Iron Bridge Coffee Company
Vendor
Products
About
We are a small specialty farm-to-cup coffee roastery located in Waco, TX. Our coffee is special because every bag of our freshly roasted coffee is sourced from our small family farm in Costa Rica.
We started growing coffee in 2020. In the first two years we sold in the traditional method, directly to a nearby beneficio for processing. In 2022 we brought samples of our green coffee to Waco to roast and folks who tried it agreed that we had an amazing product. This year, 2023, we brought our entire harvest, 2800 lbs of green coffee! The coffee arrived in August and we started selling at markets and local popups in September.
We carefully roast our coffee beans in small batches in our home roastery in Waco with a fluid bed roaster powered by 100% renewable electric- the most eco-friendly option for coffee roasting. Our products include whole bean and ground coffee in bags and 100% recyclable k-cups.
Our mission is to bring delicious specialty grade Costa Rican coffee to Waco at a great price and provide good jobs and benefits for our hardworking Costa Rican family working at our farm. We can't wait for you to try our coffee!
Programs and Partners
Production Practices
Shade grown coffee, perennial crop, permaculture style biodiversity- grown intercropped with various other fruits including banana, mango, avocado, naranjilla, jocote (Costa Rican plum) and other native trees which provide shade, pest resistance, and natural fertilizer.
Green coffee Certified and approved by Icafe of Costa Rica
Cupped and Scored in TX as Specialty Coffee
Roasted with renewable electric energy, solar and wind power
Eco-friendly & recyclable packaging.
Location
Waco, TX
Manager
Horacio Sosa, is Costa Rican by birth. He came to Texas when he was a teenager, but always dreamed of having a coffee farm in Costa Rica as a way to stay connected to his family and heritage. His grandfather worked the land that we own in Costa Rica today. You can actually see the old family lands in Jocotal across the river from our tiny little farm in Monte Redondo. His sister Gabi is the manager of our farm and one of the main reasons why we chose to bring our coffee to Texas- we want her and her children to be able to have benefits and retirement that just selling the crop to the co-op in Costa Rica.
Horacio is incredibly detail-oriented, great with people, and will read and learn anything and make things happen! This is how we ended up with the coffee farm, importing our own coffee, and the 2800lbs of green coffee we have in our living room that we are now roasting ourselves! He has a chemistry degree and lab experience so from the soil to the plants to the milling, bagging, shipping, storage and roasting our coffee he has been carefully ensuring that we are caring for the coffee in the best possible way every step of the process.
Michaela Sosa is a gardener and a baker and has amazing memories of attending markets as a child with her mother and grandparents selling vegetables, bread, pickles and jams- bringing coffee to market is such a fun reminder of those good times! Michaela grew up in Waco, graduated from Midway in 2010. After high school, she spend a few years away at college and work but ended up back in Waco by choice. Horacio and Michaela met here, and have chosen to settle here and raise our two boys here. We love Waco, and we have been given lots of opportunities for education, growth and jobs here, so we want to do what we can to support this community that has been so good to us, our parents, and now our children.
Here in Waco we have a tiny house in the middle of town for now, but lots of hopes for our future here on some land out in Lorena (on Iron Bridge Rd- thus our company name) where we have a few cattle, fruit trees growing, and the start of a big garden. We would also plan to have a place there to store and roast our coffee- and, in time, a house too!
Our main goal with our little Costa Rican coffee farm and our little Texas coffee roasting business is to give back to others, to our family and community members in Costa Rica and to our family, friends, and neighbors here in Waco and Central Texas.
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