Uprooted Coffee is an immigrant-owned, family-run coffee company. Can you tell us more about your own refugee roots, as well as what inspired you to dive into the world of coffee?
SAENG: Growing up as a refugee kid, you're in between worlds. My family moved around; I came to the States when I was four. We lived in Georgia, California, and finally Minnesota. I’ve always felt like I'm on the move, physically and mentally, not ever feeling like I could call a place home. So I started learning about myself, as well as my family’s history, and Southeast Asian history.
In college and graduate school, I studied anthropology. I have a Master’s in Southeast Asian Studies. In my last semester of undergrad, Gao and I took a course that included a study trip to Southeast Asia. It was my first time being back in Southeast Asia, specifically in Thailand and Laos. That was my first time seeing a bunch of Asian folks, and I finally felt that I fit in somewhat, both in Thailand and in Laos, because I speak the language, I know the culture. But at the same time, even there, I wasn’t a Lao or Thai citizen, so it still felt like I didn’t fully belong. In 2018, I took a professional leave of absence to do research and I went to Southeast Asia for two and a half months.
Towards the end of that trip, my wife and kids joined me there. While we were there, there was an annual coffee festival in the capital of Laos, Vientiane. In Laos, there are two big coffee companies: Dao Heuang coffee and Sinouk coffee, which have, for a very long time, been the main coffee growers, producers, and distributors. I love coffee, so when I was preparing for that trip, I had been looking up coffee places. When I arrived in Laos though, I went to a bunch of local coffee shops and really noticed this emerging scene of specialty coffee, and also an emerging middle class that included young Lao entrepreneurs. Not only were they starting their own cafes, but they were working directly with farmers and cooperatives to develop coffee beans, roasting their own coffees—that got me really interested. So when we came back to the States after attending this week-long festival and visiting so many coffee shops, it got us thinking: what can we do with this?
GAO: My family arrived in St. Paul in January of 1980. Can you imagine leaving a tropical climate and being plopped in Minnesota in the dead of winter with nothing but the clothes on your back? My mom has told me about how they couldn’t communicate at all during that international trip, and didn’t eat any food because when they were offered food on the airplane, they couldn’t understand English and they didn’t know if they had to pay for it. It makes me really sad to think about all they went through to get here - that plane ride was just the final leg of a years-long trek that started in their home villages. When I was born, my parents were living in public housing in St. Paul and eventually, my parents bought a small two-bedroom home on the Eastside where I spent the majority of my childhood. That two-bedroom house housed my parents, eight children, my paternal grandmother and at times uncles, aunts, and cousins. I think many refugees and immigrants can relate to this story - it’s all about survival.
When we dipped our toes into the world of coffee - we didn’t know anything. You don’t know where to begin and who to turn to, it’s been a huge learning for us by making mistakes and learning as we go. Coffee itself isn’t new, but the process of getting Southeast Asian beans here, learning about roasting and the coffee growers across an ocean is a bit of a challenge.
We have loved seeing this new wave of Southeast Asian diaspora entrepreneurs and businesses, especially ones focusing on sharing and celebrating Southeast Asian culture, like you all do with Uprooted. What were the early days like in starting your own business and how has the pandemic impacted its operation?
GAO: Neither of us has a background in entrepreneurship, and we don't have family members that own their own businesses either. So it was really like walking in the dark for us, figuring it out as we went. We didn't know if we were doing it correctly, or the way it's supposed to be done.
SAENG: We actually didn’t start with coffee right away. Besides the coffee festival and all the coffee shops we visited in Laos, we also experienced handcrafted sodas at the night markets there. Traditionally, they came in a plastic bag with a straw, but when we were there, it was in this nice pouch, like a Capri Sun-type pouch. They had different flavors like lychee, mangos, and other Southeast Asian fruits. My favorite was simply soda water with lime juice and simple syrup. In the summer of 2019, under the Uprooted LLC brand, we started a beverage company called Indigo Street Drinks that featured handcrafted sodas inspired by our trip.
GAO: Indigo was our first business venture and that came really fast. I mean typically, when you're building a business plan, I feel like there's a lot of planning involved and people work on it for a long time. Well, we kind of just jumped right in; we were just one day like, “Oh, let's just start ordering these things.” I think that propelled us; it forced us to do it. The same with this coffee business. That kind of just took off one day. We just put a date on the calendar and said “We’re going to launch it on this date.” And then we just did it. It wasn't ceremonious or anything.
SAENG: With Indigo, we were doing festivals, some private catering events, and then the pandemic hit, causing everything to halt. Our original business model was really dependent on in-person business. So fast forward a year later to spring 2021. On social media, I saw a bunch of folks in my network posting about how Trader Joe's offered small-lot coffee from Laos and the community was just going nuts about it, buying it, testing it out, saying how great it was that this big brand, Trader Joe's, was offering coffee from Laos. So we knew that it was something the community was interested in. And we wanted it too. I started researching more about the coffee business. I basically made a big list of social media accounts for coffee brands, and looked into which importers they were working with. I got a hold of several bags of coffee from the Bolaven plateau area in southern Laos. The idea then was, “Let’s bring back Uprooted.”
As an immigrant-owned business, you are also planning to donate a portion of sales from Uprooted Coffee to the community. Why was including this in your mission important to you both?
