Today we’d like to introduce you to Stacy Coplin.
Stacy, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
Eric Knight (my now husband) introduced me to yaupon in 2012 when we first started hanging out. I had been interested in running my own business and was at the time working for a woman-run corporate sustainability company part-time and the Austin Nature and Science Center (where Eric and I first met and worked as environmental educators). We played around with the idea of a yaupon tea company and sold small batches of bottled yaupon tea to family and friends but ultimately tabled the idea (at the time, it seemed like a lot to take on considering we had just started dating). The idea never left us though and good friends would frequently ask us when we were going to pick it up again. Fast forward to 2016 and we decided to pick it up again and started working towards a product, a name and all the many facets that are part of starting a business. Local Leaf LLC was born.
We started out with a ready to drink cold-brewed bottled drink called Yaupon Mate. We had two flavors Green and Toasted and they were delicious! We started out selling it at the Mueller Farmer’s Market, Peoples RX, Tacodeli, Casa de Luz and a few other local gems around town. We stopped selling our Yaupon Mate in 2020 after COVID hit as it significantly impacted where we could sell it (most of our customers where restaurants). And now we are focusing primarily on our second product: yaupon matcha.
In 2018 we had a trip to Japan planned and before we left for our adventure, we had the idea of creating a matcha powder from yaupon one evening while driving back from wild-harvesting. I began to reach out to Japanese companies that make matcha and one thing led to another and I was connected with a contact in Japan. We set aside some of our trip for work and visited green tea farms, visited facilities and learned insights into the process behind making green tea matcha. Upon our return, we got busy figuring out how to adapt what we learned in Japan to processing yaupon leaves into matcha (which loosely translates to “ground tea”) in Japanese.
Since 2018 we have been slowly growing our yaupon matcha business and since 2020, it’s been available at all 7 Whole Foods locations in the Austin area. We are also honored to collaborate with other wonderful small businesses like Lick Ice Creams who uses our yaupon matcha in their Yaupon Matcha Chip seasonal flavor. We also recently collaborated with Vosges Chocolates and were featured in their specialty (Prima Materia Truffle Collection) chocolate box as well as their Bronte Pistachio Truffles.
During 2020 we also wrote a book called Foraging Texas: Finding, Identifying, and Preparing Edible Wild Foods in Texas. This book was released August 2021 and is now available online or at your local bookstore. This project tied in with our mission to provide local, wild-harvested, and nutritious products; use food to inspire environmental awareness; instill stronger connections to the natural world.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I think this has to do with your mindset honestly. I look at Local Leaf as an ongoing project and view new challenges as opportunities to learn and grow. This shift in perspective didn’t come until year 2 or 3. The first three years were the hardest but also some of the most exciting and were also when we found our community within our industry and met so many wonderful people creating amazing things. I wouldn’t change a thing about those first few years. You learn and grow so much. One of our biggest struggles was with our bottled Yaupon Mate drink; we had a short shelf life and were not willing to add preservatives to alter the clean product we created. We stuck with it until we no longer could and when the lockdown with COVID occurred that was our cue to wind that part of the business down. Everything has a way of working itself out and we began working on the book shortly after we stopped producing the bottled drink; I can’t imagine we would have had the time to write the book if we were still cranking out Yaupon Mate. Creating something from nothing is never going to be easy and I knew that going in. You find the joy throughout the process and stick with it even if it’s a different version than what you started with. We truly enjoy what we do and are honored to get to do the work that we do and continue to grow and adapt as we go.
We’ve been impressed with Local Leaf LLC, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We specialize in Yaupon Matcha and take pride in our unique Japanese-inspired process start to finish. We also take pride in focusing not just on yaupon but also educating the public about other edible plants; we host plant walks in the spring and fall months and collaborate with other entities like the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center and Jester King Brewery to host plant walks on their sites. Be sure to keep an eye out for upcoming walks and check out our book, Foraging Texas: Finding, Identifying, and Preparing Edible Wild Foods in Texas.
Contact Info:
- Email: hey@local-leaf.com
- Website: www.local-leaf.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/localleafatx/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/localleafatx/
Image Credits
Whitney Arostegui
