Specialty Coffee Retailer is a publication for owners, managers and employees of retail outlets that sell specialty coffee. Its scope includes best sales practices, supplies, business trends and anything else to assist the small coffee retailer.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/46786
Slow roasted, Gaviña Gourmet Coffee started more than 100 years ago and is going strong on supermarket shelves. BY PETER SUROWSKI T wo brothers leſt the Basque region of Spain more than 100 years ago to grow coffee in Cuba. Their descendants are still in the business, roasting for coffeehouses and grocery stores four generations later. Three siblings run Gaviña Gourmet Coffee, which makes its "Gaviña" line for specialty coffee retailers and its better-known "Don Francisco" brand for supermarket shelves. They and their 250 employees roast about 35 million pounds of coffee a year in a 240,000-sq.-ſt. facility in City of Industry, Calif., says Leonor Gaviña-Valls. She is one of four siblings. Her brothers Jose and Pedro run the family business with her, though her other brother, Paco, became a civil engineer. ACROSS THE OCEAN The three siblings have been pitching in since they were children, recalls Gaviña-Valls as she strolled the halls of her family's roasting facility, looking over the black-and-white photos dotting the hallway walls. The company had only one non-family member employee—a delivery truck driver—until 1969. Her father, Francisco Gaviña, roasted the beans, and her mother, who was a schoolteacher until the family leſt Cuba, did the accounting and occasionally made sandwiches or cakes for the family. Roasting beans in the United States was her father's dream. He was born in 1903 on his father's 30-hectare coffee plantation, called Hacienda Buenos Aires, in the central hills of Cienfuegos, Cuba. His father, Jose Maria Gaviña, and his brother, Ramon, leſt Spain's Basque region in 1870 to grow coffee, and they did it all their lives. They passed the plantation on to their children, 30 | November 2011 • www.specialty-coffee.com who carried on growing and roasting coffee—until the Cuban Revolution. The family, fearing persecution by the new Communist regime, fled—first to Spain, then to Miami, then to Southern California. LAND OF OPPORTUNITY Aſter settling in, Francisco noticed a problem in for the small Cuban refugee community, recalls Gaviña-Valls. The coffee was bad. Maybe it wasn't bad, but it wasn't the way Cubans like it, Gaviña-Valls recalled. They usually drink a dark espresso roast, and nothing was available in Southern California like that. "If you were an immigrant, you had a different taste for coffee, but nobody was fulfilling that need," Gaviña-Valls said. So her father scraped together enough money to buy a used roaster and started his business in a 2,100-sq.-ſt. shop in Vernon, Calif., in the back of a bike shop. "His dream was to go back to his coffee business," Gaviña- Valls says. They sold the roasted beans at local markets and to restaurant owners, and once word spread among Cubans about what the Gaviña family was doing, their business grew. They outgrew the Vernon location by 1976, and the family moved the business into a bigger building. The demand for the family's in-store bagged coffee grew the most, so in 1984, the company released "Don Francisco," named aſter her father. FRANCISCO'S DREAM TODAY Today, the bagged bean line is about half of the company's Family patriarch Francisco Gaviña, father of the siblings who now run the company.