Inside Voyager Craft Coffee
Grabbing a coffee at Voyager Craft Coffee offers the spirit of an impromptu vacation. The globally influenced, colorfully designed cafés welcome neighbors and the community to gather. “What inspired us around the brand of Voyager is travel and different cultures,” says co-founder and Head of Operations Lauren Burns.
Voyager’s menu offers a taste of home for some and new flavor experiences for others. “All of our destination drinks are based on places we’ve traveled to and the flavors we’ve seen from different cultures,” says Lauren. Ube yam gives the coconut crème–sweetened Manila latte its purple hue. The Lexington, a take on caramel macchiato, incorporates a house-made Jim Beam Kentucky Bourbon Whiskey reduction. And The Tokyo infuses fl oral cherry blossom water, house-made vanilla syrup and brown sugar in latte form.
Their drink menu is always seasonal, oftentimes bringing back a past favorite or two as well as releasing new flavor creations from Voyager’s Drink Innovation Team. Some examples of springtime drinks are The Shanghai, an espresso latte with house-made honey syrup and jasmine tea, or The Venus, with raspberry two ways—fresh puree and dried organic powder—in a matcha latte with a raspberry cold foam. It’s a stunning, layered creation of deep red, bright green and pretty pink. Seasonal baked goods follow suit, all worth sampling before the next season arrives.
In 2015, Lauren translated her experience working with coffee into a travel-inspired drink menu she served from a trailer at farmers markets. “I just had this idea: Why don’t we start a coffee company? The way I can give back is through the community, being socially responsible, and also doing something I really love.” She founded Voyager with Sameer “Sam” Shah, who has a background in consulting. As the head of wholesale, Sameer oversees the bakery and roastery. He interacts with corporate clients and works with Lauren on community initiatives.
Voyager Craft Coffee has expanded well beyond the trailer to six South Bay cafés in San Jose, Santa Clara, Cupertino and the Stanford campus—three of which opened in 2025. The 8,000-square-foot Voyager Roastery & Bakery, aka “Park HQ” on Park Ave in San Jose, supplies all of the baked goods and house-made syrups. Coffee roasting is also done onsite, allowing Voyager to control the flavor and roast of the coffee. Voyager employs 80 baristas across all locations, 10 bakers and four coffee roasters.
With recent expansions complete, Lauren and Sameer are building community around their unique blend of café culture. “We’ve found with the cafés, we’re really good at creating a space where people can come and connect,” says Lauren. They’ve started a run club and host live music on Saturdays out of the downtown San Jose St. John Street café. A dog walking club to advocate for animal adoptions is up next and will honor Margie, a dog who walked into a café and became a part of the Voyager family.
“The most important thing is we just want to be good people. We want to serve high-quality stuff, and we want to bring the community together.”
—Lauren Burns
A real-world incubator for ideas and exploration, Voyager support has helped several employees launch businesses. Caleb Gomez started Cowboy Coffee and uses Voyager’s kitchen to store supplies for the mobile coffee company, and is a wholesale roastery client. Voyager’s croissant master, Charlotte Kryska, launched her handcrafted, single-origin chocolate business, Hapa Chocolat, from Voyager’s kitchen and sells her chocolate bars in the café. Voyager also makes space for artisans and makers to sell products, like the ceramic mugs designed by a barista.
When Voyager started, there was no bakery or roastery. These defining elements of Voyager’s success happened because of employees’ passionate contributions. “We have this huge platform for people to do what they want to do, whether it’s trying new things in the community or creating new food items and drinks. We’re going to really lean into how they want to move forward,” says Lauren.
Each week, Voyager’s bakery makes 6,500 pastries to supply cafés and fulfill wholesale orders. Year-round baked good favorites include maple walnut coffee cake, a family recipe from Lauren’s mom, and the creamy, fruity, flaky guava croissant. The bakery program started in the early days of the pandemic when a local baker shared a basket of baked goods Lauren loved. The baker joined Voyager and baked from a cramped café kitchen, which has since grown into a dedicated space at the Park HQ location with 2,000 square feet to make cakes, pastries and test out new recipes.
Voyager’s coffee roasting program is also in-house at Park HQ. The roastery was started by one of Voyager’s first employees, who had a passion for the process of coffee roasting. Voyager’s coffee buyer has relationships with farms and co-ops all over the world. Coffee beans are sustainably sourced from Africa, South America and India. They are excited to roast beans from Black, majority women-run Brazilian farms and an all-woman farm in Rwanda. It’s important to Voyager to provide a living wage and support sustainable worker treatment through paying higher commodity prices for their coffee.
When coffee beans arrive for roasting, they are green or yellow in color and darken when roasted. “Coffee has different flavor notes, almost like a wine,” says Lauren. “We have anywhere from very light roasts to a blend of three Indian coffees that’s a pretty dark roast. We try to have something for everybody.” Voyager is excited to use coffee from experimental growers who impart different flavors on coffee beans when they are taken out of the coffee cherry. “They’re co-fermenting coffee with fruit,” says Lauren. “It literally tastes like blueberries. It’s just insane.”
Voyager uses local suppliers where they can, and they are finding ways to cut back on food and packaging waste. When customers hang out at a café, baristas craft for-here drinks in reusable ceramic mugs—the ideal canvas for latte art. If there are baked goods left at the end of the day, they are posted on the food app Too Good to Go, at a reduced price, and sell out immediately. Even though Voyager has a bakery department, they can’t keep up with the demand for toast (especially their avocado toast) and source bread from The Midwife and The Baker in Mountain View. They also work with a local lavender farm, milk supplier and a family business that sources matcha from Japan.
Voyager’s culturally inspired drinks and treats, amongst friendly faces behind the coffee bar and in the seat across the table, is a recipe for an awesome adventure. “The most important thing is we just want to be good people,” says Lauren. “We want to serve high-quality stuff, and we want to bring the community together.”
