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This Newark Coffee Roaster Might Be Behind Some of Your Fave NJ Coffee
Red House Roasters, located at 308 Mt. Pleasant Avenue in Newark, is a specialty coffee roasting company founded by Montclair locals Richard Seidenberg and Stacey Feder. Partners in life and business, Richard and Stacey ventured down the path of coffee roasting after an inspiring trip to Costa Rica and have never looked back. Now, their company focuses on sourcing, importing, and roasting the best coffee beans on the planet and sharing these top-quality beans with partners and consumers across New Jersey. Read on to learn more about Red House Roasters based in Newark, New Jersey.
The Backstory
Stacey and Richard met in New Brunswick. Richard was working a sales job at the time and was inspired by Stacey’s lifestyle of traveling through Latin America, where she’d connect with local craftsmen. The two bonded over the fact that they come from families of makers in Newark and the Bronx and decided to build a life together that went down this path.
Richard quickly adopted Stacey's love of coffee roasting, which she picked up in Costa Rica. He went all in with it and started roasting his beans on their back porch. This led them to open their first roast house in 2009 in Weehawken. Their daughter was born shortly after, and they simultaneously landed their first big account. The business took off from there and landed Red House Roasters at its current location in Newark.
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“The whole reason we like to do this is that we love incredible coffee and roasting it,” Stacey told The Montclair Girl. “The nuance of coffee and its grading system are similar to wine. We only do specialty grade coffee that’s 80 points and above.”
About The Roast House
A bag of Red House Roasters coffee has two main influences: the sourcing of the coffee and relationships with top-quality farms and roasting the coffee in a way that produces the best flavor from the bean.
Red House Roasters sources from all three major coffee-producing regions–Central/South America, Indonesia, and Africa–with a focus on farms located at the highest elevation for the best quality. Each continent produces different flavor profiles, so whether coffee has a fruity flavor or a honey or chocolatey flavor is influenced by where it was grown.
Once Richard and his team obtain the coffee, they work to find the sweet spot in each bean and roast, which takes some finessing. The roasting process is two-fold. They first dry the bean to remove the moisture and release the natural flavors, and then suck the air out and cool the bean down to lock in the flavor.
The company produces and sells Single Origin, which focuses on one distinct area or region where the coffee is grown, and Blends, which are a mixture of two or more different-origin coffee beans. Today, there are 20 different coffee flavors to choose from, with Richard and the team constantly innovating to add more to the list. Some of the names have New Jersey influence, such as the Jersey Devil Blend, which was the very first, and the Scarlett Knight French Roast, an ode to Stacey and Richard’s alma mater.
In addition to being a top-quality roasting facility, the warehouse in Newark is also considered a coffee lab. The team hosts industry folks for latte art competitions and cupping sessions, a method used by coffee professionals to evaluate and explore the flavors of coffee. On occasion, partners and customers stop by the facility to buy coffee bags and score a cup of coffee on the house.
Local Footprint
Red House Roasters is New Jersey-born and bred, with partners across Montclair, Hoboken, Jersey City, Asbury Park throughout the Jersey shore, and more. As a wholesale business, the company supplies its coffee to restaurants, cafés, and offices.
As Stacey shared, “Since inception, we’ve been focused on the product and making sure it’s exemplary. That, and supporting the community. Everything we can do to impact the community is what we’re about.”
Red House Roasters regularly donates to Toni’s Kitchen, a Montclair non-profit that gives back to the community through free meals to those in need. It also donates all of the chaff, the papery covering of the coffee bean, to nearby agriculture operators, so nothing goes to waste. It’s also a partner of the New Jersey Performing Art Center (NJPAC) and the We Are All Music Foundation (WAAM).
Richard and Stacey are proud of their New Jersey footprint (they are Rutgers alumni, after all), and they aspire to continue expanding and being part of the culture and community-building of Newark and the Garden State at large. They routinely seek out collaborations to bolster local businesses and deepen the company’s New Jersey roots and have hopes to show up at more festivals and markets in the months and years to come.
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While they continue to be steadfast around wholesale, Richard and Stacey have dreams of growing into retail in the future. Until then, locals can enjoy a cup of Red House Roasters coffee at Raymond’s–where it’s been for 15 years–or buy a bag of beans at Marcel Bakery + Kitchen.
