About
Safari 97 is a family-owned coffee company in Calgary, run by two brothers, Joe and Shem Thiongo.
Safari is the Swahili word for journey. The 97 in our name is the year we arrived in Canada. Eight suitcases between four of us. It was an exciting time: we got to explore a new culture and experience a new climate we are not sure we were ready for.
We grew up between two coffee countries without realising it. At home, our parents drank either hot water (iykyk) or tea. For most of our lives, coffee was caffeine. Something you put up with to wake up. We discovered it in university, where it helped us through early-morning classes and long nights of cramming. We never thought of it as something you'd choose for the taste.
The discovery came years later, on a trip back to Kenya: coffee could actually taste good. Naturally sweet, with more flavour than we knew the drink could hold. Nothing in Canada had tasted like it. We brought many bags home and shared them with friends, and since good Kenyan coffee was hard to find here, we took it upon ourselves to bring it in.
Our goal is to highlight Kenyan coffee, and the coffees of the other East African countries. We want to bring the joy we felt in that first cup to people here in Canada.
Today we work directly with farmers, producers, and the Nairobi Coffee Exchange, through a long-standing relationship with a coffee exporter based in Kenya, to source this coffee. East Africa has many small farmers who grow some of the best coffee on earth, and deserve to be recognised for it. That is the brief we set ourselves every time we put words on a label.
The compass on our mark points 340°: the great-circle bearing from Nairobi to Calgary. One end is where the coffee is grown. The other is where it lands. The orange dot in the middle is the sun, or a bean, or wherever we happen to be standing at the time.
We're glad you found us.
Joe & Shem Thiongo