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It’s Founder Friday! Today we are visiting the wonderful city of Bangkok, Thailand as we have a very interesting and inspiring conversation with Varat Vichit-Vadakan!
Varatt is co- founder of Kinnest Group, a boutique F&B and a lifestyle group based in Bangkok Thailand (www.kinnestgroup.com). The journey started in 2007 when Varatt, who was working in media and marketing at the time, fell in love with specialty coffee and after a year of learning and going down the coffee rabbit hole, decided to open a small 16 seat cafe called “Ohana Cafe”. From then on, his coffee and food journey continued, where he founded a cafe called “Roast” (www.roastbkk.com), a micro roastery called “Roots Coffee” (www.rootsbkk.com) which focuses solely on sourcing and promoting some of Thailand’s best coffee and was also Thailand Barista National Champion and competed in WBC in 2014. Coming into Roots’ eighth year, we are still trying our best to develop the specialty coffee market here in Thailand, championing the local farmers and producers with our unique cup to farm program where a part of the revenue is returned to the origin to improve the quality of the coffee and in many cases the livelihood of the farmers we work with. Roots now runs a roastery supporting many cafes across the nation, 4 different outlets around town and a team of around 50 people who worked hard together to showcase and highlight the specialty coffee scene in Thailand.
In our conversation we get to hear about the early years where many important and hard lessons were learned that informed how they conduct business today.
This is a fantastic conversation that shines light not only on the great work of Varatt and his team, but also on what is happening more and more at origin as consuming markets in coffee growing countries are gaining momentum. After this I m sure you will want to pay a visit to to Bangkok and taste the awesomeness for yourself.
We discuss:
- Beginnings in coffee from a marketing career
- Hard lessons form early failures
- Tapping into success through listening
- Coffee culture in Bangkok
- Evolution of Thai coffee
- Building a customer base over time
- Expanding and evolving form past experiences
- The keys of service style and consistency
- The consumer market in Thailand
- Complete circle value chain in Thailand
- Sourcing and serving Thai coffee
- Meeting your customers where they are
Links:
The BEST in commercial coffee equipment!
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