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Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has named Collin Whittington, founder of Bentonville-based Roasties, to her Faces of Arkansas series. Roasties makes an all-natural fire starter from coffee chaff, the thin, papery skin that peels off beans during roasting and normally ends up in the trash.
Faces of Arkansas is a monthly series that highlights Arkansans through a written profile, portrait and short video, with each honoree’s framed photo displayed at the entrance to the governor’s office. Sanders announced Whittington as the eighth honoree last week. The state picks people it says keep Arkansas running, from local leaders to those who fill a key role in their industry.
Whittington’s product started with a problem most roasters never think twice about. Coffee chaff is light, messy and combustible, and nearly all roasters sweep it up and discard it.
“Ninety-nine percent of coffee roasters throw it away,” Whittington said. “So we actually turned the problem into the solution.”
The idea came to him in 2021 while he was roasting coffee in Fort Smith, but it sat for nearly three years. A road trip through the Pacific Northwest finally gave him time to act on it. He asked Onyx Coffee if he could haul off bags of its chaff, then began mixing it with beeswax in his kitchen.
The early batches were trial and error. Some burned too fast, and others would not stay lit. Eventually one worked: a small puck that burns long enough to catch kindling.
The operation grew fast. After Whittington married his wife, Hannah, the work moved into their home, which briefly turned into a small factory when an order for 2,000 fire starters came in. Roasties is now carried in more than 100 stores, including outdoor outfitters and Arkansas State Park gift shops.
Whittington credits much of that growth to Arkansas’ outdoor recreation community and to the University of Arkansas Greenhouse Outdoor Recreation Program, which helped him sharpen his pitch. He said he plans to keep manufacturing in the state.
“We’ve gotten tons of people that have tried to produce the product for us as we’ve grown,” he said. “But I do want to stay here manufacturing in Arkansas.”
Billions of pounds of coffee chaff are thrown out worldwide each year, most of it unnoticed. Whittington said the bigger lesson is to question the mundane, and to look harder at what gets discarded in coffee and everything else.
