Why do some roisteries flourish and others fail? How can we raise the quality so we can look our customers in the eyes and see you should also be paying more? Is there a risk that scale can destroy the quality? Yeah, absolutely. How many of you are excited about chains? Like the single places are always better. But we are a chain. The founder of Coffee Collective in Denmark, one of the most highly respected coffee names out there, Cloude! Coffee Collective was the very first cafe that I went to. We actually didn't start in the shop that you went to. We started in the airport in a garage. We was literally one of these tin sheds where you opened a garage door. Now, there are certain values you believe all roasters should consider when sourcing their grain coffee. The main value or responsibility as a roaster should be to try and track the money all the way to the farmer. That's it. I've yet to meet a roaster who don't think they pay well for coffee. But I've also yet to meet a coffee farmer who thinks they get what they should for their coffee, right? Welcome back to another episode. I am one of your hosts, Ron Cook. I make coffee on the internet. And I'm Ben Biggnell. I judge people who make coffee but only in competitions. It's okay. And together we are, it's just coffee! The podcast of people who know it's never just coffee. Ron, we are absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to coffee brands to choose from. Specialty coffee has made it. I feel a little bit like a kid in the candy store sometimes. You know, should I order that delicious wash Kenyan bit of cranberry acidity from the barn in Berlin? Or maybe that fruit bomb anaerobic natural from roots in Bangkok? Or maybe just go local with one of the hundreds of coffee roasters in Australia out there. Look, I love it. But to be honest, it can be a little overwhelming sometimes. Knowing what to pick, whether it's going to be a hit or a miss once it arrives, you know, it's hard to know. Yeah, look, I hear you. And it's definitely one of the key ideas that we want to explore today. Why do some roasteries flourish and others fail? We have a plethora of different roasting options out there. But are they any good? And will they actually last the test of time? And I want to know what you can do to actually strengthen your offering. So, this is a coffee ran put together an awesome listing of coffees. I dabbled in the space with golden brown. I've got, you know, some nice blends, a couple single origins. But I'm interested to learn a lot and I'm keen to dive in today. Well, you're in luck. You're in luck growing. I love it. Why is that? Because today I'm very excited to welcome one of the most highly respected coffee names out there. And an early participant in the entire specialty coffee movement. I'm to share his experience with us. Welcome to the founder of Coffee Collective in Denmark. My friend and industry legend, Klaus. Thank you guys. This is Big Words. Big words, big ups, big ups. Thanks for joining us. Thanks very much. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure and great to see you again. Don't go any where. We're going to have a quick word from one of our sponsors, Apex Lab. Elevate your coffee experience with Apex Lab at Mineral Concentrates. Apex Lab's precision engineered formulas, including tonic, jam and lilac, are designed to enhance the coffee's natural flavors. Not going to change it. It's just going to enhance it. It's going to bring out the vibrant acidity, the rich sweetness. Or if you use lilac, it might bring out those delicate floral notes that you've been looking for. Trusted by world-class cafes and even barista champions, Apex Lab helps you unlock your coffee's full potential. Discover more at
[email protected]. Wait, where was that again, Sonum? Uh, the internet. Oh, okay. So just going to say the website. Thanks. Today's episode is brought to you by our amazing sponsors at EcoBarista. The reason I sound like this is because they got massages at our stand at mice. And so I'm getting a massage while recording this message for you. They're the best sponsor of the pod that we could have had. Ah, they have the best eco products. This probably sounds really pornographic, but it's not. I'm just getting a massage. They have the best eco-friendly coffee products. They've got coffee bags that you can design yourself. They got cups. They got ice coffee cups. They got everything you need. So make sure to support them because they support us. Head to EcoBarista.com.au And get 15% off your first purchase when you sign up. Oh, mama, that's good. Yeah, absolutely. Well, great to finally meet you on my side. I actually had a little experience early on. I was in Denmark in 2010. And coffee collective was the very first cafe that I went to. Not only that, 2010, this is an early adopter right here. I was on Instagram. I did a post. I think it was like my fifth post that I ever did. And it's a photo of a coffee collective espresso. And I announced to the world that this is the best coffee in Denmark. Is the caption of the post. And it's got like some terrible filter on it that it looks all like worn and aged. Is that the Instagram filter? I was also, I was probably only like six months into and I wouldn't even say specialty coffee. I worked at like a cool cafe and we served an all press. But I went there and I remember going in and I ordered I was like, I'll get that single origin in a double risotto. And the response was very Danish from the other side. It was just like, but that will taste no good. And then like you should get an espresso. I was like, I was just trying to say cool because I thought double risotto sounded cool. And I got the espresso and it was delicious. But as we start off, I want a little context surrounding your journey in the industry class. Can you tell us a bit about coffee collective and your role there? Yeah. So at the time you were visiting, I think we were three years into the business. We started in 2007 and we started as a micro roastery. We started in the airport or near the airport in a garage. We was literally one of these tin sheds where you open a garage door. And we moved in with a roaster and had like the chimney was