Welcome to another episode of The Dial-In with your hosts, Emerson and Brian. Today's guests are Ross and Dee Dee from Miffits. What happens when your life changes course? Not through mishap, the unexpected or unplanned, but through a deliberate intention that shakes the foundation of your entire world. What happens when the light of your passion dims and you're left to confront the knot near the routine? Do you simply sigh and resign yourself to the path ahead or do you take a chance, roll the dice and allow yourself to pivot to a new passion? What if the passion you choose is able to merge with other passions yet inexplicably would require you to move nearly halfway across the world? With your confidence and fearlessness tipping the scale, over uncertainty and anxiety, you take a chance and make a move. And just as you're getting settled and your feet wet in the ocean of a new adventure, a pandemic hits and shuts the world and your passion down too rarely. Now what? We'll find out in our conversation with Ross and Dee Dee. Thank you for coming all the way from Orange County. I really, really, really admire your guys' resiliency through everything that has happened over the past year. It's just been a lot. Oh yeah. A lot. For both of you, I would say. We chose the worst time ever to do this, yeah. You could say that. It's fine. What doesn't break you makes you stronger. I mean, right. And historically, you know, the food and beverage industry has always been extremely hard to even make any type of money, let alone during a pandemic. So I cannot imagine the things that have been going on in your guys' lives to now and how you guys imagined it or pictured it that it was going to happen from the UK to Orange County. Can we back up one second and just what is it you guys did during the pandemic? To rewind a little bit, we had every intention to start Miffy's Coffee officially in America of June 2020. And we had like our visa appointment book, March of 2020. And we were going to come out here to sign off the truck in March and sort out where we wanted to live, finally meet Tony and Emerson properly and had all these grand plans. The day before our visa appointment, the embassy shut, the country shut down. Everything shut down. We all know the story. So we, yeah, we plan to basically start our entire company, June of 2020, ended up getting delayed until December 2020 and started it, maybe not the hype, but the tail end of the craziness of the pandemic, which was a challenge. What were you guys doing before that? Like, what were your jobs before that? And how did it relate to like a coffee making? Well, this is the thing. It doesn't at all, really. I was a freelance musician. So obviously I have my own band, didn't make a lot of money doing that. So I had to sell myself for the weekends doing private functions and events. Yeah, pretty much. In music. Yeah. In music. Yes. And I did also, I've had part-time day job working for Dee Dee's parents. So that was me. Nothing to do with coffee though, in answer to your question. Dee Dee was the coffee connoisseur out of us too. I've just started drinking coffee the last year probably. So. Wow. Yeah. That's a huge jump. I'm a tea man. I'm English, right? How did you get into coffee? Well, my career was not coffee. My career was cameras. Begins with a C. Begins with a C. Yes. A little further down the alphabet. A little bit. Yeah. So I worked with cameras, Canon cameras and I was a product manager there and it was incredibly great and corporate and everything your career is supposed to be when you strive for ambition. And loved coffee on the side. I've always been enthusiastic hobbyist, everything and always had dreams of doing my own business. I was brought up in entrepreneur family, own their own business. Everywhere in my life there's self-employed people and it just always felt like the right path to take and working to pay them out and didn't feel like the right thing to do. So just took the opportunity, got made redundant. The music industry is incredibly tough just to do something that followed our passion and our dreams and this was it. But how did it come about? Like I think there's a big question and I think like a big interest in knowing that you went from a corporate job, from musician and then getting into a business that is A hard and B in another country even harder and then pushing through all that after the pandemic or during the pandemic to get over here. Like how did that all align? The initial idea actually was because we watched a movie, Chef and I know that sounds really cliche food truck, you watch Chef, but let's face it, it was, wasn't it? It was one of the original ball rolling moments. Yes and in terms of location we needed to do it somewhere hot obviously as well and we happened to come out here in September of 2019. We started right at the bottom of San Diego, right by the border and went right to the top up to Petaluma Way didn't we and I suppose we just fell in up with the weather as well. You lived us in California. Yeah, the weather and the beaches etc. So we thought let's do it here. I've done a lot of travelling but I've never lived anywhere else as such, I've always come back to the UK. So for me it was just a really exciting adventure and the timing seemed right with Didi getting redundant. I wasn't particularly happy with what I was doing, it was a bit kind of groundhog day-esque. So it was just an adventure, we both wanted to