How a Truck Driver Built a Purpose-Driven Coffee Brand

We just needed a vessel at this point to get this to people and get out to the masses.

“And I said that would be really neat. How do we do this with coffee and get this to the next level?”

We now are using rotting coils where we send the frequency out into our ground coffee, our beans, and then we also do it with our water and our theory is once you have it, it's got the positive effect into it. Phil DeAngelo and Ashley DeAngelo are resilient entrepreneurs, business owners and community leaders. Best known for building Giovona's gourmet coffee and DeAngelo's property management. Together they've built their businesses on perseverance, hard work and a shared commitment to their community.

A lot of people will say we're crazy for wanting to work together. I trust him with every part of my life so why not trust him with the business part too? Because I know that with that bond that we have it's not going to be broken. Her confidence with it is extraordinary and that's kind of we want to embody that with her. Just like do your thing. Maybe you don't like in 20 years and that's okay.

“Just keep the machine working. If you want to go into accounting, if you want to go into graphic”

design, something in this machine you can branch off and do. Just keep the machine working and the living your legacy podcast for those who live to leave a legacy in Barcelona. Oh, that is sensational. We're here for another episode of Legacy Maker's podcast. I'm your host, Jay Slingon and we are joined here by a very special family. Why don't you guys tell us your names, your business,

and where you're from? I'm Phil. This is my wife Ashley and this is Giovanna. We own Giovanna's gourmet coffee. We are a small batched family owned infused coffee company. I'm a coffee lover. I'm a wake up in the morning. Every day, I've got to have my coffee. What about you guys?

“How do you like your coffees? We can get crazy. I like him. I like him. I like him. Like”

a many, any way now. We've got to experiment a lot with, with I guess coffee. There's no, when we started this, we didn't really know a whole heck of a lot and we figured this is too complicated. It really is just whatever you're feeling. There's no right or wrong way. It's like beer. Whatever you like, it works. So this works for us. We like it this way. So it's cool. Yeah. Yeah. And what about

yourself? How do you like your coffee? Yeah. So my first cup of coffee in the morning has to be hot

and black. There's nothing to it. Very plain. But after that, once we start moving with a shop, we enjoy getting creative and depends on the weather. I sometimes frozen. We'll get real crazy. What kind of coffee machines do you guys? You guys got those big Italian roasters or what are you working with? So right now we're working with bun and we are kind of keeping what's coming under wrap. We have a lot of cool stuff coming. A lot of cool tech coming with the building.

That's our big, big reveal that should be about a month from now starting to break around. But yeah, we're into a bunch of wild stuff with frequency generators and rod and coils and different things we do with the water to kind of manipulate the coffee a little bit. Because at the end of the day, it's just a bean and then just water on it, right? We at the end of the day. Yes, it's so much more complicated. The science of everything. They get really into it.

The coffee nerds. They do. But we are, we're just kind of kicking the door in and doing our own thing, right? So we just want a good coffee, a good bean and kind of just experiment and see kind of how it goes. I know that you can get to the acidity levels and all that and we're pretty dialed in when it comes to our cold and our ice coffee with things like that. But right now we're just playing and having a good time with it and what tastes good is usually what people gravitate

towards. I could tell you it's low acidity this and low acidity that, but if you don't like the taste of it, you don't care, right? Your taste is kind of going to steer you in the direction

you want to go. I see that you have your lovely daughter here. Yes. And I'm always thinking

what is the appropriate age for someone to have their first cup of coffee? I mean, she's working in there every day, right? She's not quite that age yet. How old are you? You're five years old and

I'm sure it smells really good in the truck. What do you think is parents? Giving them a taste

“that that's fine. But it can't be a normal daily thing yet. I don't think so yet. However,”

we do see some. I mean, there's quite a few kids that kind of roll through and especially in the summertime when when school is out, you see a lot of younger people more often. But I guess it's

not alcohol. I guess I just come from such an old school mentality and things are always

changed, right? Because I remember my dad growing up and, you know, every day in the coffee machine and I was like, what is that? We didn't have coffee culture back then. Right. It was just dad having his cup of coffee and now it's so different than back in the 90s or any of that. I mean, it's a whole new beast. I mean, look at you guys. When you were younger, did you ever think that you'd have a coffee company? No. It's funny. Just the other day, we were at home thinking,

when was this shift? Because I do remember being younger and it was black coffee, maybe sugar, maybe a little cream. What was the the switch to catalyst that flipped this into hyper mode? And

“maybe at the end of the day it's just connection with people. I think we'll be spoke about this”

other times like younger people don't want to be bad no more, right? So the bar is seen in all

that kind of gone away, but we still need connection. Alcohol consumption is gone down. Yeah, coffee culture and consumption has gone up. But you want the connection with people. Like the bar was, I guess, you know, the alcohol was there, but really what people are there for is to connect with other people. And now it's just changing to a different vessel. So the coffee house is where people connect and just coffee happens to be it. But we have other stuff to, you know, tease and

you guys got to get into these like morning club culture also where they have, you know, daytime parties where they are serving coffee and they're doing yoga. But there's also a DJ and club. I mean, coffee culture has come into, you know, so many different areas and every country also has its

“coffee culture as well. Have you guys had a chance to experience coffee culture in different countries?”

