Evan HoweProduction Team Spotlight

Passenger’s small but mighty production crew works closely with our roasting and tea sourcing teams to package and fulfill every Passenger and Necessary Coffee Roasters order. In the 2025 calendar year (Monday through Friday), production processed approximately 1000 lbs. of roasted coffee per day, packaged in ~700 different units, to fulfill an average of 300 distinct customer orders a day! The team also packaged and shipped nearly 13,000 units of tea to Passenger customers in 2025, alongside an annual coffee total of more than 170,000 units fulfilled. To highlight this impressive work, and the people who make it happen every week on the production floor, I sat down with Bethany Holler, Passenger’s Production Manager.

Evan Howe: So Bethany, when did you start at Passenger and what is your current role?

Bethany Holler: I started with Passenger in June, 2022. It feels crazy that it’s already been over three years, I love it here! I had worked in production before, but nothing at this scale, and never with coffee and tea.

E: What motivated you to apply to join Passenger’s team?

B: I think I initially learned that Passenger was hiring a production assistant on Instagram. I didn’t have much experience in coffee, but I was in a life moment where I felt ready for a professional change. As a local, I was familiar with Passenger, and thought it might be interesting to be part of Passenger’s team. So I applied, and here I am! Since getting hired as a production assistant, I was gradually given more responsibility, promoted to Lead Production Assistant, and then promoted to Production Manager. It’s been really rewarding to see the role evolve, and to see myself grow in the role as Passenger has grown as a company.

E: Were coffee and tea a part of your life before taking the job at Passenger?

B: Yes, I first had coffee while I was at college actually. I don’t remember my family having it at home much when I was growing up, but now my Mom is always asking me to bring a bag home, so that’s fun! Coffee and tea came into my life in a social context as a young adult: accompanying a catch-up with a friend, meeting people at coffee shops, etc. And one of the first places I ever had coffee was Prince Street Cafe here in Lancaster.2 Prince Street used to be open late, so my friends and I would hang out there and drink coffee in the evenings - back when my body could still handle caffeine at that time of day!

E: Could you tell me a little about the type of production work you were doing pre-Passenger?

B: Yeah it was a big switch! The previous job was not coffee-related at all. I have a friend who owns a business selling leather bags. As production manager working for her business, I was half of a two-person team, just me and her. We were making all the bags in-studio, so I was not only managing orders and fulfillment for our customers, but also assisting her in the actual fabrication of the bags. So overall very different, and Passenger’s production line is considerably more fast-paced.

E: Earlier you mentioned three different production roles (Production Assistant, Lead Production Assistant, and Production Manager) that you’ve held during your time at Passenger. Could you tell me a little more about what these roles entail?

B: Our Production Assistants are the team that gets people their orders. As a Production Assistant you are one of a team of two or three people that fills all the bags with coffee or tea, fulfills each order, and packages each order up as a special gift to send to its recipient. Production Assistants work at Passenger’s Plum Street roastery and take turns rotating through different stations throughout the work week. Some of those core stations include the weigh and fill machine, our drop-ship table, and the tea room. As a Production Assistant you are working shoulder to shoulder with your teammates on the production floor, making it happen Monday through Friday. Fairly early on as a Production Assistant I felt curious to know more about Passenger’s behind-the-scenes systems and inventory processes. How do we get these boxes? Who keeps count of these retail bags? How do we maintain order when we receive massive shipments? So I think that natural curiosity led me to the Lead Production Assistant role. The Lead Production Assistant is the natural “middle role” between Production Assistant and Production Manager. As the Lead Production Assistant on a particular production day, you are the floor manager that “owns the day”: you get the team set up for success in the early morning hours, and you ensure that all the day’s orders are successfully fulfilled and on track before you leave the building. I liked the Lead Production Assistant role because it brought increased responsibility but still involved plenty of time working closely on the production line with the rest of the crew. Finally, as Production Manager, I oversee the entire production team and make sure everyone has what they need to do their jobs successfully. I ensure Passenger’s production inventory such as packaging, labels, shipping materials, etc. stays sufficiently stocked. I receive deliveries as they arrive, and track down deliveries that are missing. I collaborate with my team, and other colleagues at Passenger, to problem solve when we have shipping or other customer service challenges related to production and order fulfillment.

The morning standup meeting at Plum Street.

E: Could you tell me a little more about the early morning “set-up” process that has to be executed at the beginning of each production day?