go on together really, wasn't it? Yeah and we've always travelled, we travelled across Europe being English, you can travel to Spain in the same amount of time it takes you to get to San Francisco from San Diego. So we always travelled a lot and wherever we travelled we coffee shop hunted and we started to fall in love with the same thing, thankfully I guess that's why we're together we like the same type of coffee shop and just saw an opportunity to create a space and an environment that makes us happy but do it our way and being both vegan we wanted to create something that met the needs of a vegan without having to ask for that and still appeased the dairy people because they just like the drink anyway. Well it's still circular in a way because you both ended up in a town where your original focus is very much a part of this town whether it's with cameras and filming and photography or with music and whatnot so it's like you started something new while still being surrounded by those other things that you love so much COVID aside it sounds like a win-win overall. Yeah definitely and I guess that was by no coincidence was it the draw of music to LA and Emerson knows it. Ross constantly talks about how his famous friends were friends famous people he knows are up the road and how amazing that is and how some of the greats have played all around here in the music and to be surrounded by music and film and everything in this city you don't get that in Europe. Yeah I remember when I first got to when I went to Venice Beach for the day didn't we and then we went down Abbott Kinney just as the sun was going down and I hate to sound too spiritual but I was just like this is just incredible because I'm not used to seeing anything like that really and from there on I was just like we got to get out here and try it so initially it was always in my brain Los Angeles it was never Orange County or San Diego where we happened to be working so that's kind of strange as well. I mean it is an interesting town a very interesting town and for that matter an interesting half of the state in Southern California were just so different in a lot of ways from Southern California so I can see the appeal and then also travel you know traveling to the UK when I went to do my own thing and everything the thing that that was really interesting is that in London there was just not a lot of coffee like good coffee I saw a lot of Costa I saw a lot of Pratamangé a lot of Starbucks and there were not a lot of like third wave shops so how did you guys even begin to think about that or to formulate this whole thing around third coffee shop and a truck selling vegan milks? Well it all comes from the European coffee shop so I would have said Definitely and I guess as well where we live in Brighton there is a huge third wave scene there's a coffee shop chain unfortunately now called Small Batch Coffee they're huge in Brighton and they were quite a good site for us like to hang out in and realize what the industry can do they sold out as many people do but there are still inklings of it and then exactly as Ross was saying yeah that travel element everywhere we went we sold out the third wave and it was everything they were doing compared to the likes of what we got in London when I lived there I could think of nothing worse than going to any of those shops you just listed and then when you see them in Europe you're like oh this is so charming and magical and how can we capture all of this essence and then I guess Chef was the impetus for the truck Yeah it was Another thing as well is the truck seemed an easier win than what it would be to start trying to open up a shop in another country We were naive The truck felt easier at the time to do it hasn't been Yeah and I guess there's something where we live and what we've experienced there is no truck scene I think it's growing and there are elements of it but we've never seen it on a European level come here and it's very glamorous and you think this is absolutely amazing to be able to take coffee wherever we want to take it on this little truck and drive it around and it'd just be great and I fully blame Tony and Emerson for creating something so beautiful because we went and sought them out at the very infancy of our journey and saw how they were doing it and how they did it from a third wave perspective doing everything so beautifully and meticulously on this amazing truck and it was as foreign as we did that same thing everyone does we're like let's go find the truck it happened to be the day we were in LA it was their day off it's fine, it took us a year we finally got to farm cup Yeah it's a freaking cool thing so it just felt like let's create some magic in a mobile truck So go back to that moment so when you've got your truck and you're ready and even if this is kind of hypothetical but so you're looking on the map and you're like where do we go like take me back to that moment on like how you decided where to start which neighborhood, which street, roll on the dice maybe they'll show up it wasn't easy it's the hardest part definitely I think when we did our initial drive from San Diego up to San Francisco there were certain parts of the west coast that we fell in love with and certain parts we didn't so we definitely kind of knew like there was this I don't know if you take away everything you know or you experience in Orange County, San Diego and LA just driving up that coast