The Gaviña family is coffee royalty. From farms in Cuba to the fourth generation now overseeing the daily operations of the largest minority-owned and family-owned coffee roaster in the United States, the Gaviñas are an American success story extraordinaire. Immigrant Francisco Gaviña founded the company in 1967 after purchasing a secondhand roaster and setting up shop in Vernon. Today, his granddaughter Lisette Gaviña Lopez is running the company, which is No. 19 on the Business Journal List of Minority Owned Businesses. We asked her to share some insights about the challenges and opportunities of being a minority business owner.
Please tell us how your business was founded.
The Gaviña family has been in the coffee business for over 150 years. We started as coffee growers in Cuba with my great-grandfather, José Maria, and his brother, Ramon. My grandfather, Francisco Gaviña, learned from his father and later taught his children — Paco, Pedro, José and Leonor — about growing and roasting high-quality 100% Arabica coffee to make the perfect espresso blend. When the communist revolution took place in Cuba, my grandparents fled with their four children to Spain, and eventually settled in Los Angeles. Having left behind the coffee farms and roasting business in Cuba, my grandfather dreamed of working in the coffee business again. While working in a restaurant, Francisco Gaviña made contacts in the coffee business in Los Angeles and soon uncovered the opportunity to purchase a small roaster that belonged to Bob’s Big Boy restaurants. My grandparents purchased the roaster, and with the help of family and friends the roaster was dismantled, transported from Carlsbad and set up in an 1,100-square-foot leased commercial space located in the city of Vernon. It was 1967, and with a very small operation, the Gaviñas were back in the coffee business.
What’s the best aspect of having your own family business?
The best part of having your own business is making a product that people love. A lot goes into making a great cup of coffee, starting with the coffee farms where the coffee is grown, harvested, and processed, and then the quality and care that goes into the cleaning, blending, roasting, and packing the coffee to ensure its quality and freshness batch after batch. Our family is so passionate about making great coffee that we take great care to inspect each batch and ensure that the quality meets our high standards, because it’s our reputation and our grandfather’s name on it. Plus, coffee is a food item that people ingest, so it has to be made with quality and safety in mind.
And the most difficult aspect?
Business is challenging, and as entrepreneurs we must continue to evolve our business and products to meet the needs of customers, consumers and team members. Technology has had a great impact on our lives and has impacted coffee, too, with new ways of brewing coffee like the single-serve coffee pods and capsule systems, which we now make in our plant in Vernon. As a business owner, you must remain hungry and stay ahead of the competition, and you must continue to invest in your business and team members so that they will grow. As a family business, having a united vision and purpose is what keeps us together and the business thriving through even the toughest moments.
What advice would you give someone who’s contemplating launching their own business?
To anyone looking to launch their own business, my advice is to surround yourself with good people whom you can learn from and who have faced and overcome similar situations. No one makes it alone in this world, and we have been lucky to lean on the strength of our family, team members, vendors, advisors and friends when we really needed their support and expertise.
What’s the biggest challenge Gaviña has faced? How did you deal with and resolve it?
Some of the biggest challenges we’ve faced are related to movements in the green coffee market. When the market, which determines the cost of unroasted coffee, doubles overnight, the cost of our main ingredient doubles, too. The business is not able to take price increases right away, so lines of credit and a good relationship with the bank are important to make it through. Plus, these needed price increases must be carefully explained and justified to the customer, and at times they are not accepted, which can lead to product discontinuation. We experienced this in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and most recently in 2021 and 2022 following the pandemic. The market high of 1977 almost put Gaviña out of business as my dad was going to the bank every day to increase the credit lines. Thankfully, the bankers understood our business and trusted us to repay the loans. This prepared us to weather the storm in future green coffee market movements.
How has the Covid pandemic affected your business?
The pandemic certainly impacted our business. Restaurant and office coffee customers were hurt the most due to the shutdowns and have not completely recovered.
As essential workers, our team worked through the pandemic, and we took great care to protect the health and safety of our coffee family, which was our top priority. Then coffee commodity prices skyrocketed, along with increases in packaging, freight, insurance, utilities, and labor, among other business expenses.
It’s been a tough time, but we are learning a lot about our business, our customers, and our team members, and we’ve grown personally and professionally because of it.
What are the next five years looking like for Gaviña?
The next five years will bring continued growth for our Don Francisco’s Coffee, Café La Llave, Gaviña Gourmet Coffee and José’s Gourmet Coffee brands.
We are proud to roast coffee in California and hope to win the hearts and minds of more Angelenos, among others, across the West and beyond in the years to come.
— James Brock
