Even though it hasn’t even celebrated its grand opening yet, Ferndale’s Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters is already buzzing with activity. On a recent weekday, the sunny café is filled with customers sipping on lattes while working on laptops, with one pair appearing to be recording a podcast in the corner.
“The community has just been super supportive — just the vibe and everything on the first day, it really felt like home,” says owner Nathan Hamood, who opened the café and headquarters for his company at 927 Hilton Rd. back in April. A grand opening party was planned for Friday evening with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a latte art “throwdown,” and other festivities.
Hamood says that though the news of the flagship café’s arrival spread quickly on social media, it was important to have an official grand opening. “We’re very excited people and I think it’s very easy to lose sight of celebrating the wins,” he says.
A coffee enthusiast, Hamood says he launched the company amid the economic downturn of 2009 with his family’s help.
“It was kind of a wild time to open a business, really, but in a way it felt like we might as well try it,” he says, adding, “I think I was the only coffee drinker in the family, so it was also kind of a weird business for us to get into at the time.”
They opened their first location in Rochester, with the idea in part of creating a space for Hamood’s then-teenage sister, Stephie James, to perform. “My sister was looking to play music, but she was like 16 at the time, and that kind of got us thinking about the different places there are to sit and listen to music and not just in a loud bar setting,” Hamood says. “She used to play like four nights a week in that original Rochester shop.” (James is now based in Nashville, readying a new EP.)
A few years later, around 2012, they moved the café closer to downtown Rochester, and in 2015, they opened a location in downtown Detroit near Capitol Park.
“We were really inspired by what was happening in Detroit, and the focus on craft that we were seeing in the food scene,” he says of the area, which also includes the Cannelle bakery, the Prime + Proper steakhouse, and the high-end Lebanese restaurant Leila.
Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters prides itself for its ethical sourcing of quality beans from small farms around the world, but Hamood says he didn’t necessarily set out to create a specialty coffee roasting company. “In 2009, the specialty coffee industry was very new, especially in this area,” he says. “It was really our passions that led us here.”
Hamood says he decided he wanted to start roasting his own beans within the first year of business. “I was so interested in coffee, I wanted to find a way to get better quality coffee, and I felt kind of isolated in the Rochester area,” he says. “There weren’t a lot of, at the time, great local roasters, and also great roasters that I felt like I could afford to purchase from at the time.”
So he says he saved up $600 and bought his own small roasting machine, which could roast only one pound of beans at a time. “I’d come home from school and I’d roast coffee in it,” Hamood says. He eventually dropped out of Wayne State University to pursue Dessert Oasis full-time.
Before long, he decided that the company needed to establish a larger location that would serve as its headquarters and main production facility.
“You make things work when you’re growing little by little,” he says. “You know, opening a location every few years or so, things just kind of start creeping up and you’re like, ‘Man, how are we storing all this flour? How are we bringing these bags of coffee up a flight of stairs?’”
When a deal at another location began to fall through, Hamood noticed the Hilton Road building, which was then a warehouse owned by the audio equipment company Vintage King, had been put up for sale. He reached out to make an appeal to the sellers, saying why he believed it would make the perfect home for his company.
“I was like, if we can humanize this process a little bit, we might get some movement,” Hamood says. Coincidentally, he says, his contact at Vintage King was familiar with his Detroit café, and the deal ultimately came together.
The front of the building now includes a café, with two rooms where people can sit. The back area includes a shipping dock and a large Probat coffee bean roaster, where Dessert Oasis roasts its beans to perfection.
“It’s been my dream to roast on a Probat,” Hamood says. “I mean, they’ve been in existence since like the 1800s. The engineering is super top-notch.”
The new machine can roast 20 pounds of beans at a time. The beans are heated and spin in a turning drum, which brings out flavors through different chemical and physical reactions.
“As we’ve scaled, I don’t know that today it is cheaper to roast our own coffee than it would be to buy it from a wholesale roaster,” Hamood admits. “But it’s also just a passion and part of our core foundation now.”
The headquarters also includes a large bakery, which provides fresh confections for all of the Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters locations. The company is also ramping up a wholesale program to sell directly to restaurants and office buildings. There are also administration offices and a large space to teach employees about “the science of coffee,” which Hamood says fosters a community of coffee lovers and experts.
“You can come into one of our stores and grab a bag of coffee and get a bunch of free advice from any barista here,” he says.
In fact, a number of the company’s administrative staff started as baristas, including its director of finance.
“To me, that’s invaluable to have people that are that understanding of where the business has been, where it is, and what’s important to us as a company,” he says, adding, “It’s generally not because of the bottom line.”
With the headquarters established, Hamood says the company can focus on continuing to grow.
“This was in part to allow us to open more locations in the future,” he says. “But we want to do that really carefully. In a lot of ways, we’ve grown fast, but a lot of ways we’ve also kind of taken our time.”
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