We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Porttia Portis a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Porttia, thanks for joining us today. Any thoughts around creating more inclusive workplaces?

Creating a more inclusive workplace in coffee has been one of my biggest goals for a while now. For decades, the industry has been white male centric and vastly ableist, but I feel like I’ve connected to this newer generation of coffee workers aiming to amplify BIPOC voices, as well as make the workplace more accessible to those with disabilities. I try to mentor as many of the younger BIPOC and LGBTQ+ coffee professionals as I can, knowing that I didn’t have someone who looked like me to look up to in the industry when I first started. I also try to think of coffee from an accessibility mindset, something I feel like didn’t become as much of a focus until the pandemic happened. There are so many ways that coffee bars are set up that, again, prioritize the average white male, from the height of the bar to the overall structure of the companies and cultures. I hope that through my work and visibility, more people pursue and succeed in coffee as a profession.

Porttia, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a journalist turned coffee professional, with more than a decade of experience in both worlds. I studied Mass Communications with a focus in print journalism and sociology at Wright State University in Dayton, OH, right when journalism was making its switch over to the digital realm. That switch made my schooling almost immediately antiquated and irrelevant, but I was lucky enough to be a technology first adapter as a millennial, so I already had a foot in the digital realm before all of my professors and a lot of my peers.

Around senior year, I started working for my older brother’s graphic design firm as the social media manager. He was the first person to give me a real shot as a creative, and I will forever be grateful for that. After college, I was still doing social media work, but struggled to find my first journalism job and started to get discouraged. That’s where coffee came in and saved me.

I applied to be a barista at a local roasting company where I’m from, and got hired on the spot. I thought it was just going to be something temporary until I landed my first “big girl job,” but I ended up falling in love with it. I could see myself making a career in it, but I was still itching to get my foot in the journalism door. After about a year, friend at UNT connected me to Pete Freedman, the founding editor at Central Track. We emailed back and forth for a couple of months, then he offered me an internship. Unpaid. But the prospect of moving to Texas to pursue my dream was worth more than being stuck behind a coffee bar in my hometown, so I packed up my Hyundai Santa Fe with my partner and left.

I completed my internship after a few months, then freelanced for Central Track as a food and coffee writer with my own respective columns, in addition to writing for various websites like Eater Dallas.

I started missing the coffee world, and took a job as the coffee manager for a restaurant called Ellen’s to help revamp their bar program. From there, I’ve worked in various restaurants and coffee shops managing their coffee programs and providing training. I’ve done everything from coffee cocktails to learn how to make traditional Vietnamese iced coffee and boba. My most recent role was managing one of the highest volume locations of White Rock Coffee in Dallas, TX for more than three years. But my next journey is becoming a quality control specialist for Atlas Coffee Importers in Seattle, WA through NKG PACE, a program that focuses on closing the gap for Black coffee professionals in managerial roles, as we are statistically the least promoted in the industry.

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

I think my unique experience as a journalist has done wonders for my reputation in the coffee world. For about three years, I wrote a coffee column for Central Track called Unfiltered. I traveled the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex with my friend Kathy Tran interviewing and photographing people and their coffee business. The goal was to tell their actual stories as they were, not stripped down. Hence the name.

We never knew what to expect going into these interviews, and a lot of times we were met with extreme resistance. Interviews make people nervous enough, and no one knew what to expect from two young WOC. But we were hungry and sincere, which helped people open up to us more often than not.

I knew I did a lot of these articles at the completion of the column, but I wasn’t aware of just how far my reach in the coffee industry was until I stepped away from journalism to focus on being a coffee professional. I ran into SO many people who knew who I was through that column: readers, delivery drivers, baristas who were on shift that day to the shop owners themselves. Not only was it just name recognition, but I retained a lot of knowledge from each encounter that helped with my training tactics. I love to tell people that you can learn something new from coffee every day, and each of my experiences is proof.

Can you open up about a time when you had a really close call with the business?

I mentioned being hungry as a driving factor for pursuing my coffee column, but let me clarify that I was LITERALLY hungry. I was disgustingly broke in the early journalism days. I was surviving off of the free coffee and treats that coffee shop owners were giving Kathy and I during those visits. I know a lot of them were running on thin margins as it were, and they were rightfully concerned about giving out so much free products for the prospect of good publicity, but trust me, we were beyond grateful. I looked forward to those interviews just to put something in my stomach, and that somehow enriched the experiences even more.

Contact Info:

• Website: porttiagabs.com
• Instagram: porttiagabs
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/porttiaaaa
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/mwlite/in/porttia-portis-29245b70
• Twitter: @porttiagabs
• Other: TikTok: @porttiagabs

Image Credits
Imagine of me in coffee bar: Ash Gongora (@ashgphoto on Instagram)