Meet Maria A Bahamon

We’re excited to introduce you to Maria Antonieta Bahamon, quality control manager and co-founder of Yipao Coffee. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Maria below.

Maria A, thank you so much for taking the time to share your lessons learned with us and we’re sure your wisdom will help many. So, one question that comes up often and that we’re hoping you can shed some light on is keeping creativity alive over long stretches – how do you keep your creativity alive?
Manual and visual creativity is an inherited virtue for me; I’ve always been curious about developing projects in the artistic, decorative, and image fields. Undoubtedly, creativity is required for all of this.

However, creativity is necessary in many other areas of everyday life, in entrepreneurship, and in business development, I haven’t always been able to develop that necessary creativity in devising strategies for the growth of my business.

But sometimes the difficulties, the challenges of life itself, force you to develop this skill, which becomes a survival instinct.

By keeping the focus on the why? from where? and the reasons that led me to develop my project, I reconnect with my creativity. Another importante think to keep the creativity alive is giving space to not think about anything that has to do with your specific project, cleaning your mind.

Remembering your reasons, that’s key to keeping creativity alive.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
As a Colombian, coffee has been present in my life since I can remember, but it wasn’t until 7 years ago that I truly delved into the world of coffee and understood the difference between the coffee I had been drinking all my life and the specialty coffee.

I decided to enter the coffee world as a business idea, but it turned into a passion. The world of coffee captivates and makes you fall in love, the more you know about it, the more you want to grow in it. Especially when you have the opportunity to experience coffee from its very origin.

Yipao Coffee was born in 2018 with a tent, a table, and bags full of coffee that visited farmers markets around San Diego. At that time, we still had much (all) to learn about quality and specialty coffee. By 2019, we bought a coffee trailer that was parked for a year in University Heights, there, we began to gain recognition as a brand and our first customers. In 2020, we took an important step towards our business consolidation by opening our current location within the Kairoa Brewing Company in the heart of University Heights, and our trailer began its journey again through farmers markets, this time selling not only coffee beans bags but also coffee-based beverages.

Thanks to the support of our clients and the community, our team members and the quality of our coffee, we have grown a lot, and it is very satisfactory. The pandemic was a tough challenge, but we must say that it was that window in University Heights that kept our business afloat during a difficult time for everyone, then the economic crisis. We have overcome all these challenges and continue to move forward, without ever having had an investor we have achieved great things. We became roasters of our own coffee also in 2020, and as of today, 2024, we already have one year in our second location at Pacific Beach.

In San Diego, we are the first and only coffee roasters focused exclusively on specialty Colombian coffee. We have learned a lot on this journey, we have trained in coffee, I am a certified QArabica Grader by CQI (Coffee Quality Institute) and Jairo, my partner, is the roaster of these wonderful coffees, trained by SCA (Specialty Coffee Association). We work with our origin, with our producers, with what we really know, and we have coffees of the highest quality, some of them are competition coffees.

We also offer wholesale and toll roaster service for coffee shops and access to amazing single origin green coffees for other Roasters.

There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
For someone looking to venture into the coffee world, whether as a café operator or a roaster, having prior experience in managing this business, such as working as an employee in another company, is a significant advantage. Otherwise, investing in knowledge is indispensable. Not just in coffee, but also in operational processes, marketing, understanding the regulations, requirements, and licenses of each city for this business is essential. It will save you a lot of headaches to understand this before embarking on this coffee adventure.

What is the number one obstacle or challenge you are currently facing and what are you doing to try to resolve or overcome this challenge?
As a Latin family business, it has been a journey filled with obstacles and difficulties, we have a non-immigrant E2 investment visa, that means we are not American citizens and we don’t have same credit access. Yipao Coffee needs to increase the working capital because is growing fast and expanding to new business lines.

Contact Info:

Image Credits
Photographs: Kenneth Bahamon Laura Arango Israel Palacios

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