Counter Culture

Brett Smith and Fred Houk founded Counter Culture Coffee in 1996 after attending the Sustainable Coffee Congress hosted by the Smithsonian. They made their first sale to Pop's Trattoria and opened what became the first organic-certified coffee roastery in North Carolina. The Durham facility now includes a training center where they host free public coffee tastings every Friday at ten in the morning, a tradition running for nearly three decades.

In 2009 they published their first transparency report documenting direct trade purchases. They operate a certified B Corporation and became the first specialty coffee roaster to use color-sorting technology on roasted beans. In 2024, eighty-five percent of their coffee came from producers they had worked with for five years or longer. They pay above market rates for green coffee, forward contract to give growers stability, and publish detailed purchasing data for every coffee they buy.