By Adela Suliman
Diana Saliceti pours cold brew coffee over ice as she talks about her decision to give up a successful law career to start her own coffee brewing business uptown. “I just thought, if not now, when?”
Saliceti, 42, a Harvard Law School graduate, resigned as a partner in her law firm last December.
“It wasn’t an easy decision to leave law, a high-paying and respectable career,“ she says. ”My friends and colleagues thought I’d lost my mind. But I really thought deeply about this decision and I wanted to be an inspiring figure to my daughter.”
Part of her mission in setting up High Bridge Cold Brew earlier this year in Washington Heights was to provide employment for “at risk individuals,” mainly survivors of domestic violence or abuse. She hopes to eventually expand to include female ex-offenders, the long-term unemployed and disadvantaged youth.
“My goal is to create as many jobs as possible,“ she says. ”They’ll be a wide variety…people to manage the website, social media, company accounts, office administrators as well as brewing production and processing staff.”
The issue of domestic violence is particularly pertinent in Latino communities: A 2014 Allstate Foundation study found that 64 percent of Latino women said they have known a victim of some type of abuse and 30 percent said they had been personally victimized.
Allstate, a national charity, calls financial abuse “the number one reason domestic violence survivors stay or return to an abusive relationship. … They don’t have the financial resources to break free.”
A joint report this year by the Avon Foundation for Women and National Latin@ Network found that Latino women are also less likely to report abuse to authorities, primarily due to fear of deportation or of having their children taken away. Washington Heights has a large Dominican population, along with other Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Saliceti, a single parent, moved to Washington Heights a year ago from the Upper East Side. She says she likes living in a “Spanish-dominant area” because of her Puerto Rican background. It also helps her raise her 4-year-old daughter to be bilingual.
Saliceti’s plan is not to start another coffee shop in Washington Heights but to actually brew coffee, which she will then supply to local offices, homes and street vendors and eventually, she says, to corporations.
Cold brewing involves soaking coffee beans in cold water for 12 to 24 hours, depending on the recipe, Saliceti explains. “The coffee never touches hot water so certain chemical properties are never drawn out,” she says. “The effect is less bitter coffee that tends to be 60 to 70 percent less acidic, tastes smoother and more chocolaty and has a very different flavor profile.”
Saliceti will produce cold brew coffee as a concentrate that’s naturally stable, she says, without the need for preservatives or freezing. It can then be consumed hot or cold.
“I just love coffee,” she says with delight. As a child visiting her grandparents in Puerto Rico, Saliceti spent time in the coffee-growing mountains. “I would drink very strong coffee from the age of 5 or 6,” she recalls. “For me, it’s a real emotional connection; coffee is an association with family and culture.”
For now, High Bridge will operate out of a co-working commercial kitchen to brew the coffee. There’s no lease or overhead and the space can be rented by the hour, particularly helpful for start-ups. Saliceti has used her savings to launch the company and estimates that she has spent around $5000 so far. She has also applied for private and government grants for women and minorities and is seeking investors. If necessary, she may also try crowd-funding for specific projects or tools.
“Coffee presents lots of opportunities,” Saliceti says. “There is always a very high demand, so even if you only have a small percentage of the market share, you can still make a healthy income.”
Still, Saliceti’s biggest fear is failure, common for start-ups.
Diana Saliceti, CEO of High Bridge Cold Brew coffee company.
“Business success rates are quite low,” says Dennis Reeder, executive director of Washington Heights and Inwood Development Corporation (WHIDC). His organization assists start-ups and gives loans of up to $50,000 to small businesses in the area.
Because of uptown’s high commercial rents, he said, “most businesses have a very tough time making a profit here.” Reeder added that the coffee company’s social ethic “is admirable but may affect their profitability.”
Saliceti says she was first inspired to hire the “unhirable” while in college, where she heard a presentation from Homeboy Bakery, a Los Angeles company that employs ex-gang members.
“I was just blown away,“ she says. ”I thought it was such a phenomenal idea, I couldn’t fathom it. A seed was definitely planted.”
The seed remained buried until just a few months ago. At a fundraising event in East Harlem, Saliceti met a woman who had gotten a cosmetology license, giving her the economic freedom to leave her abusive partner. Her story struck a chord.
According to the Northern Manhattan Improvement Coalition’s domestic violence project, “Washington Heights and Inwood has one of the highest numbers of reported incidents of domestic violence in New York City.” Half of all reported incidents of domestic violence in Manhattan occur in upper Manhattan, the report said.
Saliceti has discussed her plans with the Violence Intervention Program in East Harlem and the Center Against Domestic Violence, which run shelters uptown. She has already gotten job requests from battered women while she awaits her Department of Agriculture license.
Saliceti hopes High Bridge can offer not only employment opportunities but training to help women be employable when they apply for work elsewhere.
Saliceti will offer samples of High Bridge’s cold coffee brews at the Medieval Festival in Fort Tryon Park on Oct. 4.
(Feature photo courtesy of Diana Saliceti.)
