Better Coffee, Lower Carbon

Keith Zakheim 0:02

Welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast.

Keith Zakheim 0:05

I am your host, Keith Zakheim. Today, as we do with every podcast, we're going to ask our guest one question and one question only.

Keith Zakheim 0:14

What is your age of Climate adoption story? A little bit about the age of Adoption. We live in an era where enterprises of every shape and size, regardless of Industry, must rapidly transform to become more sustainable, climate sensitive. And just my day job is CEO of the marketing public relations firm Antenna Group. Our agency works exclusively with conscious brands.

Keith Zakheim 0:38

What is a conscious brand?

Keith Zakheim 0:40

It is a brand that is conscious of its responsibility to be on the right side of history. Like most businesses, our clients are experiencing a transition from an age of innovation, an era in which technologists, entrepreneurs and investors focused on innovating climate and sustainable solutions, to this age of adoption which characterizes the world today. So if you the Age of Adoption hypothesis, then there's really only one salient question to be asked. What is your Age of Adoption story?

Keith Zakheim - host [1:17 - 1:19]

Jonathan Bass finished college in the late 90s and immediately felt like he was watching the dot com boom from the sidelines. After brief stints as a substitute teacher and then banker, he joined aSilicon Valley tech communications firm that encouraged him to follow his passion.He dabbled in network infrastructure, video networking, and haptics before discovering what we then called clean tech — work that felt meaningful beyond just funding a tech fad or driving return for investors. But it was meeting the founders of SolarCity that really changed everything for Jonathan. They were the first entrepreneurs he had encountered who truly understood how to build a business model around sustainability. Jonathan spent nine years at SolarCity all the way through its Tesla acquisition. Then he joined Wing, Google’s drone delivery project, where he learned something unexpected: Australians were obsessed with having lattes delivered by drone because the coffee could arrive in 90 seconds, still hot, and with the lid intact —By the way, a feat of engineering that is often overlooked when picking up coffee, let alone having it delivered via drone. That fascination with coffee led him to Bellwether, where founderRicardo Lopez engineered an electric coffee roaster that reduced the carbon footprint of coffee roasting by 87% while cutting costs in half. No vents. No ducts. Most importantly, no after burner incineratingnatural gas — Just fresh, tasty coffee. Today on the Age of Adoption podcast, Jonathan explains why green washing is always counterproductive, how the Bellwether roaster pays for itself in three months and what Bellwether is doing to support coffee bean farmers around thew orld — 80% of whom live beneath the poverty line.

Back with Jonathan faster than a drone can deliver your morning latte.

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Keith Zakheim 3:39

Jonathan, welcome to the Age of Adoption podcast.

Jonathan Bass 3:42

Thanks so much for having me. Excited to be here.

Keith Zakheim 3:45

My pleasure. Jonathan, you're joining us from the San Francisco Bay area.

Jonathan Bass 3:49

I am. I'm from Bellwether headquarters in Berkeley, California.

Keith Zakheim 3:53

Fantastic. Well, I think we're. Anybody on the east coast is typically a little bit envious of those in Northern California, but especially on a day when we have snow and sleet on the East Coast. I'm actually today recording this from our Washington D.C. office and it's not a pretty day in the nation's capital. So enjoy the weather.

Jonathan Bass 4:11

Absolutely. Yeah, we're struggling through low 50s right.

Keith Zakheim 4:14

Now, so you're not going to get my sympathy today with the cold and the damp. I've already put down about 30 ounces of coffee. It would have been a great day to have a nice hot cup of Bellwether coffee.

Jonathan Bass 4:24

Absolutely.

Keith Zakheim 4:26

But I can do the shameless plug anyway. Jonathan, you've had as somebody myself who has been in the climate and sustainability communications space now for 20 plus years, your name has always been a prominent one in this community's comms industry. You've worked in house at some of the biggest names, SolarCity and Tesla and Alphabet, you've worked on the agency side. But for those years, I think the common thread is you've been involved in telling stories around electrifying essential systems. So SolarCity and Tesla, we're talking rooftop solar and batteries feeling normal for households and businesses at wing framing electronic drone delivery as an efficient low carbon alternative to delivery trucks. And of course at Bellwether, now applying that logic to coffee roasting and doing all of this as a storyteller, which of course for me is what we do. We think that's how we contribute to the climate and sustainability movement. And again, you've been incredibly high profile in doing that over the years. So if you don't mind, if you can take us through that career journey, what inspired you, the different stops along the way and how that, I guess has come to a crescendo right now with your current role at Bell?

