Ten-year-old Charli Johnson is so famous in her town that she can’t even walk outside without being recognized.
That’s because she’s the face of Big Guns Coffee — the first hydroponic coffee company in the United States — alongside her father, Marine Corps veteran T. Shane Johnson.
Shane, who served in the Marine Corps from 1998 to 2002, participated in the Frontline to Farm program at North Carolina’s Appalachian State University where he met someone growing hydroponic lettuce. There, an idea was born.
“I feel so bad for that dude,” Charli said. “He [my dad] probably asked him so many questions… Dad was wondering, ‘Why have people never done hydroponic coffee?’ And so he was like, ‘Why don’t we do hydroponic coffee? We can do it here where we live. We can have all these things that we can do, why don’t people do it?’”
“Once we realized we wanted to do hydroponic coffee and that it was a dead space, just like Marine Corps, we like being first,” Shane said. “So we were like, ‘We’ll give it a go,’ and we just ran with it.”
Big Guns Coffee began in 2021 and, thanks to Charli’s work, already has its products at the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, grocery chain Sprouts and about 200 to 300 WalMart locations.
Growing Big Guns Coffee
The Johnsons, who live in Tryon, North Carolina, met with executives from Sprouts and WalMart through RangeMe, an organization that holds events Shane likened to “speed dating for business.”
But it was Charli who shared the Big Guns Coffee mission and pitched the product to executives.
“I did it all,” Charli said. “I was talking right to them.”
“She has her presentation deck, she walks in, shakes their hands. I sit to the side,” Shane said, noting he only gets involved if she gets “hung up.”
It’s these meetings with investors that Charli enjoys the most.
“Because they never know that I’m coming,” she said. “… [With] WalMart, he was like, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been pitched by a 10 year old before.’ It’s so fun.”
But what Shane said he’s noticed is that the “CPG [consumer packaged goods] world” includes a lot of women — and they’re supportive of Charli.
“They don’t treat her like, ‘Oh, this is a novelty item that her dad’s trying to run a gimmick,” Shane said.
“They talk to me. They don’t talk to him,” Charli continued.
Future of Big Guns Coffee
Shane said their first goal with the company is to develop more hydroponic farms throughout the United States with a co-op and profit-share model and Big Guns Coffee in a consultant role. This is alongside laying out their distribution channel.
“We want to connect that farm-to-company experience with these retailers and relationships with roasters and so on and so forth,” Shane said, “so that farmer has a direct link to generating revenue.”
As of mid-March, Shane said they received a call from a co-op program interested in collaborating to grow hydroponic coffee in their state of Montana. A veteran farmer in Kentucky also plans to launch a hydroponic coffee business through Big Guns Coffee.
“So this is really taking tradition and innovation, combining it together and creating something unique that I think can provide a pretty cool cashflow for farmers so they can continue growing their crops,” Shane said.
The long-term vision is for Charli to fully run Big Guns Coffee one day. Naturally, she already has a plan: go to college, then return home and grow the business.
“I don’t really want to just grow it all big and have this huge reputation and then, ‘Eh, whatever.’ Because everybody knows me now,” she said.
For more information, or to purchase Big Guns Coffee, visit the company’s website.
