GoKawiilBlack Rifle Coffee Company is marking Memorial Day with a project that’s a lot heavier than your average holiday promo. The veteran-founded coffee brand, launched in 2014, has grown into a nationally recognized company built around serving great coffee and supporting veterans, active-duty service members, first responders, and their families. This year, co-founder and former Army Ranger Mat Best released “Folded Flag,” an original song and music video that pays tribute to fallen service members and the Gold Star families who live with that loss every day. Backed by a $150,000 commitment to the Major Brent Taylor Foundation, Best explained the mission of the video and how he hopes it will help pull Memorial Day’s focus away from sales and back to remembrance.
What made you want to do something like this?
I’ve done a series called “I Choose Life” throughout my career on the internet, and it’s always meant a lot to me because people go through struggles—men in general, veterans in particular—and a lot of that stuff is what the standard male doesn’t want to talk about. Around Memorial Day especially, I think it’s become so commercialized: people think, “I get an extra day off, I’m gonna barbecue and drink beer,” which is great because it’s a celebration of our freedoms—but the generational sacrifice it took to give us that should be front and center at the same time. I wrote “Folded Flag” about my friend Luke, who passed away in 2008, as a way to tell a story of remembrance around him and hopefully inspire people going into the weekend to really understand the severity of sacrifice—not just in the GWOT [Global War on Terror] era, but all the way back to places like Omaha Beach in World War II.
For people who don’t know, tell us a little about Black Rifle Coffee Company and what inspired you to create it.
The origin story of Black Rifle is kind of fun because we never set out to be a big CPG company selling coffee at scale. I was already on the internet and had a lifestyle apparel company when I met my business partner and now CEO, Evan Hafer, who was this small‑time roaster in his basement working on a one‑pound roaster. He’d been in the GWOT as a Special Forces soldier and used to retrofit Humvees to roast coffee during the invasion of Iraq, so it was this perfect coalescing of my love for brand-building and his love for coffee. We looked around and saw no one in our community doing what we wanted to do, so we said, “Why don’t we sell coffee that tastes freaking awesome and support the things we love—our community?” That idea caught fire and has taken off over the last roughly 11 years, and we’re incredibly thankful for the support we still have today.
Where did the name Black Rifle Coffee Company come from?
I’ve got to give credit to Evan. He was running a high‑level training course for a three‑letter agency, roasting coffee in the back of a truck, and he had his black rifle—our service rifle, the life‑saving tool we take everywhere to protect our friends and ourselves—right there next to this delicious coffee. Coffee is usually the first thing all of us do in the morning before we get into the team room or our jobs, and those two things pair perfectly, especially at the range: we’re gonna go do all this crazy training, but first, coffee. Out of that moment, Black Rifle Coffee was born.
How long did you serve, and did you know you were going to become an entrepreneur when you got out?
I did four years and five deployments with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, then got out and worked another five and a half years for another organization, doing multiple combat deployments, so I’m just shy of 10 years of carrying a gun professionally. When I separated from the military, I did not have a plan—I always joke that I was just a stupid Ranger who got out thinking, “Whatever, I’ll figure it out,” and a year later I was like, “Oh God, what am I doing?” I tried college, but the campus culture didn’t fit; about a year and a half later, I got a job with a three‑letter agency, put myself through college, and slowly navigated civilian life to figure out what I wanted to do. I’m very thankful that my day‑to‑day still lives in the veteran and military community—doing work I love and, yes, still getting to play with lasers, guns, and jump out of planes once in a while.
How did your military experience shape the way you run the business?
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