We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christine Santos a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Christine, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to go back in time and hear the story of how you came up with the name of your brand?
When my husband, a serial entrepreneur, and I decided to bring his family’s award winning green coffee to the US market, we knew we wanted to incorporate our shared loved for travel and coffee.
We started thinking about names that reflected our family, but nothing felt right. We were moving fast in late 2019 on strategy and operations of our coffee roasting business. And it wasn’t until COVID slammed the brakes on travel that the direction of our company’s name became clear.
As a multi-cultural family who have lived in both Brazil and the US (and Germany, France, and Canada), we have amassed our share of travel documents (passports, boarding passes, etc).
We named our company Boarding Pass Coffee in reference to letting our customers “travel through coffee” and giving them their ticket to the world’s best flavors of coffee!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
We offer farm-to-cup specialty coffee. We bring the coffee direct from our family farm in Brazil to the port in Savannah, and then roast it ourselves in small batches. We know exactly where the coffee comes from – we know who works on the farm and their families too. In fact, we even got married on the farm!
Besides our in-house roasted coffee, we are really proud that we can offer the experience of coffee tastings. These sessions are about 60-90 minutes where we prepare 5 different types of coffee (different origins, roast levels, tasting notes) and sample them side-by-side. It is an engaging environment that talk about the production of coffee and discussion of everyone’s tasting notes and personal preferences.
Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?
Well, my cofounder and business partner is also my life partner (and sometimes tennis partner!) Our first date was on the tennis court, and afterwards we went for a bite and all we did was talk about travel.
The first time I met my future in-laws was on the coffee farm. We had been adventuring on his motorcycle and took a spur-of-the-moment detour to visit his parents there. They weren’t expecting us, and on this very hot and bumpy trip up the mountains I got a splitting headache. I walked in, greeted them as briefly as possible them promptly excused myself and found the nearest bed to take a recovery nap. Little did I know I’d be getting married on that farm, and then having a business with direct ties to the farm!
Have you ever had to pivot?
I’ve had many pivotal moments in my career in terms of geographies, focus areas and priorities. But none were as big as the decision to go all-in to Boarding Pass Coffee.
I had been in Consulting straight out of college, and loved helping clients solve their problems. It allowed me to truly see the world and live in mind-blowing places like Sao Paulo, Brazil.
When we started Boarding Pass Coffee in 2020, I was working full-time during the day, and moonlighting at night and every other spare moment. It got to a point where we decided that the moment was now to end that chapter and start a new one.
It was hard walking away from a career I had been so proud of, learned so much from, and given so much to me. It was really really hard walking away from a great salary and benefits that provided for my family. But we know it was necessary to help Boarding Pass Coffee grow.
Contact Info:
- Website: Www.boardingpasscoffee.com
- Instagram: Boarding Pass Coffee
- Facebook: Boarding Pass Coffee
- Linkedin: Christine Grasso Farias Santos
- Yelp: Boarding Pass Coffee