The Founder's Story

Where Coffee and Mission Meet

I never really set out to start a coffee company, and in many ways, the story of Crossroads Coffee Traders began long before there was a website, a coffee bag, a logo, or even an idea that someday coffee would become part of what God was doing in my life.

My faith in Jesus Christ has shaped the direction of my life for many years, and for more than two decades I have had the privilege of serving in missions and ministry in communities around the world, walking dusty roads and crowded city streets, worshiping in churches with dirt floors and unfinished roofs, sitting with pastors and missionaries, praying with families, sharing the Gospel, and meeting people whose lives and faith have left a lasting impression on me. Along the way, I have witnessed tremendous poverty and tremendous need, but I have also witnessed extraordinary faith, generosity, perseverance, and hope, often in places where people possessed far less materially than most of us could imagine.

Those experiences changed the way I look at the world, because when you sit across from someone in their home, worship beside them in their church, hear their story, hold their hand as you pray together, or watch a pastor faithfully serve a community with very few resources, missions stop being something you read about and become deeply personal. Over the years, I began to understand that some of the greatest work in the world is being accomplished by ordinary people who are simply willing to use whatever God has placed in their hands, and I found myself wondering more and more what else I could place in His hands to help fuel that work.

Somewhere along that journey, a question began taking shape in my heart: What if a business could be built with mission woven into its very purpose, rather than generosity simply being something added to the business after everything else was done?

That question eventually became Crossroads Coffee Traders.

Why Coffee?

Coffee made sense because it is something people already enjoy every day and in almost every part of the world, bringing people together around kitchen tables, across desks, in churches, cafés, offices, homes, and countless other places where conversations begin and relationships grow. There is something wonderfully ordinary about sharing a cup of coffee, and perhaps that is exactly what attracted me to the idea, because I have learned through the years that God often uses very ordinary things to accomplish things far greater than we could have imagined.

I began thinking about the millions of cups of coffee people drink every morning and wondering what might happen if even a small part of that everyday spending could be redirected toward something with eternal and humanitarian significance. Instead of asking people to add one more thing to their lives, what if something they were already purchasing could become part of helping a ministry serve a family, protecting someone who is vulnerable, strengthening a community, equipping a leader, sharing the Gospel, or simply bringing hope to someone who desperately needs it?

That was when coffee became more than a product to me; it became a vehicle.

From the beginning, however, I knew that having a meaningful mission would never excuse us from offering an excellent product, because I don’t want anyone purchasing from Crossroads Coffee Traders simply because they feel obligated to support a cause. I want people to open the bag, brew a cup, genuinely enjoy what they are drinking, and then have the added satisfaction of knowing that something they would have purchased anyway is now connected to something larger than themselves.

That is why Crossroads Coffee Traders is committed to quality specialty coffee, professional roasting relationships, freshness, transparency, and a growing selection of coffees and teas that people can enjoy and confidently share with others. The coffee needs to be worthy of the mission behind it, while the mission gives the coffee a purpose that reaches far beyond the cup.

In the end, the cup was never the point; the hope it could carry was.

Choosing the Ministries We Support

One of the responsibilities I take most seriously at Crossroads Coffee Traders is determining which ministries and organizations we support, because I never want our mission partners to become a collection of logos placed on a website simply to make the company appear charitable. I want to know what these organizations stand for, understand the work they are doing, and whenever possible develop genuine relationships that allow Crossroads Coffee Traders and our customers to see the people and communities behind the organizations we support.

After more than two decades of involvement in missions, this part of Crossroads Coffee Traders is deeply personal to me because I have seen the faces behind the statistics. I have sat with pastors and ministry leaders, walked through communities, listened to people describe the challenges they face, and witnessed firsthand what can happen when faithful people are given encouragement, resources, and an opportunity to continue the work God has called them to do.

Our ministry partners may serve in different ways and in different parts of the world, but we look for organizations whose work reflects the values at the heart of Crossroads Coffee Traders and whose impact can be seen in the lives of the people and communities they serve. Some may protect vulnerable women and children, others may serve families, provide humanitarian assistance, strengthen communities, equip leaders, or share the Gospel, but behind every organization are real people, and behind every statistic is a story that matters.

That is also why I want Crossroads Coffee Traders to do more than simply say that we “give back.” As we grow, I want our customers to be able to see where the money went, which ministry received it, what it helped accomplish, and, whenever possible, the lives and communities affected through that partnership. If you choose to spend your money with Crossroads Coffee Traders because you believe in what we are doing, then I believe you deserve to see the impact you helped make possible.

My Role at Crossroads Coffee Traders

Crossroads Coffee Traders is not a company I created and then handed off to someone else to operate behind the scenes; I remain personally involved in shaping the brand, developing our products, building and evaluating ministry partnerships, telling the stories behind our impact, communicating with our roasting and fulfillment partners, and determining where this company goes next.

At the same time, one of the values I have wanted Crossroads Coffee Traders to maintain from the beginning is transparency, which means being clear about what we do and what we do not do. We do not own coffee farms or operate our own commercial roasting facility, and I am certainly not standing behind a roasting machine every morning pretending that I personally roasted the bag arriving at your door. Instead, we work with experienced specialty coffee roasting and fulfillment partners who bring their expertise to that part of the process, allowing Crossroads Coffee Traders to offer professionally roasted coffee that is prepared fresh and shipped directly to our customers.

My role is to steward the larger vision and make sure that, as Crossroads Coffee Traders grows, we never lose sight of why it was created in the first place. I want Crossroads Coffee Traders to be known for excellent coffee, honest business practices, meaningful relationships, genuine ministry partnerships, and measurable impact, because I believe all of those things belong together.

More Than a Coffee Company

When someone orders a bag of coffee or tea from Crossroads Coffee Traders, my first hope is very simple: I want them to enjoy it. I want that coffee to become part of the rhythm of their life, whether it is brewed early in the morning before anyone else in the house is awake, shared around a table with family or friends, poured before heading out the door for work, enjoyed during a Bible study or conversation, or simply sitting beside them during a few quiet moments in the middle of a busy day.

But somewhere in that ordinary moment, I also hope they remember that their cup has become connected to a much larger story, because somewhere else a ministry is serving, a pastor is faithfully leading, a family is being helped, a vulnerable person is being protected, a community is being strengthened, or someone is hearing a message of hope.

That connection between the ordinary and the extraordinary is really what Crossroads Coffee Traders has become for me.

Looking back over more than two decades of missions and ministry, I can see how experiences that once seemed completely unrelated were quietly shaping the vision that would eventually become Crossroads Coffee Traders. The countries, the churches, the pastors, the missionaries, the families, the conversations, the prayers, and the stories I carried home with me all helped teach me that we do not have to wait until we possess something enormous before we can make a difference; sometimes we simply need to look at what God has already placed in our hands and ask how it might be used for something greater.

For Crossroads Coffee Traders, one of those things happens to be a cup of coffee.

There is still a great deal of this story left to write, and I believe there are more ministries to encourage, more communities to impact, more relationships to build, and more stories from around the world that deserve to be told. My hope is that as Crossroads Coffee Traders grows, the company never becomes so large or polished that we forget the individual people behind those stories, because they are ultimately why this business exists.

So when you brew your next cup of coffee from Crossroads Coffee Traders, I hope you enjoy every sip, but I also hope you remember that you are participating in something that reaches beyond what is in your mug.

Together, we are fueling hope, one cup at a time.

Tony Geist
Founder, Crossroads Coffee Traders