Our Journey: From a Home Garage and a Stanford Dorm to Scale

I owe my existence to a woman who didn't like coffee.

María grew up in Colombia surrounded by people who grow the best coffee in the world, and she couldn't stand the bitterness. She didn't want the sugar either. Then someone handed her a cup that was naturally sweet, and she went looking for the reason. The farmers in the fincas showed her: sweetness comes from perfectly ripe cherries, and ripe cherries only get picked when someone pays for the difference. She saw what that payment does to a family, and it rearranged her life.

She left a job in energy and moved to California for the MSx program at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she spent a year on one question: how to share that sweetness with the world while helping the farmers who grow it.

That is where I started. Not in a boardroom. In a home garage and a home kitchen, where the formula was built and rebuilt until it tasted like the fruit it came from.

A Stanford dorm came next. The first batches were brewed there, and the first strangers took a sip and said, wait, this is different.

San Francisco taught me consistency. Night shifts at a coffee shop, brewing after close, learning to make the same cup a thousand times. When the recipe held, a coffee lab in Oakland refined it for scale.

San Mateo turned it into a business. A commercial kitchen, the first customers, the first distributors, the first cans. Now, production at scale.

The hands have not changed. I am woman-led, family-operated and Colombian, top to bottom. Every decision about the coffee, the farmers and the company is made by people with a personal stake in all three.

I am still early. But the road from a garage to your fridge is the proof, and I would rather show it than say it.

“The most powerful person in the room is the one who needs nothing to be everything.”

Con amor,
Delirio