When entrepreneur and rapper Bartholomew Jones’s interest in coffee first took root, he quickly began to realize something that would change the trajectory of both his life and future business: he was one of the only Black people in the coffee industry. So, Jones began to do some major research — digging into the history of coffee production and the reasons why his community was so vastly underrepresented there.
What he discovered was the colonization of the coffee bean, a crop whose modern use had originated in Ethiopia. He learned how Africans were then excluded from both the industry and the wealth it ultimately brought to its major players. Now, Jones is on a mission to change all that with one cup of CxffeeBlack at a time. The x in the company’s name, by the way, happens to represent that missing link in the coffee industry.
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