In the Kansas City coffee industry, these Black entrepreneurs are brewing change
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In the Kansas City coffee industry, these Black entrepreneurs are brewing change
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Like many folks, Brent Rice was bored.
The COVID-19 lockdown had begun, and he was stuck inside his home in Independence. He couldn’t even go out to get a good cup of coffee.
So he decided to use those long hours to make his own. Not just brewing it, mind you. He learned how to buy the raw beans and roast them himself, studying and testing different methods.
That hobby tuned into a passion, and from a passion a business, Kultivate Coffee.
“When we were under lockdown, it’s really like when you are a kid and stuck in the house,” Rice says. “All you have are your thoughts. You have all this time, and it allowed my creativity to flow.”
Rice stands among a growing number of local entrepreneurs who created Black-owned coffee brands during the pandemic, slowly breaking into Kansas City’s predominantly white coffee scene.
Alongside Rice, there is now Black Drip, founded by two Kansas Citians whose day job was helping others create startups, and Kinship Cafe, a new Kansas City, Kansas, coffee shop that brews community along with its coffee.
Only recently, their feats may not have been possible. But they are capitalizing on the strength of the “Buy Black” movement in Kansas City, inspiring them to take the leap of faith into the unknown.
Their choice was risky in a time when many businesses were struggling to stay afloat. They had to not only break into the market but create their own. They had to gamble on whether their community would spend the few extra dollars for gourmet coffee, instead of buying the usual cans from the big-name coffee conglomerates filling shelves at any given grocery store.
“I’ve learned that Black people really don’t care about coffee that much,” Rice says. “I think that’s because most of what we have been exposed to are the overprocessed and over-roasted beans we are used to.”
According to Rice, that coffee has been sitting for an extended period, all the while losing its original flavor before it ever hits the shelf.
“Coffee, how it’s supposed to taste, is with no preservatives or added flavors,” he says. “It’s fresh off the roast. I became a nerd at it. I read books, watched YouTube and just learned the different intricacies of the whole industry. I looked at my passion for coffee and was like, I can get lost in this for hours.”
For the past eight years, Rice has worked as a training specialist with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. At the height of the pandemic, Rice, like many American workers, felt uneasy with the uncertainty of an established career.
“There did come a time when people were losing jobs,” Rice says. “Then you think these jobs we went to school for aren’t permanent and can be taken away in the blink of an eye. I started thinking, do I have something of my own where I can create an alternate stream of income and hand down to my son?”
He and his fellow innovators are indeed finding success on this new path. And they’ve found support and guidance along the way.
Building bonds
Part of the secret of the success of these Black coffee pioneers is the partnerships they have forged with white counterparts in the KC coffee arena. Local powerhouses are now helping the new brands enter spaces that may traditionally be closed, expanding their reach.
For Rice, that partnership was with Gregory Kolsto, owner of Oddly Correct Coffee on Troost Avenue.
“He was the one who taught me how to roast. He taught me what to look for, what a bean should look like, what you should listen for when you roast,” says Rice. Instead of competition among the old and new, there is collaboration.
Charon Thompson and partner Dan Smith created another new Black-owned brand, Black Drip, and teamed with KC powerhouse Messenger Coffee Co.
The duo had been working together since 2017 in their not-for-profit Porter House KC, which has been instrumental in assisting many small local businesses get off the ground.
“We would drink coffee every day in the office,” says Thompson. “Me and my partner Dan was sitting around one day and was like, we should just make our own. I started looking into how to get unroasted beans. I went online and got a little roaster, and we started from there.”
Soon they found themselves in need of guidance. They reached out to Isaac Hodges, Messenger’s vice president of sales. For Hodges, it was not even a question.
“We are trying to make change that will impact the entirety of the coffee supply chain and story in a redeeming way, to impact Black-owned who are doing it right,” says Hodges. He helped Black Drip with roasting and developing its Renegade Blend, a mixture of a Guatemalan, Brazilian and Colombian beans.
“We will be working to only source coffee that is elevating Black-owned farms and producers of coffee, and partnering with exporters and importers that are Black-owned operations,” he says. “We want to make sure the supply chain is true to what they are looking to accomplish with Black Drip.”