there are spots that are just absolute magical bliss and for me one of them was Huntington Beach because it is just that long stretch of beach and there's open space and you can see all these places to park trucks and so that was always a bit that kind of rang true to me and then we're kind of like well Ross wants to be near LA for the music scene and the vibe I lived in central London for a really long time so I was like I'm out of city see you later I need a beach so it kind of just started narrowing it down got the map out where can we commute to, where can we still get to LA can we still get to San Diego can I still get to the beach are there still enough people around and then you start plotting out where all the coffee shops are mapping out all the truck scene yeah I mean it is really hard though because on paper you go I've got a county license I can go anywhere right in the county no no we have to get multiple city licenses obviously so it's like where can and can't we go you know so we wanted to go by all the beach towns really because that's kind of what we saw our truck has like the beach sort of coffee truck thing but we were quickly knocked down by quite a lot of councils that you can't be here and stuff so but a time we narrowed it down we just had a few locations really didn't we so we just thought well we're just homing on them so it was like Huntington Beach and we had a San Diego license as well didn't we the other location was a farmers market that we still do to today so it was like let's just let's just see how they go first it's been real trial and error it really has the hardest part of running any food truck is location you've got where you live where you travel to there's so many things you don't know before you embark on the journey of a truck and just the simple things and going from where you live to where your truck is where your storage is for your truck it's not where you park your truck and where your truck is in comparison to your location you're trying to trade at and just on a real simple level if you think about trying to drive a coffee shop on the roads that are the American roads which are very bumpy and you've got water electricity coffee everything going up and down it's a constant daily challenge so yeah all of that ends up weighing into your equation of okay well actually I can only really park within X amount of radius from where I have to park my truck which has to be X amount of radius from where I park my house or you can spend seven hours on the road each day trying to get to where you need to be the proximity to the beach was the goal and not just any beach the state of Maine is stunning with its crisp air but the crisp air comes attached to long cold winters in the case of Ross and Dee Dee the beaches of Maine were too much of a reminder the coastlines of the UK after a pre-COVID visit they knew Southern California would be their destination their new home despite the ongoing and persistent uncertainty and stress of COVID this choice proved to be the gift that paved the way for their ability to build the foundations of their new life one day at a time as one of the only coffee trucks in all of Orange County they became by default the ultimate outdoor coffee experience during the time when outdoor service was the only service that was possible when life gives you lemons you simply turn around and make well, that metaphor in the case of Miffies you make coffee you get the idea and now back to our conversation with Ross and Dee Dee to me like starting the the truck was so easy to put it into a concept but to actually execute was probably the hardest thing and I think that you're taking something that has been so ingrained in our society that is a communal space to have and then turn it into a wheel shop or a food truck at this point and then selling it out there and then trading and everything and then you kind of like bypass that whole point of like being able to sit down and enjoy it or like put your laptop down and everything like that and I think that was one of the biggest problems that we would have people try to sit around us but there was no space and you know people do want to enjoy it especially you guys coming from the UK I think there was a huge shift in that culture probably from like drinking tea at home or with some type of pastry and everything and enjoying it rather than like I need to go I need to go I have two seconds and then I just need a drip kind of a thing so adjusting yourselves to that must have been a little bit hard it was for us for sure definitely we don't have drive through in England like it doesn't yeah but not in the coffee world really Starbucks have brought it in but we're exactly about that and we still struggle with it we still have a problem with people it's not a problem it's lovely people come to our truck and they stay for half an hour 30 minutes chatting to us and they're like I'll just put a table and chair out it's like but we're not a bricks and mortar I can't just put tables and chair out on the sidewalk right and it is difficult because that's always what we've wanted to create is a community and a space and chat and everything and yeah the truck has forced us not to be able to have that sadly yeah but then that's also brought our desire on to have a bricks and mortar eventually because exactly as Emerson said that's what we want we want people just sitting at the shop enjoying it chilling out we can go