What Were You Doing at 12? They Started a Coffee Company!

Young Entrepreneurs: How Three 12-Year-Old Boys Built Their Own Coffee Company

Does anyone remember a few years ago, when a 12-year-old girl from Hong Kong named Ye Rongxi developed an app letting children around the world learn languages through video calls? She even founded her own company, hoping to build a platform where kids everywhere could communicate and learn each other's native languages.

This year, three 12-year-old boys from Australia — Arlee, Rocco, and Cristiano — pooled their efforts to establish a coffee company named ARC. From the company logo to green bean quality control, roasting, bagging, recording, and sales, the three divided responsibilities clearly, each playing to his strengths to ensure every task met the highest standard.

It began as a school holiday assignment: students were asked to complete something creative as a team over the break. At first they had no plans to start a company — they simply visited a local coffee roasting company to relax and have lunch nearby.

During the visit, Arlee's father suggested, "Why don't you try starting a business!" That sparked a wave of ideas. After talking it through, the three decided to jointly found their own coffee company — ARC Inc.

They contacted the roasting company they'd visited, hoping to learn comprehensive, professional coffee knowledge (coffee beans, roasting, extraction, and more) and become partners.

Division of Labor and Product Development

Once they'd mastered the fundamentals, the boys got to work with clear divisions of responsibility: Arlee handled coffee bean production and company operations, Rocco took charge of creativity and design, and Cristiano supervised and planned sales strategy.

They began applying what they'd learned, determining each bean's flavor characteristics through cupping. Then they created an espresso blend exclusive to their company — ARC Reserve.

The blend draws on beans from three origins: Arlee selected Brazil, Rocco chose Australia (yes, coffee does grow in eastern Australia, though production is limited), and Cristiano picked Costa Rica.

The finished blend presents an intense, balanced flavor with distinct cocoa and caramel notes. From bean selection to blending to flavor profiling, the coffee represents not just their company but Australians' love of and pursuit of good coffee.

As Arlee put it: "This has been a very fulfilling process. We learned how to roast coffee beans together and keep coffee quality consistent, and selling the beans taught us more communication skills too."

First Sales and Marketing Strategy

After finalizing their roasting and blending plans, they produced their first batch of espresso beans. With no customer base at launch, they left some packaged beans at the roasting company's store for sale and took the rest home to sell door-to-door around the neighborhood.

After considerable effort, they sold their first batch — and celebrated for five whole minutes! They found the whole sales process fascinating, meeting all kinds of customers and hearing the market's thoughts on coffee. That led to the next plan: selling to cafés.

Knowing that pitching coffee beans cold might not catch cafés' attention, they decided to launch a charity initiative. They partnered with a local children's charity, pledging 5% of the net income from every bag of beans to the organization's children's foundation, then created sales flyers to tell consumers and cafés more about their company.

Rocco, who proposed the initiative, said: "I think it's important to be grateful and help others. Many children aren't as fortunate as we are, so I hope that through selling coffee beans we can help more kids enjoy life at this age instead of worrying about the future."

Industry Support and Future Aspirations

The head of the roasting company that helped ARC said: "We are proud to help these children develop their own brand and company, and they've found an unexpected way to give back to society. They haven't just launched a new brand — they've planned various coffee bean sales activities. Through this collaboration, we hope to encourage people of different ages to unleash their creativity and create more infinite possibilities."

Arlee noted that buying their coffee is an investment in their business — support that helps them grow and learn important life skills and daily business operations. Running a coffee company is just the first step: Arlee hopes to become a forensic scientist, while Rocco dreams of becoming a world-famous rock climber. Earning money now, they hope, will help them realize those dreams.

Reflections on Young Entrepreneurship

A child's world is always full of wild imagination, which can look like a "fairy tale" to adults. But the world doesn't run by textbooks. When children get the chance to acquire and apply knowledge, it does more good than any tutoring session or textbook chapter. Age has never been a barrier to understanding the world.

Sometimes children know what they want better than adults do, precisely because they're pure of heart. When facing our own dreams, we could stand to be like them — simple and sincere — and perhaps reap different rewards.

To everyone reading this, who was once a child: may you live a happy, fulfilling life and realize your own dreams.

Image source: The Coffee Commune

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

The boys' balanced, cocoa-caramel blend is a reminder that medium roasting is where balance lives. During roasting, three elements decide a coffee's final flavor: acidity, sweetness, and bitterness. The darker the roast, the more bitter and heavy the cup; the lighter, the more acidic and delicate. For anyone chasing balance, medium roasted beans are the best place to start.

If you dislike both sourness and bitterness, choose the FrontStreet Brazil Fazenda Rainha — a Yellow Bourbon from the world's largest coffee-producing country, gently sweet with cream, peanut, chocolate, toast, and sugarcane notes after medium roasting, equally at home in a pour-over, moka pot, or espresso machine.

For a sweeter medium roast, the FrontStreet Strawberry Sugar Gesha blend is the first choice. Unusually for a fruity coffee, it combines two famous origins — honey-processed Costa Rica and washed Panama Gesha — and a medium roast draws out both orange-blossom honeyed character and rounded sweetness, shining in cold brew, pour-over, or espresso.

For a taste of Chinese specialty coffee, the FrontStreet 2013 Natural Typica carries the orthodox Yunnan small-bean character, medium roasted to reveal gentle notes of nuts, brown sugar, black tea, and dried apricot — great value for pour-over, cold brew, or drip machines.

And for the pinnacle of balance, the FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 — grown on Typica, a world-renowned premium Arabica — takes its "Emperor of Coffee" nickname seriously: medium roasting fuses its unique sourness, bitterness, sweetness, and body into an elegant aroma, with chocolate, roasted nuts, cream, and caramel unfolding from the very first sip, a feat no other coffee can quite match.