Living Life By Design: Mary Allen Lindemann and the Future of Coffee

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I am Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching our video podcast Radio Maine, where we explore and celebrate creativity and the human spirit. We are sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery here in Portland, Maine, and one of our neighbors for a long time has been Coffee By Design co-founder and owner, Mary Allen Lindemann, who is here today to talk to me about the intersection between creativity, the human spirit, coffee and locally owned businesses, the past 30 years and the next 30 years for her organization. Thanks for coming in today.

Mary Allen Lindemann: Well, thanks for having me. The timing is perfect on this post snowstorm day, overlooking the islands and the island I came to here in Maine.

Lisa Belisle: That is absolutely right. So we happen to be taping in April. People who are watching or listening will see this after April, but strangely enough, we have had sort of the April Fools week of snowstorms. And you're right, as you're driving out here to be with us on Littlejohn, you're overlooking Chebeague Island. So let's start with that. Tell me about your connection to Chebeague Island and to Maine.

Mary Allen Lindemann: It's interesting. Here in Maine we always talk about whether you're a Mainer or from away, and I guess I would be away, but I was a summer person. My family came here in 1971. My dad worked for NBC and there were quite a few people from NBC who summered on Chebeague. So we came thinking it was just going to be one summer and it ended up being a purchase of a house, an old sea captain's house. And my family, my brother and I in particular, my sisters were a little bit older, but my brother and I really spending many summers and beyond on the island. There are these pivotal moments in your life, and that for me was one of them, living on an island in Maine.

Lisa Belisle: For those who don't know this, Chebeague is accessible only by ferry. So for your family coming from, you were from New York?

Mary Allen Lindemann: New York.

Lisa Belisle: New York originally, coming to a place where you couldn't drive there, you actually had to be there for the boat, get on the boat on its schedule and then go across to the island. That must've been quite a change.

Mary Allen Lindemann: The water was always important to my family. My dad was a big sailor, so we were used to the craziness of who would put five kids on a sailboat and go sailing. And I have many memories of my mother on the bow of the boat because my dad loved storms. Carl, you're going to kill the kids. So I was used to adventures. It wasn't that big of a stretch for us, but the idea of being one place and becoming part of a community, which has become very important to me, is the perceptions we have of one another and how do we live in a community when our upbringing, our points of view may be very different. So island living was very important for me.

Lisa Belisle: That gets us very nicely into a topic that I think is really pretty critical to you, and that is locally owned businesses, because you co-founded and have built over the last three decades a very important local business in Coffee By Design, and it's something that you're hoping to continue into the future for many, many years. Bring me back to that original point where you said, I would like to have a business in Maine and this is the focus of our business.

Mary Allen Lindemann: I think what's interesting is I never thought I'd be a business owner. My career path was very different. I was in marketing and advertising in the fashion industry, and I actually found an old cassette that will date me. Many years ago when I went to Europe for the first time, someone sent me to my first psychic, and I found the cassette and I talked about this vision I had of what my life was going to be. And he started laughing and said, you'll be a small business owner. And I said, oh, no, no, no, no, I will be this. And I listened to that now and think about why was I so opposed to it? Because it's everything that I was meant to be doing, the importance of being in a community. When Alan and I first met, we were in Portland and we had careers. He was and still has his license as a landscape architect and environmental planner. I was working in the fashion industry and in retail here in Portland, and we really could tell when the recession hit very strong in the late eighties that opportunities were starting to dry up. And if we wanted a future as young people, we needed to leave. It actually was a coin toss. We looked at different places that had stronger economies in the US and we flipped a coin. It was Seattle or San Francisco. The coin luckily landed on Seattle, a place we had never been, and I say lucky because number one, the coffee industry, the specialty coffee industry and Starbucks, were still very new. It was 1989. But also the week we moved to Seattle, San Francisco had an earthquake, a fairly significant one. So our path would've been very different, but we did land in Seattle and I was marketing specialist in charge of new business for an advertising agency and was asked to research what was starting to become this growing vibrant industry known as specialty coffee. So it would be my research, and Alan, being interested in land usage, would review about coffee, and we started looking at culture. The decision to come back to Maine was coming back and forth and seeing that our local economy was not bouncing back, a 40% vacancy rate downtown. I have to say that we're opening a business during a recession. Nothing prepares you for the pandemic, but I pulled books off my bookshelf that I read when we were first opening, of what do you do when there's a 40% vacancy rate and how do you bring your local economy back? And it is locally owned business. So we did open Coffee By Design in 1994, and we're very lucky that we had a community of other local businesses around us. We were known as the Blighted Block. I didn't know that until someone was talking about the block in a community meeting and kept referring to the blighted block. And I realized it was our block. But it was a great group of local businesses. I bought my first pair of Doc Martens across the street, and we kept an eye and really built each other, and could show that local communities are here and that no one knows how to bring a downtown back better than local owners. So we launched and we had a projection to have 25 customers a day, and we opened our doors and the State Theatre had just been renovated and Bob Dylan decided to tour and tickets went for sale. I owe him a debt of gratitude, a letter before he passes on, because 250 people came through our door the first day. We don't remember the first day.

