Today we’d like to introduce you to Cliff Young.
Hi Cliff, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I started my hospitality/food service career at the age of 13 making a $1.35 an hour working the concession stand at a little movie theater in Kansas. Then I started in restaurants as a dishwasher at the truck stop and eventually started working my way through different restaurants changing as a supervisor and into management.
I finally migrated back out to California in 1990 and started working for PepsiCo managing multiple KFC restaurants in San Diego. While at one of those restaurants I walked up to a Kaiser hospital and I saw this little coffee stand outside and started talking with the owner. 6 months later I had my own coffee cart at the Kaiser Permanente in Fontana California and over the next couple of years, I ended up opening locations at Kaiser Riverside, Kaiser Anaheim Hills and Kaiser in West LA. We also ended up with our first freestanding store in Redlands, California called grounds for enjoyment. For many years we were voted best local coffee house and part of it was for sure because I started roasting my own coffees in 1999.
I made many trips up to the Bay Area and to Seattle to hang out with the old-time roasters. Where I learned right away to keep my mouth closed in my ears open. Standing next to icons of the industry like Alfred and Michael Sivetz, we’re definitely some of the highlights of my early career.
And 2004 I started a Roasting Company in the Inland Empire called Inland Empire Coffee. Kept that for about four years until I started doing a local PBS television show called out to eat that ran on Southern California PBS stations for about six years.
I’m really a foodie that makes his living doing coffee. In 2012 I decided I had to get back to having a real job instead of the PBS television show because PBS you don’t make a lot of money you get a lot of free wine and skill it’s a knife set but I had kids going into college.
In 2017 one of my craft beer friends called me and said Modern Times beer down in San Diego was starting a coffee program and they needed a director of coffee, somebody that had traveled to origin and new coffee from being to cup.
Long story short, put together a resume sent it to them and hounded them for two months, finally I just got a generic rejection email and I was Furious because I knew they didn’t hire me just because of my age. They hired somebody who had never been out of the country to visit coffee farms and had been roasting about six months. So then I decided, well I’m going to start another coffee company, so Coachella Valley Coffee was born.
I believe in 2018, my net income was about 14,300. But I was confident that the Coachella Valley would understand what I was about and what I’m doing, so it took a couple of years and all of the chefs out here that I met on my PBS show started using my coffees, and little by little the business picked up I had a steam. I started roasting on a 5 lb fluid bed air roaster, currently we have a couple of 12 lb fluid bed air Roasters and this summer we are moving to a 6000 square foot facility so I can install my vintage 1962 Probat 90 kilo roaster…
For the first three years of operation, I was the only employee, now I have a very good team of five working with me, people that understand coffee and are absolutely just as passionate about the product as I am.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has been far from smooth sailing. In 2003, I merged my coffee cart / Coffee House business with another company that had 20-something locations in Northern California. Though my five locations tripled their sales. They appointed me president and CEO, gave me millions of dollars of restricted stock options, and then after two months I confronted the board because I found out they were just a pump and dump company. I was immediately terminated. So long story short I lost everything overnight.
So I headed back to my hometown of Redlands California with my tail between my legs and scratched together a couple of $1,000 reopened a coffee house and once the locals figured out it was me, the lines were out the door again…
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?
Coachella Valley Coffee was my newest coffee business and I started that in the fall of 2018.. we are absolutely fanatical about making sure everybody involved in the process of coffee is taken care of correctly. From the workers at the farm, are farmers on up to our employees. Everybody is taken care of. Every move we make is ethical,. Little over 50% of the coffees I currently bring in are all from women on farms, which is kind of the cool thing to do now. But most of these Farms I’ve been dealing with for decades. Cuz I knew years ago that if I wanted to take care of a family, I had to make sure the female got the money because they will always take care of the family first.
All of our coffees are either rainforest or certified organic coffees again just because it’s the right thing to do. We don’t have shelves of pre-roasted coffee sitting and waiting, we roast everything to order and if that customers in Southern California usually they will see it the next day.
Things we are most proud about is that sense are business has increased immensely. That just gives us more funding to help some of our favorite nonprofits. We work with one called street life project, where they feed people throughout this entire valley. We are now in a position where we just pay for the entire feeding program in the Palm Springs area, we also work with the anti-bullying safe school’s program where we give scholarships, last year we were blessed to get to work with KFI radio and Catarina’s Club at Orange County and were able to cut a check for $5,000 for there amazing work that they do…
We also have many programs at origin, on the coffee farmers, where we’re working on providing solar lighting for some of the little schools. So I always tell food and beverage directors or chefs as I’m meeting them I just need more business because there’s more people that need help. As the owner, I still drive around in my 20-year-old car or if I’m feeling really fancy I will drive around in our 11-year-old delivery van…
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
Something I always try to teach people is by your coffee like you do bread and produce. Buy it in small amounts and buy it frequently…
You can probably figure out that I was just using my microphone on my cell phone to fill this form out. If you have any questions, please give me a call directly at 760-422-7530.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.CoachellaValleyCoffee.com
- Instagram: CoachellaValleyCoffee
- Facebook: coachellaValleyCoffee
- Twitter: @CoachellaCoffee