like the tube from the pro bag going out the door into the parking lot. That was our humble beginnings. So I used to just like Apple and Microsoft. That's we started. You have a safe job. Yeah. Coffee. Small, small, small, yeah. Small ambitions. I also am a college dropout. Hey, yeah. I do. Do you wear turtlenecks? No. No. No. I have just actually bought one this summer. Yeah. Black one. Yeah. Yeah. I can see where this is going. We look forward to saying that. We started at like humble beginnings. We started based on like our ideas and our experience from working in coffee for a number of years. I think when I met you, Ben, the first time I was working at the another coffee company called Estate Coffee. And at that time, I'd been in coffee in various ways. I'd worked in my first barista job at a Starbucks of all places. And then I really got into the whole coffee world. Diving into home is espresso and that whole rabbit hole of geekiness and reading books and online forums and everything. And suddenly it was like my all-encompassing hobby. And yeah. And I just kind of spiraled from there and I went to barista competitions and was very fortunate to win the Danish competition in 2004 and go to the world in Treesd, where I placed third, Tim Vendelbo, good friend of mine won that year. And then I took a year off competing to learn and go to this coffee fans and explore and just kind of grow as a barista and came back in 2006 and won the World Breast Championship in Bern, which was amazing. And that gave me like that opportunity to go see the whole coffee world. I went to Australia for the first time. There was a coffee festival on the rocks in Sydney. And yeah. And I was blown away by like the Australian coffee scene at that point. It was amazing to see these coffee shops churning out hundreds of drinks and I'll come back to Copenhagen and everything seemed so small. And I could see how little the developed the market here was. And so that was kind of a bit of a kick start for me to join up with my co-founders Peter and Casper to to found this company that because we thought well there's so much potential out there. There's so much more we can do in coffee. And you mentioned your co-founders and you've actually got an incredible array of skills amongst the three of you because you're not the only champion in the team. No, Casper won the World Cup Tasting Championship in 2008 when it was actually income here. So we had that the home turf advantage in you the taste of the more. Yeah. So it's you know, I'm good at brewing. He's good at tasting and Peter is really good at sourcing and the whole development. Yeah. Part of it. I think that might have even been part of my caption that I was putting up there. I was like the 2007 cup tester. Yeah, you're having. I like it. He's already dropping the names back in 2010. What can I say? You know, people are coming to me for this information. Yeah. And so that's kind of where coffee collective started and was kind of originated from. But what does it kind of look like now? What's the shape of the business? Yeah. So I think I'll just go back and start with one other thing right from the beginning before I go to where we are today. And that that was the whole premise of starting the company because one thing was like seeing how much was to develop on the serving side of brewing coffee and creating experiences for guests. But what really frustrated us back then was the whole sourcing side of things. So we had a lot of experience going to origin already at that point. And we saw that you know, you'd go to visit farmers in Ethiopia and the caragua. And they were really struggling making a financial income. And there was an absurdity to us that at one end I could be on a stage presenting coffee in this world barista champion sitting and I could go travel.
to Seattle and Tokyo and do talks about coffee. So there was this whole celebration part of it, but at the other end, founders were struggling to make ends meet. And it frustrated us so much that it was actually part of why we started the company. We sat down and cleaned the paper and started thinking about, what can we do to fix this absurdity? And so the whole company actually grew from these ideas about what do we need to do to fix this broken value chain? And we wrote down some ground rules for ourselves that I'll come into a little later. But that was actually how it started. We didn't start it because we wanted to start a business or make money or anything. It was literally because we just didn't see any other solution in our market than starting our own company. And so that's how it started and started really small. It started with that, our own little pocket money and a little shed out there. And then it's grown to where it is today, which is eight shops, seven income higging and one in all who's and a bakery as well. It's own entity in itself in some ways that also provide all our coffee shop with freshly baked pastry and bread. Yeah. So that's where we are today. I think we counted about 150 employees in the company. So it's grown a little bit from three guys roasting in a show. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got those cafes of your own, but you also wholesale and sell e-commerce online, right? Yes, exactly. So we wholesale, I think we have a little above 420 partners, wholesale-wise and some very, you know, very big clients, local in Copenhagen, others are multi-roaster coffee shops all over the world. We sent to I think 50 different countries now, which I couldn't even name 50 different countries, I think Britain. And the same with the web shop, we have subscription service that goes out to pretty much everywhere in the world where we can ship to. So that's a big, so it's kind of like those three legs of the company, it's the coffee shops wholesale and the web shop where the subscriptions is a huge part. Probably a little easier from Denmark than it is from Australia. There's probably a few places that are real-place. Yeah. Yeah. Well, shipping is actually tough because Denmark is a tiny little country. We're about 5 and 1/2 million people. So as a country, international shipping rates, we don't have a lot of power to