AAPI-Owned Coffee Roasters in the US (2026)

Nine independent operators, individually verified — the people behind the bag and the work they're doing.

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Coffee and Asia are tangled up in ways most US drinkers never think about. Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer and the dominant source of robusta. Yemen and Ethiopia were trading coffee through the Arabian Peninsula and onward into South Asia for centuries before it ever reached the Americas. The Kona belt on Hawaii Island — the only commercial coffee region in the United States — was built on the labor of Japanese plantation workers and their descendants starting in the 1890s. None of that history shows up in how the modern US specialty industry talks about itself.

We've verified nine active AAPI-owned independent coffee roasters in our directory as of May 2026 — meaning the operators are roasting their own beans in-house, the business is currently running, and the founders are publicly identified as Asian American or Pacific Islander. The actual nationwide number is higher; ownership data is rarely surfaced publicly, AAPI heritage covers a wide span of cultures and communities, and we've kept the list conservative. This is not exhaustive — but every roaster on it has been individually checked through founder press, websites, and trade-press coverage.

What ties them together isn't a single style or sourcing approach. Some focus on Vietnamese fine robusta — Hello Em in Seattle, River Phin in Oakland, Chloé Cà Phê in Sacramento. Some are highlighting Asian specialty across origins — Tanbrown in Atlanta, Belux on Taiwan Geisha. Some are Hawaii's living coffee history — Oka Family Farms, fourth-generation Japanese-American on the Kona slope. Some are neighborhood operators rebuilding what coffee looks like in their part of town — June in Birmingham, OneDo in Canton-Baltimore, Cherry Seed in Lexington. The common thread is that the operators have built businesses connected to where they or their families come from, in an industry that has not historically gone out of its way to make space.

South

Three roasters in the South — one Vietnamese-American operator in Birmingham, two in Atlanta working on different slices of Asian specialty coffee.

June Coffee — Birmingham, AL

Founder Jimmy Truong opened June in 2018, the son of Vietnamese immigrants who landed in New Mexico and then relocated to Clay, Alabama when Jimmy was four. He worked at Good Coffee in Portland, came back to Birmingham to work at Octane, and launched June (originally Epilogue Coffee Roasters) when Octane changed hands. June ships nationally. The cafe at 3rd Avenue North and 25th Street has become an anchor of downtown Birmingham specialty coffee, and Truong has said he's not interested in expanding outside Alabama — he wants people to come to Birmingham for it. Profile on Roast Local.

Belux Coffee Roasters — Atlanta, GA

Ben Li and Lucy Liu — husband and wife, both Taiwanese, in the US for 14 years — founded Belux in 2015 out of Cumming, Georgia. The roastery is now in Alpharetta, with a second cafe in Roswell that opened in 2024. The name is a portmanteau of their first initials, and the rabbit logo is named after their pet Holland Lop, Bela. Belux is one of the few US roasters consistently sourcing Taiwan-grown coffee, including Taiwan Geisha lots, alongside their global menu. The Taiwanese embassy office in Atlanta has visited their roastery — a signal of how seriously the Taiwan-coffee relationship is being taken. They ship nationally. Profile on Roast Local.

Tanbrown Coffee — Atlanta, GA

Marissa Childers founded Tanbrown in 2022 with Ethan Darla, building a queer- and Asian-owned roasting business out of pop-ups and farmers markets in Tucker and Reynoldstown. Marissa is a seasoned coffee professional who has competed and judged in national competitions, and Tanbrown's editorial framing is explicit: Asian coffee, like Asian people, is not a monolith. The roastery sources across Asian origins — Yemen, India, Indonesia, China — and uses the work to push back against a US specialty industry that has historically flattened those distinctions. They keep distribution local; the work is wholesale, pop-ups, and event partnerships rather than national shipping. Profile on Roast Local.

Hawaii

One roaster on Hawaii Island, anchoring the longest continuous coffee-growing tradition in the United States.

Oka Family Coffee Farm — Kona, HI

The Oka family has been farming coffee in Kona for over a hundred years. Their great-great-grandfather, Sentaro Yanagi, came from Japan to Hawaii as a sugar plantation worker in the 1800s, and after the 1899 coffee market crash he bought parcels of land in Kahaluu-Kona where coffee was already growing. In 2009 Raymond Oka handed the farm operation to the next generation — his wife Beverly, their children, and their spouses now run the 28 acres. They grow, harvest, process, and roast 100 percent Kona coffee on the same land their family has worked for four generations. Oka Family Farms is one of the clearest living examples of how the Kona coffee belt was built — and continues to be built — by Japanese-American families. They ship nationally. Profile on Roast Local.

West Coast

Two California operations and a Seattle roaster, all working on different parts of the Vietnamese and Hong Kong specialty story.

