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MILNOR, N.D. — Many farmers and ranchers start their days off with a hot cup of joe before climbing in the tractor or tending to newborn calves. That cup of caffeine may be the only piece of solace and silence until they take off their boots and climb into bed long after the sun goes down.
Three North Dakotan men wanted to enhance that coffee drinking experience for the typical Midwestern coffee drinker and decided to sell premium roasted quality right in rural America.
The trio — one of whom is himself a farmer — created Dakota Dirt Coffee, offering only the finest cup of dirt to those who work in it all day long.
A new venture
Landon Mund, Wyatt Mund and Beau Goolsbey all grew up in Milnor, North Dakota. The two brothers and Goolsby formed a lifelong bond that stretched into adulthood. The threesome was always looking for something new and exciting to do and had wanted to start a business together for some time; they just didn’t know what. That was, until they decided to try their hands at a coffee roasting business.
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“We wanted to start a business and do something with our spare time,” Landon Mund said. “We ultimately landed on coffee because we all drink coffee quite a bit.”
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Landon’s basement became the place where the group would first attempt roasting their own coffee. They tried a variety of roasts to see which they preferred.
“Everything was a learning process for us, a lot of trial and error,” Goolsbey said.
The trio then set their sights on building a location to roast their java. They built a roasting facility in their hometown of Milnor. They use the back half of the building to roast, process and pack their coffee. The front will be used as a coffee drive-through and a place where customers can enjoy their cups of coffee in the future. It was important for them to offer a fun coffee drinking experience in their rural community.
“What’s lacking in small towns is things to do. That’s one of the big things in the area that we want to serve our community in, is give somebody something to come out and keep busy doing on the weekends,” Goolsbey said.
A new kind of bean
Landon Mund is no stranger to beans, as he farms both soybeans and corn in the area. However, coffee beans were a whole new territory for him.
“For me, as a farmer, it is really cool to see those similarities. Working with a specific commodity, on our farm we farm corn and soybeans, and they are a lot of similarities," he said. "We’re bringing in a product that farmers have planted and harvested and brought to market.”
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Dakota Dirt Coffee gets their beans from all over the world, and they have even visited a coffee bean farm in Costa Rica. They only purchase and import premium beans as they want their product to be the very best.
They tried to capture the essence of the Midwest with their product, naming their blends Frozen Tundra, Flatlander, Buck Fever, Kickin’ Up Dust and other names that pay tribute to the region.
“We really wanted to be Midwest based and put a lot of focus into the hard workers of not only rural America, but the Midwest in general,” Landon Mund said.
Dakota Dirt Coffee has a strong media presence, truly giving their customers an inside look as to what the company is all about. The majority of their sales right now are through an e-commerce website. However they do sell in select retailers across the region. While their brand and product are Midwestern focused, they have sold bags of their premium coffee blends to all 50 states.
Their Midwestern charm has even been noticed by Tractor Supply Company, which will begin selling Dakota Dirt Coffee in their stores in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana in early November.
“It’s honestly the perfect retail partner for us. We don’t do a lot of retail partnerships, but Tractor Supply is our core demographic," Wyatt Mund said. "I mean, we’re all about small town America, and that’s kind of what our coffee is. If you take a look at the bag it's positioned against a Midwest attitude.”
