With its many locations across the city, 787 Coffee brings a taste of Puerto Rico to New Yorkers – a mission co-founder Brandon Ivan Peña refuses to give up on, no matter what obstacles stand in his way.
“We stand for connectivity,” said Peña. “That’s why we do it around coffee. It’s the experience.”
Coffee plays a big role in Puerto Rican culture, with Peña explaining its prevalence in everyday life there.
“It’s what we’re born with,” he said. “It’s our grandparents. It’s the smell in every single house.”
787 Coffee, named after Puerto Rico’s area code, is authentic as it can get. Peña explained that not only is all the coffee sold at the shops across New York, New Jersey, and Texas (as well as in Puerto Rico itself) produced in Puerto Rico, but also that they are now looking to work with farmers in places like Colombia and Mexico.
“Latinos supporting Latinos,” he said.
This desire to spread Puerto Rican coffee also comes from Peña’s pride in the island and what it truly is capable of.
“It is such a beautiful island that everyone has tried to take advantage of,” said Peña. “Everyone’s importing everything into Puerto Rico, but no one’s really taking advantage of the capabilities, the humans, and taking Puerto Ricans’ product elsewhere.”
These goals and missions run deep for Peña, so much so that he refused to compromise what the store stands for, even if it meant temporarily shutting down the company’s then-five 787 Coffee locations after Hurricane Maria.
“Hurricane Maria destroyed our farm. We lost everything,” Peña said. “Everyone was like, ‘Why don’t you go buy coffee from a supermarket or from a different farmer?’ But the promise was to take Puerto Rico’s coffee to the world. It wasn’t just to sell coffee.”
Luckily, the shops were able to recover, and there are more 787 locations than ever. But, that is not what is important to Peña.
“Before Maria, we were a business,” Peña said. “Post-Maria, we have a heart. That’s when the ‘human for human’ mantra that we have became a reality.”
Above all, Peña is proud of what the shop has helped create through its values, priorities and culture.
“We empower so many humans on my team,” he said. “We have a presentation every single Tuesday, when they got up and did public speaking, they could barely do it. … And now every Tuesday … I’m more impressed. The way they dress, the way they speak, the presentations, they see transformation.
I’m like, ‘This is what we’re building.’ So that’s the idea. Represent a culture, represent an identity. Connect and speak with an accent, and be proud of what we stand for.”
