Poughkeepsie, NY

 

Feza Oktay had been volunteering for Hudson River Housing for about ten years as part of their Middle Main Initiative to revitalize the Middle Main Street corridor of Poughkeepsie. The Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory had been part of the Middle Main Initiative since the beginning. While Hudson River Housing’s main goal is to create affordable housing for those in the area, another goal of this specific initiative was to create a commercial component to the Underwear Factory as well as housing. Due to its location, finding businesses interested in the space ended up being much more challenging than they thought.

Around the same time Hudson River Housing was looking for businesses to come into the Underwear Factory, Feza’s daughter was in her last couple years of high school and she had been working as a barista at a coffee shop. This opened up a whole new world to Feza, and his interest in coffee began to grow. It wasn’t until visiting a coffee shop that was also a coffee roastery that the gears really began to turn. Feza wondered if coffee roasting could be the business that the Underwear Factory needed. Similar to the start of many different companies in the food and beverage industry, Feza started at home. He bought himself a home roaster online and began experimenting with roasting coffee.

“I was completely hooked. I was just fascinated and enthralled with the entire process of roasting coffee, it’s so cool!”

At that point, Feza knew this was something he could do and was ready to use the idea for a business to fill the space at the Underwear Factory.

“This was really a home looking for a business as opposed to a business looking for a home.”

Growing up in Poughkeepsie, Feza already had a strong connection to the community and goals to revitalize the area, remembering when Main Street was once the central mall of the area. Concentrating in not-for-profit management in college, the not-for-profit world has been his world for as long as he can remember. Social good organizations are his passion.

Blending together Feza’s passion for building a better community and his new business idea with Hudson River Housing’s Middle Main initiative, a business model for the roasting company began to develop, and one with a much deeper social mission than your average coffee shop. The first goal was to make sure North River Roasters would be in a location that would help with the revitalization of Poughkeepsie. Second, was their commitment to the environment. They do this by considering their impact not only on their community but its environment and in every aspect of their business. Organic beans and compostable bags are just two of the ways North River Roasters aims to be conscious of their environmental impact. Most eco-friendly bags are only compostable in a commercial composting environment, which most people don’t have access to. They are now using omni-degradable bags that supposedly degrade as long as they’re in an environment where there are microbes. In fact, they’re stored inside plastic bags because just being left out in the open can cause them to begin to degrade.

Lastly, North River Roasters has a commitment to their people, not only the community but those who work for them. That means giving employment opportunities to individuals who are otherwise challenged when it comes to finding employment and making sure they receive a living wage. The second part of this is to eventually convert the company into a worker-owned cooperative. Feza found that organizing a company in this manner is more successful when you start the business traditionally and then slowly convert to a cooperative.

For now, Feza is the owner of North River Roasters, but he hopes to pass on ownership to his employees soon. The idea is that if the workers eventually all have ownership in the business it is more likely to become a lasting enterprise in the community that will ultimately thrive for several reasons. One, they will all have a stake in its success, and two, because there isn’t a single owner who could decide to pick up and move, leaving members of the community jobless. Feza also hopes to promote this type of business model to the Poughkeepsie area as a sustainable means of growing the local economy.

The roasting aspect of the operation began sooner than the coffee house, as the Underwear Factory was a bit behind schedule. This, however, did not stop Feza from taking the company off the ground. He began roasting coffee beans in a temporary location. When he started out, the coffee roasting was solely for their Community Supported Coffee Roasting (CSCR), another important part of their business model aimed toward supporting the community. Similar to Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) in the Hudson Valley, upfront customers buy a three-month share. Every week they then receive a bag of freshly roasted coffee. The coffee varieties vary from week to week so it is really designed for people who are excited about trying different kinds of coffee. At that time, members chose from a handful of different pickup locations for their coffee. When the coffeehouse opened in the Underwear Factory, it became the main place for pickup, with the exception of the Poughkeepsie Farm Project on Tuesdays and Saturdays.

In April of 2017, North River Roasters officially made a home in the Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory. By the following May, the entire coffee house was open for business. Originally the idea was to simply have to coffee roasting operation, but as the vision for the company grew, the idea of creating an open space for the community grew along with it.

