Coffee People ft. Jess Nepstad, Planetary Design.
Entrepreneur and CEO of coffee storage product company Planetary Design, Jess Nepstad joins the Coffee People podcast from Bonner, MT to chat about his journey from Montana to California, and back again to uplift a brand that was struggling.
Full video posted below, or watch and/or listen to Coffee People on:
Apple Podcasts • YouTube • Spotify • All Your Favorite Platforms
Guest: Jess Nepstad, Partner/CEO of Planetary Design
Based: Bonner, MT
What they drink: Americano or black drip coffee
Where coffee meets adventure. BruTrek®; Airscape®, ethoz®, Cannascape®, & Fresh-Port®. We are dedicated to bringing you the best brewing, storage, and drinkware technology through these brands.
• PlanetaryDesign.com
Coffee People is sponsored by our friends at Roastar. They can support your coffee brand by providing excellent service and custom packaging made in the U.S.A.
Is my memory of learning to drive the truck with a phonebook taped to my shoe while dad watered the trees a real memory? I’m not honestly sure. It may just make for a story that has evolved over the years. I'm okay with that. In my mind, it is a warm spot in the saga of father and son.
What I didn't say on the podcast was that those trees weren't in our yard. They were on a plot of land, an old farm, that my dad and a business partner bought with the goal of dividing it into lots for sale. This was a side hustle to the day-to-day of operating the family restaurant.
Turning off the entrepreneurial tap isn't easy for him now, long into retirement, and it definitely wasn't happening in the few hours he had away from the restaurant each week. He had to find a way to insert the other parts of his life—including family time—into his work. The question was never, "Am I going to do this?" It was "How am I going to do this?" He was always starting and following his own vision. I didn't realize until much later that there was another way into business.
Planetary Design wasn’t doing well when Jess Nepstad started to consider purchasing it. There were no graphs showing profits headed into the stratosphere or caches of cash that attracted him to the business. It was a combination of the business's problems and the ability to offer the type of life he was seeking.
The problems first. They weren't just fixable, but they were also ones that Jess had the answers for. Technical, product, and sales answers he had gleaned from years of problem-solving in his previous career. The product designs were unique and functional, and with a little design tweaking would be more appealing for a retail audience. He also saw a team of people who were talented and hard working, but not getting the direction and support they needed. Those were challenges that could be solved.
Beyond the work, Planetary Design offered Jess a path back to Montana—a place that had always called to him as home. The purchase offered him an opportunity to use all of that expertise he had earned, and the opportunity to not only work with a team, but help build one.*
In the first years, Jess was scared. There are no guarantees when you take the risk of entrepreneurship. It was a 24/7 fire. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. What was the worst for many coffee businesses ended up being a boon to companies like Planetary Design as more people began taking at home coffee brewing seriously. The pandemic gave a large audience time to explore the far corners of the coffee rabbit-hole, including how to make the best coffee in their home. It wouldn't take long for them to look at the Mason jar of beans on the counter, and think, "I can do better."
Jess Nepstad appeared on ABC News yesterday to chat about tariffs.
It's hard to condense a career into a few minutes on a podcast. Jess Nepstad's has spanned several iterations, including early entrepreneurial efforts, a corporate career, and even start-up hustles.** Beyond the entrepreneurial advice, the biggest takeaway is that it—the journey–is all leading to this.
It is easy to get caught up in examining the past and planning for the future, in business, even more than in life. There is always a projection to build or a lesson to be learned. Growth is paramount for many businesses to ensure survival. I'm not downplaying the importance of the forward or the behind.
What I learned from Jess is that the now, the today, is how all of those future and past experiences culminate into something we experience. Look around. Is this where you thought you would be?
*Speaking of team building, one of my former employees and a graduate of the hospitality management course I offered just opened her first wine bar, WetStone Solana Beach, in Southern California. Congrats, Jen!
**Jess talks more in-depth about his jewelry start-up experience in an episode of The Missoula Podcast.
Find online at: https://planetarydesign.com/ and on social media, including LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook.
PODCAST TAKEAWAYS
- UV light is bad for coffee beans, or so I've heard and read a million times. There are so many articles about how UV light degrades coffee beans that I gave up before finding the source of the data. I'm not in a position to argue, and the effort to protect your coffee beans from the potential for going stale seems reasonable—store away from sunlight, moisture, heat, and oxygen. The first three are easy, and the third is address in the next bullet point.
- Argon gas (or at Planetary Design, Airgone®) is heavier than oxygen. Push it into a canister of coffee beans and it will force the oxygen up and away before settling like a protective blanket. Argon is often packaged similarly to the canned forced air with red straw you've used (or at least seen) to clear the crumbs from between the keys on your computer.
- We’ve all been at the various points of our coffee drinking journey at different times. Usually, the trends ebb and flow, but sometimes it is day to day. Last week, I went to the nice roaster to sample multiple single origin espressos and pourovers. Yesterday, I weighed, ground, and brewed a blend manually. I focused on the details. Today, I pressed the button on the side of the machine. There is room for many paths in a single journey.
- Jess’ wife passed of cancer, but before she did, she gave him a road map for his future. Entrepreneurship has been part of how he as gone through the grieving process.
- Park H.S. in Livingston, MT lost the Class A state basketball championship to Dawson in 1982. Then (with the rise of the Ferch brothers) won it all in 1983. The took the title again in 1985 and 1989.
- Don't forget to plan exit strategies for your business and business partners. Expect the unexpected.
- Build decision-making hierarchy into your business so that someone is the last decision maker. The buck stops with them, as the saying goes. That way, the business will always be enabled to move forward instead stagnate over an important decision. Checkpoints can (and should) be built into the process.
Before the recent onset of AI assistance, Jess would;ve recommend finding a business that already existed, something you were passionate about that already had the wheels turning to buy. That way you could skip to the doing the work part you love instead of the start-up building phase e.g. business structure, logos, website, etc.*
With the arrival of AI, virtual assistants, and programs designed to help an entrepreneur skip steps, starting a business may be more viable than before, but still consider whether you want to start from scratch or refurbish something that already exists.
(Paraphrased from Jess Nepstad).
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
Ryan Woldt
The Simply Good Coffee Plastic-Free Brewer is officially sold out for 2025. Pre-orders for 2026 have begun. Check out our review of the original. We are a fan of the brand's effort to offer a better brewer at an affordable price without compromising on the effort to reduce plastic.
COMING SOON:
We connect with Cait Rifkin, the GM of Jackson, WY-based Snake River Roasting Co.
Just for fun-ish:
Do you know what a Snood is? It is a word I stumbled on accidentally while working on a word jumble game that I had to look it up.
From The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.:
snood (noun) /snoo͞d/
- A bag typically made of net fabric that is worn at the back of the head to keep a woman's hair in place.
- A fleshy wrinkled fold of skin that hangs down over a turkey's beak.
It is a much cooler term for a hairnet. In the first definition, they may be functional or decorative, or both. There are also beard snoods, which are most common in food production. Lined snoods are commonly worn by women in the Orthodox Jewish community, in accordance with their religious beliefs. They may come in a wide variety of colors, fabrics, or styles.
How and why the same word refers to the flap of skin hanging from a turkey beak is a mystery of modern languages.