River Phin Coffee Roasters — Oakland, CA

Sharon Hiu Yan Fung founded River Phin to specialize in Asian specialty coffee — particularly Vietnamese fine robusta and the slow-brew phin filter that defines traditional Vietnamese iced coffee. Sharon was born and raised in Hong Kong, has roots in Hanoi, and trained with roast masters in Vietnam to learn the technique for roasting high-end robusta. Robusta has historically been treated by the US specialty industry as a commodity grade beneath consideration; River Phin is part of a small but growing group of roasters reframing it as a category capable of award-winning specialty coffee. The roastery operates out of Foster City and Oakland and runs a rotating seasonal menu. Profile on Roast Local.

Chloé Cà Phê + Roastery — Sacramento, CA

Charley Phung and Crystal Huynh-Kim opened Chloé Cà Phê in Midtown Sacramento in March 2025, after years running a Vietnamese dumpling truck. The shop is named after their daughter. The cafe is built around traditional espresso plus specialty drinks that incorporate Vietnamese flavors, with rotating vintage cars on display in the space. Phung sources directly from Vietnamese farmers and producers — coffee that he's described as coming from people who, like his own family, grew up in poverty without electricity. Chloé Cà Phê is part of a Sacramento-area shift toward Vietnamese specialty coffee being treated as a premium category rather than a low-cost niche. They ship nationally. Profile on Roast Local.

Hello Em Vietnamese Coffee — Seattle, WA

Hello Em is Seattle's first Vietnamese specialty coffee roastery. Yenvy Pham and Nghia Bui opened it in January 2021 in the Little Saigon neighborhood of Seattle's Chinatown-International District. Yenvy and her sister Quynh-Vy Pham have built their parents' Phở Bắc into a James Beard-nominated Vietnamese restaurant group, and Hello Em is the coffee extension of that work. The roastery sources single-origin fine robusta directly from Buôn Ma Thuột in Vietnam's Central Highlands — the country's main coffee region — and treats it the way US specialty has historically treated washed Ethiopian or Colombian arabica. They ship nationally. Profile on Roast Local.

Mid-Atlantic and Midwest

Two operators in the Mid-Atlantic and Ohio Valley, both Korean-American or Vietnamese-American operations rebuilding what coffee looks like in their neighborhoods.

OneDo Coffee Roasters — Baltimore, MD

Gloria Hwang and James Park were born and raised in Korea, immigrated to Maryland in the 1990s, and have lived in Canton-Baltimore since 2007. They opened OneDo in 2018 on South Lakewood Avenue. "OneDo" is the Korean word for coffee beans. The roastery sources green coffee globally and works directly with a small family farm in Colombia. OneDo is a minority- and women-owned business and is expanding to a second location in Rash Field Park at the Inner Harbor in 2025 — a meaningful footprint for a small Baltimore roaster. They keep distribution local rather than shipping nationally. Profile on Roast Local.

Cherry Seed Coffee Roastery — Lexington, KY

Lacey Nguyen founded Cherry Seed Coffee Roastery in Lexington as a home roasting operation, then expanded into a brick-and-mortar coffee house. The business was incorporated in 2019, and Cherry Seed has grown into a steady fixture in Lexington's small but serious specialty coffee scene. Kentucky doesn't have a deep specialty roasting tradition outside Louisville, which makes Cherry Seed's Lexington footprint more distinctive. The roastery operates locally and serves the cafe alongside small wholesale and direct retail; they don't currently ship nationally. Profile on Roast Local.

What this collection is, and isn't

This isn't a "support AAPI businesses" listicle, and it's not an attempt to flatten nine very different operators into a single category. The roasters above are on this list because they're worth your money on coffee terms — they roast their own beans, they source carefully, and the cup is good. The fact that they're AAPI-owned is contextually important. Coffee has a deep Asian history that the US specialty industry has historically downplayed, ownership data is rarely surfaced, and a guide like this is one of very few places where the information is collected in one place. But none of these operators want to be reduced to that fact, and the work itself is the reason to order from them.

We're keeping this list short on purpose. There are AAPI-owned roasters in cities we know we haven't fully captured yet — particularly New York, Los Angeles, Houston, and Boston, where established AAPI coffee scenes have more roasters than this collection currently reflects. We'll add them as we verify each one individually. Several operators we explored are not on this list because we couldn't confirm AAPI ownership through reputable sources, even when names or branding suggested it — we'd rather under-include than mistokenize.

If you're new to Vietnamese specialty coffee, order from Hello Em or River Phin — the single-origin fine robusta they're putting out is a different category than what most US drinkers have ever tried. For Taiwan Geisha and other Taiwan-grown coffees, Belux is the most consistent source. For Kona that's grown by the family that has been growing it for four generations, Oka Family Farms. For more guides, see our woman-owned coffee roasters and Black-owned coffee roasters collections, or browse the full directory on the explore map.