Walk into the Buddy Brew cafe inside Sprouts Farmers Market in Valrico and you’ll find specialty coffee. Spend five minutes with co-founders Dave and Susan Ward, however, and the conversation quickly moves to the people behind it.
That perspective started in their Hyde Park garage. They installed a commercial roaster there in 2007 and opened their original Kennedy Boulevard cafe three years later, naming the company after Buddy.
Susan smiled when she talked about the name. “Buddy is our dog,” she said.
That first shop had no cash register. Customers dropped $2 into an old coffee can on the honor system. Trust was not something the business earned later. It was where the business began.
Today, Buddy Brew employs more than 100 team members and continues expanding across Florida. Still, the Wards remain focused on purpose. About 75-80 percent of its coffee comes through direct, long-standing relationships with global growers.
Dave has visited many of those farming communities, where coffee cherries are picked by hand on steep terrain. The experience, he said, changes how you see each cup by revealing the people and work behind it. Buddy Brew supports Trees For Kibira’s reforestation work in Burundi, East Africa, through sales of its Rainforest Roast.
That farm-level care directly shapes what ultimately reaches the customer. Specialty coffee is graded on a universal 100-point scale, with 100 representing the highest possible score.
“In order to be specialty, the average score is 80 points or higher, but we typically buy 85 points or higher,” Dave explained. “Really, the definition of ‘specialty’ means coffee without defects.”
Dave also sees education as a way to connect farmers with customers. Understanding specialty coffee helps people appreciate the human effort behind every cup and ties directly into the company mantra.
“‘Brew good. Do good’ is all about our culture, our people, our communities and the farmers,” Dave said.
That same focus on values brought Buddy Brew into Sprouts Farmers Market. The partnership developed gradually as the companies got to know one another.
“As we got to know Sprouts, it really became evident how closely our brands are aligned — from their values to their mission,” Dave said. “They were almost identical.”
When asked who chose whom, Dave explained that there was a process. Susan, however, proudly offered the simplest answer: “Ultimately, they picked us.”
It was clear to both of them that this was going to be a great partnership.
Opening inside Sprouts brought Buddy Brew into Eastern Hillsborough County after years of requests from customers in Brandon, Valrico, Riverview and New Tampa.
“This was one of our ways of basically getting into the broader Tampa Bay area in coffee underserved areas,” Dave said. “The response blows my mind, to be honest with you.”
The companies have since developed a cafe prototype that can be incorporated into new Sprouts stores during construction, helping them grow together across Florida.
Even with all that growth, Dave and Susan’s priorities haven’t changed. Talk to them and you’ll hear about Buddy, the farmers growing the coffee, that old honor-system coffee can and finding partners who share their values.
Coffee just happens to be what brought them all together.
The Buddy Brew Coffee cafe, located inside the Sprouts Farmers Market at 3315 Lithia Pinecrest Rd. in Valrico, is open daily from 7 a.m.-5 p.m.
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