October at Oval
· Oval Coffee Roasters Journal
We spent much of the summer roasting, packing, shipping, and sweating through a lot of coffee. This fall, much of it is arriving on new shelves around the country. There are new stores from the Carolinas to the Midwest, a day spent with much of the New York coffee community in Greenpoint, and a busy stretch of making coffee for people around the city. We are also approaching the part of the year when coffee becomes a gift, rather than simply the thing allowing you to purchase gifts.
A few updates.
New Places to Find Oval
In August, all six of our retail products arrived at 49 Lowes Foods stores across North and South Carolina. Bowling Green Women-Grown, The Natural Natural Process, and Riverside Half Caff are each there as whole bean and Pour Over Single Serve.
September brought the same six coffees to 65 Fresh Thyme Markets across the Midwest. We first met their team at the Summer Fancy Food Show in 2025. More than a year later, the coffee arrived on the shelf. This is roughly how quickly things happen in grocery.
Closer to home, we’ve also begun working with Kings Food Markets and Balducci’s Food Lover’s Market, bringing Oval whole bean coffee to selected stores through Whisha Specialty Coffee Distributors.
We remain extremely fond of the independent and specialty grocers that first gave us shelf space in New York, but it is gratifying to imagine someone encountering Oval for the first time somewhere we have never been.
A Day at the NYC Coffee Festival
On October 3, we brought Oval to the NYC Coffee Festival at The Post BK in Greenpoint.
We do a lot of public tastings, but usually in grocery stores or at broader food events, where coffee is one of many things competing for attention. This was different. Thousands of people came specifically because they love coffee, and many of them arrived at our table already several tastings in and spectacularly caffeinated.
By our count, we served samples to more than a thousand people over the course of the day. It was an onslaught beyond any café rush I’ve worked through, and I’ve worked through many, but somehow much more fun. Our Ratio Eight and our middle-aged La Peppina espresso machine kept up nicely too. Everyone wanted to taste, ask questions, compare notes, and tell us what they were drinking at home. There are not many occasions when we get to interact with that many coffee enthusiasts face to face.
There was a nice professional side to it too. During setup we found ourselves next to a roaster I knew from years ago, when we roasted side by side at a shared facility. Our businesses have gone in different directions since, but there we were again, a few feet apart, preparing an unreasonable amount of coffee for strangers.
Fashion Week, With Coffee
September brought our first New York Fashion Week collaboration, providing coffee for Cult Gaia throughout their entire Fashion Week operation.
For eight mornings, we delivered coffee to their casting and fitting headquarters as models, stylists, designers, and the rest of the team prepared for the show. There is something satisfying about having a small, repetitive role inside a much larger production. Every morning, regardless of what had happened the day before or what crisis was presumably happening somewhere upstairs, the coffee had to arrive.
The week culminated with Cult Gaia’s show at the American Museum of Natural History, which is certainly among the more extraordinary places we've ended up dragging around many gallons of hot brewed coffee.
We weren’t permitted to photograph behind the scenes, so the image above is from the gorgeous show itself. Our coffee is somewhere outside the frame, having already done its job.
Coffee as a Gift
Coffee is unusually well suited to being a gift. It is useful, disappears eventually, and, unlike many useful things that disappear eventually, can be genuinely beautiful.
We’ve put together a few ways to give Oval this year.
Our Variety Packs include Bowling Green, The Natural, and Riverside, available as whole bean or Pour Over Single Serve. Discovery Sets pair one 8.8 oz (250 g) whole-bean bag with eight single serves of the same coffee. And for someone whose habits you know well enough to confidently introduce a recurring delivery into their life, there is our Roaster’s Choice subscription: one 8.8 oz (250 g) whole-bean bag every four weeks.
For larger orders, we also make custom-labeled coffee gifts for clients, teams, birthdays, weddings, and events. Plan quantities of about 100–1,000 bags, with a 100-bag minimum for 8.8 oz bags or 250-bag minimum for 4 oz bags.