I've been the person who didn't get a break.

I'm a registered nurse and a veteran. I've spent my career in cardiac ICU, in interventional radiology, and in neuro and trauma — the kind of units where you look up and it's somehow 1500 and you haven't sat down, eaten, or used the bathroom since you clocked in.

The coffee in those buildings was always the same: a scorched pot somebody started at 0500, a jar of powdered creamer with a spoon fused to the bottom, and a sleeve of cups that ran out by noon. We were the people keeping everyone else alive on twelve-hour shifts, and we were drinking the worst coffee in the county to do it.

A loading dose is the first, larger dose you give to bring a drug up to therapeutic level fast — before you settle into maintenance dosing. That's what the first cup of a shift actually is. Every name on our bags comes from that same place: charting, bedside manner, codes, night shift. Not jokes about healthcare from the outside. Language from inside it.

So I started roasting for us. Coffee good enough that you'd choose it on a day off, priced and packaged for people who buy it with shift-differential money, and a give-back that puts real coffee into real break rooms — because the break room is where this whole idea came from.

The MBA is how I make sure this thing is built to last. The military background is where I learned that mission, discipline, and taking care of the person next to you aren't separate from good business — they are the business.

Getting good coffee to people who don't get a break.

— Founder, RN · Veteran · MBA candidate · Loading Dose Coffee Co.