Prevail Union Coffee and the Quality Behind it

Most Auburn students and alumni have their fair share of encounters outside of the Plains. Whether it is in an airport, mall or gas station, we are always ready to greet each other.

This is how the story of 2006 alumnus and founder of Prevail Union coffee shop Wade Preston’s relationship with the Schippers family begins.

Since 2015, Preston has been buying thousands of pounds of Guatemalan coffee from the Schippers plantation in San Luis El Volcancito to serve as one of his staple coffees in downtown Auburn and Montgomery.

Preston met Auburn alumna Paulina Schippers and her father, owner of the coffee farm San Luis El Volcancito, at a Specialty Coffee Association of America meeting in Seattle, Wash. in 2015.

“We met after a lecture that an Auburn professor presented,” said Schippers. “Wade was asking some questions and mentioned that he owned a coffee shop in Auburn and it caught my attention.”

After the lecture, Preston gave the father and daughter his business card and they eventually met up back on the Plains to talk business.

“The coffee that we work with is probably top 2 percent in the world,” said Preston. “We tried it and loved it. They scrambled to give us a little of what was left of the last harvest, and we bought a few bags from 2015. Now it’s our staple coffee and base for a lot of the blends. We have the ‘Father’s Daughter’ blend named after them.”

Like every other farmed food, location and elevation makes a difference in the quality of the harvest. At San Luis El Volcancito, the plantation surrounds a volcano; Volcancito means ‘little volcano’ in Spanish.

“All of the volcanic soil makes very fertile land,” said Estrada. Compared to other farms in the country we don’t have the highest altitude. You can say that soil helps even out the quality.”

That fertile soil has resulted in Preston bringing in about 750 pounds a month to his roaster in downtown Opelika. “It’s great to see what it’s done for the business,” said Preston. “And now Paulina has become this ubiquitous part of our lives. She babysits my kids and comes over for dinner.”

Preston has also used the coffee at the U.S. Barista Championship qualifier last year.

Schippers graduated in chemical engineering in 2014 and is currently an automation engineer for SiO2 Medical Products Inc. at the Auburn Technology Park. She primarily helps her father through Dos Niñas, the family farm’s importing company that acquires new potential clients and maintains contact with their current roasters.

The success of the Schippers plantation in Central America has allowed them to give back to the community as well by renovating the local Santa Rosa school about three years ago.

Prevail Union has partnered with the Auburn University-based Hunger Solutions Institute, a non-profit collaborative initiative within the Auburn University College of Human Sciences and the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station dedicated to ending hunger and malnutrition through efforts to implement innovative and practical solutions.