Brewed in Tarrant: A husband-and-wife cold brew business hopes to disrupt the coffee industry

Editor’s noteProduced in Tarrant is an occasional question and answer series on small businesses started in Tarrant County. Enter your business here.

HustleBlendz

WHO? Patrice and Tweety Angwenyi are the founders and owners of HustleBlendz.

when is it The couple married in 2010. In 2019, they started the business roasting coffee in a one-bedroom house. They opened a brick and mortar storefront in January 2022.

where is it? 1201 Evans Ave., No. 101, Fort Worth.

what A company that specializes in all things cold brew.

Contact:

www.hustleblendz.com

IG: www.instagram.com/hustleblendz

FB: www.facebook.com/hustleblendz

Patrice and Tweety Angwenyi, the faces behind HustleBlendzHe spoke with The Fort Worth Report about the transition from an online business to a brick-and-mortar one and the transition to coffee culture in Fort Worth.

This interview has been edited for clarity and grammar.

Sadek: Tell me about HustleBlendz. How did it happen?

TweetyHustleBlendz started with my husband. She had an idea. One day there was a teacher coming out of school and she called me. HustleBlendz said… I was like, ‘That’s cool. What a lovely name.’ And she said, ‘No, we’re going to create a coffee shop called Hustleblendz because we’re going to merge two different brands.’

Everyone always has a side hustle. A nurse is not always a nurse. Nurse has another side hustle. A teacher always has another side hustle. But we want to create a community, a place where you can come together and share coffee because a lot of people come together for a conversation – meetings in a coffee shop. So she had that idea and decided to do more online business. We started roasting and selling our coffee online on Amazon. And then we switched to cold cooking. We started selling our cold brew coffee online and that was enough to start our brick and mortar.

Patrice: So the name HustleBlendz came to me but we were both neck deep. Tweety taught himself how to roast coffee, so at home, we brew coffee and try different blends and different origins and just grow the culture of HustleBlendz or what HustleBlendz is. All of us had aspirations of one day owning our own business and honestly, just running around with ideas. That was our biggest thing.

Hustle stands for ‘Help us see the light everywhere’. Our whole thing is speeding up your wheels and spinning and going crazy and running into walls all the time, we’re not trying to push the narrative. We really want to inspire people to pursue that thing, whatever that thing is. Don’t let another year go by or another decade go by and you have all these ‘shoulds, coulds’.

Sadek: Can you tell me a little more about what it’s like to hold this cool place online so far? I love the idea of ​​a coffee shop in shipping containers like Connex.

Patrice: Online is a completely different experience. We were both employed full-time at the time. The orders come in during the day and we’re like, ‘Oh, that’s great, you know? It sounds more passive. In person, it’s the whole experience.

For us online, it was very important to us to push the client back to read the script for what HustleBlendz stands for. And that was very effective because now some of the online customers have converted to physical customers. And now they’re like, ‘Hey, I was with you from the beginning. I remember this and I remember this and I remember this packaging and I remember this.’ It’s great to see people come in, too, in person.

Sadek: Tweety, you mentioned that your grandfather had a coffee and tea plantation back home in Kenya. Does this play a role in how you make your coffee blend?

Tweety: When I was a little boy, we used to go to coffee and tea plantations and pick tea, understand what tea leaves look like and plant the right plant that produces the coffee. That process was so difficult when I was a child that when I was growing up I used to say, ‘I don’t want to do anything with coffee or tea.’

It was a lot of work for these farmers to get the coffee beans here. So when I came here to America and saw that it was in other stores, I wanted to have a culture that represented that in this neighborhood so that people could see that we have African roots in our coffee stuff. Our menu was specially designed for our culture.

Patrice: There is one particular mixture and then we find, it is Bwana. It translates to boss in Swahili and everything about HustleBlendz translates to or is related to the culture of the boss.

SadekTell me more about your coffee menu. They don’t serve any popular coffee or espresso drinks.

Patrice: It’s a fair mix together. We are married, we have two children, but[HustleBlendz]is our first child. And many of the menu items fit our personality. I’m from this part of town and I’ve always had an old soul, a lot of old hip-hop music that always really resonated. Our Lucini Macchiato, that’s based on a Camp Lo song. Hola Hovito, that’s a Jay-Z song. The Southside double shot is a crossroad from this side of town. I remember when I first started dating a Kenyan dirtbag, Tweety, I always came to his parents’ house and they always had tea time.

SadekWhat was their reaction to your presentation of coffee and your presentation of coffee?

Tweety: It’s a great response because we’re a business and focused on cold brew. When it comes to drinks, everything is added with a cold brew or has a cold drink in it. And I believe people respond better because we are experts in what we do. We’re not trying to sell you the best match in town. We’re not trying to sell you the best espresso, we’re trying to sell you the best cold brew.

Patrice: Coffee culture is a thing here, but it’s completely made up. And when you realize that many thriving businesses here are making their own rules, you realize that I don’t have to bend to a format.

Tweety: We were disruptors in the coffee industry, I mean our non-traditionality made our customers fall in love with our selection of drinks that they couldn’t find anywhere else.

I was really big on coffee coming from Kenya and Tanzania. It comes from black and brown countries, but when it comes to America and these European countries, suddenly it’s Italian, suddenly it’s cappuccino… We don’t see many African-American coffee shops in Texas. Why are we the second only black coffee shop in Fort Worth?

Sadek: You run this coffee business with your two children. How do you manage?

Tweety: for me. It’s a legacy idea… our main focus is to one day hand this business over to our children. So the idea of ​​heritage, the idea of ​​building a generational thing, keeps us moving forward. First of all God. But the idea of ​​building that legacy, something to leave behind—I think it weighs heavily on our hearts.

PatriceWe also have a great community, a great support system.

Sadek: Anything else you’d like to share?

Tweety: I feel like he didn’t have a little bit of our big business opportunity going into the competition. We have 176 square feet of opportunity every day. I like to say that we may be in a container but we are not contained in it. We use our customer experience and passion for coffee to provide everyone with the best version of coffee we can. That was a game changer for us.

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