Lisa Belisle: That's pretty incredible. That intersection of fate and circumstance again in your situation, that you would have that many people coming through to just hit the ground running.

Mary Allen Lindemann: I think again, it's how people's perception, and people really felt our downtown had gone away and that our arts community wasn't as vibrant as it was. And we called the company Coffee By Design for a reason. It had to do with coffee unique, one of a kind made just for you, but it also had to do with the arts community. And we believe that the arts are of vital importance to us as human beings. The arts express who we are, they help us understand one another better in ways that I feel are non-threatening and essential and an entryway, if you will. So we had art shows at a time when galleries had closed. There was no place for people to show. And so I was really privileged to have people like David Cedrone and Greg Day and some people who still are incredible artists, who really showed their work with us, and we were able to build a community together, offering a great cup of coffee and a whole lot more.

Lisa Belisle: I always loved the David Cedrone pieces that were on your walls in particular. Just the figures and the imagination involved and the work that he did. For me, that was always his biggest selling point, going in for my white mocha latte.

Mary Allen Lindemann: It's interesting, the huge canvas at Congress Street. I hear so many stories about what that piece is all about. Staff now, I forget, I have to tell you who was in that piece, because they'll say, oh, it was customers after we opened, and it wasn't at all. David was a very good friend, and we gave him a bag of photographs and said, paint the road to opening Coffee By Design. So it's our family friends, the U-Haul moving back east, musicians who are important to us, all in that piece. And the biggest question I received recently, because we did close the Congress Street location last October, but I'm really pleased to announce it's reopening this month under a wholesale account's name, Model T Coffee. I just knew that that store had a new life in it, and maybe it was time to pass on to someone else. But the Cedrone painting, when we closed in October, the two most often questions, well, three, were first of all, are you going to reopen, then what happens to the Cedrone piece, and then the absolutely stunning Jeff McCree mosaic mural out front. And the Cedrone is now at Diamond Street and will be placed in a place of honor to honor the 30 years, and then the mosaic tile work is coming also. We're waiting until the weather's a little better to remove it properly.

Lisa Belisle: How many stores do you now have, and describe to me the scope of the business, which is certainly much bigger than when you started 30 years ago?

Mary Allen Lindemann: It's much bigger, but I think that we're smaller in some ways than people perceive. Before pandemic, we had five locations, and like many overnight things changed. We went from 75 staff to 25 overnight. We were viewed as an essential business and furloughed 50 people and really were determined to keep everybody happy, healthy and safe as you could. So we kept people on health insurance until we all knew what we were into here, but we went from five stores and we're down to two right now. The bigger part of the company that people didn't realize was the wholesale business and the online sales. And I love retail. I never want to have zero retail presence, but really maintaining retail is challenging, and making sure, are we representing the communities that our coffee is served in? I know the coffee will do well, but what should that retail location look like? What should the staff, who do you hire, how does that all work? I think having people who actually live in a community, coffee is very personal, whether it's in a restaurant or in a store, having people who actually know their community. So how it should be presented is important. So we have our flagship store at Diamond Street, which is where we also roast our coffee, and we have training facilities there for our wholesale accounts and our own staff. And then we have our India Street location. But it's a different model, and I tell people it's not good or bad. During pandemic, we all had to dig deep and say, what is core to your company? To me, we talk about our core values a lot, and it's about coffee changes lives, and it's a matter of, do you change them in good ways, or do we look the other way and it changes in a bad way. We're choosing to stay true to, we can make a difference in a really impactful positive way locally and globally.

