Coffee Sketcher

Cafe Kreyol

Properties3
descriptionThe Virginia importer-roaster built around rebuilding Haiti's collapsed coffee industry — Roast magazine's 2023 Macro Roaster of the Year, and one of the few US companies whose whole business case is a single origin's recovery.
tagsorganization, roaster, importer, usa, virginia, haiti, ethiopia, direct-trade
aliasesCafé Kreyol, Cafe Kreyol LLC, Kreyol Coffee

9 min read

Cafe Kreyol

Cafe Kreyol (often written Café Kreyol) is an American green-coffee importer and roaster in Manassas, Virginia, founded in 2012 by Joey Stazzone, who styles himself the company’s “Chief Coffee Hunter” (Cafe Kreyol — our story, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch).

It is unusual among the buyers in this wiki. Most of them are chasing the best cup — Klatch Coffee bidding on Elida Estate Geisha, Orsir Coffee flying cuppers to auctions. Cafe Kreyol’s stated reason for existing is the opposite direction of travel: rebuilding an origin that fell out of the coffee trade entirely. Its own words are that it exists to “create sustainable employment in Haiti, using specialty grade, organic coffee” (same source).

“Importer” here means the company buys unroasted coffee directly from producers abroad and brings it into the United States itself, rather than buying from a middleman’s list — the same direct trade posture described on Sucafina and Klatch Coffee, and just as unaudited. Unlike Fairtrade or organic, “direct trade” is a claim a company makes about itself, with no independent inspector behind it.

The company

AttributeDetail
Founded2012
Founder / ownerJoey Stazzone — “Chief Coffee Hunter”
HeadquartersManassas, Virginia 20109
ModelDirect-trade green importer and roaster
Core originHaiti
Other origins soldEthiopia (Guji), Mexico, Colombia, Bolivia
Best-known productOrganic Haitian Blue
Major awardRoast magazine 2023 Roaster of the Year, macro category

Founding year, location, ownership and origin list all come from Cafe Kreyol’s own site, fetched directly (our story and home, both accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch). A LinkedIn company page and an independent roaster profile give the same 2012 date.

The award

Cafe Kreyol won Roast magazine’s Roaster of the Year in the macro category for 2023, sharing the year with Rabbit Hole Roasters in the micro category (Roast magazine — Roaster of the Year archive, accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch against the awarding body’s own list).

Roast is the US coffee-roasting trade magazine, and its Roaster of the Year has run since 2004. It splits into micro (small-volume) and macro (larger-volume) categories, and it is judged on the business as a whole — sourcing practice, quality control, staff development, community work — not on a single coffee. It is the closest thing the American roasting trade has to a company-of-the-year title, which is why a company built around one difficult origin winning it is worth recording.

The same official archive shows this wiki’s other Roast winners: Klatch Coffee (as “Coffee Klatch”) took 2009 micro, and Equator Estates Coffee — the earlier name of Equator Coffees — took 2010 macro.

The Haiti mission

Haiti is the whole point of the company, and the reason the company is interesting is that Haiti used to matter enormously in coffee and now barely registers.

Cafe Kreyol works with Haitian producers growing Heirloom Typica and what the company calls “Arabica Blue Mountain” — the Jamaican trade name for a Typica selection, and the same plant lineage rather than a separate variety (see Typica for why one variety carries half a dozen regional names). Its flagship retail coffee is Organic Haitian Blue.

The company says farmers in its chain receive “around 300% higher wages than what Fair Trade requires” (our story, accessed 2026-07-23). Treat that as a company-reported figure: it appears on Cafe Kreyol’s own pages and nowhere independent that was consulted here, and “Fair Trade minimum” is a floor price for green coffee, not a wage, so the two things being compared are not the same unit.

To verify

Haiti’s historical position in coffee. A 2018 feature states Haiti supplied “about half the world’s coffee” by the end of the 1700s and was still “the world’s third-largest coffee exporter as late as 1949,” with yields now around a third of the Central American average (Fritz Nelson — Café Kreyol Sings A Coffee Redemption Song, accessed 2026-07-23). These are widely repeated figures, but this is one journalist’s blog, not a trade statistic from the ICO, FAO or Haitian government. The narrative of the collapse given there — Duvalier-era instability, the US embargo, hurricanes, and deforestation as coffee trees were cut for charcoal — is plausible and consistent with general history, but is single-sourced here.

