Zac and Jessica Parsons are celebrating 10 years of Honey Moon Coffee Co., which made its debut on South Weinbach Avenue in late 2016. They’ve since expanded to four shops, become roasters through their purchase of Evansville Coffee Co., and gotten married. The duo shared what keeps them going in this Evansville Living story; now, they dig into the details of running a growing business together.
What customer feedback has stood out to you?
Jessica Parsons: Because we’re coming up on our 10th year, it’s been the kids that grew up with their parents taking them, and now they’re super fans, or it’s very nostalgic for them. We get to hear stories of, “I loved your bubble waffles when I was five.” “I would come here for my birthday every year.” Or they started coming when they were younger, and now they want to work for us. That’s been something neat as we come upon a decade here.
Zac Parsons: They’ll even sort of put us in this category of a Los Bravos or a G.D. Ritzy’s or a Donut Bank and say, “If I’m coming back to Evansville, these are the spots that I’m going to hit.”
How do you picture yourself at Honey Moon 10 years from now?
Zac: We’ve talked about this … looking at this 10-year mark as a potential halfway point into some sort of handoff to a new generation of leaders, or maybe even owners 10 years from now. I guess some of that depends on how the growth happens, if it’s more geographical or more online with e-commerce as well as the roasting side of it. But I think that will be what will be in our mid-fifties at that point. And the pace of it may be too much for us at that point.
Jessica: Right now, we’re really focused on building a strong team, and we have a really great team that sits around this conference table, and I trust them. And they’re learning the ropes and the leadership and all that me and Zac do right now. So, I don’t know what we’re open to. Wherever growth leads us, we’ll look at any opportunity that someone brings us.
Zac: We’re definitely more responsive than strategic.
Jessica: We’re not necessarily saying, “I want to move into this market, this market, and this market.” It’s, “Does something make sense here?” And then we’ll look at it.
You partner with coffee growers in other parts of the world. How have these partnerships changed your perspective on coffee and on life?
Jessica: For me, it brought a deep appreciation for a cup of coffee when I saw how much had to go into the entire supply chain just to get coffee to us where the barista then crafts it. I just was grateful that we have this thing that, every night when I go to sleep, I’m looking forward to the morning. We recently got back from Guatemala and got to see a female-run farm, and that was important for me because there’s a gap in the industry of … not as many females. It’s more male dominated. So that was cool to see. And just the traceability of getting to meet the farms where we get our beans from is important to us.
You’ve traveled to Colombia and Guatemala to meet coffee growers. Which country has been your favorite?
Zac: I’d say Colombia probably because it was our first. It was just that cross-cultural experience that we got to share together. It was Jessica and me, and then another married couple that’s grown with us as employees. We got to experience that through their eyes and our own experience. We got to see the big city. We got to see the rural farm and everything in between. Some of the history from the colonial days. This is a world that has opened up to us just because we started to create a coffee shop in little old Evansville, Indiana. … “Juan Valdez” is kind of the mascot for the Colombian coffee federation. But then (we’re) getting to learn the different segments of coffee production from the farming perspective and what a farmer can sell their coffee for to a big brand like Nestlé, versus trying to find smaller partners like us that are selecting for specific growing conditions and processing methods that bring more distinct flavor to the cup. They celebrate our visit because we represent something that’s kind of smaller in their world, which is dominated by coffee. So, there’s this mutual appreciation and hospitality that they provide for us.
Jessica: When we went to Guatemala, we actually brought Roasted Guatemala coffee to them because … they don’t have a roasting machine on the farm, so they hadn’t tried it. We had a big lunch with all of the employees of the farm —
Zac: No one spoke English. We didn’t speak much Spanish.
Jessica: But it was like a very special moment.
Zac: You could feel the appreciation. We haven’t made it to Africa or Indonesia yet, or even parts of Asia. But like that is on the docket for the next 10 years, to truly travel the globe to meet and source more coffee origins.
How has purchasing Evansville Coffee Co. in early 2023 to roast your own beans changed your business model?
Jessica: Evansville Coffee Co. is our sister company, and it’s growing. … We’re really focused more on wholesale, like some of our coffee shops that we provide beans for. Along the way, we have customers ordering from all over the country now, so that’s interesting.
When you opened Honey Moon, you did much of the work yourselves — marketing, hanging drywall, working barista shifts. How has your daily involvement changed as your business has grown to four locations?
Jessica: We’ve been very scrappy. That’s something that’s hard for us to get away from now. We’ve never hired a painter. We’ve painted all of our buildings. [Laughs] There’s a point where we need to kind of be willing to give some of that up, but I think that’s definitely part of our, or at least my, Midwestern mindset. [Laughs]
Zac: It’s hard, for me, to imagine that we’d have four (shops). That seems crazy. We didn’t set out to open an empire [laughs] or a chain.
What is a small daily habit that keeps you grounded?
Jessica: For me, I don’t ever want to get out of touch with our employees or our business or how challenging something might be. So for me, it’s checking in with the team.