Lisa Belisle: That's going to get us into a topic that I'd like to talk about, but I do want to put a plug in for Greg Day, who of course is a Portland Art Gallery artist. So in addition to being able to see the art that you've described at your physical locations, people can actually see Greg's art at the Portland Art Gallery in Portland. And it's beautiful.

Mary Allen Lindemann: It is beautiful. And again, the arts were so core to Coffee By Design and bringing people together over a great cup of coffee and enjoying art. And how our view of the world to me is through it's written word and visual and it's live performance. And Greg, I hope Greg will forgive me for saying, Greg was instrumental in the build out of the Congress Street location. He and Alan did a lot of the work while I continued doing temp work to make sure we could pay our bills. And the neighborhood, it just shows an interesting time in history. That was the only neighborhood that was really safe, if you were, at the time we would say that it was the gay and lesbian community, now it's fortunately really expanded into LGBTQ plus, but when I arrived, when we were close to opening, people didn't realize there was a woman in the picture, and there was an assumption that Alan and Greg were a couple. So it was a very interesting transformation for me walking in. But Greg will always be a part of our business, and it was such a joy. I've collected a number of his pieces over the years and then hadn't seen him. So seeing his art opening at the gallery, he and I both, I would think he would say the same, we burst into tears. I didn't expect that response. There's a history there of, we know where we both have come from, and some people have changed what they do for their professions, but there's this core of, what was I meant to do with my life, what's my purpose, what's my meaning? And to realize we both really have followed that. And in his case, I was really moved, and I could explain to him in detail how I viewed the progression of his work, his palette, the depth. And I think people would say the same thing about Coffee By Design too. There's a depth to it people didn't realize existed.

Lisa Belisle: There's two pieces that I'm not sure people understand about the work that you do, and one is the importance of ongoing environmental viability when it comes to coffee. And the other is the importance of social justice and the economics of that. And both of those are core to the work that you're doing with Coffee By Design, but also the work that you're doing with outreach globally to other individuals who feel the same. So those are two enormous topics, pick one and let's go from there.