and chat and we just don't have that right now not that I'm moaning about what we have now but you know the future I would definitely say we grow out of the truck as such if there's like a flip side to the coin of like you know you need this city permit and you need that city permit is that hopefully like you'll go through enough of it to where you can find the actual like community where you're going that's our brick and mortar spot as opposed to like doing that outright you know and starting that outright and going oh my god we just invested in a brick and mortar in a neighborhood that's not our vibe at all I think that's an interesting journey that like you guys get to explore it's probably some of what you and Tony have been through that same exploration of like well we're at the trading post every week and we see how that's going and where do we want to put Sonny? Well there was always that definite like feeling of how are people going to receive us and if they're going to remember us because there's always that option chance that they're like I've never seen a coffee truck before therefore I'm going to go and try it you know and you might not see them again but you thought that one day that you were there that it was a great day and then you come back that amount of excitement around it so there was always a really hard kind of like thinking about it and being like okay is this going to be a good day and getting yourselves into that mindset of like no I hope it is a good day if not I don't know how we're going to take it I always see it as like playing the food truck game on coffee is like playing a video game on extreme hard like it's because like you go around it and you're like do I have the permit can I park here am I going to get a ticket are people going to come by there's all these things and it's so hard it is really really hard and then to drive down that message of I think for you guys to drive down the message of like turning into a vegan shop on wheels with coffee in Orange County I mean that is kind of like a extreme hard level hard how did you guys I know that you guys are vegans yourself like did you guys ever think that that was going to be kind of like a heart sale in a lot of the people down there I don't think we did really because when we went in 2019 you know I loved the vegan scene out here I thought it was just fantastic it was better than the UK at the time definitely wasn't it so I suppose I didn't really think that would be too much of a challenge and it you know it hasn't been really has it I guess it's swings and roundabouts I think we were naive picking Orange County in a way because we don't know the ins and outs of it and it is the beauty of the truck we can figure out what city we do and don't want to go to sometimes I think we thought it would be absolutely not a single problem at all and you still do get those people that want cream and sugar and as much as I can put oat milk in their drink and coconut sugar which tastes delicious you know that sometimes they're not happy with it they're obsessed and they are too hooked on the fact that you need dairy in that drink and that did take me by surprise thankfully it's like 1% of our customers that walk away it's not even that which is really good but yeah I probably did think it would be an easier thing or I would think that more people would value it I think there's a lot of people that see us and they don't instantly go vegan which was deliberate to a degree because we didn't want people to walk past the truck and go oh they're a vegan truck and go near them I wanted everyone to approach our truck and we definitely do if you've not had oat milk before have it if you don't like it it drinks on me not a problem which really works well for us in the past and at least by not being overtly one way anyone will approach us when I imagine most people too would just order let me just get nice latte and then since you're not advertising it you're just kind of like there you go that is what we do absolutely yeah you get often the people that turn around and go what's in this right and you're like oh it's oat milk then I get so good I mean I had one customer he's been to us about 20, 30 times oh use oat milk to help yes I've been giving that to you for months actually I commend both of you guys for that approach because I feel like so much that gets lost in the conversation of health and veganism and even like sustainability is just the way we conduct the conversation yes and so we kind of like we turn people off right at the outset and so I think just kind of the way you've done it is very kind of discreet and kind of like oh it's nothing nothing to see here, nothing to see here enjoy your drink and then the people who do want heavy cream are half and half it's like heavy cream I mean it still happens it does still happen yeah I got well confused cream when I first got here I was like you want spray cream in your coffee like whipped cream cream I think you guys call it double cream that's what it is double cream to us is like you put on a cake or something right or smother your strawberries in it cream that's cream that's a very British sentence that I just heard I mean to me like it's switching from a dairy based business model to an alternative business model at least in LA it made sense there was just such a profound movement towards doing that and there were just so many customers that were already saying oh I want oat