Never Stop Learning: Our Recent History

When we learn we grow.

Learning is very important for the development of each person in our company. At Stone Creek we say “everything is iterative”, regularly. By that, we mean that we can be absolutely sure of something one day, and be willing to question it the next. The world changes. So must we.

We adopted the “Never Stop Learning” mantra here at Stone Creek Coffee back in 2016. At the time we felt it captured the journey of failure, learning, and growth that characterizes both the human condition, and our journey with this company. 

Eric Resch founded Stone Creek over 30 years ago. Over that period of time, we made countless mistakes and failed numerous times, but we also learned a bunch. All of those experiences have brought us where we are today, and today’s learning will propel us into the future. Here are a few “learning highlights” from the last 30 years…

You have to start somewhere. For us, that somewhere was in an old warehouse in Cedarburg and a small cafe in Whitefish Bay. We started a few roaster fires, roasted our coffee really dark, and started making friends. We founded the company under the name “Giri Corp.” The term “Giri” came from the Bushido Japanese code of honor and conveys the idea that we have a “social obligation” with all of our actions, especially those in the business sector.

After 10 years, we moved our roasting operations downtown to what we now call “The Factory.” At the time, it looked nothing like it does now, but another 20 years and some elbow grease have had a positive impact.

The “Farm to Cup” ethos became a part of our operations in 2012 when we began to learn how to source coffee directly from farms and co-ops around the world. We had previously worked exclusively with coffee importers (which is a much easier and more common method of sourcing), but this transition was an important part of our evolution as a specialty coffee company.

These two years helped shape SCC for the next half-decade. We decided to slow our physical expansion efforts to focus on caring for our employees and our home market. We closed some stores, evolved our infrastructure, and started the process to become a certified B-Corporation. While many things in these two years were hard, we wouldn’t trade the learning for anything.

We officially became a certified in January of this year. The process of certification give us tremendous guidance in the impact areas we are accountable to: Our Employees, Our Customers & Community, Our Suppliers, and Planet. We look forward to the years of learning, growth, and improvement ahead of us with this new framework for the sense of “social obligation” we’ve carried with us since Day 1.

We opened the brand new Cafe & Kitchen in Whitefish Bay. At the time it opened, it was our 9th cafe. The build process took over a year and a half, but we couldn’t be more thrilled with the end result. At the outset, our goal was to create something that we loved, something authentic to us, that we could share with the community. There is a lot of experimentation and learning ahead of us in this new space.

And on we go...