VERONA, Wis. — The coffee industry is worth billions of dollars, and yet most of the world’s coffee farmers live below the poverty line.

A Wisconsin coffee shop is doing its part to change that. 

Alice Good Coffee has been helping satisfy the city of Verona’s caffeine craving for a little more than a year. The coffee shop’s name is a play on words, coming from the Yiddish-German phrase “alle ist gut,” which means “all is good.”

Three of its owners — including Laura Serrato, her sister and brother-in-law — are from Colombia.

“We wanted a place so people could just relax and enjoy and be with friends and the community,” Serrato said.

The fourth owner is Serrato’s husband, Ralph Stern, who is from Madison. He and Serrato lived in Colombia for five years. They were set to open a coffee shop there, but the pandemic hit. So, they started an e-commerce packaged coffee business instead.

“We started making contacts with coffee growers over there,” Serrato said. “And we started seeing the whole industry.”

They learned how little of the profit goes to the actual coffee growers. When Stern’s parents started having some health issues, the couple decided to move to Wisconsin.

“It didn’t stop […] our love for coffee, and our passion for kind of finding a way to make the coffee world a little bit kinder,” he said.

Their coffee shop dream became a reality as they worked to make Alice Good Coffee the place it is now.

“How can we have a positive impact on everyone from the farmers, who are you know, taking care of the plants for years, and harvesting the coffee cherries by hand, to the people who prepare and roast the coffee, to the people who here are enjoying a cup of coffee every day?” Stern said.

Everything they do at Alice Good is sourced from Colombia. From the coffee beans they grind, to the bags they sell their coffee in, to the glasses customers drink from and the gear employees wear at work.

“We’re going to support businesses that are doing something beautiful, and see if we can help them to be successful the same way that they help us to be successful,” Stern said.

“From the beginning, it was how can we do this and in the right way?” Serrato added. “Even if we make a little bit less money, we want it to be meaningful.”

Serrato said by helping her home country, she feels they have forged stronger bonds in Verona.

“We actually feel like we have been building a family,” she said. “We have customers that we have dinner with now, or like, we know each other. We know their struggles, and they know our struggles.”