Coffee Cart Boys is a Pasadena-based specialty coffee and tea catering company. We’ve served 100+ events across Greater Los Angeles since 2020 — weddings, corporate offsites, brand activations, on-site office residencies. This is how we got here.
The start: 2020
The Coffee Cart Boys Founder, Emilio Daniel Vasquez, started the company in 2020. The category we work in — mobile coffee catering for high-end events — was not a category Emilio (we call him, Danny) set out to enter. It was the result of building a business that could serve a city like Los Angeles in a way the city actually wanted to be served.
Emilio’s path to founding CCB isn’t the usual one. He’s a first-generation entrepreneur whose family came to the United States as immigrants. He experienced homelessness and food insecurity as a young person. He came up through environments where small businesses opened and closed quickly and where the people around him worked hard and didn’t always get to keep what they built. That backdrop is the reason CCB exists, and it’s the reason every decision we make about our crew, our menu, our equipment, and the communities we serve flows from one principle: do the work right, show up the same way every time, and treat every guest like the moment matters.
The first cart and the first hard chapter
The first cart was a solo operation. Emilio pulled every shot himself, drove to every event, did setup and breakdown in the same morning, and went home to do invoicing at night. The early bookings were small — birthday parties, residential gatherings, the occasional corporate breakfast — and we said yes to nearly all of them because we needed the experience and the cash flow.
There was a chapter in 2022 that almost ended Coffee Cart Boys. The details aren’t important — wrong booking, wrong assumptions, a stretch where the business spent more than it earned and the path forward wasn’t obvious. What mattered was the decision Emilio made coming out of it: rebuild the operation from the inside out, get serious about the parts of the business that aren’t pulling shots, and stop treating every booking like the next one would save us.
2023: Intuit’s IDEAS Accelerator
In 2023, Coffee Cart Boys was selected for the inaugural Los Angeles cohort of Intuit’s IDEAS Accelerator (Invest, Develop, Empower, Accelerate, and Scale) — a year-long business accelerator pairing Intuit’s financial technology platform with coaching from the National Urban League and Zella Life. We were one of the program’s earliest participants, in a small cohort the program used to validate its model.
The program changed how the business runs. The coaching from the National Urban League and Zella Life pushed Emilio through the imposter syndrome that follows most first-generation founders into rooms they didn’t grow up in. The Intuit toolset — QuickBooks, Mailchimp, TurboTax — replaced spreadsheets and email threads with infrastructure that could actually scale. And the program’s $10,000 cash grant financed a second mobile cart and new equipment, expanding our service capacity overnight.
The follow-on effect was a relationship that became real in both directions. Intuit — the company whose accelerator we’d just graduated from — became a recurring catering client, and remains one of our most consistent corporate accounts. Coffee Cart Boys now operates a three-cart fleet, scalable to multi-cart enterprise activations.
October 2024: Featured on Intuit’s official blog
In October 2024, Intuit published a profile of Emilio and Coffee Cart Boys on their official blog — “Emilio Vasquez: From Unhoused to CEO Entrepreneur, A Story of Resilience”. The article tells the story we don’t often tell publicly: where Emilio started, what shaped him, and how the IDEAS program fit into a longer arc of building something that survives.
We’re proud the story is out there. It’s the kind of thing that’s hard to say about yourself.
Today
Five years from the first solo cart, we’ve served 200+ events across Greater Los Angeles, Orange County, the Inland Empire, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Ventura County. Our client roster spans tech (Intuit, Amazon, Reddit, Adobe), finance and real estate (Cushman & Wakefield, SoFi), automotive and luxury (Hyundai, Aston Martin’s Monterey Car Week 2025 activation), entertainment (Universal Studios Hollywood, LA Galaxy), weddings, brand activations, and private events.
The recurring weekly residency at Cushman & Wakefield’s downtown Los Angeles office on Figueroa Street is the kind of arrangement we’re proudest of — three days a week, our equipment kept on-site between sessions, the same crew serving the same building’s people in a way that turned a corporate amenity into part of the office’s rhythm.
We’ve earned a 5-star rating on Google. We’ve been featured in VoyageLA, Shoutout SoCal, and Subkit in addition to the Intuit blog. We partner with educator-focused nonprofits like Learning Works. We source our coffee through a direct-trade partnership who also roasts it locally in Los Angeles County within a couple weeks of each event. Every drink is pulled to order by a trained barista on commercial-grade equipment.
What this is, and what it isn’t
Coffee Cart Boys isn’t an industrial drip-coffee operation, and it isn’t a Keurig that arrives on wheels. It’s a specialty café we bring to your event — staffed by trained baristas, equipped to serve 50 to 75 specialty drinks per hour per cart, scalable to multi-cart for enterprise activations, fully insured, and able to operate at every venue type Southern California throws at us (vineyards, rooftops, ballrooms, private estates, beach venues, office lobbies, school courtyards, on-set base camps).
It’s also a Black and minority-owned business, founded by a first-generation entrepreneur whose own story explains why we treat every guest at every event like the moment matters. Because we know how it feels when nobody does.
Work with us
If you’re planning a wedding, corporate event, brand activation, or ongoing office coffee residency in Greater LA or beyond, we’d love to help. Send your event details and we’ll respond same-day with a custom itemized quote.