SAENG: I've worked in the community for a very long time; locally, I kind of know the landscape of which immigrant and refugee-serving organizations we want to support. We think about organizations that don’t necessarily have the capacity to hire a grant writer, organizations that are doing the work, supporting immigrants, both in terms of resettlement and providing resources. Those are the types of organizations that we want to focus on. Also, when George Floyd was murdered we saw so many individuals and organizations step up to really advocate and protest against injustices in our community. We know that we can contribute to the health of our communities and the little part that we can play is to make it more inclusive, more accessible, and more just. Right now, we are looking into local organizations that could use a bit of help and we’ll contribute portions of our sales to them.
Aside from Uprooted, Gao, you also are in business with your sisters.What lessons or advice can either of you share with others who might want to make the leap into starting their own small businesses?
GAO: I co-own Kindred Co. with my sisters and we do custom gift boxes, sourcing from BIPOC makers only. A lot of the business has been mission-focused corporate gift giving. But I just joined that venture last August. It’s something my two sisters started a couple years ago and, at the time I wasn't interested because I worked full time and just didn't have the time. But one sister moved abroad and so I joined to kind of help out, and then became a part owner. And now Saeng and I have been juggling the two businesses, and we both also work full time… so life is just crazy all the time.
SAENG: With Uprooted, we wanted something that is at least somewhat pandemic proof. We knew we wanted to start out with just e-commerce, people ordering online. Kindred helped us learn the logistics part of it: how to process orders, box them, and ship them out.
GAO: Owning a business, the forward-facing part of it seems fun, right? Like, you get orders, and then you package them, and it's really fun, and you share it on Instagram reels, and it feels like, “Oh, it only took five seconds to do that.” But the reality is all the technical pieces behind it: the actual running of the business, the bookkeeping, the tracking of the dollars and the customers and the boxes and making sure we have enough stuff. It just takes so much time. And I think that that's something that a lot of people don't talk about, and I wish that they would, because you go in thinking, “This is going to be super fun!” But we have days where our kids are helping us box orders, or they're helping us move things to and from the car, and making sure shipments get out. It is so much a family business in that sense.
One thing I want to make transparent is that we didn't get here by ourselves. We have friends that have lent their support and business-knowledge and ideas, such ast Kayla Yang-Best from Seasoned Specialty Foods in St. Paul; it's a lot of her own personal time. She just continues to give to small makers and entrepreneurs, like giving us a home to have a pickup site, making that piece real. And then Eddie Wu from Cook St. Paul continues to support, as a business owner we need them as thought-partners and they’ve generously been so giving of their time. We don't do it alone; it's been really great to have that support.
As Uprooted continues to grow, what’s ahead for you?
SAENG: We have had a couple of businesses that have contacted us about doing wholesale, so we're in the process of getting our wholesale license, while also working with a local food incubator where we can office out of and kind of scale up a little bit more.
GAO: It's such a catch-22, because to be able to leave your job for it, it has to be profitable. And for it to be profitable, you have to put in so much time, but you can't because you also work full time. And so either way, I feel like we're being held back at some point because we don't have the capital to front money. And then we don't have the time because we're so busy. We want to scale up, because eventually the dream is that we could leave our jobs and do this full time, because we've worked for other people our whole lives, never really for ourselves. And I think that is something that we would like to do. But to get there, to run a small business while also thinking about healthcare and retirement, it seems really hard.
I wish people would share more about how that happens, because I think that when a small business is able to scale up, it benefits the community. It benefits everybody. It might be three years. It could be five years. It could be ten years from now. But that stability of having healthcare, a savings account, and things like that is so real, especially for families of refugees where you have the mentality that you just never have enough. So, it's tough.
I also think it's important to say that some of the products that we sell are directly shipped in from Laos, and as those become popular here, those funds don't stay with us. They go back to the makers and that's a really important piece of it. Once we get an office space, or a more permanent home for the business, I think that would help the community too, just another small business that stays. And we want to continue to uplift others as they're looking to get into entrepreneurship or to share our struggles and our story because literally anyone can do it. It would be great if we had a lot of capital to start up, but that’s not the reality for a lot of people, we certainly didn't, which is why we still work full time to be able to pay our mortgage and bills. The struggle is real! We are just a normal family. A lot of people have great ideas that we can help amplify. So we'd love to do that and see other entrepreneurs succeed too.
Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with Project Yellow Dress. We have one final question for both of you: How do you take your coffee?
GAO: Okay. I'm going to go first because I don't drink coffee! Saeng is really the coffee snob and has been forever. I love the smell of coffee; our house always smells like coffee. But I actually don't drink it. Once in a while, I'll take it with a lot of cream, or some milk. But I'm starting to drink it just a little bit more now just because it smells so good. I'm getting there, but it's taking me a really long time. I'm a tea person.
SAENG: Maybe in five years it will be Uprooted Coffee and Tea! Depending on the day, I drink our own coffee, and I also like trying other brands, other types of coffees. There are certain coffee you drink just black, while others you drink with milk, and then iced. We have a coffee from Paksong, a city in southern Laos. It's a medium roast, but it's on the darker side, so I like to drink it kind of like Vietnamese phin coffee with the phin filter, or like the Lao Kafe Nom Yen, which is iced coffee with condensed milk. But with some of our other ones, just straight up black: nice warm black coffee.
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