Joe Greengo was founded in 2008 by Ramon Padilla and Eric Parker. Ray’s background as a chef and Eric’s as an architect seem like an unlikely combination for founding a coffee business, but together their passion for environmental sustainability, organic foods, and ultimately their love of coffee made for a perfect brew.

Ray grew up in Brooklyn, New York as a son of Puerto Rican immigrants.  As a child, he learned from his grandfather, a chef, about the value of organics in cooking to achieve richer and fresher tastes. As an adult, his Puerto Rican heritage had allowed him to see and know the effects of deforestation in some regions and the harvesting of the land that wasn’t respected.

Growing up in Augusta, Georgia, Eric spent his youth playing in the woods behind his parent’s house and developed a love of camping and being outdoors. With his father, he would visit construction sites in the rapidly sprawling suburbs and developed an understanding both of how buildings were put together, but also of the impact they had on the woods that he loved playing in.

As an Architect, Eric spent much effort on specifying sustainable and earth friendly materials, and to make buildings more energy efficient, but often found that his impact was limited because ultimately the decisions for what materials get used within a building fall with the owner and not the architect. However, while designing a project for Stanford University he had the good fortune to meet Ray.

Ray told Eric of his dream to open a chain of organic coffee shops, and how his inspiration for Organic coffee came from the Puerto Rico Rain Forest (El Yunque) the coffee grows in beautifully shaded areas and in natural habitats with no pesticides. For Eric, this presented an opportunity to not only design a sustainable building, but to also effect the environment on a larger scale by protecting large tracts of rainforest through the type of coffee production Ray described.

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