Tony Anderson’s childhood memories are rich with outdoor experiences, from helping in his grandfather’s 10-acre garden to collecting plants and leaves in the woods near his childhood home. When he discovered that Mizzou, where he followed his future wife, Sarah, who was pursuing a degree in physical therapy, had a plant sciences major, he was immediately hooked.
After receiving his degree in plant sciences, Anderson and his wife moved back to their hometown of Owensville, Missouri, where he started a small landscaping and garden center. After a few years, he purchased a larger plot of land to build a larger garden center, but an accident that broke his leg delayed his progress.
“It’s hard to landscape with a broken leg,” Anderson joked. “But that incident slowed me down enough to realize that we didn’t want to immediately put down such deep roots in our hometown without experiencing some other things first. So we sold the property and moved to Nashville, where I sold cars for two months and hated every minute of it. Through want ads, I found a job at a greenhouse I hadn’t heard of, but it turned out it was the second largest bedding plant grower in the country, and they had a facility 5 miles from my house. I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough experience to get a job there as a sales rep, but the site manager was blown away that someone who actually had a plant sciences degree had applied.”
After a few years in Nashville as the sales and distribution manager for the greenhouse, Anderson decided that whatever his next career move was, he would need more business education.
“I realized school had taught me a lot about plants, which was easy for me because I love plants, but I kept finding myself in positions where I needed to know an equal amount about business and I had very little business knowledge,” said Anderson. “So I decided to go back to school at a university in Nashville to get my MBA.”
Equipped with his MBA, Anderson became the senior director of horticulture for a large real estate developer, working in both Nashville and Texas, but when the housing market crashed in 2008 he had to pivot again. Although he explored several other options (including a job in the Bahamas), Anderson and his family wanted to get back to Missouri. He took a job with the Missouri Department of Agriculture, where he worked as a marketing specialist and pioneered what is now the Missouri Grown program.
During all of these career changes, Anderson and his wife had prioritized their involvement in their church and had gone on several mission trips, where his wife served communities with her physical therapy expertise.
“We went on a trip and had the opportunity to visit the Mercy Ship,” said Anderson. “I had gone with her just to follow her around, but when I got there the organizers told me they knew I had an agriculture degree and had set me up to spend the day helping on a training farm where the ship docked. It was an amazing experience, and our missions director at the time told me that if I enjoyed that I should look into coffee.”
This push started a chain of events that eventually created Three Story Coffee.
Anderson had only become a coffee drinker while he worked at the car dealership, because the coffee was free and he was trying to save money by not buying soda for caffeine at that time in his life, but he knew almost nothing about the industry. While he worked in real estate in Texas, he was put on a committee at his church to help make a business model for a coffee shop the church wanted to start. When the church voted not to start the coffee shop, Anderson got permission to keep the business plan. While working at MDA, Anderson kept thinking about his interest in international missions and the coffee shop plans he had, until he finally decided to pull the trigger on the plans and see what happened.
“I knew it was a sound, smart business plan,” said Anderson. “When I had a free evening I would go back in my office and pull up the plan and study different components of it, but the more I tried to work out the plan in real life I just hit roadblock after roadblock. I was getting really frustrated, and then a friend of mine asked me over dinner how the coffee shop thing was going and I kind of flipped a gasket. I said ‘It’s not going, I don’t even want to talk about it. If I could just get this stupid coffee shop open then I could do…’ and I started listing all the things I wanted to do with it, like building relationships with farmers and telling their stories and it was while I was ranting about it that I realized I needed to start at the other end of the process.”
This lightbulb moment led Anderson to start a roastery first. He attended a roasting class in California, through a connection from his previous church that developed the business plan. At the class, he met the son of a coffee farmer from El Salvador, Mario Valiente, who invited Anderson and another friend from the roasting class to his farm. Anderson learned through immersion on the Valiente coffee farm.
This connection started the ball rolling. After a trip abroad, learning how to roast coffee beans and finding other small coffee shop owners to partner with on shipping containers full of single-source coffee beans, the Three Story Coffee roastery was born in late 2012 The business was named not only for the Three Story Building it inhabited the first floor of on Dunklin Street in Jefferson City, but also Anderson’s philosophy that every cup of coffee comes with three stories: that of the farmer, the roaster and the consumer. Anderson’s passion for telling all three stories has led to his current success.
“People would walk into the roastery and be looking for a drink, and at the time we didn’t do that,” said Anderson. “But the average customer spent about 30 minutes in the shop, just talking with us. We could explain what small batch roasting was, what direct trade was, and it was fascinating to me because all these people who can’t live without coffee just don’t know anything about it and it’s the second most traded commodity in the world. It was great for me because I realized in those days that we’re as much an education company as we are a coffee company. Some people thought when we said we worked with farmers we were working with local farmers, but you’re not going to find anyone growing coffee in Missouri, so I got to introduce them to the stories of our farmers in El Salvador and other countries, and repeat customers would come in asking how the Valientes were doing and checking in on these farmers we bought from. It was amazing.”
By early 2014, the roastery was successful enough that Three Story Coffee became the coffee shop of Anderson’s long-time dreams, now located in a large building with event spaces off of Bolivar Street in downtown Jefferson City, with a clear view of the Capitol. Currently, they have direct partnerships with farmers in Burundi, Bolivia, Guatemala, Colombia, Ethiopia and Indonesia.
Anderson’s many career ventures led him to a business he loves, and he would recommend CAFNR students diversify their passions with other skills that will help make them successful.
“I think a lot of CAFNR students are in the same position I was,” Anderson said. “They have a background that is driving them because it’s where they got their passion for something as a kid, whether it’s plants, or animals or whatever that interests them. And that was me, that’s what drove me to plant science, but looking back now I think the missing piece was picking up other broader and wider skills in addition to what I learned about plants. A lot of CAFNR majors are going to have to become business oriented in one way or another, and I went back to get my MBA because of that, but I wish I had learned more about that through opportunities in undergrad and had a better business understanding from the get-go. Just diversify a little bit in addition to what you’re already passionate about.”
To learn more about Three Story Coffee’s famers, mission and products, visit their website or their shop at 311 Bolivar St, Jefferson City, MO.