Eagles’ Jordan Mailata helps a local coffee shop move its new 650-pound commercial oven
Mailata and his wife, Niki, are frequent customers of The Ground Coffee Plants & Gifts, and went in to try the new drinks named after him. “He’s clearly very strong and made it look very simple,” co-owner Michelle Miller said.
Jordan Mailata is keeping himself busy this offseason. Fresh off winning a Super Bowl, the offensive tackle is still moving objects off the field — but instead of pushing a 300-pound man, he’s moving a 650-pound oven.
Michelle Miller, the co-owner of a local Philadelphia coffee shop known as The Ground Coffee Plants & Gifts, located in Rittenhouse Square and Norris Square — needed help moving a new commercial oven into their kitchen. Help came in the form of a 6-foot-8, 365-pound offensive tackle who can be seen on The Ground’s Instagram page moving the oven with ease.
“It’s actually not that bad,” Mailata said in the video before perfectly shimmying the oven into place.
“He’s clearly very strong and made it look very simple,” Miller said. “But I assure you, in real life, that is a giant oven, and it’s really, really heavy. … It took him under five minutes. He was committed to putting it in exactly the perfect spot. And originally I thought I would help him, but he just walked right over and clearly didn’t need help.”
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Miller has been friends with Mailata and his wife, Niki, for over four years. On Thursday afternoon, Mailata and his wife were visiting the shop to try out some of the specialty Super Bowl-themed drinks — the Hakuna Mailata and the Mailatte — but he wasn’t expecting to be put to work.
Miller currently is renovating the kitchen after a small fire at their Rittenhouse location in December. The shop’s food menu has been paused for three months. With hopes of restarting their food menu in the next two weeks, they had one more task at hand.
“So they came in yesterday to try the drinks, and we’re in the middle of renovating our kitchen,” Miller said. “One of the things that we needed to get done yesterday was to move that oven. My manager and I tried and could not get it to budge. And so when Jordan came in, we just asked if he would move it for us, and he did it without hesitation.”
It was the least the Super Bowl champ could do for the coffee shop after it named a few drinks after him — which he ended up enjoying.
“Oh, he loved it,” Miller said. “The Hakuna Mailata is honeydew with peach and then kiwi-bursting boba. We have a whole description on it. You know, his voice is smooth as honeydew, and then he’s such a peach of a person, and his family is from New Zealand and they’re called kiwis. It’s a cute little mix of stuff for Jordan.”
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This isn’t the first time Mailata has helped out a local business. The Eagles offensive tackle and his wife are big supporters of small businesses in Philadelphia. After the Hawaiian restaurant Poi Dog closed down during the pandemic, Mailata helped the restaurant owner Kiki Aranita bring her Huli Huli Hawaiian sauce to Lincoln Financial Field in a collaboration with the Australian restaurant G’Day Gourmet. Now, not even two weeks after winning a Super Bowl, Mailata’s work continues.
“Him and his wife, Niki, are very sweet and super considerate, good friends,” Miller said. “They are very authentically just kind, good people.”