It will mark the first St. Louis location for the Kansas City–based fair trade coffee chain.
by Iain Shaw
Kansas City coffee roaster Revocup Coffee Roasters will open its fifth location—and first in the St. Louis metro area—on March 16 in Maryland Heights.
The coffee shop will offer espresso drinks including an Ethiopian macchiato, lattes, cappuccinos, mochas, and Revocup’s popular single-origin drip coffee. The restaurant will also offer frozen drinks, smoothies, and a limited menu, including light sandwiches and pastries.
Revocup’s core offering is its freshly roasted coffee, which includes beans from Ethiopia and many other parts of the coffee-growing world, including Colombia, Tanzania, El Salvador, Kenya, and Costa Rica. In addition to having a cup of coffee on premises, customers can buy bags to take home, with the average bag priced at $14–$16. The most popular varieties include the Ethiopian Sidamo Natural, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, and Genesis Natural.
Revocup founder Habte Mesfin takes pride in transparency and the bean’s origins. “People know our coffee is fresh, and we give them more information than anyone else: which country it comes from, what particular farm or region it comes from, the date that it was roasted,” he says. “Coffee is an agricultural product, and it has a very short shelf life.” To ensure freshness, Mesfin says bags of retail coffee are usually removed from the shelves after three to five weeks and brewed in store.
Before launching Revocup in 2008, Mesfin worked in finance and advocated for better terms for coffee farmers in his native country of Ethiopia, widely considered the birthplace of coffee. “I was trying to advocate for the wellbeing of the farmers, which meant telling the big corporations how difficult life is in a farming community,” says Mesfin, who moved to the United States in 1985 but retained connections from his time as a young man working as an organizer on a farming cooperative. “The corporations understood how difficult it would be to live on a farm,” he says, “but when it comes to economics, they were not going to shell out a large sum of money for someone else, and their shareholders were not going to allow them.”
Mesfin decided to go directly to the consumer. “I felt the need to tell the human side of the coffee story,” he says. “In order to do that, you have to have a good roasting facility, you have to have good shops, and you have to present the best quality of the product. When you are addressing humanity, you should not do it with a substandard product.”
In addition to buying his coffee on fair-trade principles, Mesfin and his wife, TG, launched the Revocup Foundation, which receives 10 cents from every cup of coffee sold at Revocup’s stores and $1 from every bag of coffee. To date, the foundation has opened 38 libraries in coffee-growing communities in Ethiopia. “We believe education is the most effective weapon against poverty,” says Mesfin, who hopes the foundation’s projects and geographical reach can grow over time, too; for instance, he’s currently working on issues around clean water.
Maryland Heights is the latest plank of Mesfin’s mission to improve the lives of coffee growers in his homeland by providing customers in the U.S. with a high-quality product.
“They know they’re not only enjoying a cup of coffee,” he says, “but also helping someone else.”
Revocup Coffee Roasters
12670 Dorsett Road, St Louis, Missouri 63043 View Map
Hours6 a.m.–7 p.m. Mon–Fri, 7 a.m.–5 p.m. Sat–Sun
Price Range Moderate
https://www.stlmag.com/dining/revocup-coffee-roasters-to-open-in-maryland-heights-on-march-16/
