“People said ‘Another coffee place? Good luck,’” says Kathleen Pratt, co-founder of Tandem Coffee Roasters — that was in 2012. In 2015, Tandem reported a revenue of $1.5 million.
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When Will and Kathleen Pratt started a micro-roasting coffee business in Portland's East Bayside neighborhood in 2012, the local coffee and food culture impressed them, but the locals didn't offer them much encouragement.
“People said 'Another coffee place? Good luck,'” says Kathleen Pratt, because roasters including Coffee By Design, Arabica Coffee House, Bard Coffee, Wicked Joe and others already were well established in Greater Portland. “You have to prove yourself,” she adds. “You have to be part of a neighborhood to survive.”
But their bet that coffee lovers would welcome more options paid off. Last year their company, Tandem Coffee Roasters, pulled in about $1.5 million in revenue, half from wholesale coffee sales and the other half from their two retail coffee shops in Portland. The Pratts say they hope revenue will hit $2 million this year, and they plan to hire another four or five people. The company is profitable and currently employs 19 people to whom it will offer health insurance starting June 1.
This calendar year, they plan to hire four to five more people and have a revenue goal of $2 million. Will Pratt says they have 50 wholesale accounts, including Duck Fat, Hugo's, Eventide, Gelato Fiasco and East Ender.
They're distinguishing themselves by the atmosphere in the cozy East Bayside roastery and coffee shop, where regulars from nearby Rising Tide and other businesses drop by to sip coffee made at the drip bar and chat. Their other location on Congress Street — a former gas station then laundromat — has a bakery.
Most recently, they added an option to their coffee subscription service to also get a vinyl album. The music part of it is curated by Joe Kievitt's KMA online record store. May was the first month for the $30 subscription, which came with two 8-ounce bags of coffee and John Coltrane's “Blue Train,” first released in 1958. Subscribers only discover the album of the month when they receive it, so Will Pratt would not reveal the name of the vinyl that will be sent out on June 1, describing it only as “Japanese psychedelic Brazilian” music.
No coffee break
While there aren't available statistics for the coffee market size in Maine, the number of micro-roasters in the state has grown from a handful two decades ago to at least 28 today, according to industry insiders and a compilation by Mainebiz.
There's still plenty of opportunity for specialty roasters, says Bob Garver, who with his wife Carmen owns Wicked Joe Coffee in Topsham, as well as Bard Coffee in Portland and Benbow's Coffee Roasters in Bar Harbor.
“Most of the coffee sold in Maine isn't sold by Maine coffee roasters,” he says, adding that a lot of offices buy coffee made elsewhere.
“So there's a tremendous growth opportunity for local companies,” Garver adds. “Having more great coffee roasters raises the bar. We like that. Coffee is a fun, interesting, vibrant and dynamic industry.” He adds that every coffee shop also has a different personality.
Local coffee roasters say they are part of a national trend toward more artisan coffees, some of which are fair trade, organic, or both, like those sold by 44 North Coffee in Deer Isle and by Wicked Joe.
According to the Specialty Coffee Association of America and National Coffee Association of America, the retail value of the U.S. coffee market is about $48 billion, with specialty coffees (including coffee accessories) comprising about a 55% share of that. Some 31% of consumers aged 18 or older drank a specialty coffee yesterday compared to 24% in 2010. The biggest growth is among 18 to 24-year-olds, 35% of whom drink specialty coffee daily, up from 28% in 2013.
There were no figures for artisan coffees alone, but trade data show U.S. coffee imports rose 2% in 2014 over 2013, sparked partly by high demand from the “third-wave” trend of consumers wanting superior taste and a better understanding of where their coffee beans originate, according to the International Coffee Organization.
“There's been an increase in roasters. Coffee took off here about four years ago,” says Matt Bolinder, owner of the Speckled Ax, which sells wood-roasted coffee from its South Portland roaster in its Portland coffee shop and elsewhere. “It's been driven a bit by the food scene, but it's more about the national coffee scene, which took off in about the same timeframe as here. So the micro-roasters are proportional to what is happening everywhere else in the country.”
