Member Spotlight: Lee Wallace – Founder & CEO of Peace Coffee

Lee Wallace, Owner and CEO of Peace Coffee and OSC Core Chapter Member, takes five to reflect on 5 simple questions. Enjoy!

OSC: What is your hometown?

LW: Troy, New York

OSC: What’s one thing most people don’t know about you?

LW: Growing up, I drove an ice cream truck named Mr. Ding-a-Ling. Kids would yell “here comes Mr. Ding-a-Ling” as I drove around.

OSC: What is it about the mission of your company that really ignites you?

LW: Growth=impact. Right now, a very small percentage of the world’s coffee that is certified as fair trade and organic gets sold as such. For every additional pound we buy we are getting more money into coffee growing communities.

OSC: What’s a favorite childhood memory of food that you have?

LW: Sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter and helping my mother make milk gravy to go with the fried chicken she’d just made. She loved to cook and got us involved in the kitchen at a very young age.

OSC: What’s one thing that keeps you up at night?

LW: Climate change – like so many other agricultural products, the change in climate is really impacting coffee and coffee farmers.

 

About Peace Coffee:
We’re here because we believe that coffee is more than just a commodity. We believe it is essential to weekends and workdays, brunches and bundt cakes, and everything in between. We also believe it’s essential to our farmer partners who attentively tend coffee trees from seed to harvest in hopes of making a good life for their family. We play fair, we play hard, and sometimes we just play because we believe that the most important thing we can do, besides making delicious coffee, is to enjoy the ride.

We’re starry-eyed dreamers who believe in bicycle-power, being nice, and bringing neighbors, farmers, and the community together. We believe that collaboration works wonders, and that passion and honesty, and a really great cup of coffee can make the world a better place. And when that coffee is sustainably grown and freshly roasted to bring out the best in every bean, well, that’s when the real magic happens.