Q: What originally inspired the mission behind Purity Coffee?
It started with a personal story. My wife Amber was having some health concerns and was drinking a lot of coffee — she had a low energy problem, and as a British tea drinker, I tried to persuade her not to drink so much of it. I didn’t feel it was good for her; I felt like the caffeine was telling her body it could do something it really couldn’t, and that it was having a negative effect. Her challenge back to me was simple: “Prove it.”
So I started doing research — this was about ten years ago. I was lucky enough to meet two professors at the Institute of Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt, and I took them out to dinner. They gave me this long list of the health benefits of coffee, largely tied to the antioxidants — the CGAs — in the bean. Then I asked the obvious follow-up: who’s actually making decisions based on health? And the answer was no one.
That struck me as remarkable. All these health benefits exist — reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, dementia, Alzheimer’s, general inflammation — and yet nobody in the industry was building around that. So I started asking: what would it look like if someone did?
I began working with Dr. Adriana Farah from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, one of the best coffee scientists in the world, who has consulted with the World Health Organization. My question to her was simple: what if you could make every decision based on health, without compromising on taste or cost? We spent about eighteen months in R&D, looking at every stage of production and asking what we’d do differently if health were the only priority.
That’s how it started — launched first to friends and family. There were real reasons this would be hard as a business: people don’t buy coffee based on health, and they don’t rebuy based on health. So we had to find out two things: was this actually a category, and could what we were doing — organic, regeneratively farmed coffee, maximized antioxidants — genuinely make a measurable difference in the body. Once we validated that, we built the business from there. We launched our first bag of coffee in 2017.
Q: What makes “healthy coffee” different from the average coffee most people drink every day?
There are really two answers to that.
The first is easy: avoiding the bad stuff — mold, heavy metals, mycotoxins, pesticide residues. That’s table stakes. If you buy organic, specialty-grade coffee and test for mold, mycotoxins, and heavy metals, anyone can do that, and it’s not expensive. It matters, but it’s not where the health benefits come from.
The health benefits come from the chlorogenic acids (CGAs), antioxidants, and polyphenols in the coffee — and maximizing those is complicated. CGA levels vary crop to crop, harvest to harvest, region to region. The only way to know if a coffee is genuinely higher in antioxidants is to lab test the green beans and select for it, because roasting burns away antioxidants — that’s unavoidable unless you’re working with green coffee extract. So a very dark roast has fewer antioxidants than a lighter one.
But it’s not quite that simple either. In the early stages of roasting, you get acrylamide from the Maillard reaction — the browning process — which you want to avoid. As you roast darker, you start creating polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which you also want to avoid. So there’s a sweet spot: a roast light enough to preserve antioxidants and keep acrylamide low, but not so dark that you’re generating PAHs. Finding that balance is what actually makes a coffee healthy — beyond just avoiding the bad stuff.
Q: What are some of the biggest misconceptions people have about coffee and wellness?
That coffee has been demonized. It’s treated like a guilty pleasure — people say “don’t mess with my coffee, I’m doing it anyway” — because they assume it’s bad for them and they’re indulging regardless.
The reality is the opposite. People talk about green tea or matcha as the healthy choice, but coffee actually has more antioxidants than either. It’s probably the healthiest beverage you can drink. The biggest misconception is that coffee isn’t good for you — when really, it should be seen as a health food.
Q: What does your personal coffee ritual look like each morning?
We drink Sacred Cups coffee. Our ritual is taking twenty to thirty minutes to talk about the day — we actually use the Sacred Cups ritual itself: what are we grateful for, what are we focused on, and what are we looking forward to. It’s really about using coffee as an anchor for that ritual, not just a beverage.
Q: If someone wants to improve their energy, focus, and overall health starting tomorrow, what’s one simple change you’d recommend?
Look at the things you do every single day. If you eat bread every day, look at the quality of the bread. If you eat eggs every day, look at the quality of the eggs. And if you drink coffee every day — and 164 million Americans do — pay attention to its quality, because the compounding effect of drinking poor-quality versus good-quality coffee, day after day, is meaningful.
Coffee is the single biggest source of antioxidants in the American diet, and it’s also one of the easiest things to improve. So if you’re a coffee drinker, my one piece of advice is: focus on getting good-quality, organic, specialty-grade coffee — tested for mold and mycotoxins, and tested for CGAs and antioxidants.
Source: Founder interview, recorded June 25, 2026.
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