Chapter One: The Beginning

Long before there was Attack of the Killer Coffee, there was my family! We believed that food should be made with love.

Growing up my family never cared much for chain restaurants. We hated food that tasted fake, mass-produced, and stripped of its personality. Food was supposed to mean something. It was supposed to bring people together.

My mother taught Chinese cooking classes out of our home and wrote three cookbooks. My father came from an Italian upbringing where we canned tomatoes, made homemade fennel sausage, and gathered around the table for big family meals.

That was also where my relationship with coffee began.

My father had a 1960s Italian Moka pot. Making coffee with it required a little more work. It took longer, and there was more to clean afterward, but the deep, rich flavor made the extra effort worthwhile. Once you experienced coffee like that, there was no discussion about going back to something bland and ordinary.

Coffee became more than something I drank. It became a ritual.

After graduating from culinary school, I spent approximately 20 years working in the restaurant industry. I worked as a chef, sous chef, manager, bartender, and server. Most of those restaurants were some of the best restaurants in the cities where I lived. I always believed quality over quantity.

I grew up in Annapolis, Maryland. Annapolis has fantastic crabs and crab cakes, but I wanted to experience a city known as one of the food capitals of the world.

In 1998, at 20 years old, I moved to San Francisco. I arrived with ambition, very little certainty, and a desire to learn everything I could. I was fortunate enough to land a position at one of the top restaurants in the city.

Even then, I dreamed of opening a place of my own.

After a year, I returned to college to earn a degree from Towson University. While I was there, I discovered acting—and it changed my life.

For the first time, the class clown, creative artist, storyteller, and comic inside me all had somewhere to go. Acting gave me permission to be myself.

Throughout those college years, one of my many Moka pots started almost every morning. That was also when my collection of coffee and espresso makers really began to grow.

Pursuing acting while working as a chef was nearly impossible. Restaurant kitchens demanded long hours, and the schedule left very little freedom for auditions. I had moved to the front of the house, where working as a server and bartender in college, that choice gave me more flexibility to chase the dream.

I spent ten wonderful years in Hollywood.

I appeared in more than a dozen commercials, acted in several admittedly terrible independent short films, and earned my SAG card. By many measures, I had achieved more than most aspiring actors could reasonably hope for.

But eventually, I had to be honest with myself.

I did not want to turn 50 while still waiting tables, tending bar, and talking about the dream instead of building something permanent.

So I moved back to Maryland—with my growing collection of coffee makers and a familiar idea that had never completely left me.

During my years in California, I had often thought about opening a coffee shop. Over time, that idea grew into something bigger. I did not just want to serve coffee. I wanted to roast it, package it, and create an entire experience around it.

But life took another turn.

For 12 years, I worked as a senior project manager for a home-remodeling company. It was a completely different world, but coffee remained in the back of my mind the entire time.

I was always thinking, planning, and imagining my eventual escape from home remodeling. I kept picturing the coffee shop I wanted to create.

Then COVID arrived, and opening a physical coffee shop no longer seemed like the smartest move.

Approximately two or three years ago, I began seriously searching for the right location and the right concept. At the same time, I started ordering coffee from more and more roasters.

I wanted to understand what made one coffee memorable and another completely forgettable.

The more coffee I tasted, the more I noticed something: many companies were roasting the personality right out of their beans. The coffee tasted burned, flat, or overly dark. The natural sweetness, aroma, and character had disappeared.

My understanding of how coffee should be roasted became clearer with every bag I opened.

I also noticed something else.

Nearly every bag seemed to have the same type of branding: a mountain, a river, an anchor, a canoe, a forest, a peaceful sunrise, or simply the company's name printed in a nice font.

There was nothing wrong with any of it.

It just felt boring to me. Like watching the same movie over and over with different actors.

I have always loved concepts built around stories. That is where my background in acting, comedy, restaurants, and art finally came together.

I started asking myself:

What kind of coffee would make me smile every time I opened the cabinet?

What would make me laugh every time I poured someone a cup and told them what they were drinking?

What would feel less like another bag of coffee and more like discovering a character, a movie, or an entire strange little world?

Approximately a year and a half ago, the answer arrived:

Attack of the Killer Coffee

From that moment, I went to work.

I began filing trademarks and creating the artwork myself. There were many—many—different versions. Characters changed. Colors changed. Names changed. Labels changed. Entire designs were created, rejected, rebuilt, and rejected again.

I was searching for what I considered perfect.

My version of perfect will not ever be perfect of everyone else's vision. But my experience in the restaurant industry taught me something simple:

Create a theme, fill it with fun energy, produce a genuinely good product, and people will love it.

As I developed the company, I began thinking about the things I loved as a child.

I remembered opening packs of collectible cards and finding a piece of gum inside. I remembered the anticipation, the artwork, the funny characters, and the excitement of not knowing which card you would receive.

I wanted Attack of the Killer Coffee to create that same feeling. I wanted it to be more than just coffee, I wanted it to be an experience.

That is when Attack of the Killer Products was born.

It was never going to be only a bag of coffee. It was going to be a world of characters, stories, collectibles, and products that made people feel something.

I ordered an expensive coffee roaster and an entire equipment system that would allow me to roast, package, and ship every order myself.

Then, the following day, on Christmas Eve, at 2 am, in my pajamas, I canceled it.

Changing my mind after making a major decision is not unusual for me. Sometimes I have to make the decision, step away from it, and look at it from every possible angle.

When I calculated the cost of renting a facility, purchasing the roasting and packaging equipment, buying green coffee, hiring help, and handling fulfillment, having another company roast and ship the coffee seemed like the safer and smarter option.

For a while, I believed that was the right direction.

But when I truly love an idea, I usually end up returning to the original vision.

The more I studied the numbers, the quality, the freshness, and the future of the company, the clearer the answer became:

To build Attack of the Killer Coffee the way I imagined it, I needed control over the coffee.

At the end of the day, roasting it ourselves made more sense.

The mission is to put genuinely great coffee in as many locations as possible. I want to control the roasting, protect the quality, and make sure the coffee inside the bag is every bit as memorable as the artwork on the outside.

Every order will contain something unexpected.

Every customer who purchases Attack of the Killer Coffee will receive an Attack of the Killer Gum.

The coffee will also include collectible cards inspired by the products I loved growing up. Different characters, stories, and limited editions will give customers something new and exciting.

Because this company was never created to sell just another bag of coffee.

It was created to bring together everything I have loved throughout my life:

Family meals.

Great restaurants.

Delicious coffee.

Comedy.

Acting.

Art.

Collecting.

Storytelling.

And the belief that food and coffee should never feel fake, unloved, or boring.

After decades of thinking about it—and more than a year of building, changing, canceling, redesigning, trademarking, tasting, and starting over—Attack of the Killer Coffee is finally coming to life.