Using Messenger’s extensive coffee production resources left Thompson and Smith wide open to do what they do best: Get out there and promote the business, as they do with the startups they assist through Porter House KC.
“Messenger gets the beans and does the roasting. We are actually the ones out doing the networking because we wanted to bring coffee to our community for the culture,” says Thompson. “This first year, we have been doing a lot of networking getting our coffee into stores. We are in Sun Fresh, Kinship Café, Black Pantry off 31st Street. We are just trying to break into other stores so we can be all over.”
For startups like Black Drip, the importance of visibility and broadened availability can’t be understated.
“Right now, it’s who you know. If you want to be in certain stores, you have to be competitive. So you may need to bring your price down. We try to go in and do samplings in these stores we are carried in so people can experience it for themselves,” says Thompson.
Thompson sees this growing market for Black coffee as a sign that the Black community wants to carve out a corner of multibillion dollar markets that have little to no representation of people of color.
“We as a community are just starting to get tapped into coffee. You have a few in the field who also started within the last year, like … Equally Minded (a local Black-owned coffee shop). I think a lot of people are starting to discover the roots that coffee has leading back to Africa,” says Thompson. “Entrepreneurs in the community are starting to have this no-fear mentality where they are saying it is OK to try and fail. The community has been really supportive all along the way.”
Even with all the support, the team still finds hardships they must navigate in providing their coffee to online markets.
“The toughest part was the delivery side. Getting the logistics together when we are taking care of orders and getting them shipped online. It’s been getting to be a lot, started out just doing whole beans but recently started selling it ground. They have been selling out,” says Thompson. “Our feedback has been amazing, though. Our reviews have been super supportive, and we love hearing feedback from people saying they normally don’t drink coffee, but they will now. We just need to get them to try it, and that’s it.”
The team of Black Drip and Messenger started doing tastings for their new blend, which Hodges says is fast becoming a hit.
“The Renegade blend we developed has great notes of chocolate, brown sugar and caramelized cherries,” he says. “It’s not a straight fruity taste but it is very sweet. Not that it has any extra sugars in it, but it has been roasted correctly so there are great caramelizing notes. Balanced and sweet. No bitterness or oily. Milk chocolate at the finish. There is a difference if you are drinking a store-bought.”
Black Drip coffee is looking to soon expand into pods for Keurig machines as well as the standard bags currently sold in stores and online. Thompson feels hopeful for the future of not only Black Drip but also Kansas City’s Black coffee sphere.
“We aren’t worried about stepping on each other’s toes because there is enough out here for everyone to eat,” he says. “We are making a Black coffee community and supporting each other.”
Creating a home
One location that is proud to carry Black Drip coffee, along with other local Black-owned brands, is Kinship Café in Kansas City, Kansas. T.J. Roberts opened the coffee shop in 2020.
“Black Drip was one of our first partnerships we started with,” Roberts says. “They have some of the biggest amounts of potential with their partnership with Messenger Coffee. We serve them here, and I feel lucky to have worked with them.”
Roberts, 30, was born in Kansas City and given up for adoption, raised by a white family in tiny Wamego, Kansas. He remembers growing up in a loving, caring home, but the cruel lessons of life would soon invade.
“I was adopted around the age of 1,” says Roberts. “I always felt like the outsider. My dad was the pastor, and I was the only Black person there. I was the first African American to graduate from my high school. It was like that pretty much until college.”
Roberts also faced the hurdle of being born with only two fingers on his left hand. He moved through his young life in ever-shifting phases of confusion and sadness at how he was treated by peers just for the way he was born.
“I was born with seven fingers. By third grade I had already experienced the good, bad, and ugly,” he says. “Then you throw skin color in the mix. I was just so confused as to why this was happening to me. I didn’t know our history of our culture very well. I didn’t understand the ramification of certain words. After a while I just became angry.”
As Roberts grew older, he began to push himself to prove to everyone that he was just as good, if not better. He refused to allow his skin color or disability to hold him back.
“I just had this thought after a while that nobody was really better than me,” he says. “If people couldn’t accept me for my hand or my color, it didn’t matter to me. I am not even going to get mad at these kids. They don’t know anything. They didn’t know me.”