negotiate. So it's quite expensive to ship from you. But fortunately, we've had an EU that makes a lot of the local markets a lot more accessible. And yeah. Well, that's great. I mean, there's one of the reasons that we've got you on today is we really want to have a discussion and kind of get your insights into that kind of process of choosing what coffees that you offer out to the market, whether it be wholesale or kind of web shop. Because it's such an interesting discussion. I think a lot of people and roasteries kind of evolve and add things organically, but not maybe with a huge amount of strategy to them. So we kind of want to look at like, how can we get that a little bit better? So to dig into that, can you walk us through the process for a coffee collective? How do you go about selecting, roasting and selling? How do you release that coffee at coffee collective? Yeah. So I think the selection part is, you know, starts very much at origin for us. So we always get asked like, how do you find coffees? And it's actually a hard question to just answer because it's in such a multitude of ways. Sometimes it is, you know, getting on a claim, go to an origin, visit, you know, different exporters, different cupping labs. Maybe you already have some farmer connections or someone to reach out to and you meet up with them. Other times it's someone reaching out to us and, you know, we had one farmer we worked with for a number of years who found us on Instagram and he sent us pictures of his fresh picked cherries and the selection looks so good that we were like, this could be interesting. And his like kind of proactive element really spoke to us. So, you know, you can find it in the multitude of ways and I think sometimes it's also very much network based. So if you know people in the industry and you have good access, they will recommend you to go, this is someone. If they meet a really good farmer that is producing high quality but they can't buy all of their best quality, they will, you know, that roaster might actually give us a quality. Listen guys, this person is doing an amazing job. You guys should get in on it. And then from a kind of like a menu perspective, from the beginning we were more interested in trying to see what is out there in terms of flavors in the coffee universe. So we've never really been interested in just putting needles in a world map and just cover like all the areas because like in our experience, you can actually find really vast difference of coffee flavors even within one country. Like, look at Ethiopia. Like the multitude of different kinds of flavors you can get just from Ethiopia is astonishing. And you can do the same in a lot of different countries. So we think very much about our menu that there should be things going in different directions. We should have something that's widely acidic. We should also have something that's low in acidity. We should have something that's fruity, something that's floral, something that's more chucklely and caromily. And in that way, try to have like a broad menu that speaks to different people. And also something that, you know, I don't want to drink the same coffee every day, you know, you want to explore and taste different things. You want to have a natural, sometimes we also want to have a wash and a honey process and so on. So that's what we kind of look for in terms of like building the menu. And when we go to origin, I think the, you know, the very key that we look at is of course, these very basic things of a clean cup. Like it must be clean. It must be free of defects. It has to have a very clean profile. It has to have higher sweetness, you know, you have to look for like fully ripe cherries being picked on a really solid level of sweetness that's uniform and then very low bitterness. And I think those three things, right, every grocery can agree to that. That's nothing new. But I've also realized throughout the years that one of the things that Peter Casper and I share is a very high sensitivity to bitterness. It's as if we are like super sensitive to bitterness. So that's really also put a line in the kind of coffees that we've searched for throughout the years. And some coffees that other people might love, it just don't speak to us. And we want to present coffees that we love and care about and that excites us. It's much easier to sell something you're excited about. So in some ways, there's this out of the copying sheet kind of score of, does it excite us? Is this really something that, yeah, we've got to bring this back and share with our customers? And that's something that can be hard to put into a copying sheet. That's super interesting. Would you say that there are any coffees on your offering that are maybe more decided by the customers or you trying to fill that gap? Or do you think everything across your menu is like, we just want to tell this story and this is our story to tell the producer as well. But as in, you want to share what you like. I think we, there's a basic principle for us that we're going through the way that we source and everything that we also, we have to be able to like the people behind it. You have to meet them and you have to be, these are awesome people. And there's so many awesome people out there in the coffee producing countries. It's, I often feel like it's overwhelming how much amazing coffee and how many amazing producers are out there. And that's part of it. Like you have to want to represent them. You have to want to like have that feeling of like, I really wish I could take this farmer in the hands and have them go meet all my customers back. So there's certainly that element to it as well. I think like we're not really dictated by a thought of what will people like. There was a premise for us from the beginning that we just want to serve the kind of coffee that we like. That means that yes, there will be other roasters who will have other coffees, there will be customers who would prefer like a darker roast than we do or sometimes, you know, a different profile than we offer. But it's just kind of like, you can't cater to everyone. You like, we have to carve out what we think is our sort of niche in this specialty