In our quest for success in the coffee shop business we embrace the busy and frenetic pace that is assumed as necessary to bring us fulfillment. As we work we can often lose touch with the thing that drove our passion in the beginning. While scaling and ambition have many benefits, there always remains the need to connect with deep …
453 : The Craft of Operations
When we think of the craft of coffee we tend to think only in terms of the bean and beverage itself. The whole value chain of coffee has benefited greatly from continued emphasis on transparency and today we have the ability to track down almost every detail and variable of a coffee to accurately determine what went into the resulting …
RoR #29 : A Coffee Roaster’s Career Journey, Leigh Wentzle, Cedar Coffee
As a roaster your career can go through many different unique phases, all of which will tech you different things about the craft, the business, leadership, and even entrepreneurship. Not least among the things you learn is how to use both resources and constraints as opportunities to serve others and grow as a roaster. These are the kinds of experiences …
452: Championing the Customer Experience in Coffee w/ 3x SA Barista Champion, Winston Douglas Thomas of Cedar Coffee
The world of professional specialty coffee can be both inspiring and intimidating with many customers and new baristas feeling lost in the mix of rules, methods, and information. How can we create a great experience for guests and staff who all really want to enjoy coffee and find their place in it? Today we get to learn from the story …
451: Business Growth, Integrity, and Coffee Farmer Equity w/ Martin Mayorga of Mayorga Coffee
When Martin Mayorga first entered the coffee industry it was not as someone whose singular passion was the product, but the people and communities behind it that were unseen and more often that not, un rewarded for their work. Born in Guatemala City to a Nicaraguan father and a Peruvian mother, Martin’s early life was a mosaic of Latin American cultures and …
450: A Conversation About Mobile Apps and Hospitality w/ Joe Capone of Espressly
Hospitality is a pursuit that relies on our ability to not only offer our guests excellence in quality, consistency, and interaction, but it also relies on us being able to select tools for delivery of our service that line up with our values. Mobile apps and order ahead systems have become a part of the fabric of the coffee shop …
RoR #28 : Ease and Accessibility in Sample Roasting w/ Andrew Stordy, Inventor/Founder of IKAWA
Sample roasting empowers people with the knowledge of possibility locked in the coffee. Bringing sample roasting that provides for more continuity and better communication to more professionals in the value chain, especially at origin, is critical not just for how coffee’s potential is achieved but how the value of that coffee is distributed. Today we explore this dynamic through the …
449: Convenience and Automation in Coffee w/ Tim Cox of Franke Coffee Systems
The coffee market is much bigger than just specialty coffee. In fact specialty makes up just a fraction of coffee consumed globally. The advent of convenience coffee service is growing lock step with innovations in automation and that has historically make those of us in the more craft forward markets nervous. While I will readily admit to being one of …
448: Founder Friday! Part 2 “Switching Gears” | w/ Doug Zell of Intelligentsia and The Meteor!
In this second part of our 2 part Founder Friday we switch gears with Doug Zell, founder of the iconic coffee company Intelligentsia Coffee. In the years that followed the acquisition of Intelligentsia, Doug entered into a new era of creativity related to food, coffee, and his passion for cycling. With his friend and fellow cycling enthusiast Chris St. Peter, …
448: Founder Friday! Part 1 “Switching Gears” | w/ Doug Zell of Intelligentsia and The Meteor!
The landscape of specialty coffee has been influenced by many people and companies over the last few decades. The foundations of the standards and methods we use now, at one time, were merely ideas waiting for someone to put them into action. In the class of companies operators that have championed that exploration one of the most influential was Intelligentsia …
