We were lucky to catch up with Stacy Coplin recently and have shared our conversation below.

Stacy, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s talk about innovation. What’s the most innovative thing you’ve done in your career?

Creating our Yaupon Matcha product is the most innovative thing I think I’ve done with my career so far. The story of how it came to be is a big part of what I think makes this product so unique. In 2018 we had a trip to Japan planned and before we left for our adventure, we had the idea of creating a matcha powder from yaupon one evening while driving back from wild-harvesting. I began to reach out to Japanese companies that make matcha and one thing led to another and I was connected with a contact in Japan. We set aside some of our trip for work and visited green tea farms, visited facilities and learned insights into the process behind making green tea matcha. Upon our return, we got busy figuring out how to adapt what we learned in Japan to processing yaupon leaves into matcha (which loosely translates to “ground tea”) in Japanese.

Stacy, 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’m Stacy Coplin co-founder of Local Leaf here in Austin, Texas. Eric Knight, my now husband, and I run our small business together. Our passion for nature and sustainable wild-harvesting practices in particular is at the root of what we do. We’ve been wild-harvesting different plants around town together for a decade now. It’s something that we both enjoy doing when we have spare time.

We specialize in crafting Yaupon Matcha and take pride in our unique Japanese-inspired process start to finish. We also take pride in focusing not just on yaupon products, but also on educating the public about other edible plants. We host plant walks in the spring and fall months and collaborate with other entities like the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and Jester King Brewery to host plant walks on their sites. Be sure to keep an eye out for upcoming walks and check out our field guide: Foraging Texas: Finding, Identifying, and Preparing Edible Wild Foods in Texas.

Our book is a great resource and guide as well as a testament that you don’t have to go far to find something to eat. Our edible plant walks hosted at different places around town in the spring and fall are also wonderful ways to get people outside and curious about what’s growing around them. I want people to realize that wild-harvesting doesn’t have to be this all-day big expedition. It can take as little as 5 minutes, it’s as simple as going for a walk-in a nearby pocket park or neighborhood park and knowing what to look for and harvesting a small amount of let’s say mulberries and adding them to a salad for lunch. It’s the micro actions that lead to bigger actions and shifts throughout your life.

On a small scale we are working to help solve food insecurity through educating people about the local wild-foods that grow all around us even in urban areas. There is always something you can incorporate into your meals. Most of the really common wild edibles are invasive which is even better since eating invasive wild plants works towards solving two problems: local nutritious food access and ecological devastation caused by invasive species.

Sustainability is another one of our drivers. Our Yaupon Matcha product is sustainably wild-harvested right outside of Austin. This significantly cuts down on energy and fuel used on transportation compared to other teas and coffee shipped from around the world. Yaupon is an evergreen plant that grows wild and doesn’t require any additional water usage, fertilizer, or energy input.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

Eric and I met at the Austin Nature and Science Center in 2011. We were both working as environmental educators on a pilot program that taught afterschool nature programs to the recreation centers on the east side of town. It was a blast! We talked a little bit while at work but didn’t really work directly together for a few months. Then Eric introduced me to Yaupon later on once we started hanging out outside of work.

We played around with the idea of a yaupon tea company and sold small batches of bottled yaupon tea to family and friends in 2012 but ultimately tabled the idea (at the time, it seemed like a lot to take on considering we had just started dating). The idea never left us though and good friends would frequently ask us when we were going to pick it up again. Fast forward to 2016 and we decided to go for it and started working towards a product, a name and all the many facets that are part of starting a business. Local Leaf LLC was born.

Our passion and interest for the natural world is what brought us together in the first place and that strong foundation has never left us or Local Leaf.

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

Doing tons of in-person events and pop-ups for the first few years was very helpful. Doing the Mueller Farmer’s Market definitely helped, too. Being out and about helped us connect with customers and meet and collaborate with new people in the industry. These connections have been extremely important for a new small business like ours. Just being seen around town. Doing demos have and still are very important to us. Those first years of being foot soldiers were invaluable. We also have a fairly unique product even within the small but growing yaupon industry so that helps us stand out a bit.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.local-leaf.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/localleafatx/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/localleafatx/

Image Credits
Whitney Arostegui