Jonathan Bass 5:48

Sure. Well, I finished college in the late 90s and came out to Silicon Valley pretty quickly after that. After a short stint, I think, as a substitute teacher and then in banking, I really felt like I was on the sidelines for, you know, the dot com boom. So I joined a tech communications firm called A and R Partners, I guess, in 1999. And a and R was great. They encouraged you to sort of follow your passion and sort of recruit clients that were interesting to you. And I did. I dabbled in network infrastructure, you know, video networking, a little clean tech and, you know, haptics, wireless technology. And after a few years, I was sort of the startup specialist there. Got really interested in clean tech. There was a lot of venture capital pouring into it and it was meaningful, I think, to a lot of us to work on something that had a benefit beyond just making money for people or solving sort of a basic convenience problem.

Keith Zakheim 6:45

And we all felt like pioneers at the time, right? It was like a pioneer movement. Almost felt like that.

Jonathan Bass 6:50

It was, it was. It definitely felt like that. And the, you know, the founder of A and R, Bob Angus and I, and Kimberly Kupecki, another member of the team, started a clean tech practice group, group shout out to Antenna, you know, in that era. So we came out and did a little announcement that we were starting a clean tech practice area. And Antenna came out and said, you know, we're, we're. I think this is before, before your time at Antenna, but Antenna said we're, we're really dedicated to sustainability. These guys are just sort of moonlighting and sustainability, which was. Which was fair. But I think Antenna deserves. It's sort of a full circle moment. It's exciting to be here. Antenna deserves a lot of credit for staying true to that and really focusing on clean technology and sustainability some, you know, now, 25 years later. But anyway, started that practice area, learned a lot about the space, and eventually Edelman acquired in our partners. I stayed for another year. It was interesting to sort of learn about a bigger firm and the machinations of that, but I wanted to move inside of a company at that point. I wanted to do sustainability, but I. There was no sort of, you know, there was no opportunity that was really a fit for me inside of a company. So I joined a video networking company that I knew was going to go public. They recruited me to do IR and communications and sort of the B2B advertising for them as a company called Big Band Networks. I learned a ton as part of that process. I'd done a couple of IPOs on the agency side, Etheros, which is a wifi chip maker and Adforce, which is a sort of early ad, ad serving, nobody will remember it. It became part of the CMGI portfolio. It was DoubleClick and AD Force were the main ad serving companies at that time. And DoubleClick, of course, was acquired by Google later to be their ad serving platform. But, gosh, long time ago. But learned a ton as part of all those processes that I was able to apply to clean tech. Later, after Big Ben's ipo, I, I started looking around again for clean tech opportunities and I met Peter and Lyndon Rive, the founders of SolarCity. They were really the first entrepreneurs that I had met that I felt really understood how to create a business model around sustainability. And this was sort of an epiphany that would stay with me for the rest of my career. That really the way to make sustainable impact was to create a product that was better, that was a great product in its category, that competed well in the ways that sort of customers cared about, but also happened to be sustainable. Right. If you led with sustainability, either from a marketing standpoint or sort of a product development standpoint, you could find an audience for that, you could find a market for that. But if you could build a better product, a better car, in Tesla's case, in SolarCity's case, it was, what if we could make clean power less expensive than dirty utility power? And that was the core value proposition that drove SolarCity. And that was really the first time I kind of had heard that from an entrepreneur in cleantech. A lot of my early experience in clean tech were people that were very passionate about the environment in a very admirable way, but didn't necessarily know how to turn that into a successful business.

Keith Zakheim 10:07

And Jonathan, we can talk more about that particular point later, but you talk about coming full circle. They really were ahead of their time in terms of really focusing and emphasizing product and economics and less about virtue.

Jonathan Bass 10:22

Right.

