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Imagine. You park your vehicle along the narrow village road, follow the coffee-to-go sign through the open gate to the green caravan, order your latte, share morning pleasantries with the smiling barista busy at her hissing espresso machine.
You take your brew and settle under “Solomon’s Wisdom Tree.” As you savor the aroma and delight in the first sip, you hear a dull rumble. A trumpet call. And — did the earth just gently shudder? Aha! Through the gate, you watch as a herd of elephants file by. Welcome to Loretta Gomwe’s Victoria Falls coffee oasis in Zimbabwe.
“In the dry season, elephants, buffalo, hippos, warthogs frequent our caravan. Bushbuck too. And baboons and monkeys sometimes.” Not something one would expect in a residential suburb, which this is. But then everything about Loretta’s Victoria Falls Coffee Company is pretty darn surprising, unlikely — and remarkable.
It features, at the heart, a young Zimbabwean woman and a heady blend of complex flavors, percolated with well-brewed shots of enterprise, resilience, hard work, luck, risk-taking and love.
Her Victoria Falls coffee journey — with the love element as the crema on the top — has her living her best life in one of Africa’s most famous, iconic and magical destinations.
The Victoria Falls — Mosi-Oa-Tunya (the smoke that thunders) — is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and recognized as one of the seven natural wonders of the world.
They straddle Zimbabwe to the west (home to three-quarters of the Falls) and Zambia to the east. The “city” of Victoria Falls, more like a large village given its size and scale, is on the Zimbabwe side. The fact that part of the town is within the Victoria Falls National Park explains why Ellies and other animals are sometimes spotted making their way to and from the Zambezi River, along whose course the spectacular Victoria Falls occur.
Victoria Falls Coffee
It’s been ten years since Lauratter Gomwe met the man who would become her husband and business partner, Takunda “TK” Musungwa. She switched to using the simpler “Loretta” five years ago and asked that we call them Loretta and TK, as they are known and what she prefers.
This informality reflects, too, the casual, friendly, unpretentious nature and setting of their Victoria Falls coffee business. Loretta’s Coffee and Smoothie Caravan, which they built and brought from Harare.
Solomon’s Wisdom Tree — “We named the tree after King Solomon from the bible,” explains Loretta — is what they call the spreading frangipani that looks like an abstract art installation and offers little shade but makes a striking creative statement in the coffee caravan’s yard.
From its branches, between the frangipani flowers when they are in season, dangle messages, some inspirational, some tongue-in-cheek. For instance, “Age is an issue of mind over matter; if you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter” and “Phone your mother!”
The ebullient 33-year-old was running a small coffee trailer located at a primary school when she and TK met in Zimbabwe’s (Zim’s) capital city, Harare. The back story to this is as extraordinary as she is.
After completing high school in KweKwe, Zim’s seventh largest city, named (originally Que Que) for the croaking of the many frogs that populated the river in the early 1900s, she moved to the country’s largest and capital city, Harare. There, she enrolled for an internationally credentialed qualification in travel, tourism and hospitality.
She moved in with a married cousin and started waitressing part-time when not at college. With no responsibility for rent, she says it was two-and-a-half fun years at a place where people came to meet and drink beer.
Shortly before her final exams, her cousin split with her husband. “She said, ‘You’ve got to find a proper job! You have to get your own place.’ I said, ‘Just give me two months!'”
Zimbabwe Coffee-On-the-Go
She created a resume and “went and dropped it all around Harare.” But not at a certain upscale coffee café in a trendy centre on the outskirts of the city described online as “the most expensive and luxurious mall in Zimbabwe.”
“I thought of it and kept procrastinating. I was nervous!”
After two months, with her cousin demanding, “When are you moving out?” she says. “I think desperation was my breakthrough…” She bit the bullet and took in her resume. And the next day, got a call to come for an interview.
“At college, we were taught to wear black pants or skirt and a white top for a professional look, so I went in my black and white. I got there to find dozens of applicants. They were wearing clothes that were all over the place.”
She started second-guessing herself. She’d chosen the wrong attire. She was at the wrong place. But they interviewed her and — surprise — said, “Come back tomorrow and start.”