Named cooperatives and supply-chain scale. A roaster profile reports that Cafe Kreyol sources through COOPACVOD, described as Haiti’s oldest running cooperative with over 850 members, and that the company grew from 200 producers to 2,800 people by 2024. That profile (The Way To Coffee) returned HTTP 403 and could not be read directly on 2026-07-23; the figures reach this note only through the research report that cited it. The same profile is the sole source for a 10,000 sq ft Manassas facility containing a production roastery, green warehouse, cupping lab and classrooms, a Loring S70 Peregrine roaster, and over $1 million invested annually in Haiti. None of it is confirmed.

Founding year — 2011 or 2012? Cafe Kreyol’s own site and LinkedIn both say 2012, which is what this note states. The 2018 feature above says the company was established seven years earlier, i.e. around 2011, and dates Stazzone’s first trip to Haiti to after the 2010 earthquake. The gap is probably first-trip versus incorporation, but no source consulted here reconciles them.

The Ethiopian side

The topic that generated this note describes Cafe Kreyol as an importer “of Ethiopian and Haitian coffee.” The Haitian half is the company’s identity. The Ethiopian half is real but much smaller: Cafe Kreyol sells a Guji Espresso, Guji being a zone in the Oromia region of southern Ethiopia that has become one of the origin’s most sought-after specialty areas — the same country and general quality tier covered here by Sidama, Daye Bensa and JARC 74158.

That is the extent of what is documented. No source consulted names Cafe Kreyol’s Ethiopian washing stations, cooperatives, exporters or producers, and nothing connects the company to the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority’s auction system or to Cup of Excellence Ethiopia.

To verify

Competition placements shown on Cafe Kreyol’s own product labels. The company’s storefront marks its Mexican coffees El Ocote and El Rio as “2nd place Cup of Excellence,” its Guji Espresso as an “Honorable Mention,” and a Colombian decaf with a silver seal; a separate page references a silver at a Global Coffee Awards World Championship (Cafe Kreyol home and our story, both accessed 2026-07-23). These are product-label claims, and the year and awarding body are not stated on the pages fetched. Notably, the research behind this note found no Cup of Excellence results tied to Cafe Kreyol at all — a direct conflict. A COE placement belongs to the producer, not the buyer, so “2nd place Cup of Excellence” most likely means Cafe Kreyol bought a lot that placed second in Mexico COE. Check the Alliance for Coffee Excellence results tables before repeating any of this as a Cafe Kreyol award.

The founder

To verify

Joey Stazzone’s personal history. The 2018 feature reports that Stazzone — there given as CEO and founder, and elsewhere on the company’s own site as Joseph Stazzone — “was a heroin addict with felony drug trafficking convictions” before founding the company, and attributes his turnaround to a new-found religious faith; it dates his first trip to Haiti to a church trip after the 2010 earthquake (Fritz Nelson, accessed 2026-07-23). A podcast appearance identifies him as the owner under the name Joey Stazzone. The biography is single-sourced here and appears to be self-told; it is recorded because it is the stated origin of the company’s mission, not as an independently established fact.

What is not established

To verify

  • Distribution. The 2018 feature says Cafe Kreyol coffee is sold through Whole Foods, Amazon, H-E-B and independent cafés. Retail listings go stale within a season or two, and this was not re-checked against any retailer.
  • Green-coffee trade volumes. No import figures, container counts or customs records were consulted. The word “importer” here rests on the company’s and the feature’s descriptions.
  • Lot-level detail. No altitudes, farm names, processing methods (natural, washed, honey) or cupping scores for any specific Cafe Kreyol lot were found in any source consulted — Haitian or Ethiopian.
  • Certifications. The company markets organic coffee, but no certifier, SCA or CQI credential was verified.

Why it belongs in this wiki

Almost every price in these notes runs one way: a famous origin, a famous variety, a record bid. Cafe Kreyol is the counter-case — a company whose whole argument is that the interesting work is in an origin with no famous variety, no auction and less than one percent of world production, and that a US roaster can be built on rebuilding one. Roast magazine agreeing with that in 2023 is the strongest external evidence the argument has. Set against Premiumisation, it is the same specialty-coffee premium pointed at a different problem.

Sources

  1. Roast magazine — Roaster of the Year award archive — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch (awarding body’s own list)
  2. Cafe Kreyol — our story — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  3. Cafe Kreyol — official site home — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch
  4. Fritz Nelson — Café Kreyol Sings A Coffee Redemption Song … In Haiti — accessed 2026-07-23, confirmed via WebFetch (single-author feature, 2018)
  5. The Way To Coffee — Café Kreyol roaster profile — accessed 2026-07-23; returned HTTP 403, known only through the research report that cited it
  6. LinkedIn — Cafe Kreyol company page — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report; self-reported listing)
  7. “Coffee &” podcast, ep. 18 — How Coffee Gets to You, Part 2: Shipping with Joey Stazzone — accessed 2026-07-23 (cited via the research report; owner interview)

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