In 1999, Jason Scherr opened a small coffee shop on Bedford Avenue in the then sparsely populated neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Well into the aughts, he greeted customers, prepared drinks, wiped down tables, mopped floors, took out the garbage, and did his fair share of bookkeeping (among many other jobs!). He loved the sense of community he was building, but by the mid-2000’s he started to look for a way to grow this sense of community without his personal involvement in each espresso drink. He envisioned a company that would create goodwill with his customers by being the most responsible business it could be, a business that would bring back regulars time and again even if he wasn’t their barista. Think Coffee would become the realization of that vision.
In 2006, Jason opened the first Think Coffee location on Mercer Street in Greenwich Village with the mission of minimizing environmental impact and sourcing coffee as responsibly as possible. It wasn’t long after the Mercer Street opening that the Think Coffee team started to fulfill its mission by partnering with coffee producers around the globe.
Today, Think Coffee remains steadfastly independent and locally owned, while working tirelessly to reduce its environmental impact and redress the inequities in the coffee supply chain. It has kept many of the same farmer relationships from its early days, providing long-term stable contracts over the years and returning hundreds of thousands of dollars to the farm working communities that need them the most.