We were in a couple other places this past year, but nothing was, and again, everybody has their own thing, but I wasn't really, I'm kind of stuck on what I like, you know, it's like that taste thing. I do like some of this, I think it's the Cuban like the court out of things like that. Okay, so they got the quartado, they got the quartadito and they got the coffee leche, right? And I'm just

getting kind of used to it because it's like we never get it right. You know, it's like a quartado

is like an espresso shot with a little bit of milk and a cafe leche is, you know, I think two espresso shots with a lot of milk, but the quartado is always for me. It's always a little small and the cafe leche always has way too much milk. And I'm like, I haven't really nailed down into that fine tune, my order yet, you know? That's the hard thing. And that was one of the things with us where like, oh my God, we're, we're not really, we don't know all that. And so we

are looking really like at the end of the day, a lot of tape just means milk, right? That's all it, yeah. So whether it's this much or this much or that much, what do you like? And we've kind of got pretty close with a lot of our people that we see. And we know what they like. You kind of start to see the same face, you're like, oh, they like a little more, they like a little less, they they want to sweeter, they don't want it so sweet. So at the end of the day goes back to that connection with

people. Yeah. You start to know, if I see you every day, I know you're common. We have ways that we see all the people common. I know what you're going to order. Now you might throw me for a loop that day and we, when we just dump it on the drain, we won't tell you that. But I see somebody coming, I know, you know, that's my frozen, making me crazy with a vibe shot and boom, and we haven't ready to go for them. Frozen, making me crazy. Yeah. Okay. Well, tell me a little bit about that.

Well, what's going on there? Well, that's one, we actually have a roast, which is an island Carmel and Vanilla mix. So we took that and we said, let's make a drink out of it. So we took those flavors and we mashed them together and we can do a hot cold or frozen. And we have a vibe shot that we work with. And man, this thing is really cool because it's 75 milligrams of caffeine, alfineine and vitamin B, and it's tasteless. Okay. So you might not like coffee, but I can add a

tropic for the alfineine, you're getting your vitamin, but you don't have to drink coffee. You know,

“and it's, that's what the vibe shot is, but some, buddy, I'm thinking about right now. She loves”

the frozen. You're making me crazy with the vibe. Maybe she was, uh, order in too many orange book of frappuccinos, and she was like, "Jupac, amic crazy, man." And you're like, "Hmm, yeah." I will make it work. Yeah, yeah. I've had the opportunity to try coffee in different cultures. Vietnamese coffee is amazing. They serve it to you on like this little silver kind of drip kind of coaster, right? And it's, it's low drips into your cup. But in the cup is like a whole, maybe like an

inch of condensed sweet milk, right? Oh, and it tastes lovely. And then in Italy, they have, you know, just their, their small shots and go, and it's really funny. And my friend's gonna kill me on this,

but I always, I always think of this story that he told me when he went to Italy. He goes there,

and, you know, he's a Starbucks guy. He gets his coffee to go, and, you know, he, he went to a coffee bar, and he's like, "Yeah, I want to espresso to go," right? And they're just like, "To go?" You know, he's like, "I want to walk around with my coffee in a shot." So, yes, I want a coffee to go. And they're like, "We don't have coffee to go cups, because they just serve it, and they take a shot, they leave it, and then they go, right? It's all part of the culture, and then he was

adamant. He's like, "No, I want my, I want to walk around the city," right? And enjoy my coffee, right? They were like, "Okay," like, you know, he wants his coffee to go, so they didn't have the coffee cups. They finally find, like, there's this, like, huge cup, right, which would have been, like, your normal Starbucks, grandday, or whatever, right? And then they serve him, like, there's a little shot in this coffee, and then he looks at it, and then he's like, "So embarrassed, and then it just

takes a shot." He's like, "Here you go." After all that, after all that, you know, you can just see the hands, "Oh, the coffee took a look at it." To talk about it. I know of a girl. I'm American. Leave it to the Americans. I know a judge. I don't know him. I know of him, but he gets, I've seen some of his work in videos, and he gets extremely frustrated at that. Espresso is meant to enjoy right there. Sure, it's done. You pound it and knock it back. And I look at us

whether we were an Italy or Vietnam or wherever we would be. We would be the one to kick the door down and say, "I respect your culture. We're going to grow off it." We're going to change it and

