Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Tasia Maresco. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Tasia, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
Looking back to where I was three years ago, I honestly would not have expected to be where I am as the owner of Maresca’s Coffee Counter. For context, in 2020 when the pandemic hit, I was finishing up my last year of a pastry arts program that I entered knowing I eventually wanted to start my own coffee shop. However, the idea of being a business owner felt more like a far-off ideal that would take at least a decade or more to build up to. When I graduated and began working at a fine dining establishment, while I enjoyed the work I was doing, the idea of being my own boss and having creative control of my work became all the more appealing, and I had the idea for a mobile coffee truck. I had researched in school the process of starting a food truck versus a brick-and-mortar restaurant, and found that the start-up costs and monthly overhead expenses of a food truck were much more affordable. The idea took root in my brain and I couldn’t let it go.
I remember going to my fiancé (now husband) and telling him, “I think I want to try to start a coffee food truck.” I was fully expecting to be met with hesitation, but he replied, “Yeah, let’s do it!” If he hadn’t responded that way to begin with, I genuinely don’t know if I would be here today. It was the encouragement of the first person to believe in me that gave me the courage to pursue the next step – finding investment.
I am very grateful and blessed to have friends and family members who believed in me enough not just to encourage me, but to invest in me both creatively and financially, because without their contributions it would have been a much longer and more difficult process. With their help, the process of finding and purchasing the actual truck was the easy part, and I couldn’t be more grateful.
I also want to acknowledge my good friend Davis Smith for taking the time to design our incredible logo, website, and branding. We get compliments on our logo all the time,and I really do believe his work is a key aspect of what makes us stand out.
Our next major step was actually finding the truck! We found and purchased a custom coffee trailer from a business that made them according to specific requests. We got everything we needed for our trailer: espresso machine, fridge, freezer – built right into the truck for us.
Once we had the truck in hand, the next major piece of the puzzle – and the piece that caused the most trouble and delay – was finding a commissary kitchen. As a food truck, even though you are essentially a kitchen on wheels, you still need to have a brick-and-mortar kitchen as your home base where you can store all of your food product and do any necessary prep work and maintenance. In Charlottesville, there really weren’t too many options that advertised their kitchen for rent, and of the two that I could find after months researching and cold calling, one was too far out of town and the other ghosted me, and they both were just outside my price-range. At the time I was working as a bartender at the local airport to make ends meet, and for the time being it seemed the dream was put on hold. It was gut-wrenching to think that even though I had all the equipment I needed to get started, such a minor detail would prevent me from moving forward, but the red-tape was unavoidable.
During this time I was also planning our wedding, so thankfully I wasn’t sitting around twiddling my thumbs and waiting for something to happen. Fast-forward a year and my husband and I were getting brunch with some friends, and our waitress just happened to be a friend that we hadn’t seen in awhile. Later that day, I got a text from her saying the owners of that brunch restaurant were trying to open a coffee shop, and they were looking for a pastry chef to bake for them. She gave me their contact info in case I was interested. I wasn’t sure if this would work with my schedule and my business, but I set up the interview, planning to be honest about my goals and expecting them to ultimately go in a different direction.
To my surprise, they were more than just willing to work around my schedule, but they were completely supportive of my endeavor and offered to enter into a partnership where I could rent out their facilities and bake for both of our businesses. I offered to get started baking for their brunch restaurant while my business was still in the start-up phase. It was the last major step we needed to take to open our doors, and now our partnership has expanded to include roasting our coffee with them in their facilities. I was finally ready to get started.
Running into that major roadblock and ultimately pushing through it taught me a lot about patience and endurance – two qualities I think any new business owner needs to learn. The next several months included the final red tape stages – getting our truck approved by the health inspector, figuring out all the licensing and permits we needed in order to operate a food service business, purchasing product, and finding gigs where we could operate. Each of these steps came with their own stressors and complications, especially since we knew very little.
I am grateful to all the friends and family who came alongside and helped whenever things went wrong or to offer their time and talents to contribute to our vision. We always tell people we’re standing on the backs of giants, because it really couldn’t have come together without our community. Here we are, two and a half years later, and getting to watch it become a reality has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
Tasia, 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?
Maresca’s Coffee Counter is a labor of love, where we serve freshly baked pastries and coffee in a mobile food trailer to the city of Charlottesville. Pastries and baking have been some of my core passions since as early as I can remember, and coffee was my first major job in college. Growing up, baking and being in the kitchen was always something that sparked my interest. I remember wanting an EasyBake Oven as a kid, and my mom decided to instead teach me how to use the real oven. One year when we were living abroad, she decided to homeschool me, and she says sometimes she would leave me to run an errand and come home to find I’d baked a cake or some other dessert.
In college, I got a job as a barista in a local coffeehouse, and my role quickly grew to include line cook and baker. In addition to baking, working at this job gave me foundational knowledge about the coffee industry and helped me fall in love with the art of preparing coffee.
After I finished undergrad, I attended Pastry Arts school, where through classes and a job I learned all the skills to bring fresh, high-quality pastries to life – alongside skills I needed to start a business. It was during this time that I had the idea to open a food truck and be my own boss. My goal was to combine three elements – my passion for baking, my love of coffee, and my goal to have creative control of my work and schedule – and create a business where I could make a living doing what I love.
As a business, our goal is to provide our guests with coffee and pastries that we absolutely love ourselves – and our size as a small business uniquely allows us to do this. We can serve the same delicious cinnamon rolls that we make for ourselves, cooked in a professional kitchen, and know every customer is getting a “home-cooked” treat directly from a pastry chef. And not just cinnamon rolls – gluten free poppyseed muffins, sweet and savory scones, blueberry muffins, and more.