North River Roasters is only a small part of what has been made available to the community in the Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory. The Roasting company rents out a space to sell their product, while the entire coffee house space is provided by Hudson River Housing as their commitment to providing space for the community. Next to North River Roasters’s operation is the Poughkeepsie Open Kitchen (POK), also provided by Hudson River Housing. POK is a licensed commercial kitchen that anyone can rent out to make a food product in. It is multipurpose in that it not only supports local entrepreneurs, but it is also used for birthday parties and cooking classes as well. At 25 dollars an hour to rent the kitchen or coffee house space and 40 dollars an hour for both, it is an indispensable resource for the individuals in the area.

While meeting with Feza, we also got a chance to get to know the newest member of his team, who had been volunteering to get to know the ins and outs of the business,

“and now she does everything,” Feza told us, “an integral part of the whole operation.”

After studying nutrition for four years at NYU, feeling somewhat disconnected to the city life, missing her roots in upstate, and being a Poughkeepsie native herself, Christina Hughes wanted to come back home to start “adult life”. Knowing she wanted to work with food, Christina was emailing people left and right trying to find any kind of work in the industry, and she ended up finding Feza.

Christina began volunteering to learn more about North River Roaster’s wholesale accounts, their roasting process, and to get a general feel for how the business was run. One part of the “everything” that Christina does involves coffee education for their accounts. North River Roasters will work with, say, a restaurant and teach them how to correctly pull a shot of espresso.

“They’re serving our coffee and we want to make sure that A, they feel comfortable and B, that the quality is there, there are no questions, and they know who we are.”

North River Roasters sources their coffee from all over the world; Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Zambia, to name a few. When we asked about their products being Fair Trade, Organic, etc., we were thrown for a bit of a whirlwind. Feza explained,

“Your average consumer wants to do right, and I commend people for wanting to do good in that regard, but as we have learned, it is so much more complicated than that.”

Similar to USDA Organic, farmers have to pay to be certified under the Fair-Trade label. In many circumstances, beans are grown in which the farmer is actually getting a great price, but they don’t want to sacrifice that price for the label. One example of this is Costa Rica, a country that has become known for their high-quality coffee beans. It is, in fact, harder to find Fair Trade beans from this area because people are already paying a fair price due to the expected quality, but from a consumer standpoint, that would be impossible to know.

There is also Direct Trade, in which customers work directly with farmers so they know that the price they’re paying is fair, however, there is no label for this to show the final consumer that it is a direct trade relationship which is actually, more or less, fair trade. Unfortunately, it is difficult economically for a small coffee roaster to get into this kind of relationship with farmers because they simply do not purchase the quantity.

To make things even more complicated, some bean growers have what are called “micro-lots” which produce top-notch coffee beans from a much more complicated process. In this case, farmers are being paid a lot more because of the process. Their price is fair but they are not labeled Fair Trade because customers are already paying a premium for them. Because of this mess, and for the sake of their customers, North River Roasters has been limiting themselves to Fair Trade, Organic, or Rainforest Alliance certified. However, they hope to be able to educate their customers more in the future on all the nuances involved in making the right choices when it comes to voting with your consumer dollar.

In Christina’s initial job search, none of the businesses she was looking at were community or environmentally minded,

“It’s really hard to find business practices that are sound in all the ways you would hope and that’s why I think North River Roasters is really unique. Nothing we’re doing is making a negative impact. To the best we can we try to make only a positive impact, we’re working with people who agree and have the earth and community in mind and I think that’s really special.”

North River Roasters is open Monday through Friday from 8 am to 4 pm and Sunday’s from 9 am to 2 pm. Serving coffee, lattes, tea, smoothies, bagels, oatmeal, assorted pastries, and much more, they are a perfect stop for any customer’s caffeine fix and something light to eat. Customers also have access to breakfast and lunch options at Earth, Wind, & Fuego from 8 am to 2 pm at the POK. While freshly roasted coffee beans are available for purchase at their Poughkeepsie location, they can also be found at the café at Omega Institute, Adams Fairacre Farms, The Culinary’s Apple Pie Bakery Café and, Taste NY on the Taconic.

Although North River Roaster’s coffee roasting only takes up about 10 square feet, their vision for the community is far beyond what their corner coffee operation would lead you to believe.

 

 

CONTACT

Phone: (845) 418-2739
Click Here to visit the North River Roasters website
Location: 8 North Cherry Street, Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601