“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

-Mark Twain

So there’s been a bit of controversy lately and I guess it’s fine. I am up for dusting off and moving on to what is next. Conflict ultimately brings progress as history frequently shows. Good works do seem to triumph time and time again.

I wanted to address what has been asked as it relates to where folks are and the size of companies and what is possible. I am intimately aware of what it is like to be resourced challenged. It really wasn’t that long ago, 14 years actually, when we were a fledgling roasting company with a 12 kilo Probat inside of our one and only coffeebar on the north side of Chicago. We (my wife and I) borrowed money from anybody that would lend it to us and tapped every bit of our tiny savings to start our company. We’ve gone through the typical gut wrenching challenges of growing a business and we’ve landed where we have through hard work, tenacity, and of course a good measure of luck. In fact, we finally retire the last piece of original debt this summer. So regardless of what you have heard or believe, the wolf has only recently backed away from the door, and believe me when I say, he still has a habit of knocking occasionally and almost always unannounced.

So, when I say the industry should push for delicious, meticulously prepared and carefully roasted Direct Trade, In Season coffees, I know it will cause a lot of folks to stretch. I realize that it will definitely take some time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for it. It will probably take another 15 years to get the public to where we want them, so we should get started sooner than later. I know not everybody can move to complete adoption of these buying models. So I simply ask that we are honest with ourselves and our customers about what we are doing and take them along for the ride, pushing them to be part of the solution.

I remember when I was in college (I’m 43 now) a domestic beer cost $1.25 and Anchor Steam was $1.75. Now those same items are now $3.75-$4.25 and $5.50-$6.00 respectively. The cost of a great cup of coffee has remained more static over the years than it should. We need to move to by the cup and by-the carafe models where different coffees are offered at different price points and keep pushing the customer to value a great cup and abandon the free refills that occupied the past. There are no free refills on wine, beer, or cocktails, so let’s put to death forever these practices in coffee. If we can get our customers to pay $5 a cup and up and it is worth it, then the economics along the entire supply chain change. We need to dig in and figure out how to make this kind of transformation a reality, not a distant dream. The time to start is now. I don’t care if you are an industry giant or someone that just turned your roaster on for the first time. Anyway, it does seem like the smaller dogs have an awful lot of fight. I think that will prove to be very useful.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 8:48 pm and is filed under Coffee. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.