Roasting as a lifestyle
Garver has been in a good position to watch the micro-roasters market grow up, as he founded Wicked Joe with his wife in 2004. He says the company's revenue is already up 40% year-to-date. It sells roasted coffees under the Wicked Joe brand, but also roasts different coffee beans for other coffee purveyors to sell under their own name, such as Bard Coffee.
Wicked Joe sells wholesale to restaurants, bakeries, cafés, natural food stores, coffee shops and broadline grocery distributors like Hannaford and Shaw's. It has more than 3,000 individual store and wholesale customers in 42 states. It also makes a special Maine State Parks Blend and donates a portion of each 12-ounce bag sold to Maine's Bureau of Parks and Lands.
Wicked Joe has been selling a special blend called “God of Thunder” to Gelato Fiasco since 2007. This spring, Gelato Fiasco designed new retail labeling for God of Thunder under its own brand and began offering it to smaller grocery stores in New England by piggybacking it on top of its existing gelato distribution network.
“It [God of Thunder] fueled Gelato Fiasco's growth; that's what everyone on the team drank while we were building the business,” Bobby Guerette, marketing director at Gelato Fiasco in Brunswick, wrote to Mainebiz in an email. “The roast also has a contingent of devoted fans in Brunswick, and underlines that while 'gelato' is above the door, Gelato Fiasco is a place to visit for high-quality coffee, too.” He added that the private-label coffee sold with gelato will be a small part of the company's business.
Wicked Joe's Garver loves everything about coffee, from the farmers he buys from through to the expert tasters, the bean roasters, the coffee shops and their customers. The Wicked Joe website quotes a Turkish proverb that it also notes is the company's philosophy: “Coffee should be black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love.”
“It's a wonderful time to be in coffee,” Garver enthuses. “Coffee has never tasted as good as it does today because roasters and every person touching coffee in the supply chain are focused on improving its quality.”
Wicked Joe employs two “Q Graders,” certified by the Aliso Viejo, Calif.-based trade group Coffee Quality Institute, while Speckled Ax's Bolinder is also a Q Grader. The Q Coffee System, explains Garver, is meant to give companies around the world a standard for rating coffee quality both in the green beans they buy to roast and in the individual roasts at their own roasteries.
Nothing regular about this coffee
Bolinder of Speckled Ax started roasting in 2007 under the Matt's Wood Roasted Organic Coffee brand. He says he changed the branding recently to Speckled Ax to better describe the process of roasting the coffee. “It's a sexier name that reflects our process more clearly,” he says.
Speckled Ax is one of two roasters in the state using wood to power its roaster rather than natural gas or propane. The other is UnRest Roasting Co. in Hampden. Nationwide, Bolinder estimates there are about eight wood roasters.
Bolinder says wood-roasting mellows the coffee, but does not impart a wood flavor because smoke from the wood goes through the roaster in 13 to 14 minutes under high heat so it isn't absorbed by the beans.
He says the wood roasting process does cause a loss of about 1% or so of the bean weight compared to gas roasting because more air flow goes through the beans. The roasting time also is a bit longer.
He sells about 60% of his beans retail and 40% wholesale, but he'd like to double the wholesale part of the equation to 80% of revenue in two years. He declines to give an exact number, but says revenue was between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2015, and he hopes that will rise 10% this year. He says the company has basically been in a holding pattern the last couple years as he completed the rebranding to Speckled Ax.
Speckled Ax sells through its own Portland coffee shop and to Rosemont Market, Whole Foods, Black Cat Coffee and Frontier Restaurant in Brunswick. Bolinder says Frontier plans to open a new coffee shop in the next couple months that will use his coffee.
Along with the branding change to help boost sales, he plans to open another coffee shop at some point in the future. He also plans to start a coffee truck in the next couple months that would be used for coffee deliveries to help market the brand as well as coffee sales at fairs and other events.
Trucks selling craft coffee are another part of the craft coffee craze in Maine. Among other trucks are the Gorham Grind's “Flo” Anywhere Coffee Bar and the Sugarbird Coffee Truck, which sells wood-roasted coffee from UnRest Roasters. Coffee drinkers can find Flo's location on her Facebook page and Sugarbird lovers can find its truck on the company's website. It truly is coffee on the run.
As Bolinder of Speckled Ax says, “Portland is a relatively small town, and the percentage of micro-roast coffee that is good is relatively high.”
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