This popular Black-owned coffee roaster just opened a new Bay Area cafe

“It’s our cousin city,” Konte said in relation to Oakland, where Red Bay is headquartered.

The Berkeley cafe is the sixth active cafe location for Red Bay, founded in 2014, which also operates a coffee truck at the Oakland Grand Lake farmers’ market. Like its other cafes, the Berkeley shop will feature drip coffee and espresso drinks alongside Red Bay favorites like its candied yam latte. Sweet treats from Starter Bakery will be available, as well as vegetable-filled patties from Oakland’s Jamaican patty specialists the Pleasure Principle.

The most recent location’s launch follows Red Bay’s January opening in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow. An Oakland location in Grand Lake opened in July 2022, and in 2021, the company opened a large flagship space in Fruitvale, near its roasting facility.

These new cafes might look like a growth spurt to outsiders. But Konte notes the company has nine years of relationships with community business districts to build on. And recently, Konte has been able to take over existing coffee shop locations, an easier lift than starting fresh. In San Francisco’s Ferry Building, for example, Red Bay took over a former Peet’s chain location in 2021. Growth hasn’t been linear, either: Red Bay’s Market Street location, inside a market and cafeteria at the Twitter Building, closed earlier this year.

From its newest location, Red Bay looks to carry on the legacy of former tenant Alchemy Collective Cafe, an inclusive, BIPOC-owned cooperative coffee roaster and shop that closed in September 2022. “They put in a lot of really great energy into creating a beautiful coffee legacy there,” Konte said. 

Red Bay will keep Alchemy’s focus on diversity alive. Hiring baristas of color is not enough for Konte, he said; Having people from diverse backgrounds enter management roles, quality control, distribution and roasting, among others, is required to create equitable access in the industry.

“Globally, Black and Brown people are the ones growing the coffee,” Konte said, noting coffee originates in East Africa and is grown in tropical regions. “But when you engage with the specialty coffee scene in the U.S., historically, it has been a very white environment.”

Konte has been aware of this dynamic since he helped open cafe-gallery space Guerrilla Coffee on Berkeley’s Shattuck Avenue in 2005, which is still open but is no longer an owner. Back then, as a full-time artist, he was looking to have a place to exhibit his artwork, but quickly became interested in the experiences of Black people in the coffee industry.