I want almond I mean I still get some people who are like saying the weirdest types of milks like cashew and walnuts and I'm like where did you have that it's making you think that we would have it but you know I think the movement and the trend has been going towards those things now I am from Orange County originally and when I go down there it's kind of like if anything it's soy milk or at this point oat milk in one in one or another and I feel that it's really really great that you guys are just sticking to the guns of like oat milk and alternative milks because when I see that I'm like that's great they at least know the product they know who they are and then they can go from that but within all that apart from your lifestyle I think there's a bigger opportunity of like making sure that we understand the why for my business it was the sustainability point of view there's just so much dependency on milks and dairy and things like that that we were like I think it's a good choice to go that way I don't know how you guys came to it we'll be right back to our conversation with Ross and Dee Dee after this message today's episode is brought to you in partnership with Chobhani Chobhani's mission is making better food for more people and they've brought that mission to non-dairy by crafting the ultimate oat milk for food service Chobhani Oat Barista Edition it's plant based, gluten free non-GMO and vegan friendly the formula was crafted for superior performance and versatility whether adding to black coffee or creating the perfect micro-phone Chobhani Oat Barista Edition will satisfy your caffeine needs and delight your customers and now back to the episode whether you pinpoint kind of, if there was a moment or if it just kind of gradually happened to where you shifted into being vegans and the health standpoint and then how that translated into your business from like a sustainability standpoint as far as just how those two merged like if you can remember a specific example or even an influence to where it was like oh no, this makes sense to me, this is what I or we want to do yeah, I think my first one was when I was in Madeira and I saw a cow about to go to slaughter and just fighting for it's life and I suppose I just thought, it's pretty cruel and I just said to Dee Dee I'm just gonna try it for a bit, didn't I? Yeah, and I do the cooking so I was like, well I'm not cooking for two let's tell you now that was probably a turning moment and I think the sustainability for me has always been an agenda probably before veganism was I've always been the person that people carry cut clary or Tupperware's everything reduces plastic consumption, all of that so veganism just came hand in hand with it and I don't think there was ever a question with our business that we would do anything against those two ethics, morals, standpoint way of life as it were and even the way we conduct our business now for me doesn't, it's not as sustainable as it should be I still don't think that the plant based industry has done enough to be sustainable I don't know, Emerson experiences it every day we go through 50 cartons of oat milk on a weekend on one day I sent Tony on Instagram a link yesterday or two days ago I think it was somewhere in Europe they were recycling their cartons by like, I guess they were washing them out and then cutting like holes in the middle and letting it serve as a drink carrier That's cool and they were just repurposing it in a way to say, oh well we've got now this empty oat milk container let's just clean it out let's kind of triangle cut and then now it's a drink carrier people ask us every day for drink carriers and I don't have them so that's now my new thing so that's your new thing but that's the business, it was never really a question was it, would we ever do business with dairy the question always got posed to us what do you think you're doing, you're cutting off a market for sure and we had to justify our standpoint but yeah, we never had that Tadar moment that moment of we definitely have to do this it just was this One of the moments I had was getting my father onto oat milk because he's very meat and two veg in his whole way of thinking so I used to make him drinks with oat milk and he'd say, oh it's just really good really good and I thought well if I can convert not it's about converting people I don't want to put that message across but if he can enjoy the drink if he can enjoy the drink if he can enjoy the drink I was like yeah this is going to work I think he was my little guinea pig if you like because I think at the end of the day as business owners you're trying to appeal to everybody so now you have kind of like a double whammy on your guys' hands which is like a truck that goes around and then you have a place to be or sometimes you do, sometimes you don't and then you're also saying well the traditional way of drinking was this, now we're changing it to this so you kind of have like a very interesting business model that needs to be perfected for people to be like oh I love this or I'll try it again until maybe I like it or I like the look or I like their accents if they're Australian from New Zealand it's really funny no one can pinpoint where they're from and it's just the most interesting thing ever when someone says you're cutting off a market it's almost like your response is well that's not our market but then at the same time what Emerson and Tony does it's