A Filmmaker, a Physicist, and the Future of Coffee

In 2018, Tracy and Luke Jackson — father and son — opened a coffee shop in downtown Dallas. Luke was a filmmaker by trade; Tracy had the business instincts. They loved great coffee and wanted to share it with Dallas. What they did not yet know was that five years later, a single encounter would transform their small Texas café into what may be the most innovative roastery model in the specialty coffee world.

In 2023, Luke began working on a coffee-focused film project that led him to Colombia. There, he met Diego Bermúdez — a physicist and engineer who had left the science sector to build Finca El Paraíso in Cauca, where he had constructed a full microbiology laboratory, a quality control facility, and developed the INDESTEC processing protocol that places him among the most technically sophisticated coffee producers on the planet. Diego's Milky Cake lot — Castillo variety, double anaerobic fermentation, thermal shock — had already earned global specialty attention and a partnership with DAK Coffee Roasters in Amsterdam.

The question Luke asked Diego was disarmingly simple: why shouldn't producers roast their own coffee? Diego joined Native Coffee Co. as co-founder. The company relocated its roasting operation to Colombia — to the sunlit hills near Finca El Paraíso, within kilometres of where much of their green coffee is grown.

The Model: Roasting Where the Coffee Lives

The fundamental problem Native Coffee Co. set out to solve is structural. Coffee has always been produced in one place and roasted in another — usually a wealthy consuming country thousands of kilometres from the farm. This creates a specific problem: producers have almost no control over how their coffee ultimately tastes in the cup. Years of work in the field, careful cherry selection, precise fermentation, meticulous drying — all of it can be undone by a poorly calibrated roast in a facility the farmer has never visited.

By roasting at origin, in Colombia, Native inverts this dynamic. Diego Bermúdez designed the processing; Diego Bermúdez's team roasts the result. The producer is present at every stage of value creation — not just as a supplier of raw material but as a participant in the finished product. Native is one of a tiny handful of roasteries globally that can make this claim, and arguably the most scientifically sophisticated of them.

The Colombia Bimodal Harvest Advantage

Colombia's coffee-growing regions experience two distinct harvest seasons per year — a bimodal pattern produced by the country's position near the equator and the altitudinal diversity of its Andean growing zones. Most of the world's coffee-producing countries have a single annual harvest. Colombia's two-harvest cycle means that Native Coffee Co. can roast fresh Colombian coffee every 15 days throughout the year — an extraordinary freshness advantage over any roastery that imports green coffee and roasts months after harvest.

The implications for cup quality are significant. Freshly roasted coffee — coffee that has been roasted from green beans harvested within weeks rather than months — has a vibrancy and aromatic clarity that degrades measurably over time. Native's at-origin model, combined with Colombia's bimodal harvest, produces some of the freshest specialty coffee commercially available anywhere in the world.

Diego Bermúdez: The Scientist Behind the Cup

Diego Bermúdez trained as a physicist and engineer before dedicating himself to coffee production. At Finca El Paraíso in Cauca, he built a farm that functions as a precision research laboratory: microbiology lab, quality lab, Eco-Enigma dehumidifying dryers, and the INDESTEC processing protocol — a sequence of double anaerobic fermentation and thermal shock that produces specific, repeatable cup profiles rather than relying on the variability of open-air fermentation.

His collaboration with DAK Coffee Roasters (Amsterdam) on the Milky Cake lot — Castillo variety, 1,730 masl, caramel, tropical fruit, creamy sweetness — has made Finca El Paraíso internationally famous. Native Coffee Co. gives Diego a second dimension: not just producing green coffee for others to roast, but controlling the full production chain from cherry to finished cup.

The Mission: Producers as the Story

Native's core conviction is that coffee farmers are the unsung heroes of the specialty coffee industry — responsible for producing the raw material of a global market worth over $100 billion, yet consistently receiving the smallest share of the value their work creates. The company pays producers 3–4 times commodity prices and returns a percentage of roasted coffee sales back to the farmers. The at-origin roasting model goes further: by keeping the roasting margin in Colombia rather than exporting it to a consuming country, Native structurally increases the economic return that stays at origin.

"Why shouldn't producers roast their own coffee? That's the question Native Coffee Company set out to answer." — The CoffeeVine