That was February 3, 2014.
“It was a super-cool place. Very fancy. Beautiful. I was offered a good salary. It felt like free money!” But there was a catch.
Espresso Machines and Milkshakes
“I was used to making instant coffee in a flask. I had no experience with espresso machines or milkshakes. There was no training. And we were super-busy every day. I was afraid every day I went to work. It was so tough. Scary,” she says.
She did her best, watched, tried to pick up, learn, and do what was required. “But I felt people didn’t love me. And after two months, I was fired.”
She told the firing manager: “But I so want this job. And I need this job.” He told her to hold fire.
“I’ll call you in two weeks to work at one of my outlets.”
Would he? He did.
It transpired he was leaving to launch what would become a successful mobile coffee trailer business. He wanted her to work at one of them, which he opened at a Harare primary school.
“He had seen potential in me.”
Within the first month at her previous job, caught up in her stress, she failed to grasp that she was quickly mastering the art and making great coffee and smoothies.
“He fired me so that he could hire me for his new business,” she laughs.
On Love and Coffee
She was soon up and running the little business at the school. “Everyone loved me. The salary was good. I was ‘the mom’ — how they thought of me — to kids and parents from 2014 to July 2018. I loved it.”
She met TK when he came as a customer for coffee. He had been living in the United Kingdom, where he’d run his own small driving school business.
He wooed her. Started to win her heart. And he was persuasive and supportive.
“He said, you’re making this guy a lot of money. You should set up your own coffee business.” He suggested they move to Victoria Falls.
“I said, but I love it here! I’m happy! And I love Harare.” He encouraged her to consider it. He felt Victoria Falls would be a great place to open a business, to bring up children and to grow old.
She, meanwhile, had been saving to purchase her own high-end commercial espresso machine.
“My husband helped me buy a coffee trailer. Also, coffee grinders and what was needed to set up a basic coffee trailer business.” The birth of the first of their three children (today there are Chiedza, 7, Mufaro, 5, and Dawada, 3) convinced her to “trust the timing of your life” — one of the Solomon’s Tree wisdoms — and agree to make the move.
For a pretty harrowing reason, the move was more challenging than anticipated. “We had a crash on the way, and everything except the espresso machine was lost. The caravan, the vehicle, the other coffee equipment I’d purchased to launch my business.”
The anguish would blur with time. But then, it meant her returning to Harare to work and save for another year. It meant getting a new coffee caravan, which TK helped build. “What was lucky,” she says, her infectious enthusiasm diffusing the back-then disaster, “TK had given his mom a car when he returned from the UK. She didn’t need it and gave it back to him, so we had a vehicle to pull the caravan.”
Ironically, or perhaps sportingly, she says her favorite Solomon’s Tree wisdom is the one that reads: “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.”
Loretta’s Slow Roast
“We came to Vic Falls in July 2018. It was hot. I knew nobody. I didn’t like it. It was really hard. We were so broke, the first night we slept in the caravan. For two weeks, we had one meal a day, at 4 pm, so we wouldn’t go to bed hungry. I was depressed for a year.”
To divert briefly…
I met Loretta in July 2024. I was in Victoria Falls, from Durban, to meet and write about Dr. Matifadza Nyazema, director, developer, owner and CEO of Mbano Manor, her at-one-with-nature luxury boutique Victoria Falls hotel. The hotel driver, who had taken me a couple of times to explore Victoria Falls village, stopped at Loretta’s at my request after I spotted her coffee signs and caravan when we were passing.
I wandered in. Saw the green caravan. The wisdom tree. Her bring-on-the-sunshine infectious smile. Loved her. Loved her place. Loved the kids, hers and others, running around laughing, climbing on the kiddie-structures, close but far enough away for adults to sit, relax and chat over a flat white, a chai latte, a cappuccino.
Perhaps a “madnutter” — a smoothie with blended bananas, dates, yoghurt, ice and peanut butter. (Believe me, you haven’t lived if you’re a peanut fan and haven’t tasted roasted Zim peanuts.) Or the seasonal “mango quencher” with mango, kiwi, pear, mint, lemon and ginger.
