Sparrow Cafe.

Sheila & Jasper opened Sparrow on Jan 1, 2013.

In a space that was ‘cursed’ as many had said, we set out to have a coffee shop, cafe, neighborhood space as we would frequent ourselves. Jasper worked in various restaurant settings, starting as a barista in 1997 at Espresso Royal Cafe in Stadium Village on the East Bank UofM campus. This is where Jasper and Sheila met and the rest is the beginning of the fairy tale. Sheila was a working Portrait Photographer with her own studio while finishing her BFA at the U. Sheila has fond memories of her mother baking and cooking, and always had a passion for well crafted pastries, desserts, breads and the like. Sheila also received her baking certificate from St. Paul College, before perfecting her scones for the Irish Fair scone competition, where she took First and Second Place! Jasper ended up managing for the D’Amico empire for 6+ years, ending as the General Manager of Campiello Ristorante in Uptown Minneapolis. Jasper rounded out his experience with training with the International Sommelier Guild, cooking at Nick & Eddie and slinging high end Italian Wine with Vinifera Imports, and a little stint in Iraq in 2003 as an Interrogator & Persian Farsi Linguist.

We landed on Sparrow Cafe as sparrows are the definitive urban bird. Sparrows, whether one loves them or not, are our ubiquitous neighbors, and are just striving to live their best life. This is what we wanted to embody in our little cafe, a place that welcomes everyone, and just doing what we can to make our perch on 50th & Penn a friendly, jovial place to support you in your daily journey of living your best life.

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Bird Friendly Certified Coffee!

For the uninitiated, Bird Friendly Certified (BFC) coffee, is the highest, most comprehensive ecological certification out there. BFC coffee is above and beyond Organic certification and more consistent and strict than Rain Forest Alliance coffees. To start the process, the plantation must be certified Organic already. Then where this departs any other certification, the plantation must be ‘shade grown’ (shade grown is not a protected term, thus on it’s own very unreliable), the trees that provide said shade must be beneficial to the wildlife and attract migratory birds, and will have 2-3 separate canopies over the coffee shrubs. Also quite beneficial to the plantations, those shade trees are generally fruit trees (certified organic), which helps the plantation diversify and attract the most birds. This process isn’t cheap, organic certification isn’t cheap by itself, so diversifying the crops of the plantation helps with offsetting costs, which also helps the workers. Fair Trade (FT) isn’t required by the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center (SMBC), who certifies BFC coffees, but the vast majority of BFC plantations are also FT, which is easier when they have already gone through the Organic and BF Certifications. So, the benefit for all of this is higher quality coffee, although lower yields, and obviously persevering the eco-systems of rain-forests while providing habitat for birds that winter over in the Southern Hemisphere, and come back North to our back yards in the spring and summer.

It’s literally for the birds! And, it’s for us who care about our planet.

Sparrow Cafe is the only cafe (I think in the US, but at least throughout the midwest) that uses exclusively Bird Friendly Certified Coffee!