coffee market. And again, it's really hard to sell something if you're not excited about it. So I would say all the coffees on the menu are coffee that excites us in some way or another. You think there's any danger out there for coffee roasters who are listening to say, I'm not going to listen to my customer base. I'm not going to care about what my market enjoys or not. Absolutely. And it's not to say that we don't listen and we don't care about the customers. I think that's exactly what you are saying. Yeah, I get that. I totally get that. But I think there's a big difference in just trying to cater to everyone and then listening to the customers that you're getting in. I mean, when we started in coffee, there's a lot of learnings for us as a young barista. I mean, we all started as baristas. So that was our entry into the coffee world. And I think that it's still such a fundamental part of who we are is that we've been there, you know, on the 10 hour shifts, you know, with Lex Herding and we've seen customers coming in. And one of the things that people would often say to us, you know, other industry people was like, are they customers? They can't taste the difference or they don't care about that. Or they just want the balance coffee. They don't want your fruity opinion. But our experience as baristas was, that's not true. They absolutely can't taste the difference. I mean, we had customers coming in saying, like, it's funny that your single latte tastes different than the one down the road. Here's is, I don't know how to describe it.
For me, maybe more ashy, I was like, absolutely, you're completely correct. Other people might say, or singolati, you're going to drown out the coffee flavor. No one can taste the difference. And this customer just put on the exact words that we would put on as industry professionals of why our light roast was different than the super dark roasts down the street. We had customers coming in tasting two different micro regions in Kenya and tasting the different to train in Miri and a Kareniaka coffee and they would put words on it that again would be the same as we put on. So it's something that I've grown out with is that do never underestimate the customers. They are much, much and we have to give them much more credit than we're giving them. They're much more clever. They're much more adapt to tasting than people give them credit for. That was our basis, yeah, that we want to speak to them at the level they're at. And of course not everyone is into a micro lot. Some people just want balanced, nice coffee. So we have that on the menu because sometimes I want a nice balanced coffee as well. So yeah, I hope you get my point that it's, I really have a lot of respect for the customers. But you also have to, I think, do what you believe in. So it's a balanced and act. And if you just go out and ask people what they want and build your menu of that, I think you might end up with something that's very bland. I think that sometimes you just have to put things out there and see what people like. And then of course listen to them. And I mean, one easy way as a road to listen to your customers is to see what sells. What are people, what are they excited about? What do people come back to buy, right? And I think the difference of what you're doing is you're selling what you want, but you're taking the effort to be excited about it, be communicated and talk with your customers and share this experience. And like you said with your producer, it's the same for your customer. If your customer can say that you're excited about it, that's going to get them excited about it. Exactly. It's actually, it's so we, we, a while into our company, we wrote down our call values as a company. And number one is to share the coffee experiences that excite us with as many people as possible. So that there's that element of it that never exclude people beforehand. Think about this coffee community that everyone is welcome. The single latte drink coming in with the train who'd never had specialty coffee before, they should get the best service in the world. They should feel welcome. They should feel like you take their hand and it's like, yes, you get your single latte. We're totally cool with that. You can put in sugar. You can have more milk, whatever you want. And here's a little taste of something you didn't expect. Or here's a little information you didn't know about coffee or next time you come in, I want to show you your cavercino because you just taste the coffee a little bit more there or maybe we can move you towards a potato or these small steps so that people feel like you want the best for them, but you never ever want to talk down to them. Yeah, I love that. We've been talking about that a lot in different episodes of just how much we want to support the kind of consumers in enjoying that experience and meet them where they're at and guide them along the journey. As if you talk down to them or you overload them with all this data that they don't want to that point as well, it can be equally as bad. And we just lose people where they could be having a really enjoyable experience. Yeah. I mean, if you think about why people go to a coffee shop most of the time, it's to go to relax and enjoy something and they love the whole element of someone taking care and brewing the coffee, you know, get away from the computer. And so the information, the knowledge we give them should build underneath that experience. It shouldn't be something that's put on top their heads. It should be something that makes them appreciate that cup more. Yeah. And you obviously mentioned one of your key values and I know that in coffee collectively, you ever mentioned the formation of it was almost born out of this purpose-driven focus. Can you tell us a little bit about what the other values are at collective and then also how they translate into the actual coffee products or the coffee offering? Yeah. So the key values and the purpose of the company is try to build something where we can create these extraordinary coffee experiences for people and to say experiences because it goes beyond just brewing the best cup, you know, it's the total experience