Areli Barrera Grodski on Building a Roastery Where Equity and Quality Share the Same Bean

A conversation series with coffee leaders and innovators was developed in partnership with roaster and communicator Kat Melheim, who was given creative freedom to explore the people and topics she finds most compelling. In this installment, she speaks with Areli Barrera Grodski, co-founder of Little Waves Coffee Roasters and Cocoa Cinnamon in Durham, North Carolina.

In 2022, Little Waves received the Micro Roaster of the Year award from Roast Magazine. The company organizes its work around three pillars—quality, relationships, and impact—and its sourcing approach places racial and gender equity front and center. Its coffee lineup spans from top-tier specialty lots to approachable, full-bodied options, all intended to serve a wide range of customers.

The full video is available below, or you can read the transcript that follows.

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Kat Melheim: Can you give a brief introduction to Little Waves and how you got to this point?

Areli Barrera Grodski: Little Waves Coffee Roasters operates out of Durham, North Carolina. We were named Micro Roaster of the Year in 2022. Our growth has been gradual, and during the pandemic we were able to significantly expand the roastery side of the business. In fact, that expansion is what helped Cocoa Cinnamon stay open and remain financially viable.

So Little Waves is the roasting operation, and Cocoa Cinnamon is the cafe side?

Exactly. We began roasting in 2017. Cocoa Cinnamon got its start in 2010 in my mother’s kitchen in western North Carolina. Leon—my husband, business partner, and the coffee scientist in our family—and I moved to Durham in 2011 with the goal of opening a coffee shop. We launched with a bike cart in Durham and gradually assembled the pieces. From the beginning, we knew we wanted to roast eventually.

Leon already had some roasting experience. When we started with the bike cart, we were a multi-roaster operation. That was always exciting to us—the ability to taste coffees roasted by a variety of different roasters. When I first began roasting in 2017, it was my first time learning the craft—both the science and the art. It’s a process of continual learning.

I feel that when you lack experience but have someone like Leon who has it, you have a lot of support. She started our program knowing that I would eventually take it over. I took some courses at Coffee Expo while it was still happening, but the hands-on work is really what teaches you the necessary lessons. Reading books, learning from colleagues, and attending Roaster Guild retreats have also been instrumental in getting us to where we are now.

Our roast style has developed over the years in response to our palate and how we want to present our coffees. It has also evolved based on who our customers are. The core of our program has always been offering a range of truly beautiful ‘peak’ coffees alongside beautiful, full-bodied coffees that my mom would enjoy.

How did you begin to think about equity and values in your sourcing?

I think we started with the desire to be good partners to producers and to truly understand how to do that. For me, I never wanted to travel to origin until I had a track record with someone and was building a relationship.

Tierra de Mi Padre is a coffee from Mexico, from Nayarit, and that was my first farm visit. My family is from Nayarit. My dad is from Nayarit. We were there in 2015 visiting my grandpa, and we decided to find out who was importing coffee from there. I first saw it in 2014 at Victrola Coffee in Seattle, and it amazed me because I didn’t even know that Nayarit was a coffee-producing state.

By that time, Cocoa Cinnamon had been running for four years, so you had some familiarity with the coffee world.

Yes. Mexico also wasn’t necessarily as prominent on the map. Maybe Chiapas and Oaxaca, but that was about all you would see. When I saw Nayarit, it felt natural—I was so excited. In 2015, we visited family and looked up where this coffee was coming from. We wrote them an email with our very slow internet there, and I got in touch with Jim Casalos. He and his wife Deborah own Café Sustentables de México and San Cristobal Coffees.

I love how people find their way into coffee. This guy is a geologist who fell into coffee. I think that’s why it’s both an art and a science—you’ll find many scientists who become coffee professionals. Jim started building relationships in Nayarit and trying to promote the specialty coffee market there. When we reached out to him, he was still in the process of building those relationships and trust with the community and the producers.

How did this shape your sourcing philosophy over time?

The foundation of our sourcing program is connecting quality, relationship, and impact. Within those pillars, we’re trying to figure out where we go and how we keep that tasting experience alive, and keep evolving as humans, as a business, and as coffee tasters.

We use the patterns of buying and selling as a way to create sustainable livelihoods for everyone involved in the industry. I’m thinking about us as a team and me as a person—moving to the U.S. as a kid from Mexico, being an immigrant, being a woman, trying to find myself within that supply stream as well. Racial and gender equity is really important to me. We’re trying to prioritize those things while searching for beautiful coffees, but not negating it if it’s not aligned.

We’re trying to do that across the array—not just in the blenders, but also in the peak coffees. We’re trying to find amazing, beautiful, wonderful women of color out there doing peak coffee.

Did you have that perspective even when you started buying and roasting in 2017, or did that develop over time?

Both. We definitely started with wanting to be good partners to producers. But it’s also evolved by being in the industry and seeing the landscape. When you’re tasting some of these 90-plus coffees, it helps your palate evolve. But not everyone’s going to be buying those. That’s why our program is important to have an array—being able to have a customer base that’s interested in peak coffees while also having our bread-and-butter coffees.

Walk me through your approach to roasting and menu development.

I think it’s changed over time. At first it was like, ‘What is going on?’ Then you start to figure out you like lighter coffees. And then our cafe team was telling us they like lighter coffees. Our roast style has evolved based on our palate, but also based on what our team and customers are responding to.

We have one head roaster now who mostly roasts our coffee, but we still taste as a team. That has been really beneficial because we all have different palates. I think it’s really important to stay true to yourself, and I think it’s really important to be approachable. Coffee’s so cool and has so much to offer. That’s my goal when I approach it.

I keep leaning lighter and lighter as time goes by, but not every coffee is going to shine like that. You have to learn those moments and those boundaries.

Have your team’s palates developed alongside yours?

Yeah. Tasting other people’s coffees is really helpful because that helps us understand what is out there, what are people drinking, what are people enjoying. How do I perceive these coffees, and what can we learn from them for our own roasting style? Sometimes coffees will inspire a new approach or direction.

Are you looking to expand your physical space?

Yes. This space is a little tight. It’s great, but once the pandemic came, we’ve grown exponentially—for us, measure-wise, we’re at a little bit over 100,000 pounds a year at this point. For this space, it’s tight. We have a lot of bins, and when we get a fresh coffee delivery, we have to take everything out to put coffee in. That’s always a pain, and I’m excited to not have to do that anymore. We have a building and it just needs to get up to shape for us to move into it.

What else is next for Little Waves?

We’ve been wanting to really implement a subscription program that is focused on peak fresh coffees—that’s our verbiage for our top lots. That’s always been a question mark for me. What does ‘peak’ mean for Little Waves? Where’s the threshold? How do we make it exclusive while being inclusive of the ideas I brought up earlier—gender and racial equity, and really wanting to highlight origins that aren’t necessarily on everyone’s map?

Mexico was rare eight years ago. Thailand coffees are amazing. Edwin’s Edwin Enrique Noreña, a coffee producer in Colombia coffees are getting so popular, and I love that for him. But now the question for me is, where do we find the women? Those are the types of questions I have going into the peak program.

I think that’s our next step—we’ve defined it, and now it’s connecting the dots. How do we implement it and create those relationships to bring those coffees into fruition? How do we build that customer base? It’s not getting stuck being seen as just medium and full-bodied coffees, but showcasing that we can also do these lighter, beautiful, fruity fresh coffees.