For Saint Louis University senior Firaol Ahmed, coffee isn’t merely a means to jumpstart his day. Nor is it a fleeting comfort. The drink—and the humble bean from which it is made—offers a pathway to prosperity.
“For me and a lot of other Ethiopians, and Africans in general, coffee is an opportunity to live a better life,” Ahmed says.
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That’s why the native Ethiopian, who founded St. Louis-based Moii Coffee in 2023, is reimagining how his brand can reach people—particularly the farmers at the point of origin. In recent weeks, Ahmed and business partner Andy Irakoze orchestrated a major pivot for Moii Coffee. The brand no longer roasts beans and sells them to consumers. Instead, Moii has repositioned itself as a supply chain and logistics firm that offers an online platform where coffee farmers in Ethiopia can connect with North American roasters interested in sourcing their beans.
Moii seeks to both humanize the farmers and give them the selling power. Ahmed’s family in Ethiopia has been in the coffee business for generations, giving him an up-close understanding of the challenges farmers face. Although global coffee demand is ample enough to benefit everyone in the supply chain, farmers in Africa, South America, and elsewhere often see little of the profits. Ahmed says many of the roasters with whom he has interacted in the past two years have expressed a desire to be better connected with farmers. Moii’s platform allows roasters to learn the story of the beans—and the people at the source—while also allowing farmers to better control their own prices.
The idea to pivot from marketing his own beans to helping farmers at the source came to Ahmed this past summer. As part of SLU’s New Venture Accelerator, Ahmed was tasked with deconstructing his company and rebuilding it to account for consumer desires. The exercise allowed him to zoom out from the daily challenge of selling bagged coffee and better understand some of the challenges his partners face on the sourcing and marketing sides of the industry.
“I realized that the problems that farmers in Ethiopia face are the same problems that farmers in Colombia are facing, and the same problems facing farmers in Guatemala, Hawaii, Indonesia, and everywhere else in the world where coffee is produced,” Ahmed says. “Everyone is facing the same problems. I figured that, to make a bigger impact, we needed to make a bolder move. It’s riskier, but the payoff could be better in creating a more equal industry.”
Ahmed knew that making such a bold move would require infrastructure. So he recruited Irakoze, who has a background in software engineering, to build a platform that farmers and roasters alike could use to learn more about each other. Recognizing that many of the farmers they want to reach are short on time, Irakoze designed the platform with simplicity in mind.
“We want it to be something that’s easy to use,” Irakoze says.
Moii currently has eight farmers onboarded to the platform. Ahmed flew home to Ethiopia last week to network and pitch more farmers on the possibilities his platform presents. Although Moii is focused only on farmers in Ethiopia at the moment, Ahmed and Irakoze would like to soon expand into Burundi—Irakoze’s native country.
“Our goal,” Ahmed says, “is to be in every coffee producing country in the world.”
