Two Decades After the Song, Pusha T and Pharrell Turn “Grindin'” Into an Actual Coffee Company

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Two years after Pusha T debuted Grindin as a solo pop-up, Pharrell and 130-year-old Italian roaster Lavazza are backing it as a full retail brand.

Pusha T poured his first public cup of Grindin coffee at 7 a.m. on November 16, 2024, behind the counter at Café Tropical, the Cuban bakery and café that has anchored a corner of Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake since 1975. It was a one-day pop-up timed to that weekend’s Camp Flog Gnaw carnival, built around a high-caffeine blend Pusha T co-created specifically with the café, and sold alongside a small run of Carhartt WIP merchandise: a Café Tropical-exclusive hoodie at the pop-up itself, plus additional hoodies, tees, and totes at the festival. A press release at the time described it as a strong, high-caffeine black coffee built to match Pusha T’s own taste, and promised a proprietary blend and a full national rollout were coming early the following year.

Nearly two years later, on September 14, 2026, that promise landed in a different shape than advertised. Grindin Coffeerelaunched as a full retail brand, sold exclusively through its own website, with Pharrell Williams now attached as a formal partner alongside Pusha T and Lavazza, the Italian coffee house that has been roasting beans in Turin since 1895, handling production. The lineup launches with two blends, a dark roast and a medium roast, each sold ground or whole bean, positioned less as a celebrity vanity label and more as a tool for people who are already awake and working.

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The brand’s name is not incidental. In 2002, Clipse, the Virginia Beach duo of Pusha T and his brother Malice, released “Grindin'” as the lead single from their debut album, Lord Willin’, credited to songwriters Gene Thornton, Terrence Thornton, Pharrell Williams, and Chad Hugo. Produced by The Neptunes, the Pharrell-and-Hugo production team that had already spent the back half of the 1990s crafting hits for artists like Mase, Noreaga, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard before launching their own Star Trak Entertainment imprint, the track built its beat around little more than a stripped-down drum and woodblock pattern, a min choice that stood out against the maximalist rap radio of its era and is often cited as a forerunner to later sparse Neptunes productions. It climbed to number 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 that August, helped push Lord Willin’ to gold certification within two months of release, and remains one of the most recognizable records either Clipse or the Neptunes ever made. Clipse was the first act signed to Star Trak, and the label’s bet on the duo’s “grind” imagery, hustling, discipline, repetition, has stuck to Pusha T’s public persona ever since.

That second meaning, the one that eventually became a coffee company, traces back to real mornings rather than just wordplay. In interviews tied to the Lavazza rollout, Pusha T has described a specific early routine he shared with Pharrell: up by 5 a.m., reaching for black coffee or “the strongest espresso we can find,” then into the studio to write and record before breaking to ride roughly 25 miles on a bike and returning to work again. It is a cycle he has framed as create, move, create, with coffee treated less as a beverage and more as the mechanism that kept the cycle running through decades of shared studio time, from Clipse’s earliest sessions with the Neptunes through Pusha T’s solo catalog and back again for Clipse’s 2025 reunion.

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The Café Tropical debut in November 2024 was framed as a solo project, credited to Pusha T alone rather than to any formal partnership with Pharrell. The café itself carried its own history into the moment: opened in 1975 as an ice cream shop before becoming the neighborhood’s Cuban bakery and café by the 1990s, it closed abruptly in late 2023 amid a family ownership dispute, then reopened under new local ownership in March 2024, just months before Pusha T chose it as the site of Grindin’s first pour. Fans could sample the blend at the café between 7 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. that Saturday, or find it on-site at Camp Flog Gnaw, the Tyler, the Creator-founded festival at Dodger Stadium, where Clipse had reunited for a surprise performance the year before.

Camp Flog Gnaw itself, the annual carnival-style festival Tyler, the Creator has run in Los Angeles since 2012, gave the brand a built-in audience that skewed young, online, and fashion-literate, the same crowd that had already made Carhartt WIP a fixture of festival merch tables. Pusha T was not scheduled to perform that weekend; he was there working the coffee counter instead.

At that stage, the brand was pitched as a side project with a clear runway: a proprietary blend and a full national launch were promised for early 2025, and Grindin was described in press materials as “a premium yet accessible” option aimed at everyday hard workers rather than a luxury indulgence. No public evidence of that 2025 rollout actually materializing has surfaced, and the brand’s next visible move did not arrive until the September 2026 Lavazza partnership, a gap of nearly two years between the pop-up and the product actually reaching a wider audience.