I asked questions. Took pics. On a tight schedule, I got her cell number and arranged to call her when back in Durban.
I ordered a bag of coffee, medium-roasted and ground, for my AeroPress, by TK, who joined Loretta full-time in the business in 2023 as the coffee roaster and business manager. The coffee was delivered to Mbano Manor reception within the hour.
RELATED: Mati Nyazema’s Victoria Falls Hotel, Mbano Manor, Awes in Africa
Caffeine Buzz
Back to their Victoria Falls arrival. “We parked our caravan at Shoestrings (a cool backpackers lodge). No traction, so after a few long, slow months, they tried a different backpackers lodge, with a campsite.”
But before the caffeine had a chance to buzz, COVID came.
“We had to move our caravan as we couldn’t afford the rent.” For a while it stood abandoned near the house they were renting. By now, they had two children.
“One morning, I was giving my kids a walk. Passing our gate — 539 Reynard Road — I thought, why don’t we clean up the yard and park our caravan where people can see it and call it a drive-through?”
This was October 2020. TK, she says, was against the idea, convinced the property owners would object. Undeterred, “I prayed through November and December and on December 25th, TK okayed the idea with our landlord and said, “Let’s do it. Let’s clean the yard. On January 10, 2021, we started operating.”
People Know Loretta
In the first three months, virtually no one came. “We didn’t have nice fronting and we had no funds. I was standing by the gate telling passers-by what we were doing, that they should come try the coffee.”
After three months, things started picking up. “Around then, a guy from South Africa stopped in for coffee. He said, ‘You need to do a playground and put signs in the tree.'”
He agreed to loan us $500, repayable at $50 a month, so we did that. And we painted the caravan, which had been black, green. And named it Loretta’s,” because, she laughs, no pretension, just happy to know that now, “in Vic Falls, I’m appreciated and loved” and “people know Loretta is always at the caravan and she always has the smile.”
It was back then that local Victoria Falls people started getting involved and supporting them.
Not too much later, some guys with a US-based NGO that helps small businesses came for coffee. A group called Matter, as in “you matter.”
“They asked if and how they could help? I said, by getting us a coffee roaster. They gave us a loan with five years to repay it, which we are doing now. They arranged training, which TK got fully involved in and took on, and we started roasting in 2023.”
Coffee in Zimbabwe
Coffee in Zimbabwe is a reviving industry that has endured politically motivated ups and downs, neglect, weather pattern changes and more. Loretta’s Victoria Falls Coffee beans come from the country’s Eastern Highlands, regarded as having the ideal climate for high-quality coffee farming.
“We buy our beans from Chipinge, Chimanimani and Vumba in the Eastern Highlands,” Loretta shares. She went to the Chipinge region about five years ago. Known for its quality sought-after beans, this is where coffee was first grown in Zimbabwe, in the 18th century.
“The farmers we buy from in the Eastern Highlands are farming sustainably. The coffee cherries are harvested. The cleaning and drying process, over two weeks, is natural. There is no use of chemicals or anything which might impact the taste.”
Most of the beans grown in the Eastern Highlands are sold internationally, she says.
When I Google, I find an Oakland (California) online coffee supplier that has, in their library, a comprehensive overview of Zimbabwe coffee (including the challenges of finding and importing it).
“We piggyback on the exports,” says Loretta. “Farmers let us know when they’ve harvested and the beans are ready. We order the green beans. They get put on a bus and we pick them up here in Victoria Falls, roast them, pack them.”
She uses the beans, medium roast, for Loretta’s Victoria Falls coffee menu options. And they sell them, freshly roasted, to outlets around Victoria Falls.
When you’re in Victoria Falls, pop in, meet Loretta, order a coffee and one of her home-baked cookies, muffins or pies. Or sign up for one of TK’s coffee roasting workshops.
You might be lucky and time it when elephants, buffalo, hippos or warthogs are passing by. For now, check out her Instagram to meet the family, the kids, some of her regulars and to see their happy place. Keep scrolling, find the 12th and 15th-to-last posts, and check out the elephant videos. Search around for other elephant and buffalo posts too.
