Why We Started Our Roastery (the Honest Founder Origin Story)
We started this roastery because of a coffee problem. Not the kind that makes for a good press release. The kind that made me, as a customer, frustrated enough to start a company.
This is the version of the story I'd tell a friend. It's not the version for investors. There are fewer superlatives and more mess.
The problem
For about 6 years before starting Cozy Sips, I ordered coffee from a handful of small roasters. Some were excellent. Most were inconsistent. The pattern was the same: I'd find a coffee I loved, the roaster would change suppliers or the roast profile would drift, and the thing I loved would be gone.
It wasn't the roasters' fault. Roasting is hard. Green coffee quality varies. Roasts vary. The same coffee roasted by the same person on the same machine two weeks apart can taste different. Add in packaging, shipping, and storage, and by the time the bag reaches my kitchen, the cup is often different from what the roaster tasted.
I wanted consistency. I also wanted freshness. And I wanted a roaster who would tell me when something changed — when a coffee was off, when a roast was bad, when a shipment wasn't up to standard.
Most roasters don't do that. They blend the bad batch with the good batch. They keep roasting even when a coffee is past its window. They don't tell customers when something is wrong.
The problem wasn't roasting. The problem was honesty.
What I tried first
Before starting Cozy Sips, I tried to fix the problem from the customer side. I bought home roasting gear. I roasted my own coffee for a while.
Home roasting is fun. The result is also inconsistent. I burned more bags than I wanted to count. The roast profile would drift. The cup would surprise me — sometimes great, sometimes awful. I learned a lot about roasting. I also learned that I didn't want to roast coffee every week for the rest of my life.
I also tried sourcing green coffee directly. This works if you have relationships with importers and the volume to make it worth their time. I had neither.
So I went back to being a customer. And the problem kept happening.
What changed
In late 2025, I was working a job I didn't love and saving aggressively. The savings gave me a runway. The job gave me frustration. The coffee problem gave me a direction.
I started asking: what would it take to start a small specialty coffee company that solved the consistency problem?
The answer was: not much. A small roaster. A green coffee supplier I trusted. A Shopify store. A bag design that didn't look like every other bag. A cause that wasn't marketing theater.
I didn't need venture capital. I didn't need a warehouse. I needed a 200-square-foot space, a 1kg sample roaster to start, a 5kg production roaster for the actual business, and a willingness to learn.
I started Cozy Sips in January 2026. We shipped our first order on January 13. The order was for a single bag of Costa Rica Tarrazú. The customer was a friend.
What we're trying to do
Cozy Sips is a small specialty coffee and tea company. We're trying to do three things:
- Source the best coffee we can find, transparently. We list the country, region, and process method for every coffee we sell. We don't use proprietary blend names that obscure what's in the bag. We don't claim "premium" without specifying what makes it premium.
- Roast to order, not in advance. Most roasters roast in batches and hold inventory. We roast on Wednesday, ship on Thursday. Most orders reach the customer within 3–5 days of roast. The coffee is at peak freshness when it arrives.
- Be honest when something is off. If a batch doesn't taste the way it should, we don't ship it. If a green coffee supplier sends us a lot that's below standard, we send it back. If we make a mistake on an order, we fix it.
The third one is the hardest. It costs money. It costs us customer relationships when we delay a shipment. It costs us growth because we can't scale as fast as a roaster who ships every batch.
The third one is also the reason we exist. If we weren't honest about quality, we'd be another roaster. There are plenty of those.
Why the cause partnership matters
A portion of our profits supports animal rescue partners. This wasn't a marketing decision. It was a personal one.
I've had rescue animals most of my life. My dog was a stray before she came to us. My cat was rescued from a hoarding situation. Both of them came from people who chose to spend their time and money on animals that other people had abandoned or ignored.
That work doesn't happen for free. It happens because someone decides it matters enough to fund. We support rescue partners because the work they do is the kind of work we want our money to support.
We don't publish specific dollar amounts because the math is monthly and we want to verify what we say. We list our current rescue partners on our impact page and update it when partners change. The default is honest disclosure, not aspirational marketing.
What's worked, what hasn't
After about 9 months and our first handful of orders (the math is small, on purpose), here's what's worked:**
- The Wednesday roast, Thursday ship schedule. Customers notice freshness. They tell us.
- Listing origin and process transparently. Customers trust what they can verify.
- Responding to every email within 24 hours. Most of our customer relationships start with a question, not a checkout.
- The cause partnership. Some customers order from us specifically because of it.
What's hasn't worked:**
- A subscription we built too early. Customers wanted recurring coffee, but the tool we built was the wrong shape. We turned it off and rebuilt something simpler. We're not running subscriptions yet.
- A custom sampler product. Most customers want 1-2 SKUs, not a "try everything" box. The catalog is simpler than it was.
- Instagram ads. The cost per acquisition was too high. We stopped running paid social in mid-2026.
We're still figuring out what works. The thing we keep coming back to is: customers want honesty more than they want cleverness. Save the cleverness for the cup.
What's next
The plan is to keep doing what we're doing — sourcing transparently, roasting to order, shipping quickly, responding to emails, supporting rescue partners — and slowly add more origins, more tea, and more customers.
We're not trying to be the biggest specialty coffee company. We're trying to be one of the most honest ones. The kind of roaster a customer can come back to year after year and trust that the bag will be fresh, the origin will be clear, and the cause will be real.
If you've ordered from us: thank you. The first customers are the ones who took the risk on a brand new store. We don't forget that.
If you're considering ordering: the coffee is fresh, the origin is clear, and the cause is real. We explain how we source in our green coffee buying guide — same standards, applied to every origin we carry.
— Seraphina (founder, Cozy Sips)
P.S. The dog on our packaging is named Pip. She's a rescue who showed up in our backyard in 2022. She's been with us ever since. She's very small. She barks at the roaster when it heats up.