Coffee is ME - Start Your Coffee Business – Details, episodes & analysis

In this episode of the Coffee is Me podcast, Valerian interviews Mabel and Ming from Moonwake Coffee. They discuss their first sip of coffee, their professions, and why they decided to start a coffee company. 

They also talk about the meaning behind the name Moonwake and their sales channels, including direct-to-consumer, farmers markets, and wholesale. They highlight the importance of building relationships with customers and the benefits of being part of the coffee enthusiast community. 

They also touch on the challenges and rewards of starting a business and the importance of finding meaning in their work. MoonWake Coffee Roasters focuses on delivering excellent coffee experiences to customers through their micro-lot offerings and commitment to quality. They have a unique approach to roasting, offering a range of roast levels and highlighting the farm name in their coffee lineup. 

The founders are passionate about the customer experience and wanted to create a positive and transparent environment. They made the decision to invest in a Cybertruck as a mobile coffee truck to solve problems, attract customers, and provide a unique experience. The biggest challenges for entrepreneurs are starting and dealing with uncertainty. It's important to take action and have a problem-solving mindset. 

MoonWake Coffee Roasters can be found online and at the Cupertino Danza College Farmers Market, with plans to open a cafe and roastery in West San Jose.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and First Sip of Coffee

02:41 Professions and Decision to Start a Coffee Company

08:18 Should You Leave Your Job to Start a Coffee Business?

16:20 The Meaning Behind the Name Moonwake Coffee

25:25 How to Find your First Customers

58:09 Thoughts on Sourcing and Creating a Coffee Portfolio

01:01:58 One vs Wide Range of Roast Degrees

01:04:42 About Quality and the Customer Experience

01:09:22 What Makes or Breaks a Coffee Business? Embrace Uncertainty

Takeaways

• The Mexican specialty coffee scene has been growing in the past decade, with a focus on quality and innovation in processing methods.
• Being a woman in the coffee industry can present challenges, but there is a growing community of women supporting and empowering each other.
• Selling coffee to restaurants and hotels can be a challenge, but there is an opportunity to educate and provide better quality coffee to these establishments.
• Social media, particularly Instagram, has been an effective sales tool for Tueste Café, along with word-of-mouth recommendations. 
• For Tueste Café, roasting coffee to customer preferences is important for providing a personalized coffee experience.
• Mariana aims to make Tueste Café a reference in Mexico for coffee and coffee machines, while also becoming an SCA trainer.

In December, we held the Roasting Lab PRO Course, where future coffee entrepreneurs study efficient ways of roasting, developing products, packaging and branding, understanding sales channels, not to mention having an awesome time exchanging ideas and meeting like-minded people from all over the world. I run this course every 3 months; it is limited to 6 students, and the next one is coming up in March.

One of my favorite parts of the course is our guests, who come to share their coffee business experience and are willing to reveal their trade secrets. In the last course, we were joined by Joey and Sandra from Pink Owl Coffee. As I have mentioned before, I am one lucky guy! The students asked really useful questions, Sandra and Joey's energy was intoxicating, and all I had to do was record it. I hope that some of that energy will rub off on you too. 

In this episode we discuss:

- How to start a café serving specialty coffee;

- What marketing tools you should use;

- How to go about branding your cup, merch, etc.;

- Why Joey and Sandra ultimately decided to roast their own coffee;

- Mistakes they made and you can avoid;

- The types and number of products a café should offer, and how Sandra finds the best deals and quality for their offering;

- How Joey chooses the equipment for the café and whether used coffee gear is a good idea;

- A few ideas on how to finance a coffee shop, drawing on Joey's experience as a finance guy.

There is much more wisdom in this podcast and yes, it is almost 2 hours long. I believe that the shared know-how and value is incredible, so I decided to keep it as is.

ENJOY!

In this episode, Daniel Streetman explains how you can start a coffee roasting business with minimal investment.

After Daniel was laid off during the pandemic, he and his wife Ella looked deep into their wallet and figured out that the most they could spend on their new company was $2500.  

I love to brag about how I started Green Plantation with only $8000, but I would never even attempt to start a coffee roasting business with $2500, especially not in San Francisco.

In this episode Daniel reveals how they did it, where they found their first customers, and how they have grown since then. Spoiler alert, your neighborhood can be much more powerful than you think. 

In this episode we will also address branding, SEO tips, and we will talk about the power of customer reviews and engagement. 

Daniel is also a trainer at the Boot Coffee Campus, so I took the opportunity to talk about the SCA courses and the SCA Foundations Week we are planning in January 2022.  

In this show, I interview Gleason Jones from Opelika, Alabama and founder of Minimalist Coffee. Minimalist Coffee is the brand new venture of this 25-year-old entrepreneurial gentleman, addressing the need for a good, freshly roasted coffee with associated charity contributions in the local community. 

Gleason dared to violate my rule for the size of the coffee roaster. How's that working for him? Can he make a sustainable business with a 2 kg roaster?

Gleason owns a former school bus that he retrofitted for mobile coffee sales. The coffee bus drew not only my attention, but also that of the local young coffee lovers hovering around it. Gleason reveals his first triumphs and mistakes selling coffee this way.  

Can social media influencers help sell your coffee? Gleason shares his experience. 

Finally, Gleason reviews what it was like studying at Boot Coffee Campus and Valerian describes a new course for coffee entrepreneurs. 

Enjoy the show.

For this episode we asked you, our listeners, to send us questions - and to plug your business.

You sent thought provoking questions which challenged us -- Valerian and Marcus to think outside the box, share their experiences, and call upon their combined experience to come up with possible answers. 

We have tasted and drank a lot of coffee, and listener Katie asks us to name the single best cup of coffee each of us has ever had, in our entire lives. Did we choose one of the award winning geshas we often roast and cup, or some experimental process, or something else entirely? 

