STORY: ACRONYM Engineers the Perfect Roast with Wavelength Coffee Roasters

October 16, 2025

Olin College’s ACRONYM is brewing a collaboration with a new business: Wavelength Coffee Roasters. The ACRONYM leadership team spent an afternoon learning about the company’s innovative coffee roasting process, followed by a tasting where they created their own coffee blend to commemorate the Class of 2006 called, “Olin Original ’06.” 

To engage Olin’s community, ACRONYM members set up their station weekly to create cafe-style drinks for students, faculty and staff. The group aims to provide Oliners with a “third space” to interact with each other while enjoying handcrafted beverages. Over time, ACRONYM has become a core element of the Olin community, and some members were drawn to the college because of the club.  

“The existence of ACRONYM was something that further drew me to Olin. I’ve been involved with it since my first year, and it has been a large part of my memories at Olin,” said Dokyun Kim ’26, a general leadership member for ACRONYM.

Inspired by his parents, who are certified baristas, Kim became more interested in making coffee during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it soon became part of his daily routine. “Collaborating with Wavelength was a big learning experience for me. I love going to cafes that roast their own beans and looking at their roasting facilities, but this was my first time getting to see the roasting process that closely.” 

Located near Phoenix Pond in Shirley, MA, Wavelength is a new, all-electric commercial roaster founded by Jim and Deanna Varney. They use 100% electric, clean air roasting for their coffees, allowing them to use less energy with lower emissions than conventional methods. A portion of electricity is also produced by renewable energy, which is delivered by pre-existing solar panels on the property. 

To further strengthen their commitment to sustainability, Jim and Deanna use steel cans, as it is recovered at a higher rate (72%) than any other food packaging material.  

"For years, I had been trying to find ways to incorporate some of the things that are important to me from a sustainability and high efficiency sort of thing,” said Jim. “It's only been within the last maybe two or three years that electric, like commercial-scale electric roasters, have even become available. So, we have one of the very first examples of electric commercial scale roasters.”  

From electric vehicles to installing mini-splits, Jim and Deanna have been finding ways to implement sustainable options in their personal lives for years. Once Jim sold his product development company in 2024, they started contemplating ways to combine their passions for sustainability and coffee. That is when the idea of Wavelength Coffee Roasters began to bloom.

When the ACRONYM team arrived, Jim and Deanna presented information to the students about Wavelength and how they source their coffee beans. In addition to sustainability, the Varneys are also committed to sourcing their beans ethically, and they have a wide range of initiatives they use when considering their products:  

• Future Farmers: Blends with this pillar are sourced from farmers who represent the next generation, such as women-owned farms and youth programs. 

• New Varietals: Newly developed hybrid strains carefully bred to deliver high-quality coffee beans with greater resilience to droughts, heavy rains, higher temperatures, pests and diseases. 

• Adaptive Agriculture: Indicates that the beans are sources from farmers who embrace, and sometimes invent, farm-level best practices for climate adaptation and mitigation such as emission reduction, agroforestry, intercropping, water conservation, regenerative agriculture, waste recapture, mycorrhizae and many others. 

• Emerging Origins: Coffees with flavor profiles that allow consumers to experience firsthand the future of coffee. 

• Community Initiatives: Coffees with this pillar supports programs designed to improve living standards at a hyper-local level with input from the people who live where the beans are sourced from. These programs promote stability, self-sufficiency and resiliency, and include initiatives such as water filtration systems, financing micro-loans, purchasing livestock and funding K-12 schools, among others. 

Read more about Wavelength's approach

“The experience at Wavelength was not only fascinating but also innovative,” said Julian Shah ’28, ACRONYM’s financial manager. “Their roasting technique was novel and is much needed as the industry continues to use natural gas roasters despite climate change rapidly destroying coffee-growing land.”

Shah also mentioned his appreciation for Wavelength’s industry-leading packaging and their use of a refractometer to meet international coffee roast standards.

“When ACRONYM leadership was first told about this, we were all so excited to not only get the opportunity to learn about how the coffee we use gets roasted, but also to create our own blend to make ACRONYM even more special,” said Lukas Littlejohn ’28, president of ACRONYM. “When we first met with Laura, we were extremely giddy about the whole process, and we were very happy with choosing Wavelength as our partner roaster. Wavelength's ideals for refining the coffee roasting industry to be more sustainable, environmentally friendly, and clean mirrored Olin's ideals perfectly.” 

The collaboration was proposed by Laura Dill, director of annual giving at Olin College, and the special blend will be gifted to those who donate $250 or more during an upcoming giving campaign. Additionally, ACRONYM will be serving the blend at their pop-up during the 2025 Return to the Oval: Alumni + Family Weekend. 

“It’s rare that you get to taste so many differing coffees side by side and get the roaster’s perspective,” said Shah. “Creating a tradition of going to a roaster and making our own blend is a wonderful experience that I hope to leave for the next generations at Olin. Seeing where that ends up is, how I see it, a reflection of how ACRONYM (and by extension Olin) changes as the years go on.”