Mary Allen Lindemann: It is enormous. I've always felt strongly that, whether it's economic justice, I was raised that, those to whom much is given, much is to be expected, and you give back and you don't talk about it. And I've realized as a business owner you have to talk about it, because as one customer said to me, I love the coffee, I love the service, but I think there might be something more. You're not telling me where I spend my money is meaningful. Tell me the other piece of it that I don't know. Over the past few years in particular, really trying to be much more vocal, and also in all of our marketing materials, did a major refresh of the website, which just launched end of last year, really making sure that we're not only telling what we're doing, but giving the farmers even more voice is incredibly important. So we travel a lot. I travel a lot. In fact, this year I learned pacing yourself. Some of these countries, it's not only a gift and an honor and a privilege to go, but it's overwhelming when you see the extreme poverty, when you see that people are really relying on someone they may never have met before, someone who does not look like them. When you see there is trust that we are going to help, and then I'm supposed to come back and pretend that I haven't just had this. The life-changing experiences happen constantly. This year, literally within the past six months I've been to Rwanda, India, Ethiopia, Cuba, Costa Rica. It was my first time to Ethiopia. Every other time I'd had to cancel because of, the last one was pandemic, but the other time because of war, significant more in the region I was going to travel in. And to come back and not be changed every time, and say, I have a choice. I can again turn away and say, I've had enough, we're fine as we are. Or I can say, we have to go deeper. We have to make sure we tell our customer, anyone who's listening, we have to change how we do business in coffee. We have to be willing to pay more. We have to ask really good questions when we're buying the product we're buying, and it's not just a sticker on a bag or a certification. Those things all cost. In Ethiopia for example, we talk about climate change, but for us it's about economic justice. We're asking people to continue planting a crop. Ethiopia is where coffee was discovered. It is where coffee began. They're at risk of not growing coffee anymore. It's not just climate change. If you are getting more money for eucalyptus, you're going to plant eucalyptus. Australians brought eucalyptus to Ethiopia. It's not indigenous. It does not do great things for the land. If you actually see what eucalyptus does to the soil, it strips the land of what not only allows it to grow coffee, but it strips the soil of a lot of what Ethiopia needs in growth and water. So we need to explain to the consumer of coffee, the second most traded commodity globally, you have to be willing to pay more, because if you don't, you won't have coffee. And also we're destroying the land, whether we know it or not. Every cup we drink, we have to think about, where is that bean coming from, and am I paying enough? Am I doing enough? At Coffee By Design, we're a small business, but it's amazing to me, again I'm so close to it, 30 years in, I don't realize how we do things is different. Recently the farmers I'm meeting, the producers I'm meeting, will look at me, this gentleman who's actually coming to Portland in two weeks looked at me and he said, can I show you a presentation I'm just about to do? He's from Uganda. He said, you just said verbatim what my presentation is about. We need to talk. We have to look at a new model. We have a farmer from Rwanda. We had started to buy his coffee. He actually lives here in the US and imports his family's coffee from Rwanda, amazing coffee. He started describing how larger companies, now, I hate the word ghosting, we use it a lot, but all of a sudden someone he sold to for years, they're not returning calls. He actually is counting on a certain amount of the crop going to those people. Well, it may be that he's going to charge 25 cents more, it's such a small amount more, so they don't buy. He said, but they don't realize it's not just that now my workers can't work for a certain period of time. Women are at risk because domestic violence goes up. Something he and his family have worked very hard on is gender equity. If women are not out working and they're in home, they're at risk. So we started talking to him about, we're small, we can't buy all the coffee you have, but what would make a difference? What's the number one thing that you're really struggling with? And it's access to capital. The interest rates are extremely high in Rwanda, anywhere from 16% to 20% in some cases. So we have worked on a pilot project with them and said, what if we pay 50% upfront, everything we're going to buy from you. There's a risk, if you have a bad crop, we lose. If you have a good crop, we gain. But the bottom line is, what if we stretch and we give you 50% before you've planted? What difference would that make? He just came to present to our customers and our staff. I didn't know he was going to already talk about results. He said, with that extra cash, 300 people now can have better health insurance, and we're able to buy a hundred additional goats. Livestock is important. This is the difference it makes. And not having to borrow money from the bank and spending that money on interest, you're spending it and investing in our community. So that's what this year is about.

Lisa Belisle: Do you think that people are making that connection? He's coming in, he's presenting to your group, and you are here and you're talking with me about it, but do you think that people are aware of the extent to which this type of upfront investment and this type of work that you're doing globally really makes a difference?

Lisa Belisle: Okay, perfect.

Mary Allen Lindemann: That's why I'm here. Thank you very much. Yes. Again, I am an introvert who's learned to become extroverted as a small business owner. And I've learned to talk about publicly things that are important to me. This year, my commitment to our 30 years in business, if we are to be here 30 years from now, we have to be louder. We may be a small business, but we have a loud voice. So making sure that through our social media, making sure every opportunity we have to speak about, not just Coffee By Design, but the industry. Having the four people we've just met in Ethiopia and the African coffee conference, bring them to Maine and have them, from their own voices, their own experiences. What's going on in Uganda is different than Ethiopia is different than Burundi, but at the end of the day, it really all for me boils down to economic justice. If we're not willing to pay more, why should they keep planting coffee that we enjoy every day? Interesting that, again I've been in it so long that I don't notice, the last two coffee conferences I've been to, the one in Ethiopia, the African Fine Coffee conference, and then, it's actually my fifth year judging the women's barista competition in India, but the Global World Coffee Conference was held in Bangalore, India last fall. I brought my daughter who now is in the industry and my director of operations in India. We were one of maybe 10 Americans at a conference with 10,000 people globally. In Africa, we were the only Americans at a major African coffee conference. As they went around the room at the closing ceremony and had people stand up by country, they skipped over us. I had to send a note to the MC to let people know, US cares, we're here. There were three of us.