really smart and I'm assuming you guys do something similar since you understand that that market exists like the I guess we'll call it the caramel frappuccino market we don't say those words but we say that but where it gets kind of reinterpreted is when you see something like their monthly specials menu and it's like the camper and it's got all these things that are all like healthy organic ingredients and the way the language is presented visually and in the words it's so subtle and so indirect that people don't realize that they're having something that's better than and more healthy overall than a caramel frappuccino with extra caramel and extra whip and so it's like a way of saying you're right that's not our market but we're going to find a way to reach out to that market if they give us a chance yeah absolutely I think maybe before we came here are you going to do the starbucks versions of drinks are you going to do the heavy sugars are you going to do the whipped creams and I've just wanted to do really good quality coffee and I've never been interested in that kind of crazy world it's always felt a bit alien but we did start honing in on like a specials menu and all sorts to appease to those people in exactly the same way Tony and Emerson do it's like okay it's not quite laden with sugar but it's still going to give you a flavor it's still going to give you the closest thing to that but the power touch organic good high quality well sourced ingredients that will give you a treat without giving you diabetes hopefully although I'm not responsible for you is that on the menu? yeah and sometimes that can be a challenge because we get people saying have you got like a 30 ounce or a bucket full of cold brew and I'm like we just do one size here and they're like go on then I'll try it but people aren't happy just by two thank you we kind of stuck to our guns on the whole we call it like the European size and we don't go bigger than a certain size I just didn't really want someone walking around with a giant bucket of coffee with our brand on it really yeah most this area went through that in third wave probably eight to nine years ago when third wave was really blowing up and people were like that's your cappuccino well I still remember my first experience when I went to Blue Bottle I had an interview with Robert Kinney I want to say maybe I was like 20 years old so this was 10 years ago so I went there and I was like oh can I get a drip and they're like we don't have that we only have a pour over I was like I don't even know what that is and then they told me the prize and I was like whatever and I remember that I got it in a 12 ounce cup and I was like no no no can I get a bigger one and they're like we don't have anything bigger and I was thinking to myself I'm like why? Starbucks does but there's no Starbucks here but you know it was kind of like that that realization that there is another side of coffee that it's not just hyperconsumption where you're going to get that high off of that huge sugar and caffeine drink because that's what I think the American consumer really wants right some of the times it's that very caffeinated super sugary very heavy on the cream kind of drink and then you guys are serving completely different yeah because to me it's still only a double shot of coffee you know you get a 20 to 30 ounce latte it's just milk that's what I do try and explain to myself look the coffee is still there it's just slightly less milk I think the more often you focus on flavor and quality ingredients the more people like the ones that do appreciate it they do come back and they respect it and they are appreciative at the end of the day that probably that pour over you had tasted a lot better than your 20 ounce drip you have normally from that other coffee shop and then you were convinced and here you are 10 years later with a better coffee shop I want to go back you had talked about how you feel like even with what you're doing now is not as sustainable as you want it to be so like what's if you guys have like you're on that checklist your top three of like the next things you want to implement whether it's like within your company itself or an extension to your customers what are those three things that you kind of want to do my dream is number one say dream I want to have create I've seen them before they exist those big machines that we get our milk out of so rather than using cartons that's our biggest waste most we have two or three bin bags a day of cartons that we put in recycling bin where they then go I don't know I think there was one of our biggest shocks coming to California the supposed like vegan centric environmentally friendly place of America has the worst recycling I've ever witnessed before so like seeing all of that definitely suddenly made me go we have to do something better with our waste so I'd like to get rid of the cartons side of the business and find a way it's very difficult on a truck because you're limited with resource and stuff so I guess if I'm taking out the confines of that that's definitely something I want to do where we've just got a bigger system or bigger container storage and maybe we get the milk delivered in a different method that means that we can pour it straight out of that type of machine like I worked for Intelligency a way back in the day like going on ten years now and at the time when the milk would come in we would put it in glass milk