“mix it up a little bit and make it happen. I think that's the robotic mode we spoke about,”

right? You get stuck in that whole loop over and over. We want to spice it up and switch it up a little bit, and that's kind of our thing. Hey, if life doesn't have a little spice to it,

what are you doing? So I never told you that, but my first job, my first real job, was working at

a coffee shop, right? And I would be in charge of flavoring the coffees. You know, Irish cream, hazelnut, the whole gamut. And it was the coffee roasters, right? Shout out to daybreak coffee roasters. I put the fresh roast coffee inside like these big barrels, and then I put the flavoring in them, and then I'd, you know, roll it around my foot and make sure everything was coated properly. But the thing is that these extracts, these flavor extracts,

they would like stick and like seep into your skin. And no matter how much washing you would do, it was always be there. And I'm, I'm half Belgian, half Filipino, all right? So the next day,

I would go into school, all right? And they always make fun of me. They'd be like, okay,

who's been having Belgian waffles for breakfast, you know? Okay, like, oh, pancakes for breakfast again, and that's just what it, you know? So you guys have flavor coffees as well, right? So how do you stop that? What's your flavoring technique? Or do you smell like, you know, you've had Belgian waffles? Well, yeah, we definitely smell. And to me at this point, it's, um, it almost smells like a burnt cigarette

“to me. You know, at the end of the day. But that's what I smell. When I walk by somebody, they're like,”

you smell like coffee, it smells good. But, um, I don't know, like at this point, that's all I do as smell smells. Not only just smell smells, but you guys have been talking about sound vibration. Yeah. And infusing this certain level of sound into your coffee, talk to me a little bit about that, because that is just so interesting. And it really sets you out apart from any of the different coffees out there. It's really incredible. This is just my crazy mind, um, running in people that

I admire so much. Um, I stated to you before this, uh, eomuto guy, um, doctor, in Japan did some work who, where he started looking at water. And he would take, um, very clean water and he would put

um, patterns were jagged and, and just not pleasant to look at once he froze him and looked

under a microscope, took dirty water and did the same with, put positive into it and they were all beautifully symmetrical and and started seeing that water has memory to it. And whether we're right,

“wrong, whatever way you look at it, I believe this, um, I know that our body is made up of mostly”

water. So I think there's a way that we can imprint water and then imprint ourselves. We just needed a vessel at this point to get this to people and get out to the masses. And I said that would be really neat. How do we do this with coffee and get this to the next level? And we started calling a lot of scientific websites or places that they sell equipment to universities and schools. So you can't just buy this equipment off radio shack or whatever stores shelves. We actually had to prove

to them that we own a business, that we own a coffee company. Why are we doing this? Because they didn't want to, um, associate it with selling this and having some neatherious work done with, with the machines. But we had this thought with, um, uh, frequency generators, power amplifiers, collidal plates. We now are using rod inquiles where we send the frequency out into our grind, um, our ground coffee, our beans and our, and then we also, um, do it with our water and our theory is once you have it,

it's got the positive effect into it. You make it at home and now you're putting that positive frequency into your body. Yeah. At that point, even if it's just triggered your mind a little bit to start thinking that way, you hopefully would then will pass that onto your kids or to the next person that you run into. Um, that's really our whole goal at the end of the day with this. It's not

always about science. It's also about, you know, if you just know something as put in that little

special, like, like, there's this one guy that does, uh, splash art, right? Yeah, she not only does splash art, but he'll, you know, a celebrity will come to him and they'll want him to paint their Lamborghini or something, right? But the thing that makes him special is that he does like these salutations and he, like, puts energy into every splash, right? So every single splash has different meaning about the person's life and all this positive energy that goes into his paintings,

“right? And that's why it sets himself different. And that's what makes the person driving that”

Lambo with this special splash art. Think, hey, I'm surrounded by all this positivity, right? So it's not all just about science, right? Because what's scientists is going to say that makes an effect. For me, it's like, wow, I want to try this. You know, putting those vibrations, you talk about the effect that had on water and the memory, you know, when I have that sip of coffee, I think, and I can't wait to try it. I mean, I feel the effect now, but just mentally,

right? The effect that that's going to have on me. You talk about positive vibrations at the time. I think that really does have an effect on a person's day. The five people around us are our next five years. You're thinking, um, I don't know if we've all done it. We have done it. You get in that rumination, right? With that bad thinking, which is the, what's side of the brain, is that on the amygdala? You're stuck in the amygdala part of your brain,

and you just continue that negative thinking in your head over and over. Even if those things don't come real, you still are thinking them. We want you to get to the prefrontal cortex of our brains, where we are intentional about the things that we do. And if we can spark that in you a little bit, we are convinced that maybe the first day you won't feel the second day, the 15th day, the 30th day, the 45th day, you will start having an imprint and effect on your life.

“How's it been for you, uh, you know, working as a couple, building this business?”