B: The Lead Production Assistant’s day starts at 5:30 a.m. and the first hour and a half is a real sprint to get everything ready before the full roasting and production teams arrive for the daily standup meeting at 7:00 a.m. The first thing you do is log on to your computer and take inventory of all of the orders that need to be fulfilled before the end of the production day. 6:00 a.m. is Passenger’s daily cutoff time for orders, meaning that orders received after 6:00 will be fulfilled the following production day. The person doing set-up has to have a pretty sophisticated understanding of Passenger’s different customers and production rhythms: wholesale partners that are always fulfilled on the same day of the week, drop-ship partners that have idiosyncratic fulfillment constraints or timelines, pickup timelines for USPS vs UPS, the list goes on! After synthesizing all the order data, the Lead Production Assistant creates the target roast log for the roasting team, always trying to strike a balance between the roasters’ timing/quality constraints and the ticking clock of the day’s shipping timelines.

E: What does a typical daily rhythm look like for you as Production Manager?

B: My day starts at 7:00 a.m. in the roastery. Anna is our Lead Production Assistant and I usually connect with her first thing to ensure she has everything she needs and to check if she’s seen anything unusual that I need to address. From there, I also take a scan of the day’s orders and will reach out to our tech team or to Stuart who leads wholesale support if I see anything with orders or packing slips that might be an issue. After I feel confident that the team is in a good place and has what they need for a smooth production day, I generally transition to emails, meetings, inventory tracking, and ordering. I like it when delivery drivers show up at the roastery, because that generally means that I get to hop on the forklift and zip outside for a minute to pull a skid or two off a truck in the middle of the street, always an exciting time! No day is particularly “typical” as Production Manager, but I think my job is first and foremost about keeping things in order so that everything runs as smoothly as possible at the roastery.

E: Are there new challenges that you and the team have been navigating this year?

B: Passenger has been experiencing a lot of growth this year. And this is obviously a really good thing, but trying to scale up production in the same relatively cozy building, all the while maintaining our standards, has been a big challenge. And we haven’t scaled up our team significantly, despite experiencing a lot of growth in orders. It’s still the same number of hands sending many more packages out the door. So, trying to find ways to make our workflows more efficient while supporting the same team has been a big part of my focus this year. But I’m equally motivated to think about how to make our production jobs as fulfilling for my team as they can be, and protecting work-life balance as much as is humanly possible. I think a lot of it is about staying in communication with my team and trying to be an advocate for refinements that they are calling for, to the extent that I can. But yeah, a lot of the challenges that I’ve seen recently are connected to questions of how to embrace growth in a healthy way, how to scale our operations effectively without losing sight of our core values.

E: Could you tell me a little more about your team?

B: I currently have a team of five: four Production Assistants and one Lead Production Assistant. One of our Production Assistants has been with us for five years now. I think it says a lot about Passenger that turnover is quite low for our production team. We have a lot of creatives on our production team, lots of artists. A fun challenge for me when I’m creating the rotation for the team (in terms of who works which station) is to try to factor in different team members’ skills and preferences, especially on really busy production days. So I know that Nate might like to be on weigh and fill, Anna might like to be on wholesale, other team members love the tea room. Having that mix of personalities is definitely a strength.

E: How would you define the “Passenger standard” from the vantage point of production?

B: We are always looking for opportunities to exceed expectations! When I think about the Passenger standard for production, I’m thinking about the coffees and teas first and foremost. It goes back to the farmers. Knowing the work, dedication, and passion that the producers poured into these agricultural products gives me and my team so much motivation to execute our production roles with equivalent focus and commitment. And shifting things more to the consumer side, I love packing orders because packing orders is an opportunity to think about the experience that the customer will hopefully have when they receive and open that package. We prepare each and every order hoping to delight each customer on the receiving end. Passenger production standard doesn’t just mean getting orders out the door, it’s about the details: Are the labels looking sharp? Are the bags sealed correctly? Is every component of the order carefully packed and attractively presented? Passenger standard in production means bringing the same intentionality to packaging and shipping that Passenger’s buying team devotes to our sourcing programs.

“Passenger standard in production means bringing the same intentionality to packaging and shipping that Passenger’s buying team devotes to our sourcing programs.”

E: Production is a vitally important, but potentially overlooked, point in the middle of the specialty coffee supply chain. Is there an aspect of the work that you and your team do every day that you would like folks to appreciate more fully?

B: It’s true that sometimes I feel that our work is a bit hidden in the middle of the supply chain. We are between the producer and the consumer, and here in the middle there’s maybe a little more attention paid to the roasting of the coffee as opposed to the filling of bags and the fulfillment of orders. I guess I would love for folks to know how much pride we bring to our work each day, and how hard-working and dedicated my crew is. It’s fun being in the middle! Sometimes tiring and sometimes overlooked for sure, but I’m so proud of my team for their passion and the quality standards that they maintain.