Building a Black-Led Coffee Movement in Highland Park

You might have noticed one brand lately, in particular, mentioned on the menu of your favorite spot to grab a latte or on display, sandwiched between jars of artisan chile oil and bottles of premium-grade maple syrup, in one of the city’s high-end markets. Sepia Coffee Project, the brainchild of Highland Park native and longtime overseas coffee trader, Martell Mason, has been roasting about 100 pounds of beans a week from a 500-square-foot space in Detroit’s North End since 2021. The brand now counts a roster of about 30 clients throughout metro Detroit, New York, and Minneapolis. Among its customers: Folk in Corktown, the Congregation in the Boston Edison area, and all of Motor City’s Red Hook locations.

And he’s just getting started.

In December, Sepia acquired a 1,000-square-foot building in his hometown at 261 Pilgrim Street at the corner of Hamilton along with an adjoining 2,000-square-foot lot. The space will allow him to increase his roasting capability by at least fivefold. Sepia is working with Detroit-based End Studio for the facility’s design, which will include the roastery and a small tasting room. The lot next door will be used as an outdoor garden and seating area.

Mason hopes that once Sepia is in full swing, it will serve as a catalyst to reactivate a commercial strip that was once a destination for Highland Parkers, but over the years, continues to struggle to realize the same revival as the surrounding city of Detroit.

In 2023, Sepia was among the top four ventures to emerge as finalists of the Hatch Detroit Contest small business competition. Since then, the company’s client list has continued to grow and in November was awarded a $10,000 grant from beverage company Torani’s Café Opportunity Fund. Currently, Sepia is in the midst of a Wefunder campaign. The goal is to raise $195,000. As of Monday, March 11, $138,699 has been raised through the campaign, with this round of fundraising set to finish on March 15. Mason hopes to open the roastery and tasting room by the end of summer.

For Mason, this expansion isn’t just about creating a third place for the enjoyment of Highland Parkers, it’s about illustrating to Black and brown residents that they, too, are very much integral to the multi-billion-dollar coffee industry.

“I go back to the name of our company, which is Sepia. If we think about those old photos, [from] back in the day, they had all of those hues of browns and creams, even a little bit of black in there, and for me, that is my coffee community,” Mason told Eater Detroit in an interview in February. “We’re not just the baristas pulling the shots, we should be able to own roasteries and coffee shops. We should be able to import and export products. So it’s getting our community to see that you can be a part of various links of this supply chain.”

In a 2023 interview with Eater Detroit, shortly after Sepia was revealed as a semifinalist for the Hatch contest, Mason said that when he returned to his hometown during COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, he found Highland Park was but a shell of what it once was.

“Growing up in the ’80s and the ’90s, I saw Highland Park before, when we did have small businesses on every single street,” Mason says. Today, Highland Park has extremely limited food and beverage options — the city didn’t really even have a bar until 2018.

Sepia Coffee Project

Mason spent much of his career working in coffee regions all over the globe in parts of the Americas, Africa, and the Indian Pacific, where exploitative conditions remain commonplace for coffee growers.

Sepia partners directly with Black and brown farmers overseas and strives to ensure that they’re are paid a premium on their coffees. Mason works with Georgia-based BD Imports, co-owned by Phyllis Johnson, who Mason says is a longtime mentor within the Black coffee space and was one of the first African American women to import coffees directly from East Africa to the United States.

Sepia’s coffee offerings are organized into three collections: Paradise, Blk Bottom, and Harmonie — which tell the story of the areas that once served as the epicenters of Black life in early 20th-century Detroit.

The Paradise and Blk Bottom collections are both single-origin. For the top-grade Paradise collection, for example, beans are sourced from Yudi Sautra, a farm in Lake Toba in the province of Northern Sumatra in Indonesia. The region’s wet climate makes drying coffee difficult, so beans there are wet-hulled or washed. This humid environment produces a coffee rich in complex flavor, with notes of dark fruit, spice, tobacco, and chocolate.

The Blk Bottom collection is Sepia’s specialty-grade offering. One example includes beans grown on land owned by the Peixoto family, among just a few Afro-Brazilian estates that own land in the Minas Gerais region, after members of the family pooled their resources back in 1999 to move from being sharecroppers to landowners. As for the Harmonie collection, it’s made up of blends — beans sourced from different farms — from the Blk Bottom collection that features specific-to-Detroit names like the Grand Trunk — made with beans from Brazil and Colombia.

For Mason, the Sepia Coffee Project is about building a global community where Black and brown farmers, exporters, coffee shop owners, baristas, and consumers alike can reap the benefits of their labor.

“If we just go back to where a lot of these products are coming from, be it coffee, be it sugar, be it tea, these are colonial products and with that, there are a lot of systemic issues that are still part of the industry,” says Mason. “What we’re trying to do is break down some of those walls and to let people know that they also have an opportunity to be in this industry.”