at the end of enjoyment of coffee. But in a way that can bring more value back to farmers and quite often people challenge us on that. They're like, wait, what are you? Are you about the ultimate cup or are you this do good company that, you know, almost like an NGO? And for me, that's the absurdity because those two things goes hand in hand. We will never be able to get this ultimate cup in the end if it's not for the farmers. The whole premise of us doing anything. If we don't bring value back to them, we don't create the incentive for them to produce these extraordinary coffees. We don't give them the means to keep doing that. And if we don't do that, then how are we going to create these extraordinary coffee experiences? So for us, that was the whole basis to build something that can really provide more value back to the farmers so that we can get to enjoy good coffee, get more money from customers that we bring out to the farmers and have this positive spiral instead. And the way we went about to do that was really to sit down and make some ground rules for ourselves because I think, and I listened to your podcast yesterday with Katie from CounterCulture. And I mean, we share a lot of similarities. There's also some interesting differences. But this approach of doing direct trade, as we also called it for a number of years, was really the foundation. We actually didn't start the company calling it direct trade. We started with some rules for ourselves, which ultimately led to the whole direct trade idea. And the ground rules were saying that, you know, there's a lot of certifications out there that put a lot of strains on the farmers, where we actually don't think it's fair to ask anything from farmers other than their product until we in the consuming walls start to pay well for the coffee. We pay well, then yes, we can start to have some demands. But until we just pay what we should be paying, I don't think we have any asking rights. So that was what we said, downhill griddle, we have to make a business model where we, as it's public, have set cut out the middleman. And by doing that, are able to pay more directly to the farmers. We also realized based on our experience that we also have to have a more eye to eye relationship with the farmers, meeting more as equal trading partners, kind of similarly to how we would meet with our cup supplier or our back supplier. We don't meet with them as, you know, the big buyers that have all the purchasing power. We meet with them and they state a price and we'll be like, okay, can we negotiate that or can we negotiate terms and what do you have to offer and so on. It's a very mutual relationship. That's not how the coffee industry in general works. But that's kind of what we want that approach to be that we meet with them. We talk with them. We respect what they do, but they also have some power in terms of putting their price and saying to us, we think you should pay more for the coffee. We'll say back, yes, we think we should too. How can we raise the quality so we can look at our customers in the eyes and say, you should also be paying more for this coffee because it's more delicious. And yeah, and that's so that was the approach. And what men, we also said, we have to go visit farmers every year. We have to build trust. We have to build a relationship where if we just do it once in a while and it becomes just a marketing thing, that doesn't work for us. We have to build something where they also gain the confidence that they won't lose us as a customer if they push us a little bit. They have to feel like it's a trustworthy relationship. Now, there are certain values you believe Oroces should consider when sourcing their grain coffee. Obviously, we talked about how everyone can do it a little differently, but are they kind of core principles that you think everyone should stick to? Yeah, I think the main value or responsibility as a roaster should be to try and track the money all the way to the farmer. That's it. And of course, pay well. But one thing is that a lot of I've yet to meet a roaster who don't think they pay well for a coffee. But I've also yet to meet a coffee farmer who thinks maybe with a few exceptions now, I guess we're out of who thinks they get what they should for their coffee, right? So there's a discrepancy there. And I think that, you know, I think you should take it on yourself as a roaster to actually track the money. It's not to say you have to do direct trade. You can buy through importers, but you should ask importers to provide full transparency on the money flow. And when I say money flow, it is because you actually need to have a little bit of a due diligence. You have to check out that, you know, it's not just an invoice for a parent company in Switzerland. You have to track that the money actually gets down to the bank account as a farmer. And what is the FOB price might not translate to that producer price. So yeah, some due diligence there. I think that's what we should all be asking ourselves. But beyond that, when it kind of goes now down to the customer, how do you make your customer care about your values? Yeah, I definitely think you need to. Customers are, again, they're more clever than we give them credit for. Customers nowadays, you know, they look at the rights you think when they make a purchasing decision. It's of course, it's the brand. It's how it makes them feel, first and foremost. So that feeling can come from the ultra nice aesthetics, or it can come from really good service, or it can come from a wonderful, amazing flavor they like in the cup. But it can certainly also come.
