Who is Bonlife?
Hi there, it’s nice to meet you! Whether you’ve just stumbled across our website or you’ve been a BonLife fan for years now, we’re excited to share with you our backstory! So grab a mug of your favorite coffee, get cozy, and read on for the tale of how BonLife Coffee Roasters started and why we decided we wanted to change the coffee world.
Before it reaches your mug, every coffee has a long backstory. There is the story of the farmer who cares for the coffee plant, watches over it as it grows, and picks the coffee cherries. There’s the story of the traders who export and import & buy and sell the green beans. Then there’s the roaster who takes the green beans and turns them into the delicious finished product for you to brew and enjoy.
That means coffee changes a lot of hands and travels a lot of miles before it gets to you! It also means you, the consumer, hold a lot of power with your choice of where to buy coffee. Are you buying from someone who is supporting that original farmer? Does your roaster ensure the farmers get honest pay? Where do your green beans come from? Who even grew that bean?!
These are the questions that sparked the idea of BonLife.
BonLife has always been as a family affair… The idea for BonLife was born when a couple of brothers who had grown up overseas and love to travel the world, were in the mountains of Northern Thailand. The brothers found themselves drinking some of the best coffee they had ever tasted. Yet they looked around and saw one of the poorest communities they had ever seen. This got them talking, and an idea was born.
Coffee is one of the most valuable and widely traded commodities in the world, but it is produced almost exclusively in the poorest countries. BonLife was created from a desire to change this. We choose our coffees based on great people, often visiting the farms and building a relationship with the farmers. We want to be sure the dollars we invest in coffee have a positive impact on their lives. BonLife strives to buy coffees from the poorest countries where it’s produced in order to put our money where it can have the most positive impact. From seed to cup we know where our coffee comes from, who grew it and imported it, and where the money we spend on it goes.
BonLife literally means “good life”, and that’s what we strive to live and inspire and bring to others every day. Whether it’s the farmer who grew the coffee plant or you sitting there reading this while sipping one of our fresh-roasted single origin coffees, we want to bring good life to others!
So this is what we mean when we say Drink a Better Story. There’s a story behind your daily cup of joe, and it’s far-reaching. From the coffees brewed by our baristas in our cafe in Tennessee to the beans we sell in our online shop, you’re drinking a better story too!