Lisa Belisle: Why is the US so underrepresented in places like this?

Mary Allen Lindemann: You'd have to actually ask coffee companies. I am puzzled. African coffees are extraordinary coffees. Every coffee is a great coffee in the people we buy from. It's amazing what people are able to accomplish even with climate change and economics. But African coffees are extremely well respected. So I can't answer for other people. These Ethiopian, again I've traveled quite a bit, it is rough travel. There's no getting around it. I remember when I went to India and I was going to visit a farm, and the day before, literally I just arrived late the night before and the farm owner said, are you sure you want to take this trip to the farm? And I'm thinking, what is it, I don't know. And it turned out it was going to be, not all paved roads, and at night we had to get in before a certain hour because of the wildlife. And other Americans had complained, this is roughing it. And for me, we had running water, I was thrilled. It was the most extraordinary outlook. It was way on the top of a mountainside. It was an old British India, obviously the British had quite a bit of influence in the architecture and the housing, and they had bought this plantation from the British, and the most extraordinary view, and elephants in the distance and wildlife at night. And I thought, I think that part of it is some people are afraid that you might not have running water and you might not have a toilet and the food may not be something you're accustomed to. I don't know. It's so interesting to me. My best memories, there isn't a country I've been to that it wasn't an extraordinary experience of our humanity. The people who have nothing, give everything. It's truly amazing. And I think that, I was also at another conference when I was in India, a woman was sitting next to me and we were at a women's breakfast and she whispered to me, people don't think you're American. And I said, that's a really interesting comment, what does that mean? And she said, you always bring us gifts. I bring gift bags of beautiful handmade things from Maine to show the arts of Maine. And we're not just lobsters and chickadees, there's beautiful arts. So I bring really gorgeous, I bring Ebenezer Akakpo jewelry and all sorts of things, and you bring us gifts. Other Americans, when they come, they're always asking us for what we can give them. You bring gifts.

Lisa Belisle: That's a very interesting comment.

Mary Allen Lindemann: And I thought it was an interesting comment and something for all of us. So I actually came back, and I always, when I bring team members with me on trips, they always complain because I always check a lot of luggage, and it's because I bring my swag bags and they hate that we're lugging this stuff around. And then when the woman said that, I said, you see, it makes a difference. You bring gifts, we have privilege, and we are a host in someone else's country. They are hosting us. They bring us into their homes. Another interesting comment, the gentleman, Jean Christophe, from Rwanda, the comment he made when we brought him to Maine, we paid for him to fly here, we paid for his hotel room, and our director of operations went to pick him up at the airport. And then we hosted him at a dinner at my home. And he said, I have to share something with you. I've been doing this a long time. I've never had anyone pick me up at the airport. But he said, more importantly, I've never been invited into their home. And I said, that's so interesting to me, because I've never been on a coffee trip that I haven't been to someone's home. And many people's homes. We have a lot to learn.

Lisa Belisle: So one of the things that you and I were talking about before we started taping was this concept of bringing things from the past and moving them into the future. And there's actually, I believe it's a bird that embodies that idea. Can you tell me a little bit about that, since we're talking about the past 30 years of Coffee By Design and hopefully 30 plus years moving forward?

