Characters in Coffee
Mireya Jones gives freely—and sits still for no one
by Julie Beals

Mireya Jones gets the right amount of sun, sports functional yet hip footwear, and can create an impromptu barbecue sauce in 30 seconds flat. These are not wholly superficial observations, but exterior examples of comfort in one’s own skin, of balance, practicality and a knack for problem solving. “With Mireya, it’s the everyday, the practical side of friendship that people appreciate,” says Weta (Louise) Mathies, a close friend of 30-plus years. “She’s on my first two fingers of friends I can count on, whether it’s to fetch me if my car breaks down or to lend an ear.”

Beyond when-it-counts reliability, Mireya possesses an arresting charm. It’s unusual to meet someone so poised that you naturally respect her, yet unassuming and open in a way that quickly fosters trust, or even hope for rapport with her. You believe she won’t judge you, but you want her to like you, too. “What you see is what you get,” says Ted Lingle, executive director of the SCAA. “And her ego doesn’t get in the way of her work or her relationships.”

As a coffee grower, importer, roaster and retailer, Mireya participates in the industry at every link of the chain. But long before she got here, she lived in Berkeley, then Germany with her husband, Larry, and their five children. She worked in radio and volunteered for various organizations and Larry served as an Army doctor. They returned to the West Coast in 1974, settling in Pasadena for a SoCal slice of Americana, when orange groves and undeveloped hillsides still dotted the landscape.

Today, many in the industry know Mireya as a partner in Doña Mireya Estate Coffee/Jones Coffee, started in 1992 by sons Chuck and Larry. After Larry Jr. went on to work in other areas of the coffee industry, Mireya came in, and she has worked side-by-side with Chuck ever since, managing the roasting plant and wholesale accounts, and running a retail shop housed inside the plant. Mireya and Chuck, according to Larry Jr., have been “instrumental in establishing a demand for roaster/farmer relationships, origin education and bringing a renewed appreciation to the farm, insuring a clear destination for their product based on a quality they labored to achieve.”

Watching them in action, relaying messages and passing tasks back and forth in seamless motions, even finishing each others’ sentences, it’s clear that Mireya and Chuck are great business partners. “She has this graceful style of refinement with a strong sense of self and purpose,” says Chuck. “I’m like the clown who jumps into the barrel—if he’s lucky—at a rodeo … I could not imagine a better partner.”

Along with an equally tenacious spirit, Chuck has inherited Mireya’s sharp wit and sense of humor. “Unfortunately, I’m still learning the difference between class and crass,” he quips, and quickly adds: “People are very impressed when they learn Mireya is my mother. They’re more impressed when she admits it.”

Mireya insists that though she and Chuck have complementary abilities, Chuck is the one who essentially manages Jones Coffee. “He loves to give workshops, keep our wholesale customers trained and our retail customers happy. We’d love to see it grow, but not too much,” she says. “We have found that we can’t be all things to all people, and we really do what we do well and want to maintain our consistency and quality.”

On a recent afternoon at the roasting plant, Chuck’s nine-year-old daughter, Madison, is wearing a just-her-size Jones Coffee apron and happily organizing sodas by flavor category in the retail cooler in between playing computer games.

But before Chuck can fill me in on Jones’ other signature roasts, I’m passed off to Mireya, bound for L.A. County Hospital to witness one of her many volunteer projects in action. She spearheaded the opening of an onsite nonprofit coffee shop 10 years ago, with proceeds supporting three childcare centers that provide free services to patients and their families at the hospital.

Later comes a visit to Caltech, Jones’ longest-standing account. It began with a single coffee shop using 50 pounds per week and has become a campus-wide customer base that goes through 500 pounds per week. According to Chuck, “Only three vendors have been on campus for 10 years: Coke, Sysco and Jones Coffee.”

It’s astounding what comes out of Jones’ one-room warehouse/roasting plant, both in quality and volume, as I can attest to from a late-afternoon macchiato of Chuck’s creation, turned out between tending to delivery drivers, phone calls and sample roasts of a big, chocolatey Costa Rican that has just come in.

But how did Mireya, her family and Jones Coffee get to this place, humming along in so many facets of the industry? Going back to her roots and taking her children with her got the ball rolling, “and how Chuck and Larry Jr. got bit by the coffee bug,” she says.

Mireya’s grandfather encouraged Mireya’s interest in coffee, opening her eyes to farming practices when she was young, letting her roam Finca Dos Marias in a jeep, immersing herself in her family’s history and the privilege and responsibility of being a landowner in Guatemala. “My father and I wanted to make it work for the sake of the people at the finca, and for my grandparents,” says Mireya. “What I didn’t count on when we brought the first container of Dos Marias to market was the passion. Over the past 14 years, this has been my greatest joy—working with my sons has been sharing the passion.”

