We were lucky to catch up with Sookyung Kim recently and have shared our conversation below.
Sookyung, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Serendipity, opportunity, one of life’s twists is how we are now, coffee farmers in Hawaii. Over the years my husband and I went on vacations to various places around the world and country. My husband, especially, fell in love with Hawaii, and in particular the Big Island. His dream was to retire and live the island life. We planned how to leave our jobs and whether the math would work to sustain living in Hawaii. He scoured the internet for real estate for several years. Then our realtor told us the owners for this property was motivated to sell. The owners had already planted coffee trees around the 10 acre portion of the property (another 10 acres was pastureland) but had not cultivated them to a point of being a viable business.
Leaving an office job with good benefits was a real conflict for me. Leaving a known for the unknown, scary would be an understatement. Will this work? We took it one day at a time.
Our approach to marketing our coffee is, honestly just being genuine and honest about what it takes to produce that one cup of coffee, the challenges to being a farmer, coping with the various pests that affect the crop, endeavoring to be good environmental stewards to this precious land. None of our practice is unique, all farmers face similar challenges.
What we knew about coffee is that we liked it, drank it every morning. The idea of being coffee farmer was not at all something we’d considered, never mind being a business owner or an entrepreneur, that was always someone else. Life’s twist!
My husband spent the first few years building sufficient infrastructure to process the coffee and purchasing required equipments, clearing the land, understanding the ins and outs of coffee trees and its needs in order to produce healthy coffee beans. My time was spent trying to figure out how to market a product most people understood from purchasing mass produced coffees at retail stores; there is so much to know about the journey involved in that one cup of coffee. And today so much of consuming products are online, how to even get started was very daunting.
We learned along the way and our business was slow and incremental. We started selling cherries (the fruit from the trees), then parchment (the next stage after pulping), then once we had our own roaster, roasting coffee. So that six years since inception but three year since we knew what we were doing, to become vertically integrated.
Coffee market is saturated with retail sold coffees imported from the world. Hawaii is the only state in the USA that grows coffee commercially and due to many reasons is not a mass produced, cheap product. Coffee farms here are mostly family owned and small – like us – and production can be affected by weather, invasive species, processing methods, locations, labor costs, et al.
Additionally, Hawaii is considered a vacation destination, with its beautiful beaches etc. But to live here, we have to appreciated and respect its culture and history.
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?
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We are owners of Hog Heaven Coffee, a coffee farm on the Big Island of Hawaii. We sell both retail (mostly online) and wholesale coffees. We also offer coffee Farm Tour. Our coffee is known for its smooth, mild, chocolaty taste. In fact we often hear how customers no longer need to include additives like milk or sugar to their coffee, that they now drink it naked or blank. We believe in order to enjoy coffee, you need to taste it as is, no additives. So that goal is accomplished! We are in this industry by chance. Our farm is vertically integrated, that is, from beginning to end we control the process. We plant the trees, pick the coffee cherries, process, roast and package to sell. Hawaii is the only state in the USA that grows coffee commercially and due to many reasons is not mass produced nor cheap product. Coffee farms here are mostly family owned and small – like us – and margins are small if at all. The consumer doesn’t know what they don’t know. For instance, one of our products is a Farm Tour where we walk thru how we process coffee, from planting the tree to roasting. People who’ve been through our farm tour leave with so much more knowledge about coffee in general but also the uniqueness of Hawaii coffee. The overwhelming feedback, aside from how much they enjoy our coffee is that they had no idea all the stages and efforts involved in coffee. Education that adds new knowledge to an old practice(?) – everyone knows coffee but most do not know its story or what it takes- brings a certain amount of satisfaction, that we’ve contributed somehow to the collective.We also appreciate that currently, people want to know how their foods are sourced, where and how they’re made. So sharing our coffee process contributes to that understanding. Our coffee farm is also our home that we share with five dogs and six cows, all rescues. The four-legged are an integral part of the brand – all are prominently featured in our social media posts. . One dog in particular (Hazel – @hunchbackofninolce) has become our mascot of sorts and has her own instagram account that has over 12K followers. As a disabled dog, Hazel also shows the workings of a Hawaii coffee Farm. If only the business account can get such active engagement! |
How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.
We sell both retail and wholesale. Retail is mostly from our website. We use Shopify. While there are many free or low cost website builders, Shopify is the only all-in-one platform for e-commerce that I’ve found works me. I’ve also tried word press with woo commerce as an add on but it was not as user friendly for a tech novice like myself. We chose to sell directly on our own website as any third party platform like Amazon takes a cut off your already low margin, and all the risk is on you. As it is, Shopfy charges its own fees with every transaction.
Shopify integrates both the narrative of the story you’re trying to tell about your farm/business as well as the shopping side, so there is no add on. Shopify also offers templates so I don’t have to figure out how to design any page. Because Shopify is worldwide, updates to latest laws, changes to analytics, etc have been vetted and available, one less thing I have to worry about.
I do experience plenty of frustrations when making changes to the website and it’s like to search engines; I also struggle to keep up with latest developments on to achieve better listing on any search engines.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
Owning our own business, developing a website, having a presence on social media, e-commerce writ large, was something I’ve never considered doing. My long term goal was to leave as little digital footprint as possible. That all changed when we bought this coffee farm and started selling coffee.
This new life is in many way so foreign! It has been and continues to be a major challenge, just trying to keep up with technical changes – GA4 – social media, marketing etc. And the more I learn there’s so much more I need to learn, sometimes I just shut down, it’s too much.
But I just keep on keeping on, there isn’t much choice. So I just do the best I can.
The farm is our home which means, the homelife and the worklife is inextricably linked. Taking care of five dogs including a disabled dog, cows, elderly parents (one who’s on the mainland), housework while fulfilling orders to correspodinging with customers and upkeep of the website and posting on social…all get mixed up on any given day.
I’m still living the pivot!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://hogheavencoffee.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hogheavencoffee/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/hogheavencoffee
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@hogheavencoffee
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/puaalanicoffee/
Image Credits
Sookyung Kim