Will Frith

Background

About Will Frith

I started as a barista in Texas in 2001. Now I consult coffee businesses all over the world. My very first coffee job was behind the bar at Mod Coffeehouse in Galveston, Texas. I learned how to bake and manage people, but I wouldn't truly fall in love with the coffee world until I applied for a barista position at Batdorf & Bronson (now Dancing Goats Coffee) in Olympia, Washington in 2007. The woman in HR didn't think I was a good fit for the barista job - but she thought I'd be great in production. I worked side-by-side with the production roaster for a few years, weighing and bagging coffee, and observing a specialty coffee roasting company from the inside. I had no idea I'd start one of my own 12 short years later. I stayed with the company long enough to become the barista trainer, traveling around the region training our wholesale accounts. This is where I learned to be a consultant; listening to the challenges of business owners and matching them with solutions that saved them money and made their businesses more successful. Soon I moved on to Olympia Coffee, where I became the production roaster in 2011. In 2013 we were named Roast Magazine's Micro Roaster of the year. Around this time I began returning over and over again to this idea of specialty coffee in Vietnam, where my mother is from, and where I'd spent the years of 2004-2007 teaching English and traveling. The specialty industry had such awe for Ethiopian, Guatemalan, and Indonesian coffees, but why wasn't there any specialty arabica coming from Vietnam? There was, but it would take years and a lot of hard work to find it and improve standards. I have spent the past eight years working to change the world's opinion of Vietnamese coffee. Even when I worked for a sleek cafe startup in Singapore, and for Modbar as a west coast USA representative, I talked about, read about, and thought about coffee in Vietnam. I returned again in 2018 to start my first company, Building Coffee. Over the past four years we've built a specialty coffee roasting company that leverages my global network of specialty importers and the excellent coffees being developed in Vietnam to serve an exploding middle class ready for exceptional experiences. Now I advise coffee brands from California to China, and ours is a coffee company with regional significance. I write weekly on willfrith.com, and you can schedule a 1:1 discovery call with me here: https://calendly.com/willfrith/20min and follow me on instagram @coffeefrith