People ask us all the time: how do you actually find these roasters?
It's a fair question. If you're promising to deliver coffee from roasters nobody has heard of, the obvious next question is: where are you looking that everyone else isn't?
The answer is a mix of community listening, data signals, and old-fashioned legwork. Here's the full breakdown.
Step 1: Community Monitoring
The specialty coffee community is genuinely wonderful at sharing discoveries. On Reddit, in communities like r/Coffee, r/espresso, and r/Coffee_roasters, people regularly post about new local roasters they've tried. Someone in Austin mentions a tiny operation that opened six months ago. Someone in Denver says they just had the best pour-over of their life at a roastery they'd never heard of.
We monitor these conversations. Not to scrape and automate, but to pay attention. When a roaster gets mentioned in a community, we note it. When we see the same name appear in multiple threads across different communities, we dig in.
Instagram and TikTok run parallel to this. Coffee content creators often find roasters before media outlets do. A 500-follower account posts a barista visiting a new roastery. A specialty coffee enthusiast in Portland shares a beautiful photo of a natural process Ethiopian from a roaster with 23 Instagram followers. These are signals.
Step 2: The Network
We've spent time building relationships with baristas, competition competitors, green coffee buyers, and coffee educators across the country. These people hear about new roasters before anyone else — often because someone shows up to their cafe with samples, or because a friend opens a new operation.
We ask our network: who's new? Who's exciting? Who are you tasting right now that nobody else has covered?
This is the part that can't be automated. Trust takes time to build. But once you have it, the signal-to-noise ratio is much higher than passive monitoring. A barista in Chicago who's been competing for eight years isn't going to send us a mediocre roaster. When they say "you need to try this," we move.
Step 3: The Verification Filter
Once we have a lead on a new roaster, we verify:
- When did they launch? (We focus on roasters under 2 years old)
- Are they commercially roasting, or is this a home setup?
- What's their sourcing story? (We look for roasters who care about origin)
- Are they shipping nationally, or hyper-local only?
- Do they appear in any existing subscription boxes or major media lists?
That last check matters. If a roaster is already on Trade Coffee or has been featured in Bon Appétit, they're not "new" in the way we mean. We're looking for people who are genuinely pre-mainstream.
Step 4: The Taste Test
Everything comes down to the coffee.
We order a bag directly. Sometimes two or three different offerings. We brew them in multiple ways — pour-over, French press, and espresso if the roast level allows. We cup them together as a team.
We're looking for: - Clarity — Is the cup clean and well-developed? Are the flavors distinct and intentional? - Sourcing integrity — Does the roaster know where their coffee comes from? Is that story genuine? - Unique character — Is there something about this roaster's approach that's different? A processing method, an origin focus, a roasting philosophy? - Potential — Is this roaster going to keep getting better? We're featuring people at the beginning of their journey.
Roughly 1 in 4 roasters we evaluate makes it through. That's not a pass/fail filter — some roasters are great but not quite ready, and we often circle back in a few months. But we take the quality gate seriously, because our subscribers are trusting us with their daily coffee ritual.
Step 5: The Story
If a roaster passes the taste test, the last piece is the story. Every roaster we feature gets profiled: who they are, where they came from, what made them start roasting, how they source their coffee, what they're trying to express with their flavor profiles.
We do this partly because it makes the coffee better. Knowing that your Ethiopia Yirgacheffe was roasted by a former schoolteacher who spent two years sourcing directly from a cooperative in Sidama changes how you drink it. It makes you pay attention.
But we also do it because these stories need to be told. These are people who took a significant risk to pursue craft at scale. Most of our featured roasters are self-funded, working out of small commercial spaces, roasting on machines they saved up for. Getting their story in front of hundreds of people who care about specialty coffee is its own kind of reward.
What This Means for You
Every bag you get from Fresh Pull has gone through this process. We found this roaster in a community thread or through a network referral. We verified they were genuinely new. We tasted their coffee and made sure it was exceptional. We heard their story and made sure it was genuine.
Then we brought them to you — before they hit any list, any platform, or any mainstream publication.
That's the promise. See our current plans →