Dan Streetman
Dan fell in love with coffee while working as a
barista to pay his way through college. After graduating from Texas A&M, he moved to Austin to intern with a roaster, and sell those coffee beans to grocery stores and cafes.
Four years later, Dan began scouring the globe in search of the world’s best green coffee beans. During the next eight years, he built relationships with coffee farmers who pay their workers fairly. As he returned to the same farms harvest after harvest, Dan saw - and tasted - the benefit of these long-term relationships. On the farms that pay workers more, the workers pay more attention to the coffee beans, which ultimately leads to the best coffee.
In 2017, Dan returned to his roots in coffee sales, taking a
job at a roaster in San Francisco, as well as judging the World Barista Championship. But he missed green coffee buying so much, he founded Slack Bag in 2019 as a side hustle. And when Covid hit the next year, it became his main hustle (well, one of several main hustles).
Kevin Rehak
Kevin fell in love with coffee farmers before he fell
in love with coffee. As a student at The University of Texas, coffee was simply fuel for all-nighters. After graduation, Kevin served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Uganda, where coffee (albeit mostly robusta) is a major cash crop. He home roasted his first batch of green coffee beans in a chinzy frying pan, and only afterwards did he realize that he needed to hull the parchment first.
After earning his MBA at Columbia, Kevin’s first job was building a financial transparency system for hundreds coffee farmer co-ops across Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania. When he returned to the US, he started roasting green coffee at home in a popcorn popper. He was quickly hooked, and eventually bought - and sometimes disassembled out of curiosity - half a dozen home coffee roasters.
Despite their respective Texas roots, overlapping world travels and passion for coffee, it took the Covid19 pandemic and a broken coffee roaster for Dan and Kevin to meet in San Francisco. As Kevin walked home from a hardware store with a spare part, he smelled freshly roasted coffee and followed his nose. A block later, he found Dan roasting green coffee beans in his garage. They started talking about coffee, and then college football, and then barbecue…and basically haven’t stopped.
