KAGAY-AN Coffee Cartel, the coffeehouse that serves locally grown coffee beans, is celebrating its first anniversary on Sunday, November 18.
This particular cafe, owned by four baristas namely: Dawn Acebedo, Ed Abella, Mario Neri, and Jayve Ritardo, is a shop that offers its clients, the coffee drinkers and enthusiasts, the chance to customize their own drinks.
Kagay-an Coffee Cartel also prides itself as a cafe that gives the local artists and musicians in Cagayan de Oro the opportunity to display and promote their artworks and play their original songs in the establishment.
The Cartel's first run has been eventful, impressing their clients with their coffee and turning them into regulars, while the artists were delighted for a new venue to showcase their masterpieces.
"The cafe wasn't really planned. It was just like a kind of friendly thing. It was just a bunch of friends, we had a little sleepover and we were just bouncing around ideas and it came to a conclusion: 'You guys like coffee right? Let's hang out in a coffee shop.' And then we love coffee. And then here, it became Kagay-an Coffee Cartel," Abella, one of the cafe owners, said.
"Kasi we were thinking something like we need to do something more productive in our life. It feels like the right time for us to do something adventurous also. So we did it and it grew into this beautiful thing of ideas that were just stacking on top of each other and learning more about coffee, learning specialty coffee, about the bean, everything," he added.
Abella, Acebedo, Neri and Ritardo, before becoming baristas and coffee shop owners, were just a group of friends that found mutual love for coffee. The four of them even went to different colleges and took up different courses.
And funnily enough, no one in the group actually graduated from a business course, which was why it was a challenge for them when they pushed through the opening of their coffee shop.
"The business process is somehow the difficult thing that we have," Neri said, adding that they were able to overcome such trials through balancing each other with each of their strengths and with the help of their other friends.
"We also acknowledge the help of our close friends who are in the business world. They also never failed to share what they have learned during their graduate courses and even still now that they are engaging in the business sector of the society," Neri said.
Even with the business process taken care of, opening a coffee shop is not that easy to achieve.
According to Ed, the four of them had to undergo trainings and workshops so that all of them could become certified baristas.
"You can't sell what you don't know. And whenever we ran out of man power, at least we're here. At least we know how to run the bar, run the kitchen because we know how it works," Acebedo said, adding that the four of them will never stop learning more about coffee.
As a matter of fact, they went through several researches and even travelled around the country just to find the best coffee bean that they can serve in their coffee shop. Unexpectedly for them, the best coffee actually was found in Mindanao.
"Our main goal was to make it local, make this local as possible, get the beans here," Abella said.
"It’s a vision that we have to produce coffee from seed to cup," Neri added.
Kagay-an Coffee Cartel, located at 88 Arch. Hayes Street, got its name from the very city it’s standing on, as the owners found it necessary to highlight the spirit of Cagayan de Oro.
"Also, we have to find a name wherein even without the Kagay-an branding, it can stand on its own. Until such time that we were able to find a word that would encapsulation the whole coffee business process, that is Cartel," Neri said.
After gaining a year of experience, Abella, Acebedo, Neri and Ritardo have expressed gratitude to their clients and to the community as they plan to “go big.”
“We’re ready to go big now kasi parang the whole cycle of one year, alam na namin kung paano nagwo-work yung Cagayan de Oro market when it comes to this product. So I think we can dance with the music already,” Acebedo said.