Roaster of the Year: Macro Category Winner 2023—Cafe Kreyol
By Emily Puro
For Joseph Stazonne, president and owner of Cafe Kreyol—Roast’s 2023 Macro Roaster of the Year—the winding road to coffee was one of deep personal reflection, an almost epic quest for purpose and redemption.
“Prior to coffee, I was pretty heavily involved in illegal drug trade and smuggling,” Stazzone says. “It’s not a beautiful story, but that’s just who I was at the time.” That path led Stazzone to prison, which ultimately led him to re-examine his life choices. “I decided I wanted to do something different,” he says. “I wanted to be an honest person.”
In 2010, while Stazzone was in prison, he saw the news about a devastating earthquake in Haiti. After he was released, the church he attended organized a relief trip to Haiti, so he signed up to participate. “It was a pretty standard week-long trip,” he says. “I didn’t feel very satisfied by it. We painted walls for a week. Everyone spent $1,000 to go down there, and it was a 15-person team, so that’s $15,000 that we spent to paint walls, and at the end we gave out old shoes.”
Not only did the work seem relatively trivial, he says, but when he met a local woman who had taken out a loan to purchase shoes to sell in her community, only to have the church group come in and give away shoes for free, he realized that group and others like it were doing more harm than good. Determined to make a real difference, and to never do anything that would take income away from locals, he flew back to Haiti a week later and started researching more effective and sustainable ways to help. The solution he landed on? Coffee.
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