The idea for a new business started as a joke among friends. Iowa’s Naomi Gretter, Sky Hahn and Kari Berg were busy schoolteachers who were even busier raising active children and helping on their families’ hog farms. At a school in-service day, Namoi said she the three of them needed to find jobs that allowed them more time to enjoy their lives. She suggested — in a kidding way — that they should go into business together. She said she’d always wanted to run a coffee truck. Flash forward a few years and that’s exactly what they’re doing.
On the latest episode of Grow Getters, a new Farm Journal podcast that showcases agriculture’s most inventive side hustles, they tell host Davis Michaelsen how they’ve managed to succeed, making money to help support the farm while giving themselves more time for family, friends and fun.
The trio was inspired by a book titled “Growing Slow,” by Jennifer Dukes Lee, to take a new approach to their lives. “It’s about slowing down to enjoy what’s around you because it all goes by so fast,” Kari explains on the podcast. “I was running around constantly and not enjoying the things I should.”
After careful research, they partnered with Java House, a coffee roaster in Iowa City. Now they just needed a truck, which they found online. Getting it to Iowa required a weekend trip to South Carolina through an ice storm. “At first, we did add more to our plates, but now we’re able to control our own schedules and have more balance between taking the truck out or doing things around the farm or family things we’d like to do,” Naomi says.
“Since there are three of us, we divide things out so that makes it easier,” Kari adds. “If this was a one-person show, it would be overwhelming.”
Rural Revival Coffee Truck serves crowds at many events, including World Pork Expo for the past two years, Iowa county fairs and RAGBRAI, an annual Iowa bike-riding event. Maybe best of all, they now can roll into the parking lot of the school where they used to teach to serve former colleagues. Their advice to wannabe entrepreneurs is simple: “If you have a dream, follow it,” Kari says. “Just go for it. Life is short.”
Watch the full interview on Grow Getters.
Visit the Rural Revival Coffee Truck website
Read the full story about Rural Revival Coffee from PORK
See Rural Revival Coffee Truck on AgDay
