A new Dominican-owned coffee roaster in Brewerytown is redefining Latinos’ role in the business

Pedro Rodriguez has been drinking coffee since he was 2 years old.

He grew up in the Dominican Republic, where coffee is an essential part of life. When Rodriguez was just 5, he started helping his grandmother roast her own coffee, carefully watching the beans as they turned darker with heat. He eventually moved to the U.S. and, as an adult, began attending coffee shows and meeting roasters. These days at age 69, he keeps his coffee order simple: black, with just a little bit of sugar.

Now, Rodriguez is getting into the coffee roasting business. He is the president and CEO of Café Don Pedro, a Brewerytown-based coffee roasting company that officially launched on Saturday. You can place orders for coffee beans and ground coffee for delivery or pickup online at cafedonpedro.org.

Café Don Pedro will source and roast its own coffee for wholesale and retail, focusing on eliminating as many middlemen as possible between coffee growers and consumers in the U.S. Their first batch of beans comes directly from a small group of Guatemalan women who took over their area’s coffee production after so many men left the country for the U.S. These are the kinds of people Rodriguez wants to work with, as opposed to the “middlemen” — processors and exporters.

“We noticed that a lot of Latinos produce coffee. They grow it, they pick it up, they wash it, and they put it in big sacks … and then we, in the United States, as consumers, we drink it every day. But we’re not in the middle,” Rodriguez said.

“We wanted to put a foot into that middle and begin to disrupt it in favor of [Latinos].”

Rodriguez retired from the City of Philadelphia two years ago, spending most of his career in human resources and civil services, as well as volunteering with numerous community organizations. He and his friend James Duran, who is also Dominican, got excited about the idea of opening a coffee roaster in North Philly together. Duran previously owned his own coffee shop, Little Jimmy’s Coffee Roaster, in Germantown, but closed it several years ago as it became clear to him that there was more money to be made in wholesale coffee.

They decided they would rely on Duran’s connections and knowledge of the coffee supply chain, and incubate the business within Delivery Guys, a Philly-based start-up food delivery company that primarily works with Latino-owned brands, where Duran is chief financial officer. Together with Delivery Guys’ CEO, Victor Tejada, the three men cofounded Café Don Pedro. Duran will serve as CFO with Café Don Pedro, and Tejada as chief operations officer, alongside a handful of employees.

» READ MORE: Philly’s Delivery Guys is a start-up ready to compete with food delivery giants such as Grubhub, UberEats. Here’s how it will do it.

“If I was to do it again, this is exactly how I would have done it 10 years ago,” Duran said.

He pointed to how Café Don Pedro was already delivering orders to people in Philly the morning of its official launch as evidence that their model has the necessary infrastructure to succeed in a crowded national market. On Saturday, over 50 people braved a rainy January day to learn about Café Don Pedro and its coffee.

“I think a lot of people, especially folks from the community, from North Philly and the Latino community in general, were really happy [to see] something like this happen,” Rodriguez said.

Café Don Pedro’s location at 1521 N. 31st St. will serve more as a hub for online orders, roasting, and distribution than a traditional retail space, though people interested in purchasing coffee can buy individual bags of coffee there.

Even though their space is not a coffee shop that serves drinks by the cup, Rodriguez and Duran welcome anyone who wants to come buy beans or even talk business.

“Get in touch with us, come in. This is something about the Latino culture,” Rodriguez said. “If I go to Jimmy’s house, I don’t have to call in advance, I just show up, knock on the door, he [will] give me a cup of coffee. That’s how we operate as well.”