When he was 23, Larry Jr. lived on the farm for a year, learning the language, culture and the family business. He returned excited about coffee. His father suggested that they buy green from Finca Dos Marias to sell on the boutique roaster market in the United States. Mireya’s father required cash payment for the first container, not wanting to risk the livelihoods of farm workers for the initial experiment. “Larry Sr. didn’t sleep nights, trying to figure out how they’d sell the coffee,” says Mireya.

But the tenacity and resourcefulness of Mireya and her sons left no room for failure. At the time, Mireya was on the board of directors for the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The Joneses donated coffee for volunteers to sell—great charitable fund raising and marketing wrapped into one package.

Mireya and Chuck Jones, cupping at their roasting plant

Meanwhile, Larry Jr. and Chuck marketed the green in Colorado, Arizona and California, knowing that there was a concentration of small roasters in these states. This being the early ’90s, one can imagine the uphill battle: “What’s an estate coffee?” and “Isn’t all coffee grown in Colombia?” were common questions, unintentional affronts to the effort to bring estate coffees to the American market.

“But three years later, 30 customers, 200,000 pounds of coffee and a position in the estate coffee market, which was in its infancy—we were in a good place,” says Larry. Their efforts were well-timed, just ahead of the burgeoning U.S. specialty coffee industry.

Larry now works for Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, but he says his mother is “still a partner who has kept me passionate about everything I do. She reminds me of who I am and what I stand for: hard work, good times and a legacy of coffee growing that has an exciting future ahead in supporting the farm … as a great coffee producer and culture.”

Mireya echoes this sentiment. “Our motto in raising one another—and I really mean that as we were young when we started—was ‘Roots and Wings.’ The roots are family, education, wisdom and exposure to life outside the box. The wings are trust, respect, consciousness and love for one another and for ourselves.”

As a lifelong volunteer in and out of the coffee industry, Mireya embodies an ethos that it is better to act than to speak. She counts herself lucky for having had “several careers and lives,” from PTA to radio broadcasting, allied medical work to event coordinating, philharmonic board volunteer to L.A. County-USC Medical Center board volunteer.

Mireya is involved in coffee industry organizations such as Coffee Corps and the Coffee Quality Institute’s Women in Leadership program, and she has chaired the SCAA’s USBC committee since its inception four years ago. She also sits on the WBC board, which is in its second year.

Lingle describes her as a hands-on manager who tackles every detail. “She not only recruited sponsors for the U.S. Barista Championship, but got into the details of the sponsorship agreement, right down to the font used on the contract,” he says. The font? “There are talkers and there are doers, and Mireya

personifies the latter,” says Lingle. On her watch, USBC volunteers have turned an idea that was going in several directions into regional and national competitions that are better organized than ever.

But as we tour the county hospital’s childcare centers, I can’t help asking why someone with a producing and importing background would become principally involved in the USBC. “I was asked to do it. It wasn’t very subtle (laughs). I didn’t know anything about it—you couldn’t have told me what an espresso shot was.”

When she was voted onto the SCAA’s board of directors, she was tapped for her decades of experience organizing volunteers. And she was determined to join the barista forces and become a certified WBC judge. “It took me three times to pass the test! It was a totally foreign vocabulary. But I thought, ‘I can’t do this right if I’m not coming at it from inside. It isn’t fair to be chairing a committee that you’re not totally into.”

She also took on a diverse group of people, all with unique ideas on how to make the USBC work, many of whom she didn’t know until then. A core committee of people already involved in the coffee and barista communities was formed, with a goal of setting up 10 regional competitions. “We’re up to seven now, and they all feed into the USBC, which was a great competition this year,” she says.

It sounds simple enough, but where there are different interests, there are politics, and Mireya doesn’t shy away from problem solving. “When we were forming the USBC committee, volunteers and consultants were mixing, and we couldn’t have some paid and some not,” she says. “We had to make the movement sustainable and build a competition template that could go out to the regionals where everyone does and says the same things, with the same vocabulary and score sheets. And I had to ask people to fish or cut bait, because this is a volunteer situation.”

Mireya’s creativity, enthusiasm and followthrough contribute to what her fellow volunteers say is a natural talent for consensus building and organization, as one who can get a diverse group to work toward a common goal. “We all have our strengths,” says Mathies, who has volunteered with Mireya at the L.A. County Hospital and the L.A. Philharmonic. “And it takes someone special to see all those talents and place people where they still have their individualism, their strengths are utilized, and common goals are achieved.”

Mathies saw Mireya bring various parties together for a common goal when opening the hospital’s coffee shop, from the idea stage to implementation. “Bulldogging it all the way, with the whole business of writing the contracts, getting volunteers, the retail space and the hospital administration and the county to understand it and to get on board,” says Mathies. “But she gives and she cares, with a verve that makes things happen.”

Chuck Jones says of his mother: "People are very impressed when they learn Mireya is my mother."

Ernest Fleischmann, former executive director of the L.A. Philharmonic and the Hollywood Bowl, has known Mireya since the 1970s, when she served on the philharmonic’s board of directors. “Her style is direct. She’s not like the usual board member, not a high society lady or a corporate type. … Being down to earth, she can ruffle a few feathers, particularly of the more corporate types. But she’s an unusually open and friendly person, and has never said no when I’ve asked her for help.”

