Meet Francesco Pollice and Fiona Burbank | Entrepreneurs

We had the good fortune of connecting with Francesco Pollice and Fiona Burbank and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Francesco and Fiona, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
We both were working in the fashion industry but had a mutual passion for coffee. We decided to start our own coffee business to be able to work on a project together. We loved the idea of blending the coffee culture from Francesco’s Italian heritage and modernizing it for our local LA clientele. We chose the name “Sette Rosso” because “Sette” is “Seven” in Italian which has been a lucky number in our lives. Francesco was born on the seventh month and Fiona was born on the seventh day. “Rosso” means “Red” in Italian which is the color of love and passion and the color of our Vespa. Fiona drew our icon herself and we asked Francesco’s father to write out our name to create our very personal logo. We always knew we wanted to do events and not a brick and mortar coffee shop because we wanted to be a special little treat to brighten someone’s day, not just the place where people get their daily necessary caffeine. We started out as a little coffee cart out front of our apartment complex at the entrance of Runyon Canyon serving specialty vegan lattes on the weekends to our community and we have since involved to creating specialty drinks for private events.

Alright, so for those in our community who might not be familiar with your business, can you tell us more?
Our business, Sette Rosso Caffe, is a specialty coffee cart with Italian influences for private events. It has taken us a long time to get to this place of recognition and clients. We started out as a coffee cart out front of our apartment building which was the entrance to Runyon Caynon hiking trail. We would make vegan lattes inspired by our lives and travels and was able to create a bit of community by chatting with our neighbors. This was a fun time to get our business out in the open and getting such a great reaction from our community. Although it was very difficult to work our 9-5 jobs during the week and then worked our cart on the weekends, not to mention pushing up our cart up the very steep hill. When Covid-19 hit, we couldn’t do street vending anymore and we needed to shift our business to stay alive. We did deliveries and started selling merch and we were thankful to our loyal clients. After a few months we realized that farmers markets were opening up and we researched how to create pre-packaged coffee and tea drinks to be able to sell in farmers markets. We were in 6 different farmers markets around Los Angeles and were able to expand our community. Once events started occurring again, we shifted our business to what we originally wanted to do, private party coffee catering of lattes made with amore.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
We love our community and there are so many great places to see! We live in Santa Monica and if we don’t make our own coffee, we love to go to La La Land for a latte which is just around the corner from us. The employees are so positive and wonderful and a great place to start the day. We would also take a walk down Montana avenue to get to the beach and stroll around or even rent some bikes. We love lunches at La Puglia, a specialty Italian restaurant that not only has amazing food but great ambiance and lovely staff. A fun day out in West Hollywood is always a crowd favorite. Starting our morning with a little hike in our old neighborhood oh Runyon canyon and then a vanilla latte from Dialog Cafe. Drinks and dancing at The Abbey is a great way to end the day. We love the peaceful beach cities and enjoy strolling around Hermosa and Manhattan Beach piers for shopping and dining.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
We would like to shout out to each other. We worked tirelessly together to come up with the idea for our company and had to navigate extremely hard times, like poor business decisions, a global pandemic and extremely long hours, it was one another who supported each other. When someone was burnt out the other would step in, when someone was feeling discouraged the other would be their cheerleader, we became each others support system.

Website: setterosso.com

Instagram: @sette.rosso.caffe

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100067451412717