containers that would then be in our ice buckets at the machine and it was that there was like a way that we could control the recycling aspect of that those containers in that plastic which was the same thing that we would do with the beans we would get the five pound bags of beans and we'd put them in these big glass mason jars that were probably better airtight than the bags once the bags are opened we really try on the smallwares as well you know, trying to put as much as we can in the paper cups but there's still a little element of plastics that we use but even the recycled plastics were a bit of an eye-opener wasn't they? Yeah I think there's a misconception here isn't there if you put the word compostable on your item or biodegradable and everyone thinks oh that's amazing that's a really sustainable product but learn behold if you don't put that in the right facility that's just going to end up in landfill like everything else so we do have plastics on our truck and they're the number one you know the one in the little recycling symbol which means if they go to the recycling centre they'll actually get recycled and reused they're the easiest one to recycle and that you know took us some education and learning and it makes sense to do it that way but I would like to as well like number one is definitely if we do so much oatmeal those cartons we've got to find a way to go or be reused better and then number two is the small where I'd like to be able to offer a recycled back scheme so if you bring your cup back and we all make sure this goes to the right place we do like a lot of people do the discount if you bring your own cup or what not but because we're not that coffee shop I can't do anything in ceramics I can only do bring your own cup so doing something more and actually taking back the containers especially when in the markets where people grab a coffee they walk around they're still in the same areas they could happily put that cup back in my trash and then doing something with that cup to make sure it goes to the right home or the right facility is a big one we've started to do that with the coffee grinds haven't we as well giving them to the farmers market they've got to plot a land down the road that they grow fruit and veg on so we give them our beans for compost I imagine even in this neighbourhood if you had a sign or advertised it you'd have somebody with their own little home garden of some sort they'd be like oh I can have your coffee grinds yes please, save me a bag well the farm cup face scrub I can see it coming that's another thing that is always a good idea to reuse all of your grounds I know that a lot of shops do that but I think fundamentally the business model of coffee is kind of all over the place in sustainability and it and it really falls down to the owners of each coffee shop but at the end of the day the beginning stages of the coffee farming and exporting because none of that coffee comes out of anywhere near the United States so transporting it here with fossil fuels from those very far-flung places does cost a lot so we need to mitigate, mitigate, mitigate on to the point that we're giving it to the consumers so I see the drive to switch to alternative milks to really reduce that making sure that we use all the plastics and I'm putting a little bit of the blame to all of the alternative milks out there because you're right a lot of those plastic elements the tetrapacks the linings all of those things are not recyclable so there's a lot of things and I don't know how we see the coffee industry switching from now on because it's starting in the epicenter in certain places like LA, like San Francisco and all those places where the majority of the things are plant based I would say even Seattle so I don't know how it's going to expand it kind of like shift itself away from all of these things now that we know that it's like a really heavy burden and even our roasters like roasting machines do create a lot of pollution they create a lot of micro particles that do you know get around everywhere so there's a lot of things that we need to create a better awareness over and I don't know how we're going to see it I don't know when it's going to happen or how it's going to happen I mean I feel like the one good thing like if there's one potential silver lining kind of coming out of COVID you know as you guys kind of decide your brick and mortar and what not I mean the downside to COVID is like everything's been to go just by default everything's been to go because we're closed you can't hang out, support our business but you gotta go you know and now like as we're slowly coming out of that you know being able to be in a position to have your brick and mortar spaces and want to encourage people to say no no no don't go come hang out you know maybe to the point where you say we don't offer to go cups and less at your own everything else is just like sit down and enjoy your cortado sit down with your friend and do your cappuccino I love that idea and I'm gonna throw the name out there again they did a great job right and we're gonna talk about Starbucks I remember this great lesson and it came from no other than the farmer in Peru mind you there's no Starbucks near their place of you know coffee making by far I think there's like two in Lima maybe more now but he was like the only reason why we have shifted our production from a you know quantity to a quality is because