Couple uses Southeast Asian roots to start coffee business, connect with community

As refugees and children of immigrants, Gao Lee and Saengmany Ratsabout know what it's like to be uprooted from their homelands. They said like the coffee plant — which is now grown all over the world and has thrived in new environments, refugees and immigrants create community wherever they put down roots.

That parallel inspired them to start Uprooted Coffee in 2022, which offers specialty coffee direct from Southeast Asia. The journey to opening the business started earlier than that, though. Lee said the couple — who met in the advanced preparation program the summer after graduating high school and before starting at St. Cloud State University in 2000 — went to Laos and Thailand as juniors on a study abroad trip through SCSU’s Multicultural Student Services. It was Lee’s first time in southeast Asia — where her parents are from, and it was Ratsabout’s first time back since leaving his home country when he was 2 years old. The trip helped them both connect with the region and learn about the countries’ history.

“That’s where we really fell in love with this idea that you could be in a place and fully feel like you could belong. We don’t ever fully feel like we could belong there or here, but it was just a place where we were just like, ‘Oh my god, these are our people.’ So the love for the land and the love for the people really started during that trip for me, and then we brought our kids in 2018 and kind of introduced them to Laos and they really loved it. We just had a great time, and we had come upon a coffee festival while we were there in the capital city of Laos,” Lee said. “Just seeing the culture around coffee — and Saeng’s obsessed with coffee, anyway — it was just kind of a perfect marriage. When we’re in Laos, we feel like ‘How do we share this with our family back home?’ And when we’re here, we’re like, ‘How do we share Laos with our folks here?’ We found that bridge through coffee.”

She said her husband launched the enterprise while on a break from work in 2022, when they were able to connect with some producers in Laos and find some distributors in the United States. Ratsabout took to sample roasting different beans at home in the family’s air fryer to test the different roasts. They started first with just one type of speciality coffee using arabica beans, quickly realizing that it was an untapped market at the time.

“People don’t know about coffee from there, even though it’s been grown in those areas since the 1800s. We knew that at least our community here wants that type of coffee,” Ratsabout said. “The pandemic taught us that nothing is certain, so we took a chance.”

It was important to both Ratsabout and Lee that they source the coffee beans from small co-ops or small producers in Laos, and not massive operations. To them, smaller producers help local villagers learn to process and export the coffee, helping the local community to provide for their families.

“That piece is really important to us, and also just the fact that the coffee is grown on existing forest floors,” Lee said. “That piece is really important, because land is not being cleared and the people can cultivate the beans in a natural way, which allows the beans to grow in shade, which then allows them to be sweeter naturally because they get to mature a bit more slowly.”

The coffee industry is very competitive, the couple said. While broadening their target market has been a very gradual process, they have seen steady growth. Their business is largely conducted online at the moment, but they also attend local Twin Cities-area markets with their coffee and hope to keep expanding into other physical locations. So far they have partnered to have Uprooted Coffee served at Laotian fine-dining restaurant Khâluna in Minneapolis as well as XIA Gallery & Cafe in St. Paul.

“Right now our communities are the most excited for it, so we’re trying to meet their needs and make sure that we are able to bring good, quality coffee over and get them to experience coffees that their parents or grandparents may have had,” Lee said. “We’ve had some people give us feedback that, ‘I shared this with my dad, and he said it tasted like he was back in Laos,’ and that really means a lot to us.”

It’s important to both Lee and Ratsabout that the business keeps lifting up their communities.

“We’re really passionate about joy, in the way that our support for refugee and immigrant communities — we want those communities to experience joy also. Because I think when you hear stories about refugees and immigrants, they’re always so sad. This tragic journey of getting here, and then the U.S. — in many places they’re not welcomed. So there is a space we can use to create joy for each other — the refugee and immigrant communities — and we want to be a part of that. We sponsor and we donate to events that bring attention to mental health and just joy in general,” Lee said. “The refugee and immigrant experience is not a one-sided story; it’s not a one-size-fits-all. I think sometimes people forget that.”