Roberts would go on to not only be the quarterback on his high school football team, but also would hold the honor of being an all-state drummer in his school’s jazz band. As Roberts found more acceptance from his white peers, be began to feel an urge to explore his racial roots.
“The first introduction to our culture was actually rap music,” he says. “I was raised in a Christian household, so it wasn’t allowed. It became something I had to hide. But then I started to read more about our culture and history. The more I learned the more I started to understand about myself.”
In 2010, he left his small town for the first time to attend Kansas State University. It was his wake-up call. He became deeply involved in the small Black student population on campus and loved the spirit of community.
After graduating in 2013 and moving to Kansas City, Roberts started working in the insurance field, with side jobs in coffee shops. It wasn’t his first foray into serving coffee.
“When I got into coffee is when I was a kid at my dad’s church,” he says. “Coffee was my thing. I would wake up in the morning and make the whole church a pot. It made me like serving people and making them feel welcome and at home.
“Around five years ago, I began to get into coffee seriously. I was working at The Roasterie. I just learned how an operation like that works and getting down the process.”
In 2020, Roberts opened Kinship Cafe, making sure to create a space where Black-owned vendors can sell their goods and make business connections.
In addition to Black Drip, Kinship is home to such local Black-owned vendors as Nature Made Me, which sells all-natural tea products, and Peace in Pain Candles. He has hosted seminars on healthy living, yoga, meditation, and art to bring new experiences to his patrons of all backgrounds.
“We want to give people the opportunity to give that representation for Black-owned businesses in smaller markets. Our people need to see these entrepreneurs in these spaces so that they can know it’s possible to break into these fields,” he says.
“What people taste and experience here is just the tip of the iceberg. We have so many things planned that we are working on. We are bringing in programs to empower people to follow their dreams.”
Making the change
With his Kultivate business, Rice is on a mission to bring high quality, home roasted coffee directly to the Black consumer market.
“The coffee space in America is whitewashed,” he says. “You don’t have a lot of Black-owned roasters or coffee shops. Coffee started in Africa. It originated in Ethiopia.”
Rice, 33, graduated from Northwest Missouri State in 2010 with a degree in communications, and admits he only started drinking coffee a few years ago. Roasting his own beans came even more recently.
“With Kultivate, it all started off as a hobby. When the pandemic hit and we went under lockdown, I was unable to get the coffee I wanted to get. A friend of mine told me I could actually roast my own coffee for much cheaper,” he says.
Rice is no stranger to the entrepreneurial spirit. He had previously started both a lawn care service and medical transport businesses as a means of extra income. Kultivate Coffee was different, a passion project.
His business has progressed to where he can roast up to 5 pounds of raw coffee at a time, usually on Saturdays in his driveway.
His roaster is a converted propane grill. First, he preheats an internal cylinder to 300 degrees. Then he pours in the coffee beans, one of three selections he has on hand.
The cylinder begins to rotate for an even roast. He then raises the heat to 500 to 600 degrees, depending on the type of roast. The air fills with an ever changing aroma, from earthy, to chocolaty and finally to the familiar scent of coffee.
Though this is a timed process, Rice knows exactly when the beans are done by the crackling sounds they start making. Then he places the beans into a sifting tray and sets them in front of a fan, where they can cool and the chaff is blown away. He then seals the beans in a bucket, where they sit until they are packaged for sale.
To bring in a new demographic of Black coffee drinkers, Rice has made it a practice to attend functions in the Black community, not only to sell bags but bring awareness to his brand as an alternative.
“For me it’s exposure,” he says. “I try as much as I can to sign up for Black vendor events. Offer free samples.
“And let them know that we are out here creating a space for us.”
Where to get the coffee
▪ Kultivate Coffee is available online at kultivatecoffee.com.
▪ Black Drip Coffee is available online at blackdripcoffee.com and at several area retailers, including: Black Pantry, Blue Parkway’s Sun Fresh, Kinship Cafe, KC Daiquiri Shop Bistreaux, The Prospect Urban Eatery, and Classic Blends Cigar & Coffee Blends.
▪ Kinship Café is at 719 N. Sixth St. in Kansas City, Kansas. See kinshipcafe.us.
This story was originally published February 2, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
