Desert Kid Coffee Heats Up the Coachella Valley Coffee Scene

Inside Desert Kid Coffee in Palm Desert, California. All images courtesy of Palm Desert Coffee.

Blooming like a desert poppy in Southern California’s Coachella Valley is Desert Kid Coffee, a new destination roastery cafe opening this month with scratch-made pastries, house-roasted coffees and a breezy desert-living spirit.

The 5,400-square-foot corner location in central Palm Desert draws in plenty of light through floor-to-ceiling windows along two exterior walls. A garage door opens the cafe’s couch-lined lounge onto ample patio seating, widening both the sense of scale and the open-air feel.

Natural wood chairs, benches and paneling add warmth to the space, where sandy-white tile runs along a long wall behind the bar before wrapping around to wooden display shelves. Tables and millwork are stained to echo regional palm trees, and the dark countertops contain embedded, sand-like speckles.

“What we wanted people to walk in and feel is that it is inherently local, that it was built by locals and built for them,” Desert Kid Co-Founder Katie Reed told Daily Coffee News. “Building a brand out here in the Coachella Valley to celebrate it, we wanted to make sure that all of our visual identity focused around this place in particular.”

Blue geometric tile pops from the front of a slow bar equipped with a Modbar Pour-Over 2.0 at one end of the shop. Through a glass wall, cafe customers can watch an IMF RM15 at work in the roastery run by Desert Kid Co-Founder and Head Roaster Joseph Eccles, who fills the drum with green coffees sourced through importers such as Royal Coffee and Red Fox Coffee Merchants.

Eccles said that over time, Desert Kid hopes to source more coffees directly from producers, as it did recently with vertically oriented Guatemalan green coffee company Panorama Coffees.

“Our first special release, for instance, was a Geisha natural, dried on raised beds, processed meticulously and just a delicious, balanced cup,” Joseph Eccles told DCN. “Finding a way to balance bringing in some blenders from direct trade but also highlighting the special nature of those producers and some of the things that they do is the long-term goal.”

Eccles and Reed, friends since childhood in the Coachella Valley, worked closely for more than two years with Las Vegas-based Coffee Heroes Solutions, an official U.S. partner of Italy’s IMF Roasters, to develop the business plan and coffee program, as well as design, build and equip the roastery cafe.

Prior to returning to the desert, Reed held product and engineering roles at tech startups in New York City, including as co-founder of a VC-backed digital fitness platform called Balanced. Eccles worked as a high school English teacher up until pivoting into roasting.

Roasted coffees now make their way to retail bags, wholesale clients and the main Desert Kid bar featuring two Modbar Brew and Steam stations, each paired with a Mahlkönig E80S GbW grinder and Puqpress M5 auto-tamper.

Customers are served both indoors and through a walk-up window. A Bluewater purification and remineralization system treats the water feeding the cafe’s coffee equipment. From the kitchen comes a range of toasts and light bites, along with a robust baking program that includes breads, pastries and laminated goods.

Creating a hometown coffee brand is the primary vision, Reed said, while the long-term goal is to grow the brand into a national representation of the Coachella Valley.

“We’re already hitting it on the head to be able to celebrate our local community and to build a space that can host them and have people connect,” Reed said. “But you shoot to the moon and then you land amongst the stars. As Stumptown is for Portland, so how Desert Kid Coffee could be to the Coachella Valley and then nationally known.”

Desert Kid Coffee is located at 44850 San Pablo Ave. in Palm Desert.

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