How Baling Hay Prepared Me to Become the Coffee 'Bean Baron'

Speaker:

Danny O'Neill

07 Oct 2015

6:30 PM

Dolezal Auditorium, 127 Curtiss Hall

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Danny O'Neill is the owner and founder of The Roasterie Coffee, Inc., and a graduate of Iowa State. He credits a trip to Costa Rica as a high school foreign exchange student as the event that inspired his career path. O'Neill graduated from Iowa State with a double major in International Studies and Political Science and for the next ten years worked in sales and marketing, including with a large multinational corporation. He then took the leap and started roasting coffee in the basement of his home in 1995. The specialty coffee roasting company now services espresso bars and coffee houses, fine restaurants, high-end grocers, offices and retail accounts and includes three Roasterie Cafes. William K Deal Leadership Lecture and part of CALS Week.

"Everything I needed to know about building a coffee company I learned on a hay rack," says O'Neill, who grew up the middle of ten children in Denison, Iowa. Since The Roasterie's inception, O'Neill has become a sought-after expert in the ever growing coffee industry. He has judged cupping and barista competitions all around the world since 1995. In April 2001, he was awarded "Super Taster" status on the Specialty Coffee Institute Sensory Aptitude Test. In 2005 he authored a DVD, [i]Cupping 101[/i], which is sold around the world. O'Neill, who's also has an MBA from the Rockhurst University Executive Fellows Program in Kansas City, serves on a number of advisory boards for various local companies and associations, and is currently on the Board of Regents at Rockhurst University and the Board of Directors for the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce. He is also past President of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.