Pair that with a locally roasted coffee with a blend of beans that we hand-pick and roast to the temperature we think is Goldilocks-level just right, and you’ve got yourself a mobile espresso bar that brightens your day. We are so proud of our coffee bean blend and have loved seeing others enjoy the tastes we’ve come up with through hot and iced lattés, espresso, cappuccinos, coffees, and more. We believe it’s the best around.
We also love the opportunity to be a small enough business where we can smile and take the time to share a moment with each customer that comes to our window. Of course, the more busy we are, the briefer our interactions become – but at the very least, we hope you leave our trailer with a smile, happier than you were when you walked up.
Our goal is to be the first name that comes to mind when you think of a mobile coffee bar in Charlottesville. We want to become a staple of our town, known as “the spot” to visit with friends and family.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
It took us a little over two years from when I first had the idea to our very first day up and running. It was a long process getting all the pieces together, but we kept moving forward… until about two weeks before our first scheduled gig, when it seemed like as many things that could possibly go wrong did go wrong. As a food truck, we are reliant on a number of heavy pieces of equipment to keep us running, including a complex water system within our truck and a heavy generator to give our espresso machine, fridge, freezer and everything else the power it needs to run.
Two weeks before our first gig, we powered up our trailer to make sure everything was running well and to practice our flow so we could feel confident serving customers. We powered up, turned everything on, and realized we had no running water. A month before, we had everything running smoothly for the health inspectors, so at some point after the inspection, our water pump broke down. Discouraged and anxious, we scrambled to purchase a new pump, and contacted as many plumbers as we could find to see who would be willing to work on a food truck ASAP. The pump got here, we found a plumber, and within six days, we had the new pump running smoothly.
Meanwhile, we received news from our partner restaurant that our coffee roaster had suddenly quit and moved back home for personal reasons. This left us with no one to roast our coffee with only 12 days till launch. We spoke to our partners and agreed to all work together to supply both their business and ours with the coffee we need. This ended up being a blessing in disguise, as we could really perfect our roast to exactly how we wanted it – but 12 days out, it was a bit of a shock. Would we even have coffee in time for the opening? (Spoiler: we did.)
With 7 days till launch, we powered up the truck a second time. This time, when we turned on our espresso machine, our generator began to make a concerning noise and smoke came pouring out. We quickly turned everything off and, once again discouraged, looked for licensed professionals who could help us diagnose the issue. Thankfully, this one wasn’t serious, and we found a quick solution.
At this point, emotional breakdowns and discouragement felt like the norm. Not a single coffee or pastry served, months of red tape and roadblocks… When would the fun part begin? More than once the thought crossed my mind that I had gotten in over my head – and wasted everyone’s time and money on what was sure to be a complete failure. But I couldn’t let go of the vision of what it would look like if the business turned out the way I imagined it could. So we pushed forward with a lot of help and encouragement from friends and family, and I’m so grateful we did.
Has your business ever had a near-death moment? Would you mind sharing the story?
If the craziness of the two weeks leading up to our first gig should have taught us anything, it was that we had little idea what we were doing and no experience from which to draw. Thankfully, a lesson we learned early on is that we can learn and grow from every mistake. We continue to craft the “perfect” morning set-up routine and the best way to set up our trailer, and we couldn’t have gotten to the point we are at now without that period of knowing almost nothing!
One particular moment that felt like a waking nightmare was, the morning of the first gig. It really felt like everything that could go wrong did go wrong – and then some.
One of the more inefficient aspects of our setup is that the platform where we strap the 400 lb generator down for transport happens to block the door to get inside the trailer. So, once the generator is strapped down, there is no way to get back in without taking it back down, which is a strenuous process involving rolling the generator up and down a set of heavy movable ramps. The morning before our opening gig was particularly stressful because we were already running behind, it was raining, and it was our second time ever moving it onto the platform. We got the generator in place, and my husband ran to the store to get some bungee cords to strap down a tarp as protection from the rain. While he ran that errand, I went to our commissary kitchen to grab all of our pastries, milk, and coffee. We both got home at the same time and realized that we’d forgotten to fill up our water tank, which meant we needed to get inside the trailer to open the intake valves. Thus, the generator had to come down again.
This is when the morning began to feel like a near death moment for our business. We set the ramps back up to move the generator down, and because of the weight, our inexperience, and the rain, the generator derailed and fell off the side. We both pulled with all our might to cushion the blow, but it still landed on its side, and I was certain that we’d just killed one of our most crucial pieces of equipment. However, there was nothing we could do but just keep going. So we did.
Once filled, setting us back even more time, we got the generator back on its platform and went to strap it down. The straps, however, got impossibly tangled over time, and once again I had to send Patrick on an errand to get some new ones. While Patrick was gone, I somehow managed to get the straps untangled, got the generator strapped down, covered with the tarp, and everything ready to go. When he got back, we made sure we had everything we needed, hitched up the trailer, and made the hour drive to the winery where we had our gig.
We’re so thankful to the folks at the winery for being so gracious in allowing us to be late to our own soft launch while working out the kinks of our set-up! Without their patience we wouldn’t have had a spot to land on for our opening day mistakes and terrifying moments of ineptitude. And most importantly, we learned so many lessons for the future.
I’m thankful this was only a soft launch with about 95% of our customers being friends and family, and everyone was patient and encouraging despite our many setbacks. Barring one more generator scare at the venue with smoke blowing again, which our friend helped us diagnose and solve, the rest of the day ran smoothly, and we came to the end nearly broken and completely exhausted. But despite all the setbacks and mistakes, overall the day was a success, we learned a lot, and we felt much more prepared for the future! What an adventure – and here’s to many more.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.marescas.coffee
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marescascoffee/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/marescascoffee
- Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@marescascoffee
Image Credits
Bekah Grace Photos