DUNDEE, Ore. — Francis Kungu didn’t move to the Pacific Northwest to become a coffee importer. He moved to Seattle in 2007 to train as a pilot.
It was on that path that coffee found him. After his first successful solo flight, a flight instructor handed him a gift card to a coffee shop he’d never heard of.
“I don’t know what Starbucks is. I’m from Kenya,” Kungu said.
The card sat untouched for months. When he finally used it, he found something that stuck with him: a shop full of people lined up for coffee, a crop he had grown up regarding as a losing proposition.
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“In Kenya, people are constantly going broke because of growing this crop,” Kungu said. “It’s known as a poverty crop.”
Today, Kungu runs Fire Lily Coffee, a Dundee-based roasting and retail brand, and its direct-import counterpart, Jamii Coffee, which works with Kenyan coffee farmers to cut out layers of middlemen between the farm and the U.S. market. Fire Lily was known as Exilior Coffee until a fall 2025 rebrand.
Record Profits, Poverty Crop
Kungu said the idea for a more direct-trade model first came to him mid-flight. Training out of Seattle, he flew a narrow corridor between restricted military airspace and the city’s airport approach, a route that put the region’s geography on display.
“Trade is the reason why you grow out,” Kungu said. “You see the ports, all the housing for the people to support the ports, and all the trade that supports the wealth coming into the city.”
He returned to Kenya to trace coffee back to its roots. Coffee grows as a cherry-like fruit, which is then pitted and processed to become a green coffee bean destined for roasters around the world. Kungu said Kenya’s arabica varieties were developed and crossbred by colonial-era agronomists to survive the country’s high-elevation volcanic soils, producing a distinctly bright, acidic cup with notes of citrus and blackcurrant.
“It’s like a designer suit,” Kungu said. “You can still wear it if it’s not designed for you, but it’ll still be off in some places and won’t fit right. This plant was made for Kenya, and only Kenya.”
He likens the quality and unique character to wine’s terroir — the same thing that makes the land surrounding his Dundee home so cherished in the viticulture industry.
According to the National Coffee Association, Kenyan producers place a heavy emphasis on quality control during processing and drying, and use a grading system that classifies beans by size, shape, and density. Kungu said Kenya’s volume of high-grade coffee is unusual among prized origins, even though the country accounts for less than 1% of global coffee production.
When Kungu began exploring how to import coffee directly, he ran into resistance. Not with the farmers, exactly, who were excited to work directly with a Kenyan. But when Kungu started negotiating with a Kenyan cooperative, he found the deal blocked by a Belgian export company that had long acted as a gatekeeper between farmers and foreign buyers.
“I got a call one day from unhappy people,” Kungu said. “Because if the Kenyans are going directly, they will actually eliminate the middlemen that were keeping most of the profits.”
The farmer ultimately kept more of the sale price, Kungu said, and the experience shaped the direct-trade model he built into Jamii Coffee, which launched in 2016 and today works with roughly 3,000 small-scale farmers, including long-term partners at Mukarimu Farm in Meru County and Imani Farm in Kiambu County, according to Daily Coffee News.
He built early customer relationships by hand, driving green coffee samples to roasters around Portland during lunch breaks from an unrelated day job in hospital financial analysis, and a career in coffee began.
From Importer to Retailer
Initially, Kungu said he didn’t want to roast. He was focused on the business and didn’t feel he had the expertise or passion to start actually turning the imported green coffee beans into a roasted product ready for the cup. However, his importing business was running fast when the 2020 pandemic hit. Suddenly, he had containers of unroasted coffee beans with nowhere to go, and a pipeline of farmers who needed to move product.
“All I thought was, ‘this is what it look like to be broke — this is what it looks like to fail,'” he said. “My wife and I stopped to breathe and started working to solve the problem.”
The industry had slowed to a halt in the early days of the pandemic as coffee shops closed their doors to the public. Green coffee beans do have a longer shelf life than roasted coffee if properly stored, but that wouldn’t change the fact that there were bills to pay. There was one option Kungu avoided.
“I knew the industry well enough to know that I don’t want to roast,” Kungu said. “It’s never something I wanted to take on. But we needed to turn around very quickly because I had a container coming in.”
Kungu’s early roasting was done under contract through Caravan Coffee, a partnership that lasted about five years, according to Caravan Coffee founder Pete Miller, who worked with Kungu during that period.
“He worked closely with our roasting team to develop his desired flavor profile, which involved sample roasting and testing many different recipes until we achieved the optimum results,” Miller said.
Kungu and his wife began packaging the beans in plain brown bags and selling them through Facebook.
“We didn’t have a brand, we didn’t have anything, so we just put it in brown bags, posted on Facebook, and people would randomly buy,” Kungu said.
The company’s first farmers market booth was the Portland State University market, a bigger and more competitive venue than the smaller markets he said he was advised to start with instead.
“I decided to go for the big one. I had nothing to lose. What would happen if I didn’t get it? It’s no different. I never applied to another one except that one,” Kungu said. “And I got it.”
Selling at the market remained his sole distribution for years and was more than enough to keep his roasting company busy, so much so that he moved his roasting activities from Caravan Coffee to a facility in Hillsboro. At the start, it was called Exilior Coffee, which rebranded to Fire Lily Coffee in October 2025.
“The name is deeply personal,” Kungu wrote on his website announcing the brand change. “In many African cultures, the fire lily is a powerful symbol of resilience, renewal, and beauty born from adversity. Fire Lily Coffee is our way of celebrating that transformation — blending our Kenyan heritage with innovations all while honoring the values that guide us.”
Last year, the newly-named company’s profile grew as it partnered with Deadstock Coffee Roasters owner Ian Williams and Top Chef-famous chef Gregory Gourdet on Kann Coffee, a Haitian- and Kenyan-themed blend tied to Gourdet’s Southeast Portland restaurant, Kann, according to Travel Oregon.
“This partnership is a testament to the enduring spirit of connection and collaboration that transcends geographical borders,” Gourdet said in the Travel Oregon feature. “Through the Melanj Espesyal blend, we celebrate the distinct cultural richness of each nation and the powerful bonds that unite them.”
Kungu said his efforts have reflected back on his Kenyan home. The farmers he works with are paid fairly, which has encouraged more farmers to step back into the coffee-growing industry. Existing farmers have planted more coffee trees.
It’s yet another challenge for Kungu, whose niche product now has a little more breathing room. But with too much, the market may not value the crop as much, which would drop the price — a classic example of supply and demand at work.
“I became a very good consultant,” Kungu said. “But I ended up encouraging people to produce more than I can eat, so now I need to grow. It informs my growth.”
That growth may take shape in more Pacific Northwest roasters with Kenyan coffee options on their shelves. It may mean more markets or retail locations for Fire Lily Coffee. But for Kungu, that won’t be a physical coffee shop, at least anytime soon.
“I’m a ship,” Kungu said. “If I open a coffee shop, it’s an anchor. I’m worried I might lose the sea.”
Fire Lily Coffee is available through the company’s website, at the PSU Farmers Market on Saturdays, and at Market of Choice locations. Kungu said the company offers free local delivery to Newberg and Dundee addresses.
Learn more at firelilycoffee.com
