When the founders of GoCoffeeGo envisioned their startup, they pictured a “Disneyland of Coffee.”

“And part of having fun at Disneyland is running around and being free,” said GoCoffeeGo Co-Founder Elise Papazian. “When we started, we never acted like a corporate company where we tried to push people into subscriptions or funnel them into subscriptions.”

But, Elise continued, “We’ve got competitors out there who basically started off trying to be us. Then they changed their business model and now they're focus is locking people into subscriptions.”

That concerned Elise, because while her competitors were enlisting some of the same roasters featured on GoCoffeeGo, they weren’t always selling the finest roasts from those brands.

“If you sign up for a coffee subscription with GoCoffeeGo, you’re getting coffee that we like, that we’ve curated for you personally,” she said. 

Based in San Francisco, GoCoffeeGo offers a range of subscriptions.

Customers can prepay for three months, six months or a year, for a light roast or dark roast coffee subscription. Elise and her team curate the coffee and choose one or two varieties each shipment; they are roasted to order; and shipped the same day, direct, from the roaster to the customer's doorstep.

“You just basically set it and forget it,” she said. “You prepay and it comes. You don't worry about coffee again, and as long as you maintain your subscription, you’ll never run out of coffee again. And you can cancel anytime. You can change what you want. If you're in the dark roast club and you want to go and change to the light roast club, that's full of geeked out coffees that are microlots, you can do that if you want. If you’re an espresso freak, we have a lot of different espressos.”

Added Elise, “The beauty is that you're trying all these different roasters’ coffees with every shipment, so you're never getting bored. And these coffees are selected and curated by experts that include coffee Q graders.”

Q Graders are professionals skilled in the sensory evaluation of coffee. The “special” in Specialty Coffee Movement—of which GoCoffeeGo is a part—is due in large part to its Q grading, as these types of roasts must attain a score of 80 or higher. 

Both Elise and her teenage son, Oliver, a GoCoffeeGo consultant, are Q Graders. 

And both illustrate the wide reach of GoCoffeeGo.

Pioneers in the Speciality Coffee Movement, Elise and her late husband, Scott Pritikin, launched GoCoffeeGo more than 14 years ago. Their vision for the first multi-roaster coffee eCommerce site to sell espresso, single origin coffee and blends from award-winning coffee roasters was a rallying point for the Specialty Coffee Movement.

GoCoffeeGo.com sells everything from traditional dark roasts to geeky light roasts, with each boasting rare, exotic, and unique wild flavors. The coffees come from nearly three dozen top U.S. roasters. 

Elise’s passion for coffee can be traced back to when she was 16 and working as a barista at a Parisian cafe in San Mateo, south of San Francisco. While the other baristas and other cafes were simply serving coffee, Elise was making beignets, lattes and cappuccinos, which had yet to make it into the American mainstream. 

The origins of GoCoffee date back to a trip that Elise and Scott took to London years ago. They were craving a good cup of coffee in a town that is not known for its coffee. Unable to find a good cuppa, they hatched the idea for GoCoffeeGo on the spot, and designed it to be a vehicle for finding great coffees and shipping them to discerning coffee drinkers.

Visit GoCoffeeGo.com to learn more. 

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