Roasting Life: Puroast Coffee Roasters
If you’re driving down West Market Center Drive in High Point, N.C., don’t be surprised if you see what looks like smoke rising off the building at 905 West Market Center Drive. If you pause and roll down your window, you might catch a whiff of the goodness happening inside: coffee roasting. Step into the aromatic world of Puroast Coffee, where every bean is lovingly and carefully roasted to perfection, creating a unique roast that is sold all over the country and made right here in High Point.
Along with the Puroast passion for delicious coffee flavors, there is something else that sets their beans apart: health benefits. That’s right, Puroast co-founder and agricultural engineer Kerry Sachs, not only found a roasting process that produces delicious flavors, but one with 70% less acidity than your average cup of coffee, as well as seven times the amount of antioxidants than in a cup of green tea!
But the journey to roasting the perfect coffee bean didn’t start in High Point. In fact, it started many years ago, in Boston, Massachusetts. In the late 1980s, Kerry, who was in graduate school, had a roommate from Venezuela. After the two became friends, it led to Kerry’s eventual introduction to his future wife, Corina. Corina, who was also from Venezuela, wasn’t a mathematician like Kerry. She was an art student, who told Kerry that before she’d marry him, he’d have to come to Venezuela and meet her family.
That fated trip was not only the start of Kerry and Corina’s 38-year marriage, but also the start of Kerry’s passion for coffee roasting. After his initial visit to Venezuela, Kerry ended up returning to bring crop drying technologies he was working on in his profession as an agricultural engineer. While he supported farmers drying everything from corn to cocoa beans, it was the coffee farmers that found his technology especially compelling.
“Coffee has to be very dry,” Kerry explains, remembering one of his first interactions with a Venezuelan coffee farmer. The farmer invited Kerry to try an unroasted coffee bean, which Kerry remembers as having the texture of a lima bean.
“But the roasted bean exploded with flavor,” Kerry says. “The roasting of coffee is what makes it such a special product.”
Kerry and Corina traveled all over the country through the foothills of the Andes Mountains, experiencing coffee in a way that Kerry never had before.
“He took me places I had never even been in Venezuela!” Corina remembers of those trips exploring small farms in the mountainous regions.
After returning to the States, Kerry continued in his career in engineering, but remained fascinated and intrigued by the technologies used to craft those unique cups of coffee he enjoyed in Venezuela. By the late 1990s, Kerry and his brother decided to give coffee roasting a try, and began roasting in very small batches in California.
“We put everything back together again,” Corina says. “We decided to bring people from Venezuela to the United States to build the machines that Kerry designed. That’s how Puroast became Puroast.”
Their proprietary roasting process is, as one Puroast employee described, “simple but not simplistic.” Ever the mathematician, Kerry spent a good deal of time perfecting the roasting process which involves factors like timing, temperature, and cooling. The result? An espresso so smooth that people enjoy drinking it without any added creams, flavors, or sugar.
“The best way to experience our coffee is to think about the last time you actually drank a pure espresso,” Kerry says, noting the “attack” that often follows high acidity espresso, leaving an aftertaste and coating in the mouth.
And while the flavor was what drove Kerry’s research of the roasting process, what he wasn’t expecting was to uncover a process so unique it would become the subject of much research.
“We started getting info from our coffee drinkers that they could drink Puroast and didn’t experience the same symptoms of stomach problems they had from drinking other coffee,” Kerry recalls. This led to an experiment, conducted by researchers at the University of California – Davis. There, the Department of Food Science ran tests, comparing Puroast to other coffee roasts, which led to the discovery that Puroast had 70% less acidity on average than other roasts, as well as seven times the amount of antioxidants than green tea.
“We’re sitting on this way of making coffee that not only tastes good but has wellness benefits,” Kerry realized. “And there’s a consumer for Puroast in every town in the country!” Individuals who experience heartburn, acid reflux, or other gastrointestinal issues, often have to cut out their caffeinated cups, but not so with Puroast.
It was then that Kerry and his brother kicked Puroast’s marketing efforts into high gear, investing extensive time and energy in their business. Eventually, this led to the relocating of their coffee roasting company and opening of a coffee house in Miami, Florida.
But before long, Puroast knew they needed to find a spot that would allow them to manufacture their beans at a high rate of production to be able to provide their product to national suppliers. Through research, they discovered High Point and found themselves thoroughly convinced that it was the right place for Puroast to call home.
“The Economic Development Corporation and Sandy Dunbeck (former Director of Economic Development) were huge decision makers in our move,” Kerry says. High Point’s central location and skilled talent force for manufacturing meant the city “checked all the boxes” for Puroast’s operations.
The company relocated to High Point in 2021, and while Kerry admits relocating a company is no easy feat, High Point has been the right choice.
“When you’re making something, you need to be able to bring people in who are experienced, knowledgeable, and have a feel for making stuff,” he says. “Machine shops, fabricators, technicians, supply operations... High Point has all of that going for it.”
Corina adds that since relocating to High Point, she has noticed the growth taking place and sees the opportunity for their business and family to be involved.
“We want to be part of that boom!” she says.
And Puroast has already made good on that desire, partnering across the city to open up opportunities for collaboration and growth. They are now the supplier of coffee at Core Coffee, located in Carolina Core Wellness, furthering the organization’s mission to provide healthy alternatives. And they generously donated a year’s worth of coffee beans to local non-profit coffee shop, A Special Blend.
“In a manufacturing community it’s hard to let people know what’s going on,” Kerry says, noting that many manufacturers are visually anonymous in the communities where they are located. “They’re known by their products in places where they’re selling, but not by where they’re making it.”
Puroast has a different mentality. Kerry and Corina joke that they plan to add a fabricated coffee mug to the top of their building, to make sure passersby know that no, their building isn’t smoking because it’s on fire; it’s just roasting something that supports the whole community.
After all, for Kerry and Corina, each cup of coffee they make holds the memories of a lifetime.
“Every morning when I drink a cup of coffee, I feel like this is the best coffee,” Corina says with a smile. "When we keep doing that, it makes life!”
From their introduction, to their international travels, to the many iterations of Puroast, somehow, the Sachs find they never get tired of the beverage that has been with them throughout their lives.
Discover our High Points,
The HPD Team
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