Safari Coffee has been serving fresh roasted coffee to the North County San Diego region since October of 1990. The founder and master roaster, Marcel "Marc" Jennett, was introduced to the coffee business as a young boy.
"Back in the early sixties, my father delivered and sold coffee to restaurants for Blue Ribbon Coffee of San Francisco. I remember climbing into his blue and yellow Chevy panel truck, which was loaded with dozens of bags of freshly ground coffee on their way to the city restaurants which yielded a wonderfully incredible aroma because of the confined space."A customer can sample a little most anytime of the week when we are roasting and grinding in the back room."
In the early eighties, while attending college, Marcel learned to roast coffee himself on an old fashioned gas-fired Jabez Burns roaster and upon graduation joined up with United Coffee of San Francisco where he was schooled in all aspects of the coffee trade. During this period, gourmet shops selling exotic beans from all over the world were starting to flourish and United Coffee was pioneering the market on the West Coast in particular in larger grocery stores which up to then handled only mediocre ground coffees in the can.
Several years later after United merged with Peerless Coffee of Oakland, Marcel and his college roommate left the Bay Area to venture off to San Diego, which was just starting to develop a gourmet coffee industry. ""We located a retail gourmet shop that was going to close in Escondido and felt it could be turned around with a coffee focus. After a short time, we invested in a 12-kilo Diedrich gas-fired roaster so we could control our quality and reduce the cost of goods. This would allow us to provide much better prices while having more flexibility in blending and flavoring so our customers could find a larger variety of quality beans, not just the standard dozen or so that most retailers handle"."
The first several years naturally were touchy. The shop opened about the time of the Gulf War,in the midst of a recession. "There was no money for employees, so hours were long, and we made our share of mistakes along the way." However, their popularity grew, and in 1995, Safari won two roasting awards in a local "cupping" in San Diego.
In 1995 Marcel assumed full control as the business continued to chug along but with ever increasing competition we started to expand online to residential and wholesale customers throughout the U.S. Today anyone can experience what up to then had been available just to the locals by clicking on the website.
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