Keith Zakheim 10:22

So doing this because it's the right thing to do. And for better or for worse, I think that the movement over the first 20 years, there was a lot of the virtue and product and economics. And I think part of the backlash was about that this was being motivated by virtue as opposed to motivated by economics and better products. And I think now the climate community today is now kind of getting back to the message that you were talking about 15, 16 years ago, because that's really what's going to move the culture back to where it needs to be.

Jonathan Bass 10:56

Yeah, I think virtue is still at the heart of it, and virtue is still a powerful Motivator, I think for everyone who's involved in the space, I think it's just important to understand what's important to the broader market. Right. And that, that I think there's a, there's a broad range of attitudes about sustainability. There are obviously people that are very passionate about sustainability. There's a broad middle that I think understand at some level that, that sustainability, that clean energy is better than dirty energy, that, that, that, you know, we need to think about protecting the environment. But the level of sacrifice they're willing to do, you know, to make that possible, if they're will, are they willing to pay more for a product because it's sustainable? That's a smaller group of people, but they're not necessarily opposed to sustainability. And if you can give them another reason to adopt a product, if it's more affordable, if it's more feature rich in some way, if it's higher quality, then they will gladly do that and be proud of the sustainable impact they're making.

Keith Zakheim 12:03

Agreed. Okay, so you kind of had those experiences and then talk to me a little bit about Bellwether Coffee and why Bellwether Coffee.

Jonathan Bass 12:12

Yeah, so to finish the thread, I guess I stayed at SolarCity for nine years and through the acquisition by Tesla and then took a short break and then worked at Wing. So Google was spinning out, Google X was spinning out their drone delivery project as a sort of an Alphabet subsidiary. You know what they call an other bet, Waymo. And verily Waymo is probably the best known of those, but Wing also. And so I joined to kind of build a communications and marketing group for that subsidiary. And one of the interesting things about that product, again, it was a more efficient, more convenient way to deliver something that also happened to be a super efficient electric vehicle. Like a very sustainable way to deliver or transport something, probably the most sustainable way to transport an item. And it we had to start in Australia largely for regulatory reasons. And Australia is a, they're a very discerning group of coffee consumers. They love coffee. They're very particular about it. And one of the most popular items we delivered was coffee because we could deliver the drone traveled 60 to 90 miles per hour or 60 to 70 miles per hour. It, it we, we could create a latte or cappuccino and it was, the art was intact when it arrived, it was still hot. Right. So, you know, Uber was not going to throw that.

Keith Zakheim 13:38

So you were delivering actual cups of coffee. I assumed it was like, you know, coffee grind, something like that.

Jonathan Bass 13:46

No, we were delivering, we delivered meals we could deliver, you could deliver a whole chicken. You know, the drone at that time, I think it can carry a little bit more now, but it could carry around three, three and a half pounds.

Keith Zakheim 13:58

But that smoothly that a coffee. Because, I mean, when I go through the Starbucks drive through, they have problems getting that to me without spilling. So that's pretty amazing that a drone can do it.

Jonathan Bass 14:09

Exactly. We designed a little enclosure and the drone traveled very, very quickly. The typical flight time was probably 60 to 90 seconds. And so the barista would make the, the coffee and it would arrive pretty much in the state that it, it departed. So it was, it was a, you know, it was particularly powerful for that. I mean, a lot of other, you know, great use cases, medical use cases, other use cases for that technology. But, but coffee was the one that was particularly interesting to me and very popular. Yeah. Especially with parents with young kids. Right. You, you would, you would order your coffee, you would, you would, you know, tend to your toddler and then the coffee would arrive on the porch, you go out, get the coffee and, you know, continue your day.

Keith Zakheim 14:53

Maybe it would deliver Benadryl as well for your young kids along with the coffee.

