Aragon High School best friends Michelle Tu and Stanislav Kroll couldn’t have known that more than two decades later, they’d start a company together. Today they’re the cofounders of ready-to-drink Daybreak Vietnamese Coffee.
After high school, the two San Mateans went to different colleges — Tu to UC Irvine and Kroll to UC Berkeley — but they stayed in touch over the years as Tu pursued a Ph.D. in cell biology and Kroll studied business and went into manufacturing. Eventually, they settled back in their San Mateo hometown with their families.
When Tu’s planned trip to Vietnam in 2020 was canceled by the pandemic, she looked for other ways to connect with the coffee culture she remembered from childhood visits and began researching how to make Vietnamese coffee.
Fortunately, her friend Stan is “this huge coffee nerd,” Tu says.
Kroll, a tinkerer, had invested in different coffee-making tools and was drawn to the ways that geography and influences shape coffee cultures around the world — think of Turkish or Cuban coffee, he says.
But the two were surprised to learn that Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee exporter.
Vietnamese coffee is known for using a phin filter in the brewing process which, yields extra-strong brews. But as they dug deeper into the Bay Area options for Vietnamese coffee, they felt there was something missing from the ideal formula for a coffee that was strong, bold, sweet and traditional — and convenient.
Seeing a potential market opportunity, they began doing research to develop their own line of Daybreak Vietnamese Coffee. The coffee is made from Robusta beans harvested in Dak Lak, Vietnam, then dark-roasted in butter, prepared and combined with sweetened condensed milk sourced from San Lorenzo’s California Farms brand.
Since then, they’ve rented a commercial kitchen to expand operations and spread from the Burlingame Farmers Market (where you’ll still find them Sunday mornings) to restaurants and specialty markets, including Rainbow Grocery in San Francisco and Robert’s Market in Woodside and Portola Valley. It’s now available, too, at San Francisco International Airport at Pronto! store locations.
Along the way, they participated in a business accelerator program through the Oakland-based ICA Fund and developed a partnership with Hooked Coffee to create pour-over kits.
They hope to tap into the San Jose market next and broaden their reach throughout the Bay Area. Going national is tempting, Kroll says, but the product has no preservatives so its shelf life is relatively short — about eight weeks.
“We will figure it out when we get there and make adjustments as we go,” Tu says. “We want to ensure the quality of everything that we are putting out into the world.”
Details: Find Daybreak Vietnamese Coffee between 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on Sundays at the Burlingame Farmers Market, 1300 Burlingame Ave., local grocery stores — find a list at enjoyadaybreak.com/pages/find-us-at — and via local delivery within 25 miles of San Mateo.