We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Abel Wilson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Abel below.

Abel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Coffee is not a new thing, it has been around since before colonialism and had a massive expansion due to its profitability with underpaid labor in developing countries and pricing control through c-market trading. There is a sect of coffee that wants to do more for farmers, their workers, and everyone in the value chain. A Coffee Movement started with this goal at the forefront of our minds. The idea for a mobile coffee van arose after I had to move back home during the pandemic. A time when routine, regular life didn’t exist anymore, and ultimately a lot of places, coffee shops included, went under as a business. My background in Chemical Engineering took me on a journey toward better coffee. I found community, friends, gear, and levels of depth I didn’t know could exist in such a seemingly simple beverage. I listened to stories of coffee farmers speaking out on the cycle of perpetual and increasing debt each harvest. I read books relating water flow through a coffee bed to complex mathematical models and discovered theories on how that affects consistency and tastes in coffee. You quickly realize that coffee is anything but simple.

My wife and I have traveled and lived all over the world. Seeing some of the most beautiful places on earth and some of the most heartbreaking ones and all of these places have their own coffee culture that is entangled into everyday life. The people here deserve better coffee than they were getting in this tourism-driven town. One of my favorite quotes from a coffee producer in Ecuador named Pepe Jijon of Finca Soledad is “You can pay $20 for a 1-kilogram bag of shit, or you can pay $20 for a small bag of love” Both bags say coffee but one was made conscious of nature, the soil, paying farmers and workers well and the other was made with a rat race to win. We wanted to bring love and commitment to coffee that we felt had not existed in this place before.

Being a mobile shop in our minds was the most logical way to do that. It was the way we could connect with the most amount of people. To show them a different side to coffee not just through what we were serving but through our own passion for it. We could not be more proud of what we created and the coffee we have served over the past year and a half.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Abel Wilson, my wife and I own A Coffee Movement and run it almost daily on our own. We are a small mobile coffee shop serving specialty coffee. We want our passion for quality coffee to be seen and tasted by everyone who gets a cup from us. Quality coffee is so much deeper than just the barista or coffee shop behind it. It takes years of tree and soil tending by a farmer to see improvements in the coffee quality. It takes knowledge of a roaster to know how to treat each coffee differently and do quality control on each batch to ensure it reaches their standards and then it is up to people like me. To search out, use and prepare excellent coffee and try to change the perception that coffee is just a boost of caffeine for the morning into something that can be appreciated and enjoyed because of the beautiful beverage it is.

I got into coffee throughout my years at university studying chemical engineering and working in that field. I became fascinated by the chemical and physical processes happening while brewing a cup. Slowly I became more and more intrigued with it and covid gave me the opportunity to buy and start the van with my wife. We go to multiple locations throughout the week and try to serve coffee to as many people as possible. We strongly believe that everyone deserves great coffee and we’re here to bring it to them.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

Resilience for us looks mostly likely just showing up. Humans are creatures of habit and becoming a part of their routine takes time and patience. We had to change our routines and habits to become part of others. We had to show up even if we did very little sales, even if things needed fixing. Even if. We had to seek out new opportunities and take risks to go. Being mobile means relying on people to check our location and we had to find efficient ways to communicate that to them. We had to be willing to experiment and figure out what worked best for us.

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Ultimately social media but in a world where we are more connected than ever, it can be so easy to feel disconnected from everyone. We simply talk and interact with our customers like they matter because they really do. We remember their faces, we ask them about their days and weeks. We become genuinely interested in their lives because we are now a part of it. We get to bring them a little bit of beauty every day and I think that is something really special and I hope they do too.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @acoffeemovement
• Facebook: facebook.com/acoffeemovement
• Other: Acoffeemovement2022@gmail.com