Jonathan Bass 14:58

Absolutely. But I learned a ton about coffee as part of that. I've always been really interested in food and wine and, and, and coffee. Learned a ton about coffee as part of that. After Google, I, I took another break. I was looking around and I met the founder of, of, of Bellwether, Ricardo Lopez, also introduced by, you know, Lyndon and Peter Rive, who are investors in Bellwether. And I talked to him. I was like, oh, this is an interesting electric coffee roaster. I didn't know a lot about, about coffee roasting at that time, but, but got, got interested in it, realized it is a very dirty process, coffee roasting. It throws us a lot of smoke, volatile organic compounds. And there's typical, in a typical coffee roasting setup, you have vents and ducts. You know, you're piping the exhaust and smoke out. You have something called an afterburner. So a lot of coffee roasting is natural gas powered, but the majority of the natural gas is used in this afterburner process where they essentially incinerate the volatile organic compounds in the smoke coming out of the roaster. So Bellwether designed an electric roaster that it was electric, it was highly energy efficient, but it also captured, it's a closed loop system that captured all that smoke and exhaust and volatile organic compounds. So you need no vents, no ducts, no afterburner. And it was an Incredibly sort of environmentally sensitive process, but also very convenient. So we call it the shop roaster. You can put it in a cafe right next to the espresso machine, plug it in and use it and have freshly roasted coffee right in the cafe. So it reduces the carbon footprint of coffee roasting by about 87%. But it's also a great coffee roaster. What really struck me, the CEO gave me some Mexican coffee. It's from a specific farm called Sierra Azul. And I, I had not. I loved coffee. I tried coffee from all over the world. I never loved Mexican coffee. It often had this maple syrup quality that I felt that almost seemed artificial. But the Bellwether version was absolutely delicious. And I said, here's a product that, okay, yes, it's got a very powerful environmental benefit, sustainable benefit, but it also makes great coffee. And it also is much easier to install and implement and use.

Keith Zakheim 17:21

And that gets back to us, Jonathan, to what you talking about before. It's like, product has to be great, economics have to work. And maybe we can, we can pivot a little bit into, you know, the age of adoption question here. And so I just want to make, I'm going to frame the question, then of course I'll ask it. But ultimately, the mission, right, is to enable any business to both sustainably source, which I want to talk about as well, and roast its own coffee by replacing those fossil fuel roasting with an electric solution. It's also, I think your customer base has grown pretty quickly. You're in 12 countries right now. And in addition to all the great things that Bellwether coffee can do and the electric roaster can do for coffee and for businesses, you have a real commitment to farmer equity. That's like 80% of the world's coffee farmers live below the poverty line. And you have a commitment or you're working towards ending that cycle of coffee poverty and through something called living income pricing. So I want to hear all about that and I also want to hear a little bit about coffee and climate and why this conversation matters when there are so many conversations out there. So with that framework, I'm going to ask you, Jonathan, the question that I ask all my guests, which I know you've been preparing for your whole life, Jonathan, what is your age of adoption story?

Jonathan Bass 18:43

So the age of adoption story for Bellwether, it's a combination of dramatically reducing the carbon footprint of coffee roasting, but also creating a very powerful economic value proposition. Bellwether cuts the, the cost of, of coffee, basically the creation of the coffee product for the cafe cuts the coffee cost in half. So typically a cafe will pay anywhere from, from 12 to $15 a pound for roasted arabica specialty coffee. We, we offer the cafe the same unroasted coffee beans for, you know, 5 to 6.50 a pound. And then they, they purchase the roaster, roast the coffee themselves, they're cutting their coffee costs in half. The roaster essentially pays for itself in three to six months in most cases. And from then you're just, you're just adding on margin. Right? So coffee shops, you know, coffee retail in general is a fairly low margin business. So the ability to add, you know, thousands a month in many cases to your margin is a very powerful value proposition.

Keith Zakheim 19:55

Now, low margin business, not to interrupt, but I feel like I'm paying $5 for a cup of coffee every day. So I don't know, those margins seem pretty good. But let's not go there. Keep going Jonathan.

