Exploring Life & Business with Deaton & Chelsea Pigot of Tectonic Coffee Company

Today we’d like to introduce you to Deaton & Chelsea Pigot.

In 1995, Deaton started his lifelong journey in coffee as a Barista working weekends in his hometown of Orange, NSW, Australia. He spent ten years in the Australian hospitality industry, honing his coffee skills before taking them abroad. A job in coffee has taken him around the world and employed by some of the world’s most renowned coffee companies.

● Bewley’s of Ireland in 2005 where he learned to roast coffee.

● Intelligentsia Coffee LA in 2007 as a Roaster and Quality Control Specialist

● 2010 Toby’s Estate Coffee NYC and SIN (now Partners Coffee) as Operations Manager and Green Coffee Buyer.

Through this time he has coached USA barista champions, been a national barista competition judge, a licensed Q Grader, and an international Cup Of Excellence judge five times over, just to name a few accomplishments. Brooklyn NY, 2014 he met broadway actress Chelsea Morgan Stock (Little Mermaid, Sister Act, and Something Rotten), and together in 2016, they decided to launch their own coffee company, Tectonic Coffee Company in Los Angeles. Tectonic specializes in Direct Trade and Relationship coffees which has seen them receive awards at the United States Golden Bean awards and gain recognition in the industry’s top trade rags. We bring the best of the three great roasting traditions – Australian, Nordic, and American distilled into one unified approach. Tectonic Coffee is constantly learning and evolving like the earth’s tectonic plates that shift and move to create the mountains that coffee grows on. We always evolve.

I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
The biggest obstacles originally came about when looking for a location to roast coffee. Deaton, an Australian citizen, found that landlords would not talk to him based on his visa status. A temporary visa and some cash in the bank were not the credentials landlords were looking for when it came to guaranteeing leases on warehouses. We had to re-brand in the year 2018 which wiped out that year’s profits and any ground we quickly gained when we started to roast coffee back in 2016. Lastly, 2020 when the Pandemic hit we lost as much as 60% of our volume as cafe door after cafe door shuttered in the first few months. We launched a direct-to-consumer program called Wholesale Prices for All, where we switched our wholesale website to the front of the D2C site giving people bunkering down at home great coffee at wholesale prices. It took off and ended up being the lifeline that saved us and helped us keep our staff employed. Happily, we can say that revenue has rebounded and we are looking again towards the future.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We are proud of a few things at Tectonic Coffee. Every year we hold what we call a Thought Session where we invite our customers & business owners that we work with to gather, break bread, drink wine and hold discussions we can all grow and learn from. One year we raised $4000 for a school in Honduras that is on a coffee farm that we buy coffee from. This year we made face masks from our leftover burlap sacks and linen. With every mask we sold in America we made and sent one down to the same farm and school in Marcala Honduras for the workers and school children. We have a product called Coffee For A Cause, where each month we select a cause that is dear to our hearts and donate 30% of each sale to that cause. Past causes have included Children’s Musical Theater of San Jose, I Support The Girls, BLMLA and the Trevor Project. We started this because of all the social upheaval we have seen in 2020 and we thought we need to do more than just talk about it. It has been fantastic because not only can we give a little but we learn a little in the process as well. We are chuffed that you can find our coffees throughout Whole Foods in greater LA. Lastly, we are incredibly proud to have a crew of 12 strong that is positive and hard-working. This incredible group has stood by Tectonic through a very difficult year filled with the Covid pandemic, riots and so much more. It took a toll on all of us and our crew came to work and we all grew stronger together.

What matters most to you? Why?
Delicious coffee! Jokes aside, we want to provide a safe and inclusive workplace first and foremost. Plus, in the modern society that we reside in which could be faulted for having a runaway capitalistic economy, we want to be able to give back to our community. Otherwise, we’d just be another cutthroat coffee company.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: www.tectoniccoffee.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tectonic_coffee
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tectoniccoffeecompany
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tectonic_coffee
• Youtube: Tectonic Coffee Co – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0h9iJQlzmSmen8cGd6UHvw

Image Credits
Images with boxes and food items – Kat Hennessey Machinery Images – David Rho