from a feeling that I trust this company and they're aligned with my values of trying to make the world a slightly better place, even though that might sound very grand. I think that is ultimately what we are trying to achieve. We're trying to fix something that is broken, trying to leave this planet a slightly better place than where we found it. And so I think we try to communicate that in a variety of ways. And it's something that I certainly don't think we have when we found the perfect answer to how we make every guest in the coffee shop know what we're doing behind the scene. At the same time, I also think there's something kind of nice and sweet about a customer just coming into a coffee shop because they like the service, the aesthetics, the flavor, they like the vibe. And then they come back and they come over time and then you know on their fifth list, suddenly they see a little poster about a new coffee being launched and they see that, wait a minute, there's like a tasting going on and they join that tasting. There's an excited barista talking about this coffee and bringing them into the world of like, oh that's what that name means, Moologatia. That's actually the farmer. Okay. And oh he lives in Ethiopia in this region and oh you went to visit him? Wow. And you start to talk about his growing of the farm and his livelihood and how we pay him and oh wait a minute. So you pay him this much but what what is the other grocery down the street to? Or what is the what is the translation into when I go to the supermarket and they have this offer for fallbacks at the discounted price and suddenly you get the ballroom and it's a very long kind of journey for a customer. But my experience is that when you when you get people into this world in that way, suddenly they're like holy shit. I didn't know all this. That's amazing and you do all this work behind the scene and it creates this loyalty that is just on another level in that's what I mean. And so that's talking a lot about that final consumer in the cafes, which is awesome. How do you tackle that when it comes to wholesale? Right. I've done a lot of wholesale coffee sales and you have cafe owners coming up and saying, okay, so what can you offer me? You know, what are I interested in? And they've always got the checklist of like, you know, selection of products of price per kilo of technical support, all the other stuff. But what about the values? How do you kind of say steer them towards this and say, this is important. This is what you're buying into. I think it's been easier for us because the values were so embodied in the company right from the beginning. So for a number of years, we've just had so many customers who approached us. Our wholesale director of assets. It's been a little bit like fish jumping in the boat. And so we didn't like we were known for the values we were known for this. So that attracted people natural to our company. But of course, as competes and have grown, we've also had to be more extrovert in how we communicate those values. And it goes like through the whole company, we put it on the backs. Like, what do we pay to customers? We publish our transparency report every year where we show the length of relationship with the farmers. We show what we paid to each individual farmer, the amount that we bought and everything. So there's a lot of communication going out that is about these values. And I think also because we have had so much direct to consumer communication, I think a lot of wholesale customers are also starting to feel that wait a minute, our consumers are actually demanding this of us. So we have to demand it at our suppliers as well. And that's been a fortunate thing for us. It's very cool. Well, obviously in an ideal world, right? All roasters will have these same values that they can really hold to. But you know, the certainly the conversation in Australia roasters are under a lot of pressure. The market is obviously quite different for the sea price and the green coffee market globally. Our North American listeners are there with, you know, getting hit with tariffs and all kinds of crazy things. And I can feel the internet roasters warming up their key boards to make comments to us here. I will like yes, this is all great. But things get really complicated and really expensive. Have there been been any points with collective where you've really been challenged about like how do we hold to these or do business? You know, there's an either or situation. Yeah, I think I mean, we've also had to adapt to the market like like everyone else over the years. I think with the market is currently we probably have a luxurious position that way that we've always paid so much more than where the sea market peaks at. So we haven't really felt that push in and contrary, it's actually a good position for us because it just means that everyone else will be pushed to increase their prices. So we become more price competitive in that way, right? So, you know, it's and it's a good talk for us to have with customers when they talk about how you affected about these prices. We can say, well, we're not really that affected because we've always paid really high prices and we will continue to pay high prices to the farmers when it drops again. I think where we've been more challenged throughout the years and you know, sticking with our values is working directly with farmers means that we have to buy, you know, the full harvest once they're done and put it in storage and sell it over the coming year or half a year, depending on how the coffee keeps, right? So that's putting a lot of your liquidity into green coffee storage that the bank has always thought was nuts. They were like, why can't you just do like everyone else in order to pallet at a time from an importer? Be much better, you can, you know, manage your liquidity and we said, well, no, that's not our values. We want to buy it directly. That means we have to put money to this. That means we don't have money to do all this marketing or buy crispy is a t-shirt. We have to put into the green stock. But it is a challenge also as we grow, that you know, it's a lot of money being tied up in green storage and we still funded ourselves with the help of a bank that is fortunately being kind to lend us that liquidity. But it's definitely a challenge and with that challenge as well, buying directly, we also wanted to build volume on each of the farmers that we work with because just buying like a few bags doesn't really help the farmers. It also makes transportation costs very expensive. It also means that, and you talk with Katie about this going to or it's into visit them becomes too big an expense if you don't have the volume, right? Because that expense, you kind of