Angela Yee is finest often known as a co-host on the globally syndicated radio present “The Breakfast Membership” alongside Charlamagne Tha God and DJ Envy. Nonetheless, outdoors of being a 20-year radio veteran and media maven, Yee is a serial entrepreneur who’s taking the espresso trade by storm.
Along with “The Breakfast Membership,” the 42-year-old persona hosts a TV present on Fox Soul and a long-running podcast known as Lip Service. Plus, she owns a juice bar in Brooklyn, N.Y., together with a hair retailer in Detroit. She’s additionally an actual property investor and the founding father of a non-profit literacy and wellness program. On high of that, the Brooklyn native ventured into the espresso trade final yr launching a specialty espresso model known as Espresso Uplifts Individuals (CUP). Her concept for the corporate sparked after assembly with the founders of Brooklyn Roast amid the pandemic. By analysis, she then found that discriminatory practices have marginalized individuals of coloration in international locations the place espresso beans are harvested.
“Espresso beans come from all these totally different locations [like] Ethiopia, Peru, Colombia, Mexico, Guyana, Jamaica,” Yee instructed BLACK ENTERPRISE. “I do really feel prefer it’s one thing that’s actually ours, however we don’t get to partake within the fruits of that labor as a lot.”
Yee and her two enterprise companions, Tony Forte and LaRon Batchelor, created CUP to deliver inclusiveness and variety to each side of the espresso enterprise and provide chain. Not solely have they created a espresso firm with honest commerce choices, however CUP in the end goals to shift the complete trade to turn into extra equitable, particularly for farmers of coloration.
“The sum of money that folks make in espresso, I feel, has been unfair for thus lengthy. So, now it’s time to make it possible for the people who find themselves truly those which might be in these international locations are those which might be benefiting,” says the previous hip hop advertising govt.
To create extra of a stability, CUP is intentional on the place their beans are sourced. Yee can also be empowering native minority entrepreneurs by contracting all Black-owned companies to construct CUP’s brick-and-mortar store, which is slated to open within the Bedstuy space of Brooklyn in August.
“We’re utilizing all Black-owned companies within the means of constructing that house out,” she says. From the inside designer to the architect to engineers to electricians, everybody concerned within the improvement of the store is Black.
CUP is at the moment distributed in 10 Rouses supermarkets and shall be bought in different main retailers subsequent month, together with 11 Entire Meals round New York Metropolis and 16 Cease & Store shops. Moreover, shoppers also can discover CUP’s six preliminary taste choices in regional specialty high quality grocers like Brooklyn Fare and Union Market.
CUP is simply the newest addition to Yee’s rising portfolio of companies. Even along with her contract at iHeartRadio, she stresses the significance of producing a number of streams of earnings.
“It’s a must to have an identification outdoors of your nine-to-five. So, that’s at all times been actually essential for me to be my very own individual outdoors of simply being one of many members of ‘The Breakfast Membership,’” she says.
“I even have to consider my future as a result of it radio just isn’t endlessly,” she continued. “I feel forward. I’m not fascinated with how can I get a test in the present day; I’m fascinated with how am I investing my cash proper now, in order that 5 years from now [or] 10 years from now you get to see the positive aspects that you simply’ve made out of these investments.”
“I’m simply attempting to make it possible for I’m diversifying myself in ways in which additionally make sense and is genuine to me,” she added. “Having a juice press whose firm is genuine to me. I really feel just like the espresso firm is, I really feel just like the hair retailer is. So, I’m attempting to do issues that make sense. I’m not into simply earning money for the sake of earning money.”
Be taught extra about Angela Yee’s line of pressed juices, Brooklyn-based juice bar, and Espresso Uplifts Individuals within the newest episode of The New Norm With Selena Hill beneath.
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