Small Batch and Huanxi Coffee Team Up for a Meaningful Gift Package

Wake up and…hear the coffee! Yes, that’s right, dear reader. If you wake up every morning being able to hear the promising gurgle of your daily cuppa joe brewing away in the pot, well that’s something big to be thankful for. Imagine a world devoid of the any of the senses we all often take for granted — say, imagine you were hearing impaired or even deprived of hearing altogether. Disabilities are bound to inevitably impact a person’s life up to a certain extent, but make no mistake: public awareness and efforts go a long way in making the world a lot fairer and more accessible to those in need.

Dec 3 was the International Day of Persons with Disabilities and Evelyn Bai of Small Batch Cookie Co. came up with an idea to celebrate in a small yet meaningful way —a very special box of cookies, coffee and art.

Wait. What do all of those otherwise wonderful things have to do with people with disabilities? Well, sit down for an interview with Bai herself on the intersection between some of her fondest memories of daily life here in Beijing, the realities of running a business in our present times and the challenges that entire collectives often have to overcome.

Hi, Evelyn! Give us the 101 on this new deal that you are launching under your bakery brand, Small Batch Cookie Co.
Sure! So this time it’s actually a very special collaboration between three friends. In your charity gift box, for only RMB 100, you’re going to find three vegan cookies from Small Batch Cookie Co. (dark chocolate walnut, peanut butter and double chocolate), three sachets of gourmet drip bag coffee from Huanxi Coffee and a zine titled Jackie’s Coffee Story. The gift box cover itself has been designed by hearing-impaired designer and illustrator Erica Luo. This is a pre-sale operation where our goal is to raise profits from a minimum of 50 gift boxes that we hope to start shipping around Dec 10, and all profit is going to help a deaf barista to-be go receive systemic, accessible coffee training.

This is such a wholesome initiative. Huanxi Coffee is closely linked to the start of your own business, right? Regulars to nugget records are probably familiar to Jackie, the barista running Silence Coffee there in the afternoon.
Exactly. Jackie is a deaf person and the owner of Huanxi Coffee, a coffee shop on Dongzhimen Beixiaojie, and Silence Coffee. Both locations serve some of the best coffee I’ve ever had in Beijing. Huanxi is a community coffeeshop that offers lovely brews at incredibly affordable prices, and the first place that ever carried Small Batch Cookie Co. treats. It’s actually painful for me to follow these words with the news that they will be closing shop soon —business just couldn’t survive several rounds of pandemic control. But, Huanxi provided lots of joy to the community around with its bright orange shade awning and friendly vibes. I count myself lucky to have forged this friendship with Jackie; he’s taught me to understand the nuances of communicating with deaf people, and opened doors for me to hear and tell the stories of people who are often invisible in our society.

Beyond a heart-warming story of supporting a deaf friend and a small business suffering from the pandemic, help us understand why funding the barista training of a deaf person is actually a very specific means to help marginalized communities in a significant way.
You always need to dig a little deeper when you consider the stories around you. Coffee in the Western world is almost this kind of necessity. You wake up, down a cup of coffee, and let the caffeine take its course to start off your day. But after finally getting used to the pricy RMB 35 lattes around Beijing’s booming 3rd wave coffee shops, I came to understand coffee as an embodiment of middle class in China. It’s a very social thing. Friends gather around their cups of coffee at whatever trendy café, snap carefully composed photos, and exchange details about their businesses or lives. You could almost say it’s a romanticized enjoyment reserved for the privileged few. But that is not the group you can often find deaf or hearing-impaired people in. Not only that, deaf people are often excluded from employment in customer-facing industries, such as coffee. Sadly, not every customer is willing to extended patience to their barista, and every employer willing to take on the extra cost of training one who cannot hear. So where can a deaf person start if they ever want a part in the romantic world of coffee?

Believe it or not, working as a barista often requires you to make use of your hearing. The milk boils, the coffee machine lets out a certain sound —just a lot of instructions and elements involved in learning your way around in a café. There simply hasn’t been enough resources around to adapt this training to people with hearing deficiencies. When Jackie, owner of Huanxi Coffee and Silence Coffee took his first coffee training course 13 years ago, he had to pay for a pricy private instructor, find sign language translations for every coffee terminology, and invent his own ways to complete operational steps that require hearing. He kindly agreed to join me in this initiative, and train a hearing-impaired new barista with his years of experience making coffee, and running coffee shops as a deaf person in Beijing.

All profits from your purchases of the gift box will go to compensate for his time preparing for and teaching this course. The total amount we end up raising may not even come close to the price of a regular privately-instructed coffee course on the market, but Jackie is determined to help someone from his community break into the coffee industry, even in his own time of great needs.
Remember, when you order a giftbox, you are not only brightening up your own day with delicious treats, but also brightening up the days of someone with a giving heart, and someone else who is defeating all odds in pursue of a java-colored dream.

What a meaningful present for the upcoming holidays. Where can our readers order their box?
Easy peasy! Just click here to access the pre-order mini-program —remember it’s all pre-sale this time! And, if you want to stay tuned about how the training goes, and all things Small Batch Cookie Co., just add the official WeChat channel (WeChat ID: gh_9ad80665c3b2). Happy holidays!

READ: Cozy Up to the Soothing, Folksy Tunes of Beijing Native Hazel Shang

Images courtesy of Evelyn Bai