Brand Spotlight: Coffee Island Inc

This week we had the pleasure of learning the story behind a sister duo creating coffee variations for all coffee lovers. Get into this coffee brand giving you flavors from all around the world.

What I really love about what your brand offers is that it's not just coffee, not just freshly roasted coffee. So first, tell us about all that you offer here on Coffee Island. 

Okay, so first we offer freshly roasted coffee from light roast, medium roast to dark roast. We also offer flavored K cups that everyone seems to love right now. We offer various mugs and pretty soon I want to start offering some teas. Everyone's been asking about tea and hot chocolate and things like that but, right now, the coffee is definitely the focus. 

I'm a K Cup girl. I love it. So are you talking about the reusable ones or prefilled K cups that are already packed with the coffee? 

We do both. We sell reusable K cup pods. So, the freshly ground coffee, you can put it in reusable pods. And we do offer the actual K cup. The best flavor that is our best seller is Jamaican Me Crazy. It has flavors of Kahlua, caramel and vanilla, and everyone seems to love that one. 

Mm, that sounds so good. It's hard to find a really good flavor sometimes in these K cups. So, where do you source your coffee and what makes it so special? 

So, I work with a wholesaler that sources coffee from various countries. If you look at our freshly roasted coffee, you will see where each coffee comes from, whether it's Columbia or Ethiopia or Guatemala. It’s all labeled on where the coffee comes from, and it's normally small farms that the coffee beans come from.

Your sister is the other half of this brand. Tell us the brand story. How did two sisters decide to go into business together to start a coffee business? 

Honestly, it started because of Covid thinking about what I wanted to do as far as the business. I was drinking a cup of coffee and working one day and I was like, “What about coffee?” You know you couldn’t go to Starbucks anymore, You couldn’t go to Dunkin Donuts. You couldn’t go to any coffee shop. What if I wanted coffee delivered to me? So I can still feel like I'm sitting in a coffee shop, but in my home. And that's where I thought about the idea. I started doing research on it for a few months. And then, one day I'm talking to my sister about the idea and showing her all the stuff that I did, and she was like, “I love that idea. Like, what do I need to do to be a part of this?” So we talked about how we were going to set everything up and who does what. She's great in finance, so I was like, “you can deal with all the finances.” Take that off my plate. By trade, I'm great at creative marketing and things like that, so I created our website, the logo and started doing all the marketing stuff. And Coffee Island Inc. was born. 

Sounds like you're the coffee lover out of the two sisters.

Actually, we both are. She likes more hot coffee. I'm more of an iced coffee drinker. She's more of a hot coffee drinker, but we both are. People in our family are as well, like my mom. She has to have a cup of coffee every day or else her day doesn't go right. You know? And I have other family members that are the same. They need to have their coffee to make their day go smoothly. So that was also a part of it because I'm seeing all of these people around me that are loving coffee and, I wanted to say, “how can I bring that to them, but also bring our Caribbean flavor to it?”  

I love that. Because you know you really need coffee lovers to make good coffee. And so it's good to know that both of you and your family are in the business of drinking good coffee.