Typical of Mireya is how Fleischmann first came to know her. He had invited the London School Symphony to perform at the Hollywood Bowl, and the 100-plus musicians were lodged in volunteers’ homes. The morning of rehearsal, a station wagon arrived with five children tumbling out of it with their instruments. “And there was Mireya, who had been looking after all five of them,” says Fleischmann.

One of those musicians was Simon Rattle, who went on to become the music director of the Berlin Philharmonic. “I met her in 1976,” says Rattle. “Her kids and I have seen each other grow up, if we’ve grown up at all.”

Having also seen her organizational skills on display for the philharmonic while raising five children, Rattle says, “I’m not surprised that she’s been tapped for her organizational skills in the coffee industry. This is a person who has a need for an overriding passion, whatever it might be.”

Coffee has been just one way Mireya has made concrete, measurable differences in the world. Coffee is a passion, certainly, but second to her passion for helping others. “She’s not a person who’s ever at rest,” says Rattle. “Whether it’s volunteering for music or health programs, or philharmonics.”

Mireya’s sense of purpose has taken her from an inherited history in coffee to being an industry role model. Rattle and Mathies have been to the finca to see what the Jones family has done for the quality of healthcare and schools, which are right on the farm. “People who’ve been working on the farm for generations, their quality of life has been improved,” says Mathies. “It’s more than just a business for Mireya’s family, but a way of life.”

Rattle always knew coffee was in the family, “But it was in the background until the 1980s,” he says. “It’s very interesting to see someone reconnecting with their roots. There’s also this realization that if you are involved in a place like Guatemala, you can save lives with coffee.”

At one point during the coffee crisis, more than 200,000 workers in Guatemala were jobless. The three owner families of Finca Dos Marias—Mireya’s father, her uncle and another uncle’s widow—have always been committed to keeping the finca’s social and environmental programs intact. But this is becoming more difficult and costly as time goes on. “We need fewer natural disasters—we were down over 40 percent this year with Hurricane Stan—and more ongoing support for the coffee at market,” says Mireya.

But as a woman of action, nothing seems to phases her. “I’ve seen her preparing for a hurricane coming, fearlessly,” says Rattle. “The one time I’ve seen her alarmed was coming home when then 10-year-old Chuck decided he’d learn to cook. He had a recipe for making homemade pasta, which said, ‘Take six eggs …’ and he was on the seventh attempt. It looked more like a hurricane had hit the kitchen than anything that could happen in Guatemala. That’s the only time I’ve seen her taken aback in nearly 30 years.”

Chuck describes his mother as a role model for people facing adversity. “She’s always fought for the underdog and holds her values and morals close to her heart. She is teaching me these traits by example.”

At the Coffee Quality Institute’s Women in Coffee Leadership seminar last year, Mireya found herself championing the business goals of her peers at origin. Within hours, she facilitated the sale of one crop, helped fill contracts for another partner’s fair-trade/organic coffee and helped a third partner broker next year’s crop on consignment. “This was a string of successes in one day, built over a couple of months as a result of involvement with CQI programs,” she says. To Mireya, the solution to the plight of coffee producers is networking. “Networking to make it marketable, networking to find the right market, networking to get it there and networking to keep it there,” she says.

But as many people know, Mireya is more than a networker. “At any time, day or night, if anyone really needed her, she would be there,” says Rattle.

Later that night at Mireya and Larry Sr.’s home, things are more relaxed, but no less eye-opening. As one would imagine of a big family that tends to be surrounded by imaginative people, there is an eclectic mix of art and furnishings in the house, all with stories that connect them to family, friends or Guatemala. Some have timeless, graceful lines, like the hutch passed down from Mireya’s grandmother. Others have admirable old bones, such as the Guatemalan Indian bed that makes a rustically elegant coffee table.

While Larry cooks ribs on the grill, Mireya realizes they are out of barbecue sauce and goes to work on a creation using condiments on hand. As we survey the bottles pulled from the fridge, she adds random amounts of each to a bowl, and I get the scoop on where she sees herself now and in the future. “My future in coffee lies in what our sons want to do,” she says. “We look forward to a continued relationship with Green Mountain and annual educational programs that Chuck leads to origin. One thing that makes it work for us is the people—in the industry, at origin, behind the espresso machine. We really care about them all and really want to see everyone succeed in their position on the chain.”

Having contributed to numerous causes and industries as a board member and volunteer all her life, Mireya still has no shortage of energy or ability to deliver on her skills. “What wonderful opportunities have been afforded me through all of this,” she muses.

From the views of her friends, family and colleagues, the opportunity is theirs. They’ve seen her come through in practical, everyday ways, time and again. And as Madison finishes her ribs and approvingly licks her fingers, it seems there’s no better proof than her grandmother’s barbecue sauce.

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