San Francisco Bay Coffee

Hello, and welcome to our family! My parents, Jon and Barbara Rogers, founded San Francisco Bay Coffee in 1979. They basically used all of their savings intended for college for their four children to fund the purchase of a small, nearly bankrupt company on 3rd Street in San Francisco. At the time, they had two children already in college with the other two just about to go. We all had to find…. gasp… a job, to get through college. 

My father, who had extensive experience in consumer goods with Vicks, Bird’s Eye and Revlon in New York, had been wooed to California by another company in 1976. Shortly thereafter, he realized that he no longer liked working for large companies. He wanted to do something on his own. My mother, ever faithful and supportive, was with him at every step – although it made her nervous! (She eventually joined him at work every day.) So, they cleaned out their savings accounts and took out a second mortgage on their house.

When you buy our coffee, your support helps hundreds of thousands of people around the world. And you become part of our family. Besides being able to enjoy a terrific coffee at a terrific price.

Anyway, it was a tea business, also selling accessories and a small amount of coffee roasted by others. A few years later, a coffee roasting business came up for sale, and our family bought that. We learned how to roast properly from one of the leading roast masters in the area at the time. We were also one of the earliest adopters of the vacuum valve bag to keep fresh-roasted coffee fresh. The rest is history. 

We started roasting about 100,000 pounds per year. We are now roasting almost 40 million pounds annually! And all of it, the best coffee you have ever tasted.