OUR STORY
It started with bad coffee.
We met at college and became close friends before taking different paths - Or into finance, Ron into tech. Different careers, same long days, same morning coffee ritual, and the same growing interest in what we put into our bodies.
That curiosity led us to mushroom coffee. The idea made sense: functional ingredients, built into the drink people already remember every day. Focus, calm, sustained energy - all through coffee.
So we tried all of them. Every brand out there.
And it was terrible.
Every mushroom or functional coffee we tried, had the same problem - bad taste!
Stale, pre-ground coffee mixed with mushroom powder. Functional, maybe. Coffee, barely.
That’s when we asked the question that became Bywaqa: What if mushroom coffee didn’t have to taste like a compromise?
We built it backwards.
Here's what we already knew: we love coffee. Not just functional coffee - actual coffee. We grind our own beans, care about roast levels, and notice when a cup tastes flat.
So we kept one rule:
Fresh Grinding. Always.
We did the opposite of what others were doing. Instead of pre-grinding and pre-mixing, we kept the beans whole, and engineered special functional tablets designed to be ground together with the beans, so the blend comes together fresh in every cup.
Finding the right partner.
Building this took finding the right roaster - someone who took specialty coffee as seriously as we did, and treated the people growing it with the same care.
We found Agro Café. They source specialty-grade coffee from family-owned farms, build long-term partnerships with their growers, and roast with the same care a small roaster would - at the scale a brand needs.
Same values as ours. No anonymous bulk coffee. No shortcuts taken with the soul or the people behind it.
This is the coffee inside every bag of Bywaqa.
Bywaqa.
We named it after Waqa - the sky god of Ethiopia's Oromo people, in their tradition, the first coffee plants grew from his tears.
Coffee has been sacred for thousands of years. A morning ritual, a moment of stillness, an anchor for the day.
Somewhere along the line, mushroom coffee forgot that.
Bywaqa is our return to it.
