than other suppliers offer. But I tell my restaurant customers, a 10-cent increase in the price of a cup of coffee will cover that $2 increase, and your customers get a superior cup."

Black has recently hired two part-time employees — production manager Daniel Velasquez, who was busy labeling coffee-service packages for guest rooms at the Inn and Spa at Loretto, and Patty Gibson, well-known in the local restaurant industry, who helps with the books.

Aside from his three young sons, who sometimes help out with the labeling, Black said he's been doing everything else himself, including delivering coffee to his retail and restaurant customers in Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

"Sure, I'd like to get to be a million-dollar company, but my goal is to have fun here, to take care of my kids, treat my employees with integrity and keep the coffee consistently the best coffee in town," he said.

That consistency, he said, starts with the source of the coffee beans. Black worked for a dozen years for another local coffee company, working his way up from roaster to national sales. But after learning the distribution business, he decided to start his own company and wanted to get as close to the source as possible.

"What I didn't want to do was also be a roaster," he said, noting an inherent conflict with his former employer as well as competition with almost half a dozen other local roasters, not to mention the 2,000 square feet of additional warehouse space he'd need. Instead, one of his colleagues in the industry in Arizona connected him with a startup family business in Denver called Coda Coffee.

"They were doing everything I wanted to do," Black said, noting the organic and free-trade priority of Coda's business. He now buys 2,400 pounds a week from Coda, including his own signature blend that the Coda owners keep asking for permission to license for themselves.

"Now, I have the only UTZ-certified European process decaf in town. And I have the only farm-to-cup coffee in town that doesn't go through brokers. Everything's fresh, nothing sits around. It all comes down to the quality of the coffee; it's a superior cup and a consistent cup every time." UTZ is a certification process for responsible and sustainable practices in a number of industries, including coffee farming as well as cocoa, tea, palm oil and cotton.

Coda's farm-to-cup sourcing of its coffee beans means that Black can adhere to organic, sustainable and fair-trade practices and products without also having to work through a series of brokers who, along with speculators, keep driving up the price of coffee. "The farmers are getting a very small percentage from the brokers, even the fair-trade ones," he said.

"Farm to cup means no middleman; the farmers get more when they deal directly with the roaster," he said. "And this way, we know where the money goes; my roaster in Denver goes to the villages and the farms, he sees the roads and the schools that are being built with coffee money."

ON THE WEB 

• www.agapao.com 
• www.codacoffee.com 

WHERE TO BUY 

• Agapao distributes to B’s Honey in Albuquerque and Peet’s Coffee in San Francisco (in 12- ounce bags). 
• Agapao is available at Eldo- rado Supermarket, Albertsons, La Montanita Co-op, Vitamin Cottage and Sunflower Farmers Market. It’s also served at Flying Tortilla, Dulce, Miklo’s, Java Joe’s, Zia Diner, Lucky Bean, Steak- smith, Inn and Spa at Loretto and Inn of the Anasazi.