It’s safe to say that Paul Bonds’s journey to running one of Mississippi’s most successful coffee roasters did not have a robust beginning. “I didn’t grow up knowing anything about coffee. My view into it was drinking a little bit of instant,” he says. “Even when I was at Mississippi College in Clinton, I drank it only when studying for exams, you know, for medicinal purposes. I just never had any interest in it.”
That all changed when he tasted what he considers his first really good cup. “It was a fresh-roasted Ethiopian, and it opened my eyes to what coffee could taste like,” he says. Soon, he was ordering coffees from specialty roasters and even experimenting with roasting a half pound of beans at a time in a pan in his oven. “I would talk to my friends about coffee and tasting notes until their eyes glazed over. One of them finally asked if I’d considered going into business. I hadn’t, but the idea stuck with me.”
Even as he worked full time for an aerospace company, Bonds made room in his garage for a small-batch roasting machine and began selling at a local farmers market in 2010. “I started getting repeat customers, then a couple of restaurant accounts,” he says. “It got to the point where I had to make a decision, so I put in my notice. Two weeks later, we found out we were expecting our first kids.”
Fortunately, BeanFruit Coffee Company grew along with his young family, adding online sales and retail outlets, including Whole Foods and Target. These days, Bonds employs two other roasters to keep up with demand while maintaining a focus on micro-lots of carefully sourced coffee beans. “When I first got into this, there wasn’t much attention paid to where coffee comes from—it was like a can of corn,” he says. “Then came the emphasis on fair trade and connecting customers to where the coffee comes from. Those stories have cachet and create awareness about sustainability. Coffee growers have families to feed as well.”
Bonds knows his own status as one of the few Black roasters on the scene also can be part of the story. “The industry has been very accepting, but there hasn’t been a concerted effort to appeal to Black consumers,” he says. “Sometimes I hear that people didn’t realize that Black people might be into this. It’s like the movie Black Panther, when people suddenly realized that superheroes can be black, too. It has to start somewhere, once people feel like they have a place to belong.”
New customers often comment on the roastery’s name (BeanFruit recognizes that coffee beans are actually seeds from a coffee shrub’s ripe “coffee cherries”) and bold branding, which got a recent refresh with bright blue bags bearing an illustration of a snarling tiger. As has become the norm with BeanFruit, serendipity played a part. “Our graphic designer heard us playing ‘Eye of the Tiger’ really loud while working, and went with it,” Bonds says. “She thought I was going to hate it, but it awakened something for me, even if it didn’t make perfect sense for a coffee logo. We’re going to the next level, and I think this new design channels that.”
Even as BeanFruit’s business expands, Bonds still gets the biggest thrill out of winning over new coffee converts. “It’s a great day when somebody tells me they used to drink coffee with cream and sugar, but now they enjoy it just black,” he says. “It’s nice to get people interested and give them an understanding of this beautiful, delicious product. It’s so cool to be part of that.”
