We were lucky to catch up with Paige Hewett recently and have shared our conversation below.

Paige, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

Our mission is to serve our community delicious coffee with intention. We hope to make everyone’s day a little bit brighter with an oat milk latte from Living Millennially Coffee Bar :)

When you visit us, or we visit you, we want everyone to enjoy their experience. From roasting the beans to when the cup hits your hand, we’ve got our friends in mind. We purposefully chose ingredients for our trailer to cover a lot of the most common dietary needs. Oat milk is dairy, nut, and soy free – and in our opinion, it’s the creamiest and most like milk.

Paige, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am the owner of Living Millennially Coffee Bar! I am a graphic designer by trade, but a barista at heart. I mean, if you’ve met me, you know I’m the oat milk gal. So much so that I got OAT MILK tattooed across my knuckles, I guess you could say Oat Milk is my thing. So why not build a brand completely around that? :)

I wanted to design a low footprint, easy concept for getting quality coffee/drinks to customers everywhere. Our goal is to only focus on an environmentally conscious and minimal menu that anybody, including those with allergies or dietary preferences, could enjoy. We are able to achieve this by repurposing an old pop-up camper into a sustainable, mobile coffee bar that specializes in oat milk lattes.

We knew immediately, to focus on simple and sustainable, we were going to serve oat milk exclusively. It is not a major food allergen, it’s sustainable and (in our opinion) it tastes the best! We also do not stock anything made with nuts and all of our recipes are vegan. This means all of our drinks can be enjoyed by a majority of the population without modification or worry and without the need of a large extensive menu. We also settled on shelf-stable ingredients with recyclable packaging and by donating our spent coffee to the vendors at our farmers market, we have little to no waste. The only thing we needed to figure out was a new way to best serve our community – this came in the form of a 1977 Starcraft, pop-up camper!

We participate in our local Farmers Market & pop up with other local businesses to better serve our community. We’ve also participated in Tower Grove Pride & St. Louis Veg Fest. We’re always finding new places to pop up at though!

Not only do we serve oat milk lattes, we also fresh roast all of our coffee. We have 2 coffees all the time, Millennial Magic (which is a blended Brazil) & Saturday Morning (which is a single origin Ethiopian). We have so much fun coming up with seasonal coffees, our Halloween Blend, “Existential Dread”, is by far a fan favorite. Other seasonal coffees we offer are….”Good Grief” (our take on a Holiday Blend)  and “Sweet Talker” (our Valentines Day Blend).

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

When starting my business I wanted to pay out of pocket – I had student loans and a car payment…I did not want another thing holding me down. The business first started out with me selling bags of my flagship coffee, Millennial Magic, at local festivals! It went over wayyy better than I could have ever imagined…so I booked more events & said I’d have a coffee trailer up and ready to serve coffee by the time the events came…. sounds crazy but that’s the only way I can ever do anything, deadlines.

My significant other is a freakin’ genius when it comes to building things. So we sat, brainstormed, and kept questioning: “how can we do this with little up front costs?” Then it came to us, a pop-up camper! Everybody knows someone who has a pop up camper sitting in their backyard – surely we can find one! Well, we found one for next to nothing. I used my savings to buy it & furnish it..& BAM, it was ready to go.

The little upfront cost was really helpful because we were able to start putting any money made at our events back into the business to help it grow and be better. After 1 year of business we have a lot of things in the works, like upgrades to the interior of our trailer, new coffee bags, merchandise…ect. You’ll see :)

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I think just being 100% me has been HUGE with building a reputation within my market. If I’ve learned anything in this world it’s that there’s more people like you out there than you think – so put yourself out there & like minded people will come!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.livingmillennially.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/living_millennially/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/livingmillennailly

Image Credits
Lily Notz Photo Vaughn Rose Creative