The love of coffee for Ezra Coffee founder Jessica Taylor blossomed early during a visit with her grandparents. “I’ve been loving coffee ever since my sister and I started drinking it with our grandfather. We were seven and five years old,” recalls Taylor about how the sister’s curiosity for the beverage their grandfather was drinking led to a whole new world of flavor.
“By the time our parents came to pick us up, we had our pinkies up, we had our little mugs, we were coffee aficionados,” laughs the entrepreneur, whose passion for java continued into adulthood. She often bought bags of coffee whenever she traveled and enjoyed sharing them with family and friends.
A Sister’s Love
However, her sister, who was found to be lactose intolerant, couldn’t enjoy the milk-based creamers or additives most often added to flavor coffees. And so, it became a goal for Taylor to come up with a way for her sibling to enjoy a flavorful cup of coffee without having to deal with the issue of being lactose intolerant.
“I was thinking, ‘How can we have people enjoy the natural taste of the coffee without all these other things?’ Particularly my sister, she can’t add anything else. She has to drink it [her coffee] black,” shares the Memphis-born, Atlanta-raised coffee lover.
Taylor’s solution was to create a specialty coffee line that placed the spotlight solely on flavor (via creative coffee bean blends and by flavoring the beans before grinding), with the resulting coffee flavors not needing milk-based creamers to enhance their taste.
A “Surprise” Business Launch
Ezra Coffee was born during the pandemic when Taylor took a chance and decided to offer her coffee blends online, not even telling family she was starting a coffee business until her website was up and running. “I think my family was pretty surprised because I didn’t ever say anything,” says Taylor about the start of her self-funded business.
“It works better because sometimes people try to talk you out of it or ask too many questions. So for me, I just dropped them the link [to the coffee site]; they got the link the same time everybody else got it.”
And the launch was a success, with Taylor making a $5000 profit within a few hours of the site going live.
By Jocelyn Amador
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Cuisine Noir Magazine is the country’s first Black food publication, launched in 2009 and dedicated to connecting the African diaspora through food, drink and travel. To read the rest of this article and more, visit www.cuisinenoirmag.com.
