The Humble Roots of Cambodian Coffee

Sophorn Panna was born poor in 1988 in a small house in Takeo province. He described his father—drafted into the Cambodian military at 18 during the Khmer Rouge times—as “lost” by the time he was old enough to start remembering him. Sophorn’s mother raised him and his seven siblings on her own. By the time he was 14, Sophorn was working. His first job was picking the young leaves off tamarind trees to bring to a local market for sale. He picked palm fruit for a few months and was excellent at climbing trees.

“Then I was a fisherman,” he says. “In the nighttime, during the right season, sitting by a small river with a net. Cambodia was different then.” He’d come home early in the morning carrying 10 kilograms of fish. Then, he would get himself ready to go to school. He was discouraged first from attending high school and then college, but did both anyway. With financial help from one of his sisters back home, he’d eventually move to Battambang to study information technology and finance at the university there. Living with an aunt in the city, he never stopped working—when he wasn’t in class he was cleaning her house, or working as an admin at the school, or picking up shifts at a restaurant, which is where Sophorn first made a cup of coffee.

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