(KRON) – Whenever people see the Tesla Cybertruck on the road, they stop to take a look at the controversial vehicle. Whatever your feelings about the pickup truck, it usually grabs people's attention.
Imagine having your coffee delivered to you by a Cybertruck.
A common sight every Sunday at the Farmers Market in Cupertino, California, is Moonwake Coffee Roasters, run by husband-and-wife team Ming Wood and Mabel Yen, whose espresso machines, water heaters and various coffee makers are powered by a Cybertruck.
But the owners don't want the focus to shift away from their main product: coffee.
“For better or worse, it's a very polarizing vehicle,” Yen said. “Hopefully the footage will capture people's attention.”
“It's really about the coffee. We want people to stay here and engage in conversations about coffee,” Yen added. “And the truck is the vehicle and tool to make that happen.”
“It was certainly a reckless decision” to run an entire business out of Tesla trucks, Wood said, and probably also to leave a high-paying, stable job in the tech industry.
Quit tech job to run coffee business from Cybertruck
Wood said his passion for coffee began when he was an engineer at Tesla in 2018. He started an office club where he and his colleagues would brew coffee together to help ease the stress of working in an office.
The casual office coffee brewing tradition continued, and Moonwake Coffee Roasters officially began roasting coffee in 2020, according to its website. Wood left Tesla earlier this year to focus full-time on the business.
During the pandemic, Wood took Yen, who was working at Meta at the time, on a coffee journey. As the years went by, the couple saw their customer base grow. Yen then realized she enjoyed running Moonwake Coffee Roasters more. She left her job at Meta in 2023.
A first-generation Cupertino native whose parents immigrated from Hong Kong, Yen comes from a family in the food and beverage industry — her grandparents ran a Chinese restaurant in Fresno — and she says hospitality and serving food and drink are part of how she expresses her love.
“You only have a limited amount of time on earth, and for me, it was about doing something that impacts the people around me,” Yen said. “Before I did this, I worked for a big company and it's easy to feel like you're a small cog in the machine and get lost, but when you serve someone a coffee, you see their reaction. … That's also really powerful. It's not something you get every day in a big company.”
Wood was born in Indiana to a Chinese mother and a white American father, and spent most of his childhood in Singapore. After graduating, Tesla was his first full-time job, and he's lived in California ever since.
Why did we use the Cybertruck?
Before launching the Cybertruck in February, Moonwake Coffee Roasters had to use multiple battery packs from a gasoline-powered pickup truck because generators weren't allowed at farmers markets.
Trying to power two machines, a kettle and a sink had “put too much strain” on their current equipment, so the couple was at a crossroads: should they go for a full trailer load or an electric truck? Wood worked for an electric vehicle company, so he was familiar with the capabilities of electric trucks.
“The Cybertruck was a perfect fit for what we were looking for,” Wood said. “When it comes to electric trucks, there aren't a lot of options out there that can power them. The Cybertruck has a lot of technology advantages that other trucks don't have.”
Yen said he wants to maintain the “open and transparent interaction with customers” that the Cybertruck has provided.
“There are no walls,” she says. “We set it up so that the customer can see the whole process.”
In a blog post on their website, Moonwake Coffee Roasters cited four reasons for moving to the Cybertruck:
- More Power
- Maintain open customer engagement
- Flexibility to test different instruments and workflows and share insights
- enjoy
A full blog post detailing each of the four reasons can be found on the Moonwake website.
The pros and cons of a coffee business using the Cybertruck
The vehicle's portability is another advantage, Yen said, and running it from the Cybertruck is much more efficient, something that wouldn't be possible if it was running on a trailer, Wood added.
Wood said towing the trailer with all his equipment uses more power than serving coffee at the Cupertino Farmers Market for five hours, and the 10-mile drive from his home to the market uses up about 10 percent of the truck's battery.
In total, a day's work will consume about 30% of the battery.
With the previous system, Wood had to bring separate power banks and plug them all in, which could cause problems if Wood forgot to charge one of the banks the night before. With the Cybertruck, all the plugs are centralized in one place at the rear of the vehicle, Wood said.
As for the Cybertruck's shortcomings, Yeung said: The pop-up will be held indoors, so all you can do is pray for good weather.
Another downside, Yeung said, is that some people have very negative opinions about the Cybertruck, which can stop them from drinking coffee.
“We actually had people say, 'I'm not buying from this coffee roaster because of the Cybertruck.'”
The Future of Moonwake Coffee Roasters
Taking advantage of the Cybertruck's maneuverability, the couple came up with the idea of opening a pop-up store in Yosemite, and Yen said he plans to open a cafe roastery in West San Jose by the end of the year.
Moonwake Coffee Roasters is open every Sunday from 9am to 1pm at the Cupertino Farmers' Market at De Anza College. You can also order coffee through the Moonwake Coffee Roasters website.