have to spread over each bag and coffee sold basically. So at a certain point in our company history, we were down to having like three coffees on the menu. And I actually remember at one point, it was kind of devastating. We had like a couple of weeks where we had two coffees from Brazil on the menu. That's not great. That's none of the stuff I was talking about in the beginning about the riotier flavor and you can come in and taste the universe. It's like nope, that was really bad. And it was like due to, it was actually due to our own success. It was from opening a shop that became so much more busy than we had ever dared to hope for that. I mean, we sold out of all the coffees. When you don't want to just buy from an importer, you can't just order and fill up your stock. And that was us sticking to our values even though it honestly did hurt us a bit to not have this great menu. But we learned from it. And now I think we have a really great menu that rotates much more frequently. I think we release about 40 different coffees throughout the year. So now there's always something for everyone basically. I think having those core guiding principles from the very start, make it again part of the storytelling though. Like when people are coming in, you've only got two Brazilians on. You're kind of like, this is because we work in this way where we're getting it directly from farmers. We can't just top it up. We've got this. But if you come back in a month or whenever it is, we're going to have a whole new selection for you to go from how long it takes. So I think those kind of things keep adding to your story though, even if it's a downfall, it's still cool part of your brand brand history. People to realize that, oh, coffee's a seasonal product and a farmer harvests only once a year and all these things that a lot of consumers accidentally don't know about. So yeah, you can use it as an opportunity for engagement. We're doing a Brazilian showcase this week, people. I know that in the collective's lineup, so you have house blends. So you have a blend that's focused towards milk and you also do microlots. Is that correct? Yeah. So we actually want to have one blend, our espresso blend. And it's not technically completely true. We only have one blend that you'll ever see. We do have a secret blend that only goes out to like staff coffee at restaurants or which is basically the stuff that we can't sell. The microlots that got too old or a misroads and so on. That'll go out as a secret blend, but it will never go to an end consumer. So yeah, I mean, and it's sold. I mean, it's still coffee that we bought at a really great price to the producer. It's still ethically good, but we sell it at, you know, obviously cost price, but it goes out that way. So our espresso blend can always maintain its quality. It doesn't become like a dump for old coffee or so anything, but that's the only blend we do. And it's we really love doing single origin espresso and we've always focused on single origin for all our filter coffees. That's really cool. I mean, you talking about that kind of dump blend, which I'm sure is still delicious, maybe it's really high quality coffee. It's maybe just not riding the peak. I've been thinking for a while, I'm like, I'd love to do like a lucky dip like the cosy coffee or something like the cost of living coffee where for
cheaper amount, like we do it in a white bag, no branding, no anything. Everything is as stripped back and as cheap as possible. And it's just like whatever like spot, like whatever coffees were left over or this or that, we can offer it a really affordable price for people to get into. Like, especially coffee can be hard to step into sometimes at that price point, but it sounds like that coffee you'd be offering would be perfect for that. The best, you know, not for normally for sale, blend out there. Yeah. The sleep for blend. Exactly. Sometimes it's a little too good. Hey, yeah, yeah, like this is left lifting the bar a little too high. I'm so how to blend and single origin serve different purposes for your customers and your business model. I mean, I think that the blend for us originally was actually a little bit, I would say selfish, a little bit of the roasts' playground as well, to try to also create something, you know, kind of like a chef gets to create a dish for the roastry team. It was also a way of, you know, blending different coffees to create an outcome that would be different. And when we started out, we had two blends. One was like more like fruity and adventurous. And the other one was just more balanced and sweet. Then after a number of years, we realized we actually didn't need that fruity blend because we have so many single origin coffees like, you know, Keeney espresso from Kenya. That's like a fruit bomb of, you know, dark berries and stuff. So just let that play on its own. And then the blend that we do now is more focused on just creating something as more uniform and balanced and sweet and kind of pleasing in a way. And it's kind of like the go-to option from milk beverages in the coffee shops. And then we always have, you know, a single origin you can chew from that would rotate. And the blend also changes about, I would say probably about every three months, there's something that changes in that. Again, depending on seasonality, but it could also be that we feel like now it's summer time. Let's do a blend that's a little, kind of a little bit more acidity, a little bit more freshness. And then when's the time we can turn a little bit more trouble being caromelian and so on. I was just going to say, which is kind of here, I guess, like a little bit, how people treat the seasonal blend, but you're treating like the whole menu, like a chef's menu where you're like, this is what we have, this is what's fresh, this is what's tasting good. And we're putting it together for you. It feels like a way more honest, an interesting way of doing it, whereas I don't know if it's the same in Denmark, whether you guys are just truly unique, I'm going to say truly unique, but it feels like here, there is a lot more of that, like we have to have that base model for everyone to enjoy. And then