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The formal Lavazza partnership surfaced publicly through a wide-ranging GQ profile in which Pusha T discussed the brand alongside fitness and family life. “Grindin’ Coffee is my baby,” he told the magazine, describing it as a shared project with the Italian roaster. The account he has given of how the partnership came together runs through the Camp Flog Gnaw pop-ups: two years of selling Grindin and Carhartt merchandise on-site, with lines long enough to catch attention, eventually put the brand in front of Pharrell’s own network, which is how Lavazza entered the picture. The 130-year-old company, according to Pusha T, saw the way Grindin was approaching the coffee category and wanted a fuller stake in it.

Lavazza’s own history stretches back to 1895, when Luigi Lavazza bought a small grocery store in Turin and began experimenting with coffee blending. The company remains headquartered in Turin and privately controlled by the Lavazza family across four generations, and it now operates among the largest coffee roasters in the world, with production and distribution reaching well over 90 countries. In the United States specifically, Lavazza has spent more than a decade building visibility well beyond grocery shelves, serving as the official coffee sponsor of the US Open tennis tournament and the Toronto International Film Festival, and backing arts institutions like the Guggenheim Museum, positioning the brand as a heritage name rather than a newcomer. Grindin’s beans are roasted in Turin under that same operation. The positioning language attached to the September 2026 relaunch leans hard into the brand’s origin story: coffee built for the task-driven, the early riser, the late-night worker who does not clock out at 5 p.m., language that echoes almost exactly the 5 a.m. studio routine Pusha T has described as the brand’s actual origin.

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Grindin’s launch lineup keeps things narrow: a dark roast and a medium roast, both roasted by Lavazza, both available in either ground or whole-bean form. The dark roast draws beans from Central and South America along with Southeast Asia and is built around notes of cocoa, caramel, and brown spice. The medium roast sources from South America and leans toward bittersweet chocolate, caramel, and roasted hazelnut. Both are described as suited to multiple brew methods, filter coffee, espresso, and cold brew, rather than being tuned to a single format the way some artist-led coffee lines are.

The coffee is sold exclusively through grindincoffee.com, with no pricing publicly confirmed at the time of this piece and no announced plans for retail or grocery distribution beyond the brand’s own site. That is a narrower footprint than the “nationwide” lang used around the original 2024 launch, though it tracks with how Lavazza has generally approached new categories in the American market: building visibility through sponsorships and direct-to-consumer sales first, then expanding distribution once demand is established.

Neither blend is marketed as decaffeinated or limited-run, and both are framed around versatility rather than a single ritual. A drip pot at home, a shot pulled before a shift, or a batch of cold brew held overnight are all treated as legitimate ways into the same two bags, a contrast to the narrower, single-serve pod systems that have defined a lot of Lavazza’s more visible American retail presence up to now.

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Grindin arrives at a moment when both men have plenty else going on. Clipse signed to the Neptunes’ own Star Trak Entertainment imprint after their original debut, Exclusive Audio Footage, was shelved by Elektra Records, and went on to release Lord Willin’ in 2002 and the darker, leaner Hell Hath No Fury in 2006 before splitting to focus on solo work in 2010. Pusha T built a solo run that includes My Name Is My Name (2013), King Push, Darkest Before Dawn (2015), Daytona (2018), and It’s Almost Dry (2022), alongside a stint as president of Kanye West’s G.O.O.D. Music label starting in 2015 and his own Heir Wave Music Group, launched in 2020. Clipse itself reunited for Let God Sort ‘Em Out, the group’s first album since Til the Casket Drops in 2009, announced as a move to Def Jam in late October 2024, roughly three weeks before the original Grindin pop-up, and ultimately released in 2025, produced in full by Pharrell.

Pharrell’s own résumé has only widened in the years since “Grindin'” first charted. Beyond the Neptunes’ catalog of hits for artists across pop, R&B, and hip-hop, and his own music as half of N.E.R.D., he co-founded the streetwear label Billionaire Boys Club with Nigo in 2003, built a skincare line under the Humanrace name, collaborated with Chanel, Adidas, and Moncler on separate footwear and apparel projects, and worked with Louis Vuitton on two separate occasions, in 2004 and 2008, long before the French house named him its menswear creative director in February 2023, succeeding the late Virgil Abloh. A coffee brand, in that context, is a relatively small addition to an already sprawling list of ventures, but one he has tied directly back to the habit that got both men through two decades of studio sessions together.

Both men trace their roots to Virginia Beach, where Pharrell was born and where Pusha T, born Terrence Thornton in the Bronx, was raised alongside his brother. That geography is where the Neptunes sound and the Clipse catalog both started, decades before either name meant much outside hip-hop. Grindin Coffee, whatever else it becomes, is being sold on that same throughline: two people who have spent more than twenty years working together, now selling the thing that got them through the sessions in the first place. As of this week, it is available, in two roasts, only at grindincoffee.com.