About

Two founders.One origin.

Buna House is the Ethiopian-origin coffee brand we wished existed — built by people who grew up inside the ceremony, designed for the way coffee is actually consumed today.

Why we started

Coffee is fromsomewhere.

Ethiopia is where coffee was discovered. The plant grew there before it grew anywhere else. The ritual existed there before it existed anywhere else. The word — buna — is still what coffee is called there today.

And yet, when you walk into most specialty coffee shops around the world, "Ethiopia" is a tasting note. Yirgacheffe is a sub-line on a menu. The cultural story — the ceremony, the heritage, the gathering — is missing.

We started Buna House to bring that story forward. Not as decoration, not as marketing, but as the actual centre of a coffee brand. The same way a wine brand is rooted in its terroir, we want Buna House to be rooted in its origin.

The founders

Who we are.

Co-founder · Brand & Product

Abbas Hassan

Ottawa, Canada

I grew up between Ethiopia and Canada — between the coffee ceremony in my family's home and the to-go cup on a North American sidewalk. Buna House is what happens when those two worlds stop competing and start collaborating.

For years, I watched Ethiopian coffee become one of the most respected commodities in specialty coffee, with very little of the cultural identity travelling with it. Yirgacheffe became a flavour descriptor, not a place. Buna became a single-origin SKU, not a ritual.

Buna House is the brand I wanted to exist — Ethiopian coffee, told by people who grew up drinking it, designed for the table I actually serve it on.

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Co-founder · Strategy & Growth

Nahom

Ottawa, Canada

Buna House is built around long-term thinking, not launch-day metrics. My job is making sure every decision — packaging, pricing, partner — moves us toward being the brand that owns Ethiopian-origin coffee globally, not just the bag of beans on the shelf this season.

We are building this in public. The wins are useful; the mistakes are more useful. If you are a founder, an operator, or someone curious about what it takes to build a brand from the ground up, the YouTube series below is for you.

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Founder POV

In our own words.

Twenty minutes on the why, the brand, and how Buna House gets built. Direct, on camera, no script.

Coming soon · Recording with our videographer

Buna House — Founder POV

Build in Public · The Series

Watch us build it.

The longform series. Sourcing trips, packaging decisions, wholesale calls, mistakes, fixes. Coffee brand-building, on camera, without a filter.

Playlist coming soon · Episode 1 in production

Build in Public · Buna House

Subscribe on YouTube Read the Journal

What we're building

Coffee is where we begin.

Origin First

We start where coffee begins — Ethiopia — and build from there. Heirloom varietals, washing-station-level traceability, the actual region telling its own story.

Ceremony Over Commodity

Coffee is a ritual. We treat it that way in how we source, how we roast, and how we package. The bag is meant to be opened slowly.

Build in Public

Every decision — the good ones and the wrong ones — gets documented on the journal and the YouTube channel. Coffee gets better when more people understand what goes into it.

Long View

We are not building a Batch 001 startup. We are building a brand that should be relevant in twenty years, with the same conviction about origin and craft we started with.

Start here

Start with the first batch.

Batch 001 is our introduction — a single-origin Yirgacheffe from the highlands of Ethiopia.

Shop Batch 001 Wholesale