Mary Allen Lindemann: It's funny. I tell people that I tend to stockpile information, and I view all experiences like stars in the sky. And that at different points in your life, you realize that you form a constellation from things you've learned in your past. Something that you're like, why did I do that? Or even college classes, at the good fortune, my parents just trusted, what do you mean you're getting a degree in and taking classes in? And for me, I look at the past, and African philosophy has become very important to me. And so Ubuntu, everything that I do impacts you. So I have to be thoughtful in the choices I make. Our theme for the 30th birthday for Coffee By Design is Sankofa. And it's actually a Ghanaian, it's an Adinkra symbol, and it's a bird, and the bird is looking back and grabbing an egg. And for me, the interpretation, there are many, but it is that we take the best of what we've learned from the past, we bring it into the present, and it informs our future. And so in all things I do now, I don't think you dwell on the past, but we learn from it. And you have a choice. Do you want to choose the things that didn't go well, or do you choose things that unexpectedly did? And how does that inform our present? Pandemic, I think for all of us was a critical time. And I think we have a long way to go in addressing what we learned and the trauma and bringing everybody back together. For me, I'm now a hundred percent woman-owned business. And I look at my past, how lucky I was to be raised in a family with four girls and my brother number five, which is an interesting place for him. But interesting for me, being number four girl. And I had parents who believed that women should be educated and have equal opportunity to any man, in the seventies. And I think about that a lot, and things that I have never taken for granted, but I fear we are at risk of losing today. And so I look at my own past and, what do I need to look at, the opportunities I had, and how do I bring them into the present and let people know that the women's movement was vitally important to me personally. I benefited from it, but I don't feel we finished the job. And it's not about women versus men or however someone self-identifies. We haven't finished the job of bringing humanity together. And that's what from Covid I'm learning, is the time has to be now. The global community will not survive if we don't learn how. We need to understand one another, not judge, listen, respectfully disagree, but learn from the past. We have to finish a job that is left unfinished. And that's my life's work. My brother's actually visiting right now. He lives in Cape Town in South Africa. And we were talking about when we were young, our family home burned down and we all escaped, very fortunately, five kids and my parents. Another family down the road, their home burned also, not related, but they were in a different part of town. Five kids, parents perished. And my brother and I were discussing the impact it had on our lives and how we came out of it. And it was interesting, very different how we looked at our lives from it. And for me, it was out of respect for that family who died. I was chosen to live. What meaning do I bring to my life because of that? I have an obligation to this family I never knew, because they weren't in a part of town that was the wealthy part of town. I was in a family that we had privilege. Our fire was in the newspaper and can easily be researched. Theirs was not, but I know it happened. So for me, Sankofa is, take everything you learned from the past that was good, take it into our present, and how do we package it in a new way and create that new constellation of a global community where we all not just survive, but we thrive. Because if we don't come together, none of us survive.

Lisa Belisle: Well, that's a perfect place to stop. You're very well-spoken. So for a self-described introvert, trained extrovert, you've done your training and your preparation well, and I really appreciate your willingness to come and talk with us today.

Mary Allen Lindemann: Well, it's an honor, and again, to be a 64-year-old parent of a 19-year-old, it's important that my daughter, Alina, know that people of my age, we have work to do. We haven't figured it out yet. And I look to the next generation with hope. I hear a lot of negativity, and I think that I have an extraordinary team of young people and I can't do it without them. And hopefully they appreciate I have a legacy that I'm trying to move forward and that they believe in it, but they'll bring their own touch to it.

Lisa Belisle: I suspect it will. You seem like you're very good at pulling together the people that need to be doing the work. So I give you a lot of credit for that, and thank you. I look forward to seeing what happens in the future with Coffee By Design.

Mary Allen Lindemann: Come to the party June 30th, an all day celebration, music, art, fashion, and coffee.

Lisa Belisle: And people can find out about this where?

Mary Allen Lindemann: It'll be posted on the website very soon.

Lisa Belisle: The website is?

Mary Allen Lindemann: www.coffeebydesign.com.

Lisa Belisle: Very good. I've been speaking with Mary Allen Lindemann, who is the co-founder and owner of the now woman-owned business Coffee By Design. Really a 30-year-old Maine, I don't even know what to call it, it's so foundational to the work that I think we've been doing along with the Portland Art Gallery and the greater Portland community and actually global. So I appreciate Mary Allen's willingness to come in and talk to me today on the Radio Maine video podcast, which is again sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Maybe the next time you're in Portland, Maine, you can not only go to the Portland Art Gallery, but just go down the street a little bit and you can go to Coffee By Design and have a lovely cup of coffee, which is going to be from one of the wonderful people that is farming the coffee globally that Mary Allen is connected to. Mary Allen, thanks for coming in and being part of our community and helping me explore creativity and the human spirit today on Radio Maine.

Mary Allen Lindemann: Thank you. I appreciate it so much. Have a beautiful day.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you very much. You too.