Day Trip: Sahra Nguyen, Nguyen Coffee Supply

Sahra Nguyen launched Nguyen Coffee Supply in New York City in 2018 with the mission to empower Vietnamese coffee-growing communities and to change the narrative around the country’s coffee, particularly robusta—a species typically perceived as a lower-quality product compared to its arabica counterpart. In true grassroots fashion, the former activist filmmaker learned to roast and import coffee on her own, securing partnerships with family-owned farms in Da Lat. Nearly five years later, Nguyen’s vision of uplifting Vietnamese coffee has been strengthened through grocery and retail sales, expanded offerings, and regular media appearances to educate about the qualities of robusta. We follow Nguyen on a typical workday, which has transitioned to less time on the roaster and more time on growth strategy.

7:30 a.m.

I’m an early bird, and I have a morning routine. I go for a 20-minute treadmill run and listen to a podcast—my current go-to is All-In. Afterward, I love a cold shower. It helps me build mental tenacity and manage my stress because I center my mental state and my breath. I may do 15 minutes of stretching if it’s an early morning, and I always do a 13-minute meditation to get in touch with my thoughts.

Sometimes I’ll read before I meditate; I’m currently working through Bending Reality. After that, I make my coffee. I have a La Marzocco Linea Mini at home, so I usually make an iced latte with Nguyen Coffee Supply’s Loyalty arabica-robusta blend as espresso, with sweetened condensed milk and whole milk. When I get to my desk, I go through my emails, say hi to the team on Slack, and review our current projects on Asana.

10 a.m.

I head over to the roastery in Bushwick and check in with the team. Right now, we roast two to three times a week at around 5,000 pounds, which can fluctuate. I also develop all of our roast profiles. Every time we have a new bean or limited release, I’m in the roastery a lot more working on the sample roaster, roasting several batches and cupping it over the course of a month or two. I meet with my director of operations at the roastery. During our weekly one-on-one, we’ll cover everything from our retail expansion, which includes the RTD canned coffees we began manufacturing recently, to our production and inventory management to growth marketing stuff to stakeholder management and suppliers.

11 a.m.

I often meet with vendors and partners at the roastery, so they understand how we’re roasting. Whole Foods is one of our biggest vendors, who now carries the first-ever robusta in their stores because of us. I talk to them about the differences between our beans, and they see our whole production line and packaging. Then I bring them to the cupping room where I’ll always brew a full range of our robustas, arabicas, and blends. Currently we’re really excited about our limited-release anaerobic-processed robusta, so I’m always brewing that for anybody coming by.

1 p.m.

After the roastery visit, I usually have lunch with the team. We’ll order something close by, like Dominican food, [or from] a Thai spot, or a Mexican spot called El Santo. After that, I go back to my home office and continue working from there.

3 p.m.

I usually jump back into one more meeting for the day, which is typically a marketing meeting. We put a lot of thought into our marketing, especially now that we’re expanding more into retail. Afterward, I do more strategy work, answer emails, and focus on my project management to crank out some of the things we talked about.

5 p.m.

I have a really great support network of founder friends here in New York who I meet up with at least once a week. We usually share advice and work through different challenges together. Because we love to support our other friends in the food-and-beverage industry, we’ll usually end up at a friend’s restaurant in the Lower East Side or Brooklyn.