Jonathan Bass 20:07

That's a fair point. And there are a lot of different points in that value chain. So you brought up the farmers. So one of the things that Bellwether does, and we have a fantastic coffee buyer coffee team led by a Gabe Boscana and, and Greg Dawson, you know, veterans of intelligentsia, ritual Pete's, you know, some of the biggest coffee names and they have sourced, they go around the world and work directly with farmers. You know, pay those farmers a living wage for their crop. We then make that available to our, to our roaster customers at a very affordable price. Typically there, there are aggregators and, and sort of large coffee buyers buying up, driving down the prices for the farmers. So they're driving the farmer prices down very low, marking the cost of those beans up and then selling them to roasters or cafes. We're making that crop available, giving a living wage to the farmer and then giving a very affordable price for the unroasted coffee directly to the cafe. And so taking a lot of that margin, giving it back to the farmer, giving it back to the cafe. Now whether the cafe charges you three, four or five dollars, that, that's up to them. But, but our goal is to, to give some of that money back to the cafe. Give, give some of that money back to the farmer and then do it in a way that it's a very, very sustainable process. So like giving them a roaster that reduces the carbon footprint of coffee. Roasting 87 to 90% eliminates, you know, 99.9% of the emissions, you know, from, from that process. So that, that essentially is our age of adoption. Story, we're making it far more affordable for. For cafes to roast coffee, give. Giving the farmers a living wage for. For the. For the. For the coffee beans that they're growing and in the process reducing the carbon footprint of coffee roasting dramatically 87 to 90%.

Keith Zakheim 22:07

Well, that's a great story and an inspiring one, so thank you for sharing that. And I'll just throw out one more question before we end the episode. And it relates to comms and storytelling in this space. And one of the things that our industry, as storytellers, we've been concerned about is greenwashing. So companies that are telling climate and sustainability stories, or were, let's say, Pre January of 2026. And now, of course, we're kind of getting to, for some companies, green hushing. But on the greenwashing side, either exaggerating climate and sustainability initiatives and goals, maybe in some cases being really disingenuous, but you've again worked in this space, worked as a storyteller for multiple companies in multiple industries. Maybe give me your perspective as somebody who's always been an honest storyteller and about greenwashing and what that looks like and how we can be avoiding it and have our receptors up to make sure we're aware of it.

Jonathan Bass 23:12

Well, I'm sure I won't be the first or the tenth or hundredth person to say this, but I think greenwashing is almost counterproductive because you really want to focus on what's important to the customer. Right. In our case, what's important to our customers is economics. You know, the cost they're paying, the margin that they're generating for their business convenience, you know, how easy is it to use the product quality, you know, the quality of the coffee that we produce really matters to their consumers. So you can almost take greenwashing off the table by focusing on what's important to the customer. And that's going to attract the largest market anyway. You know, your responsibility as a sort of someone who's passionate about sustainability is to create a product that's sustainable. And once you have a product that's sustainable, focus on what's most important to the customer. And in the process of telling the story, solar was easy because the environmental benefits of solar were inherently accepted by the marketplace. So solar companies, I think one of SolarCity's innovations was really not talking about the environmental benefit, wasn't because the employees of SolarCity were very much united behind that movement. They were very passionate about sustainability. But we talked about affordability because that's what mattered to the customer. And at the end of the day, the more people that adopt solar energy, the more people that adopt electric coffee roasting, that's more sustainable, the greater impact we're going to have. And that's really what matters at the end of the day. So you can almost take greenwashing off the table by focusing what's important to the majority of your customer base.

Keith Zakheim 24:56

Jonathan, thank you. And that's not an answer that I've heard a hundred times, so appreciate it. Jonathan, appreciate you joining us on the Age of Adoption podcast. If people want more information about Bellwether Coffee, what's the best way to do that?

Jonathan Bass 25:10

Bellwether Coffee.com makes sense.

Keith Zakheim 25:13

All right, fantastic. Well, Jonathan, thanks again and look forward to connecting again soon.

Jonathan Bass 25:19

Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

Keith Zakheim 25:22

The Age of adoption podcast features CEOs, investors, entrepreneurs and policymakers sharing their climate and sustainability business transformation stories. Episodes can be found on your favorite podcast apps, including itunes and Spotify. The Age of Adoption Podcast is brought to you by Antenna Group. Antenna is the home of conscious brands. We partner with companies that don't wait for change to happen. These brands shape the future, are awake and already moving, unsure if you are a conscious brand or even if you are one, whether you are positioned as one, Please visit our website at www.antennagroup.com and take the Conscious Compass Assessment, a groundbreaking tool tool that enables enterprises to assess their brand against the eight traits of brand consciousness. At Antenna, we partner with companies big and small, from growth Stage to Fortune. 100, to tell their climate and sustainability stories. So once again, if you're interested in joining the conscious brand movement and learning more about Antenna Group, please check out our website at www.antennagroup.com. ping us on LinkedIn and make sure to visit the Conscious Compass.

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