My Journey: The Start | Obel Hernandez Sr.

The Start:
Origins in Coffee

Rows of green coffee beans.

People often ask me how I got involved working with coffee. In 1985, I was looking for a job while my wife was already working in the Wall Street area of New York City. One morning, I took the train with her to Manhattan and noticed a hiring agency. I decided to see if there were any opportunities for employment, and they asked if I would be interested in a job with the General Foods Maxwell House Coffee Division inputting data into a computer. I was interviewed by the Quality Control manager Dario Gomez, and was offered a job that same day. Dario was born and raised in Bogota, Colombia, where he managed a coffee mill before making his way to the U.S. approximately 37 years ago. He pretty much taught me everything I know about coffee, and I consider my relationship with him as a father and son. 

Starting at Maxwell House

Little did I know that I would be working for the largest coffee company in the world. Maxwell House was buying over 6 million bags of coffee annually, and was buying even more before I started working there. The Green Coffee office was located in the Wall Street section of Manhattan where most of the major coffee importers were located at the time. This gave me the opportunity to learn from many veterans in the business when they would visit our quality lab. 

The Early Years

Views of the city near the coffee mill in Costa Rica.

I spent the first few years roasting samples and preparing them for evaluation, and even cleaned out the spittoons. Down the road I became the Quality Control Supervisor, during which time I started to travel domestically and internationally. The domestic travel was either to visit our manufacturing plants or to conduct Tree to Cup seminars for the Kraft Foods sales personnel after they merged with General Foods. I traveled internationally to meet with the many exporting companies we did business with in order to help them better understand the company’s specifications and expectations, and minimize issues when the coffee arrived at the US ports and made its way to the office in New York. I worked for Maxwell House for 20 years, and am excited to share some of what I learned about the really cool coffee-producing countries I had the pleasure of traveling to.

Obel Hernandez Sr. and his colleague at a coffee mill in Central America.