Starbucks introduced the idea of a latte to enjoy in their shops now the model has been shifted to a to-go model right it's not as comfortable to sit down in the chairs it's not as necessary to enjoy a leather sofa in a very like dim-lit place to enjoy your cup of coffee while listening to a good song now it's more like hey I need to go I need to go until the consumers and really took over their business but it is because of them that we enjoy this kind of idea over the third place over the let's sit down let's enjoy let's talk to the barista let's get to know why you are vegan why are you importing single origins while you're roasting a certain way and I think COVID really took that away from us because it became a survival game right we were trying to just survive as businesses to kind of like push our product without getting so far away from who we were that it kind of like messed everything up and I see it in every business I mean Whole Foods a long time ago didn't have a lot of their plastic silverware and they switched over to compostables and now it's like you can't eat there anymore so you have to kind of like grab plastic plastic plastic so it kind of like shifted the idea of what sustainability is nowadays and it's really just it breaks my heart sometimes it really does it's like we put the brakes on it didn't we like the world was moving forward massively in sustainability and put the brakes on it completely yeah I say we even kind of made it a little bit worse you know like seeing a disposable mask on the floor now is super common or in the ocean or whatever even the juxtaposition here in LA in early 2020 after no one had been on the roads for like three weeks and I remember going outside and walking around going is this Los Angeles like I can feel the cleanliness in this air so it's kind of like a weird juxtaposition of like we're doing better on one end for a while but we're really doing worse over here yeah and just finding the ways to get back to that I mean I think we'll go ahead and get there some day they'll take time again I mean we probably over produced all of these things that we were going to need to get through the time and now they're there so now we're gonna have to use them up at one point or another and that includes plastic bags I mean remember in LA we actually banned plastic bags and then they were like you were supposed to bring in your own stuff and then COVID started and it was plastic bags all over again you know it was like the straws no straws straws are back at it again and it kind of just reintroduced this whole pollution problem and I do remember those early days in the pandemic where I was like oh my god I can see the sky I can see the Hollywood sign from you know downtown which usually never happens and now it's like back at it again I can't see anything yeah well I would say in closing here's my question as we wrap up for you guys what is your kind of three-year outlook for Miffy's like where do you hope to be in three years have you figured out a neighborhood or are you still just we're still not sure on the location exactly but I think one thing that we would like to do if it's possible is do a slightly off the grid coffee shop so like shipping container like run by solar battery because that's what our truck is running off now we ditched our generator and it's running off batteries and solar now so that gave us a real idea for a bricks and mortar didn't it yeah I think that the answering where is an unknown absolutely without a shadow of a doubt answering the what is crystal clear for us a bricks and mortar that's off the grid as it possibly can be that helps us continue in the good past that we've created in sustainability and making good coffee and creating a social environment for people to hang out and feel safe and chat to two lovely British people and we want to make sure we get get to a point where we can start sourcing our own beans and roasting as well and you know hopefully following Tony and Emerson's footsteps a little bit in making sure that we're creating the right product from the farm and we're helping to look at that bigger picture of coffee and sustainability like we can control a lot of what we can control in our own space with cups and open look containers and everything else and right now we're just doing what everyone's doing trying to hustle to survive so you know you can only concentrate on so many things and definitely that three year plan is to create the most sustainable coffee space we can create ticking as many boxes as we can but covering that board spectrum from cups to beans to electricity how that's produced and everything California's got a massive bright thing in the sky that creates an insane amount of energy and we have to use that more and we do on our truck since putting the solar panels on our truck we're getting 50% of our power just from the sun and it's just fantastic you know we was always told by most of the truck fabricators here that it wasn't possible to do and then we've done our own research got in touch with electrical companies and now we have set up by Victron it's batteries inverters and solar panels that's great and where can people find you on socials if they want to look for you guys at Miffy's coffee which is M-I-F-F-I-E-S coffee on Instagram, Facebook, social media website miffyscoffee.com thank you guys we really appreciate it thank you too thanks for coming by of course thanks for coffee