It's been nothing shy, amazing. Um, it, it's, has been a learning lesson. Um, my husband has more confidence in me than I think I have in myself. Um, and that has helped, I think, everything grow to be honest with you. Um, a lot of people will say, we're crazy for wanting to work together.

Yes. And that you need time part. Yeah. Um, but ever since we met, we've really never had time

apart. And it just has worked for us. And that's, I know that's not for everybody, but for us, it's always just kind of worked. And I look at it as I trust him with every part of my life. So why not trust him with the business part, too, because I know that with that bond that we have, it's not going to be broken. And it's, it's a great partner to have because you can always trust that person. But it's a lot of work. And you can see there's a lot of kind of dynamics that

needs to happen in the relationship and the business aspect and saying, okay, this is your role.

figure that out and get in that groove. Um, can you talk to me about, you know, how long, how long

did it take you guys to kind of get in that groove? It was, I don't know, I still doesn't mean getting we progress pretty quickly together. Because there's a lot of couples out there listening. And I run that, I want to run a business together. Yeah. To those couples that want to do this, go for it. But be open-minded and understanding, know your own strength and weaknesses, as well as your partners, because sometimes your strengths are the same. And obviously other times

are not the same. And know kind of might sound bad, but when to say in your land, you know, you're good at this part of the business, but keep an open mind because that doesn't mean your

partner's not good at that part as well. Um, but keep that open communication to be able to say, like,

okay, look at the bigger picture. Maybe here she is right. We need to do it this way instead, because it's going to go this way. And if it goes wrong, don't point the finger. Just say, okay, I get it. We messed up whoever's at fault. It doesn't matter. Let's figure out how to go past that.

“Yeah. I think that understanding that people need to have as a couple, both just in their marriage”

or their relationship alone, as well as as a business aspect of it, makes a world of a difference. Because if you can keep that open mind and we practice the pause a lot, you know, you get frustrated, but instead of spouting off and saying something, just pause for a minute, take a deep breath and go,

okay, maybe there is a different angle that I'm not looking at. So, and again, I would argue,

I think that's with any part of a relationship, not just a business part of it. Maybe it's those residuals of all the cough, positive energy cough, that you guys are, you know, it's siphon on every day. You know, helps with the relationships, helps with the business. There you go. We've said this for a while, now that we stay in Camelion mode. And that is really important. The robotic, right? You get stuck in the same rumination over and over.

The Camelion that we, whatever is going to happen, whatever room we are in, we got to, we got to be ready for it. You know, it might just be, I don't know, hoodies and shorts on and we're just kicking the soccer ball around and it's that, but then it's, we got to turn it up because we got to

“go to, you know, whatever we have to do. Well, I think you guys turned it up today because, you know,”

you guys are looking great. You know, yeah, a nice suit on before is not really a suit guy. He said, but it looked like he was comfortable in that suit. And so yeah, what, so you talked about the future does Giovanni Giovanna Giovanna. Giovanna, do you have a special cup that you like to drink out of anything special? Well, we got to get here a little special cup. She's got to be the queen of the, she's got to be the queen of the, of the coffee truck. Yeah, everyone. She just said the mini cup.

You like the mini espresso cup. That's the one. Yes. All right. Yeah. Yeah. She's been fantastic with this. This is the, yes. And you've been talking about how she comes in and every, every week, I believe you said she has to work one day with you. So walk us through that. It's been, it goes back and forth with her soccer and her ninja camp that she's in. But yeah, she comes with us in the trailer and in this mobile coffee, as I say, trailer, but it's a mobile coffee house that we constructed and she

helps with everything from working the window to making drinks. In fact, a year or so ago, she was taking orders. We were in the back prep and stuff and she's taken orders and we were like, wait a minute. She's doing good. But they can't fully feel her. Yeah, the customers were like throwing them out. And she's just taken them a little bit. Yeah. I mean, her confidence with it is is extraordinary. And that's kind of we want to embody that with her just like do your thing. And you know what I mean?

And even we've said this, we love the coffee. And maybe you don't like in 20 years and that's okay.

“Just keep the machine working. If you want to go into accounting, if you want to go into”

graphic design, something in this machine, you can branch off and do. Just keep the machine working in, you know, you guys can kind of do whatever you want. It's been a lovely story and it's been really nice to see just the growth and the speed of that growth and how you guys have such a lovely family and doing business together and succeeding together and struggling together and going through the whole thing. And I'm excited to give your coffee a try. Where can people find

you if maybe Giovanni wants to kind of say that. She nailed it before. Yeah inside the studio. So where can people find you? Giovanni's coffee dot com. There you go. Giovanni's coffee dot com. And listen, Google is going to auto-correct you. It's GIA, VO, NNAS, COFFE dot com. Thank you. All right, what it's been a pleasure

People, we appreciate you. Thank you.