Highlighting how those communities grow and thrive along those journeys also helped inspire the name of the business.

“Uprooted kind of came about as we were thinking about where we are, how we got to be here as refugees being uprooted from our homes. I’m not a refugee — I was born in St. Paul — but my parents are, and through no fault of their own, and not through their own choice, they came here to the U.S.,” Lee continued. “They and other communities who are also refugees and immigrants have been thriving, and they give to their communities and they make communities better, and I think this is a story that we can do a better job of telling. Because it’s not all sad and it’s not all tragic, and I want us to be a part of that.”

Both Ratsabout and Lee have a long history of being involved in their community, dating back to when they were students at SCSU. They started ASiA — Asian Students in Action — with a friend on campus in the early 2000s. Through the group they applied for a grant from the Otto Bremer Trust, and hosted the first hate crimes awareness week on campus.

“We started ASiA because — there was the Hmong student organization, there were a couple other specific ethnic group organizations, and then there were some students that really didn’t feel like they identified with any of those and that there wasn’t a place for them,” Lee said. “We wanted an organization that focused more on just your social identity, that there was learning and action to be done. So when we launched Asian Students in Action, we kind of just put all of our efforts into that organization and led it for a couple years.”

Lee graduated from SCSU with a bachelor’s in elementary education in 2004. She went on to teach adults through the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, and then worked for the Bush Foundation before focusing on Uprooted Coffee full time.

Ratsabout graduated from St. Cloud State with a bachelor’s in cultural anthropology before going on to earn a master’s in Southeast Asian studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s in liberal studies from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He’s worked for a number of nonprofits focused on immigrants and refugees and was also an adjunct professor in SCSU’s ethnic studies department. He is now the executive director of East Side Freedom Library in St. Paul, and has served on the boards for a number of foundations and nonprofits as well.

“It’s being able to work in my community — and when I say community, it’s broader community: Hmong, Lao, Asian Americans, communities of color,” Ratsabout said. “But also being able to have a voice and providing perspectives on different issues and topics that come up — I think that’s really something that continues to draw me into that line of work.”

Both Lee and Ratsabout said their professional and even their personal journeys link back to St. Cloud State, especially to that first study abroad trip.

“That trip abroad was so impactful that it comes back in different ways for me, in the sense of being a global citizen — which is something that I didn’t have the vocabulary for at the time. This idea that the impact you have on your neighborhood, your block, your community, your state, whatever — that the impact ripples out, and I think we forget that because we work in offices and we just go to work and come back,” Lee said. “I think sometimes you forget about the ripple effects of our impact. I think of myself really as a global citizen now, because of that trip. That trip taught me so much about who I am as a person — my own personal identity, but also the actions you take have far-reaching impact.”

“I feel like current movements stand on the shoulders of previous movements. How can that make an impact? How can both our individual voice as well as our collective voice matter?” Ratsabout said. “We see things happening, and we try to support people, support individuals, support groups — when you see that things are not just, things are not equitable; jump in and support others.”

SCSU also taught the couple how to be advocates for themselves and others, and they hope to pass those lessons on.

“When we think about advocacy and learning how to have a voice, that was something that I learned here. It impacted even the way we’ve raised our kids. We come from families where you’re taught to listen to the authorities, you don’t make noise; you just are — blend into the background. As introverts, I think we tend to do that also, but I think through our education here, we learned to be advocates, and just the way we approach our kids to stand up for themselves and to speak up for other people who may not have a voice or to really live the values that we learned as young people here,” Lee said. “I think about the people they’ll be in the world when they leave us, and a lot of the teaching that we’ve instilled in them is what we learned here. I’m hoping that the kids we put out there into the world — the next generation — they don’t have to go through the same struggles that we did, and they can live a life where they can seek justice and speak for themselves and advocate for themselves.”