Inside a warehouse on Adeline Street in Oakland, workers pack mail orders for customers who want their coffee the hard way: unroasted, green, and destined for a popcorn popper or a $10,000 machine in someone's garage. The business is Sweet Maria's, and it has quietly become a national hub for a hobby that lets people dodge record grocery prices by roasting their own beans at home.
As reported by The Oaklandside, Sweet Maria's sells roughly 1.75 million pounds of green coffee a year, moving beans from Sumatra, Yemen, Colombia, Guatemala and Ethiopia into one- and two-pound bags for home roasters across the United States and Canada, plus 50-pound sacks for micro-roasteries and cafes. Store manager Jarrett Allen told the outlet the company continues to see year-over-year growth in volume, though not at the pace of its pandemic-era surge, when green coffee volume jumped 15% between 2019 and 2021 and the company sold about 1.41 million pounds of green coffee in 2021. Sales of its entry-level Fresh Roast machine climbed 83% from 2019 to 2020, per the same account.
From a Columbus Basement to Adeline Street
Sweet Maria's traces back to the late 1990s, when co-founder Thompson Owen launched it as a basement-based mail-order business in Columbus, Ohio, according to The Oaklandside. Owen learned to roast coffee in early adulthood while living in New Orleans. He and co-founder Maria Troy, for whom the company is named, moved the operation to the Bay Area in 2002, first landing in Emeryville before relocating to Oakland in 2005. The company now employs more than 30 people at its current home at 2823 Adeline Street — a location Hoodline previously highlighted as one of the city's most affordable spots for roasting supplies and international green beans.
Owen told The Oaklandside that having a physical store customers can walk into is preferable to running Sweet Maria's purely as a fulfillment business. The warehouse also handles customer pickup orders in addition to its mail-order volume.
Why Green Beans Beat the Grocery Aisle
The pitch is straightforward economics. Standard ground coffee reached $9.72 per pound in April 2026, according to figures attributed to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and green unroasted coffee beans run 50% to 75% cheaper than roasted, finished coffee. That price spike tracks with broader industry data: the BLS average price of roasted ground coffee hit that same all-time high in April 2026, a 39% surge since January 2025 and a 105% jump since April 2021, according to Daily Coffee News, which tied the run-up to high green-coffee costs, supply constraints, rising demand and tariffs.
Trade policy has hit green coffee importers directly, too. Major importers began issuing duty refunds to roasters and cutting tasting room prices in July after U.S. Customs and Border Protection started repaying temporary tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in 2025, according to Sprudge. The move came amid a dispute over emergency tariffs.
Oakland Residents Who Roast Coffee
Home roasting equipment spans a wide range of budgets. Options include modified popcorn poppers and basic machines costing less than $100, all the way up to machines costing $10,000, The Oaklandside reports. Home roasters typically roast about one pound of beans a week, and the freshly roasted beans need to rest 12 to 24 hours before brewing, cooling to the touch within three to five minutes for ideal results.
Liam O'Sullivan is among Oakland's dedicated home roasters. He started roasting in 2018. But his early trial-and-error phase wasn't without incident — O'Sullivan set fire to the deck at his previous home while learning the craft, per The Oaklandside's reporting.
Marty Mulvihill co-founded Safer Made. Decaffeination methods include the water-based Swiss Water process, which can make coffee 99.9% caffeine-free; methylene chloride and ethyl acetate are chemical-based alternatives, according to Barista Magazine.
A third Oakland home roaster, Chris Jordan-Bloch, has roasted at home multiple times a week for more than 15 years after buying a $500 home-roasting kit that included several pounds of green beans and a basic roaster, the outlet reports. Home roasting also has longtime practitioners.
Oakland's Deep Roots in the Green Bean Trade
The home-roasting scene didn't spring up by accident. The Port of Oakland ranks among the premier West Coast entry points for unroasted coffee beans, receiving 10.8% of all U.S. unroasted coffee bean imports from Colombia — the nation's second-largest coffee supplier — during the first 11 months of 2024, according to the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association. The port's role in coffee imports underscores Oakland's place in the regional trade.
That infrastructure drew other green coffee businesses to the East Bay. Royal Coffee is another green coffee business in the East Bay. Small-batch roasters have taken root elsewhere in the city too — Hoodline has chronicled other small-batch roasters in the city. The city's coffee businesses range from small operators to larger facilities, while at-home roasting is distinct from the operations of larger commercial facilities.
Sweet Maria's itself also serves that commercial tier through its wholesale branch, Coffee Shrub, which supplies 50-pound boxes and full 100- to 154-pound burlap sacks of green coffee to independent cafes and micro-roasteries, with volume discounts up to 35 cents off per pound for larger orders. It's a business model that spans from the hobbyist buying a few pounds for a home popcorn popper to the professional roaster filling burlap sacks — all built around the same Oakland warehouse and the port infrastructure that put the East Bay on the map for green coffee decades ago.
