1989: How We Somehow Fell Face-First Into Humanity’s Ultimate Social Lubricant…

Starting a coffee business nowadays sounds like opening a TikTok account and posting three motivational quotes, but in 1989 it felt more like trying to build an espresso empire using emotional damage and a phone book.

After that completely unhinged day when Jaco and I met inside Ikea, right at the exact point where logic quietly packs its belongings and leaves without saying goodbye, my life permanently transformed into a flatpack disaster with missing instructions and we immediately started dating.

While going out together, we quickly started talking about what we wanted to do with our future and how we both secretly preferred becoming our own bosses.

Which, in 1989, was roughly the equivalent of announcing:
“We’re just popping over to renovate the moon tomorrow.”

Back then it was still fairly revolutionary for two barely-22-year-olds to think: maybe we don’t actually want to spend the rest of our lives voluntarily sitting in office jobs while our souls slowly stare out the window.

Nowadays every 2.5-year-old toddler already owns a multinational corporation and confidently lectures people forty years older than them without possessing even twenty-five minutes of actual expertise.

Ideas started forming quickly and I told Jaco about my Italian friends, a family who owned a coffee roasting company.

Which already sounded significantly more respectable than, for example, a factory producing fluorescent handbags for emotionally overwhelmed ants.

Jaco heard this and immediately decided this was the perfect moment to make our lives unnecessarily complicated.

And that’s how the idea was born to import Italian espresso coffee into the Netherlands and start selling it.

Without a plan.
Without experience.

And apparently also without a functioning fear response.

But absolutely WITH a level of confidence that, in hindsight, should probably have been medically examined.

Oh…
And with the logistical capabilities of a deeply confused goldfish.

A few weeks later I called my Italian friend to inform her about our grand and entirely unsupported plans.

Back then (1985) I spent every summer a couple of months in Italy and had gotten to know the family well.

My friend’s father had previously worked for another coffee roasting company before eventually starting his own business in 1975.

What began as a modest little operation slowly grew into a thriving family business.

During my very first visit to the roasting facility years earlier, they gave me a package of Manuel espresso coffee to take home.

Once home, I hung the empty package on my wall.

No idea why.

Because honestly, why hang posters of celebrities on your wall when you can decorate your bedroom with empty coffee bags instead?

In May of 1989, Jaco got a great job as a sales representative for environmentally friendly industrial water purification products and water treatment systems.

Which sort of sounds like getting your brain flushed clean.
Not with a toilet brush and chlorine, obviously, although honestly, that might still improve certain people, but with some kind of futuristic machine where you shove your head through an opening like a mildly concerned cow, get giant tubes attached to your ears and then three liters of cinnamon, pizza herbs, and environmentally responsible snail slime get violently blasted through your nervous system.

Sounds stable.
Sounds logical.
Sounds exactly like something completely normal people would do.

Despite this astonishingly purifying job, we were meanwhile obsessively trying to figure out how to become self-employed without eventually falling victim to a manager who used the word ‘team spirit’ like it was some legally required personality disorder.

At that point I didn’t have a job, which was actually entirely according to plan, because somebody obviously had to professionally coordinate the upcoming chaos.

So naturally I had all the time in the world to throw ourselves headfirst into an adventure no healthy Excel spreadsheet would ever emotionally recover from.

Of course that summer we went to Bibione in Italy, where I had been going ever since I was one and a half years old.

There we spoke extensively with two unbelievably passionate Italian coffee friends who had so much energy that even the coffee itself occasionally seemed exhausted.

Together we discussed how we were going to approach this adventure and what the possibilities were.

We couldn’t stop talking, thinking, planning and obsessing over it.

From that summer onward, everything revolved around Manuel espresso coffee:
the Italian life fuel that, in our minds, was destined to replace all existing Dutch swamp water.

To be continued…..