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

Hi Christine, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

In the roasting industry, almost every roaster I’ve talked to or researched has the idea that they know what is best for the customer. They will decide what roast level to roast beans to, and the customers will buy it and like it. The beauty of specialty grade coffee is that there are so many more flavors available, and we, as individuals, are a diverse group. Not everyone has the same palette, so why are we treating coffee beans like we do? My shop specializes in individual batch roasting where our customers decide the roast level. My favorite examples is a loyal customer that orders his Bali beans roasted to 435F and his Costa Rica to 415F, because these two beans offer the similar flavors at completely different roast levels.
This not only makes customers happier with their coffee, it also reduces waste by roasting on order so the beans aren’t aging or sitting on a shelf to be thrown away at a later date because customers don’t buy them.

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?

Before my grandfather passed away in 2006, while I was still in the US Navy, he told me in an offhand manner that he roasted his coffee beans in a popcorn popper. He highly recommended it. I was skeptical, but found some green coffee beans online, pulled out my air popper and tried it. One of those beans was a Tanzania Peaberry. It was the best coffee I’d ever had and I vowed to own a coffee roasting business one day because I realized there was more out there in the coffee world than what we could buy at the grocery store or the local small coffee shops. After a failed minor attempt to start the business after leaving the Navy, I spent the 10 years being a single mom working to support my kid to the best of my ability as a federal employee. I still roasted coffee beans occasionally, though not as often as I would have liked, since being a mom took a lot of time and roasting beans is a messy business.
In the fall of 2019, I realized I was miserable at my job, and I was setting a bad example for my teen. I had been diagnosed with ADHD in 2016, and I suspected I was Autistic also (Surprise, I am). I constantly felt like I was a terrible employee, even though I was doing work that others had failed at, more efficiently, with few mistakes and rework.
When COVID hit, I decided it was time for me to leave federal service and start my coffee roasting business. The idea of working for someone else actually gives me full anxiety attacks, and not working causes depression, so here we are.
The beauty of my business is that it is a service focused coffee business. It recognizes that we all have our own individual preferences and caters to that. It also allows for exploration of the world of coffee without a huge commitment. We offer pre-roasted samplers that are enough for about 5-8 cups of coffee, depending on a customer’s preferred brewing method.
The added benefit is that with better tasting coffee, the need to add as much other things to a cup of joe is lower, so fewer calories. I don’t know how many people look at the calorie count of their favorite coffee shop drink, but a lot of them are almost full meals.
While the shop offers all of the usual suspects for drinks, our primary focus is always the beans. If you start with good beans, your drink will always be better. Our motto is “Changing the way coffee drinkers get their coffee one bean at a time.”

How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?

Since starting my business, I have learned all the ways entrepreneurs are supposed to fund their business. I did none of those things. When I decided to start this, I cashed out my limited retirement savings to buy my roaster, moved my teen and I in with family, and started on a very small scale. This business is the poster child for self-funded bootstrapping.
There have been several hiccups along the way, but the positive side of self-funding on a limited budget is that the business operates leaner, with less waste.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

The original vision for Galaxy Girl Coffee was for it to be a completely mobile business. The roaster is small enough to fit in a food trailer and the goal was roast on site at different events. For the first year and a half of my business I roasted beans in a roasting room at our house and took the beans to the local farmer’s market, along with selling online. The entire time I was doing this, I was looking for a trailer that I could turn into a food trailer. Unfortunately, with COVID, trailer prices had skyrocketed.
With another winter market looming, I decided to look for alternatives. Our town mall has a specialty leasing program for small businesses that give them the option of ‘short’ term leases. They know that to help bring in more foot traffic the storefronts need to be filled and small businesses aren’t ready for a long term lease if they are still building their business.
I took a chance and was able to get a lease in the mall, which has opened up a lot more opportunities. I’ve been able to get my manufacturing license to sell to other businesses and garner new customers that wouldn’t have found me at the farmer’s markets. We’ve also expanded into serving crepes, which was not in my plan either, but our mall’s unique problems have created a void where food is concerned, and we decided to do our part to help fill that void.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://galaxygirlcoffee.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/galaxygirlcoffee/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/GalaxyGirlCoffee

Image Credits
DSC_0059 & DSC_0079: McK Turner All others: Christine Ball