Tune in and hear our opinions of the optimal location to open a roaster / retail store. Valerian shares an interesting challenge he faced at Green Plantation opening in a beautiful rural setting. 

Other listeners asked about ideal roast profiles which leads Marcus to encourage all roasters to become confident cuppers and to be rigorous about tracking their data. Our listen John Bergman from Hacienda Coffee had a very specific question about sample roasting on a fluid bed roasters versus a drum roaster, and our hosts discuss the challenges and possible solutions to roasting on machines that utilize different thermodynamic principles.

Marcus and Valerian also discuss how they approach blends and Marcus challenges Valerian to try a new technique. Does it matter if coffees are blended with vastly different physical characteristics? Will a blend taste good if you give up some control in the name of consistency? Is the cupping table the best place for product development and QC, or should you use other brew methods too?

We hopee you enjoy hearing from listeners and our feedback. Maybe in the future we’ll answer your question.

Anya and Matt are prime examples of the American dream: they had a dream and they invested all their time, money, and energy to make it a reality. The result has enriched  the L.A. coffee culture and brought a unidog to the bottom of the cup. As a European living in the USA, I have always admired the entrepreneurial spirit of my American friends, and I love the unidog. If you do not know what a unidolg is, don't worry, we talk about it in the podcast.

In this episode, we talked about the process of starting a cafe, and Anya and Matt explain why was it important for them to roast their own coffee. Spoiler alert--it was not the cost.

I feel very proud that Anya and Matt implemented the roasting model that works so well for my European business, Green Plantation, where we roast two days a week and spend the rest of the time on sales, marketing, or resting. Guess where they learned about it? Yes, it was in this podcast.

Anya and Matt love to travel and during these travels, they have developed special relations with farmers in coffee lands, bringing them even closer to their coffee and enabling them to relay the story of each coffee in real depth for their customers.

Meeting Anya and Matt was truly amazing and we clicked right away. I'm only sorry that it took me such a long time to bring their wisdom and energy to this podcast. But here it is and I hope you will enjoy listening as much as we did recording it.

In this podcast I interviewed Darren Spicer of Clutch Coffee Bar, a fast-growing coffee drive-through chain.

Drive-throughs are a bit foreign to me. I've never used one and personally I consume coffee differently, but most Americans welcome a good coffee on the long commute to work.

I am always intrigued about the unknown, so I was very happy when Darren's path crossed with mine in this podcast episode.

Like a good drive-through, Darren is a very composed, efficient and to-the-point fellow. If you are playing with the idea of starting a coffee drive-through, there is plenty of gold for you in this episode.

We will discuss the best locations for a successful coffee drive-through, the way to make your coffee service efficient, and the most popular and profitable beverages in your café or coffee drive-through. We also touch on the advantages and disadvantages of a franchise model, and whether a coffee drive-through would work in Europe.

Enjoy this episode!

CLUTCH COFFEE BAR WEBSITE CLUTCH COFFEE BAR INSTAGRAM CLUTCH COFFEE BAR FACEBOOK

Last year my business partner William Murad and I offered our coffee roasting company, Unleashed Coffee, for sale over this podcast. You know me by now, I live for experiments like this. I was curious whether this podcast was influential enough to sell a company. Spoiler alert! The answer is YES. 

For this episode I interviewed the new owner - Kelly Abbott. The deal is done, and in the first part of the interview I was curious to look behind the curtain from when we were negotiating the sale of Unleashed Coffee. I think this part is super useful for anyone who is planning to buy or sell a small business: you can learn from our strategies, wins and missteps in the process. 

In the other part of this episode, I wanted to find out what happened after we sold the company to Kelly, what were her first steps and what are her future plans with the company. 

On this podcast we have featured a lot of great coffee business origin stories; most of these companies are doing amazing things in the industry and inspire us all. Our goal is always to show our companies’ projects in the best light and to focus on success. But the truth is, sometimes doing business is hard, frustrating and overwhelming. Kelly and I opened up about this taboo topic in the entrepreneur's world. 

Have you ever wondered whether your product is too cheap? Is it better to offer a more expensive product and subsidized free shipping, or a cheaper product and let the customer pay for shipping? Kelly was inspired by the Amazon Prime model and made her own discovery in this field. We talk about this decision on the podcast. 

Enjoy the show! 

PS: Please ignore my bad math in the intro of the podcast. We are doing the 7th season of this podcast, not the 6th! Thank you for all your support!

In this podcast I welcome back Marcus Young from Boot Coffee.

This is an episode where we discuss the most common questions we get from our consulting clients. No, you do not have to pay a dime for this, but a review on Apple Podcasts is welcome.  Thanks.

We start the podcast with a discussion about designing a roast profile. Is there such a thing as a correct approach? How many roast profiles should a roasting company have? 

Then I put a gun to Marcus's (and my head) and force us to come up with only one roast profile for a new startup. How would it look and why? Only one way to find out: click that Play button.

When starting a coffee roasting business, you most likely will have a limited budget and will have to compromise on the quantity of green coffee you can purchase. Each of us came up with three types of coffees we would want to launch with. Spoiler alert: one of them is a decaf. What? Yes, decaf. Why? Find out in this episode of the podcast.

Should a coffee roasting startup buy their coffee through direct trade or use an importer? If you go with an importer, Marcus (a former green coffee trader himself) will give you a few tips on how to develop relationships with importers. 

Finally, in this episode we revisit the ideal size of a coffee roaster. Finally we agreed on something with Marcus! :)

We hope you will have as much fun listening to this podcast as we had recording it. 

We have officially launched Black Friday deals, hence this is the Black Friday edition. Until December 1st, 2020 you can enjoy one of these deals. Use coupon code: coffeeisme