Please share your name, title, and a description of your job duties and responsibilities.
My name is Melanee Meegan. I am the marketing manager at Peace Coffee. Peace Coffee is a fair-trade, organic, shade-grown coffee company based in Minneapolis. We're a coffee roaster and wholesaler. My job is to make sure we're communicating our mission and vision to our customers, to people who drink coffee, and the general public.
I spend most of my time responding to requests for sponsorship, planning for events that are coming up, researching trends for future products, talking to roasters about how to describe our coffees, and continually updating our website, Facebook page, and Twitter account. Overall, I act as a conduit for sharing information about our company and making sure it is in a language that represents our vision and the mission of what we do. I also spend a lot of time in meetings with the management team, the sales team, and the events teams. We make a lot of checklists! We also brew up coffee early in the morning for different events or promotions. When you're a small company you have to do a little bit of everything.
One thing that makes Peace Coffee unique, memorable, and green is that we have a bike-delivery system. We have two flat-bed trailers that haul our coffee around the city. Our delivery team can haul up to 600 pounds of coffee within a 25-mile radius of our roaster.
What is a typical day like at your job?
At my job, I spend a fair amount of my time in front of the computer: e-mailing, detailing requests to our graphic or web designers, and marketing through social media. I have a smart phone as well which helps keep me connected to our networks and gives me a way to share what we're doing at events. In this field, being tied to a computer-like device is important. I also do a lot of early morning coffee brewing for different events either during the week or on the weekends. I probably spend 50 percent of my time on the computer, 30 percent in meetings and at events, and 20 percent brewing coffee.
How did you get started working in this field?
I was brought to Peace Coffee through a recommendation from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), where I was working on my senior thesis for college on fair-trade bananas. I found Peace Coffee and, after learning more about them, thought "Wow! This is something I come could home to." When I returned to the Twin Cities after college, they were looking for a part-time, do-everything person. I got the job and within three months it became a full-time gig. I've always been a fan of coffee and worked at Starbucks previously and learned a lot about where coffee came from, but didn't understand the impact it had socially or environmentally. So once I started at Peace Coffee, I had the "wow-moment" when I realized that this is really what I want to do with my life.
I've also always had a love of art and creative things in general. As marketing manager at a place like Peace Coffee, there is a lot of space for me to use my creativity. While I don't do the art myself, I get to be a part of it during the process of creating ads or developing other materials. We're building a coffee shop now, and I have gotten to help with some of the design elements.