Remember Mozilla Coffee? In the first month they offered it, RJ Tarpley’s Coffee raised $400 for the Mozilla Foundation by donating a percentage of the profits.

We ordered it a couple of times, and it was actually pretty good. I even picked up a Mozilla Coffee Mug at one point.

Alas, the website (formerly www.rjtarpleys.com) has vanished. There isn’t even a whois record anymore. I don’t know if the company went out of business or just shut down their web operations.

All I know is that Mozilla Coffee is no more. That, and I seem to have a collector’s-item mug.

Originally posted on my Spread Firefox blog.

Update: Ron Tarpley himself commented on my post at SFX on 12/15/2005:

Hey Kelson,

I just happened to stumble across this entry today. You are right, I did shut down the Coffee biz and Mozilla Coffee with it. It was and still is an awesome idea. My problem was order fullfillment. The roaster thought he could have a program in place to fullfill orders (packaging, labels, shipping, etc.) When that fell through, I ended up doing this in my garage at midnight and 5:00 am while trying to maintain my real job, be a husband, and a father! I held on for as long as I could because the coffee is awesome and folks like part of the profit going to The Foundation. I will explore this again with my roaster (they are expanding successfully in the South) and the great folks at Mozilla. Who knows, if this can be done better this time I think it could be huge. Combining Mozilla (Firefox) and Coffee……what could be better?

Ron Tarpley