Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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58 Fresh Cup Magazine | freshcup.com GOING PRO progression that I moved into educa- tion—wholesale customer training, leading our barista training, and reach- ing out to customers." His abilities in these wide-ranging coffee fields caught the eye of the Café Imports team, lead- ing him to his next career step. What does it take to get a job at Café Imports, the Minneapolis-based coffee importing company known for industr y involvement, relational coffee sourcing, and powerful sto- r ytelling? Joe wondered along with the rest of us. "It was a dream of mine to one day get to Café Imports, but I never really considered what a roadmap to that place would look like. I thought you had to be in the industr y on the green side to join a company with that kind of prestige." He didn't count on finding another company that hired based on who he was, not on his resume. "I'd never sold green coffee before. They took a big risk with me, just like Kaldi's, and it was hard to leave Saint Louis, hoping I had given back all they had invested in me there." He adds, "It's really the humble, hard-working peo- ple in the industr y who are getting opportunities based on who they are, not those who are striving to be superstars." Joe Marroco carries himself with a unique blend of confidence and humility. Here, you instinctively feel, is someone who knows how to be. A devoted husband and father with a job he loves, working for a company he's proud of: From the outside it looks like the magic combination. "Whether you're standing at a roaster day in and day out replicating some- one else's roasts or you're checking cherries at a mill, whoever you are, you have to find joy in connection with people and in what you do," he says. "In the end, coffee is a means to those connections." he 2005 US Barista Champion is a small, confident woman with sparkling brown eyes and sleek black hair that curls a bit at the ends. Phuong Tran was born in Vietnam and escaped in a boat in 1979 with her seven siblings and widowed mother, landing eventu- ally in Oregon. A barely-there accent lingers in her vowels and reminds you of the long and winding road she took to coffee. Bored with her career in the IT industry, Phuong bought Lava Java, a coffee and gift shop in an undevel- oped mall in Ridgefield, Washington, in 2002. With absolutely no coffee experience, she built it into one of the renowned specialty coffee estab- lishments in the Pacific Northwest. "There were no resources then—no consulting, nothing online," says Phuong, "but one of my baristas and I both fell in love with coffee and had this passion to dig into it as much as possible." The other barista's name? Billy Wilson, who became a three- time Northwest Barista Champion and owner of Barista, a micro-chain of outstanding multi-roaster shops in Portland. Together they tasted, experimented, and shared coffee knowledge, supporting each other at barista competitions and remaining friends through the years. Phuong is an outstanding example of the many roles available in career coffee: owner, barista, competitor, trainer, and educator. Her twelve- A N D Y R E I L A N D "I thought you had to be in the industry on the green side to join a company with that kind of prestige." —Joe Marocco, Café Imports T May14_magazine.indd 58 4/18/14 10:45 AM