Unpacking Coffee with Kandace and Ray: Panther Coffee

Needmore Designs photo

In this week’s episode of Unpacking Coffee, Kandace and Ray sit down at the La Marzocco Showroom in Seattle with Joe and Leticia Pollock, the married couple who just five years ago launched Panther Coffee in Miami.

Panther has been a pioneering force in the South Florida specialty scene, recently opening a third retail bar to further augment its core roasting and wholesale business. While Kandace and Ray don’t delve into Panther’s bare bones, producer-forward, black-and-white packaging, the interview does get into how being in Miami can provide serendipitous connections with producers, as well as into Panther’s own remarkable origin story, in which the couple literally sat with an open map in their small Portland apartment looking at points of pure promise.

Leticia also provides some insight on how to run a business as a married couple, a circumstance Joel described as “more of a gift than a burden.”

A warning to the more sensitive viewers out there: Ray does drop an S-bomb.

Here’s the episode in full:

Unpacking Coffee is a weekly show discovering new coffee roasters one episode at a time led by Kandace and Ray of the Portland-based studio Needmore Designs, which specializes in coffee, wine and lifestyle brands.