maybe over on the side, we'll play around a little bit, but it's so cool to see that coming in every part of your offering. Yeah, but it's also again, it goes back to why we started the company because we came from a company where we was like that, we were spending 90% of the time on doing like blends and some private labels, we didn't really feel excited about and so on. So we really created this to just kind of work with the coffees that again excites us. If you were talking with, or there's probably a whole heap of existing and potential new upcoming roasters who are listening to the podcast now, if you were to give them some advice on how they should look at setting up their first lineup of kind of coffees that they would take out to market, do you have any kind of top tips that you'd say you really need to consider this? Yeah, I would say like again, steer away from just the world map and steer more into like look at the flavor wheel or something and think about how can coffees point in different directions. I would also say like it's a key thing for us to always try to have, you know, some naturals under menu and hopefully like a honey process at times as well. So you also can talk about processing methods and I mean, for me processing is one of the biggest differentiators in terms of creating flavor. And just to put it out there, I rarely drink naturals at home. I drink like 99% washed coffees, but that really doesn't mean that I can appreciate a natural and that like I still want to serve really good naturals and anaerobic naturals. Like I want the the cleanest sweet natural. I also want some that is quite fruity and funky to put out there again, you've changed. You've changed. I know. I know. Yeah. Is this just because the naturals we're getting right now are admittedly so I was like damn good. Yeah, you could say so damn good. Like okay, good, good, good. I'm finally actually finding myself enjoying naturals, which you know, hey, there we go. I think I need me a long while. When I first met this guy, he was like, no, defect, defect terrible. Why would you go for this dirty, dirty brew? Wait, okay. So if you're offering all that, who is it? Who else is it on your team? Then it's like in naturals. And because you're talking about how you're only offering what you love. Yeah, there are any of the. And Peter, I should say is responsible for our sourcing. They have been much more into like getting some of these naturals. They are also very strict. I should say like it has to be quite clean. We don't buy the like the over processed like really funky stuff. And the ones that we're buying right now are like amazingly different in terms of they don't turn into like the minigurri kind of acidity. They actually maintain that kind of citric acidity of the washed coffee. But then you add that body and that the kind of intensity of a natural. And there's a wonderful strawberry aromas that I haven't had in like 12 years from Ethiopia in some of these coffees. That's cool. So I had a friend, a coffee friend of mine who when I told him that we were going to be on the podcast together, he said, really, what I want to know is why doesn't collective just do a filter roast? Because wouldn't fit the whole use for, you know, the Scandinavian espresso profile, the high acid profile anyway. So is that, do you sell more espresso or filter or do you just do one roast? No, we don't do omnirosts as his call. We actually separate the two. And I think it's, it's, I mean, I really want to talk down about omnirost. I think it can be a place to go ahead. Yeah. But I just think for us in our experience, again, we think we can do a better job out of both if we separated because some people believe espresso is just yet another kind of extraction method. I believe espresso is a very, very different kind of extraction method than basically all the rest. Because you add a layer of pressure as you means of extraction that you don't really have in other, you know, just soluble based extractions. And so if we have to, if we had to do omnirost and just do filter roast, I'll be very concerned and worried about how is that going to extract as espresso? How are we going to make it soluble and how are we going to make it still somehow taste balanced at the very end? And that would mean that I would take my filter roast and I would roast them differently. Whereas removing that from the equation, it allows us to focus on roasting the filter coffees as light as we want, developing that acidity and the aromatics in the coffees as much as we want. And on the other end, on espresso, we can develop still keeping aromas, but, you know, balance out some of the acidity, make them more soluble, make them where you actually also get intensity texture, mouth feel, out of those coffees. So I'm a strong advocate for, you know, separating the two and allowing us to do both. And it's, yeah, it's hard if you're a small rosary because it means you have to sell out batches. And I think that's the reason a lot of roasted doob omnirost because it's just easier. I have to think about two different labels and bags and, you know, that's one sell out and so on. And I mean, we managed, as I mentioned, beginning, we started really small. So I think you can find ways around it. And I think the key thing that I'm learning from this is sitting down and putting in that hard effort right at the start of your core principles. What are you going to live by and push towards? Because I think with that, that's when you can be like, oh, maybe we should just do it this way. Or maybe it'd be easier if we do that. But you guys had some key defining things that kind of led you on a journey. So talking about helping some people that are listening and you're talking about the roast there, what are some common mistakes that you've seen some roasters make with their coffee offering? And what's something that people could avoid if they may be getting into it? I mean, this, like some mistakes that I see roasters do is not to trust their own palette. So they listen a little bit too much to consultant or things they read online and they start to steer in certain directions. Then suddenly they're chasing really high extraction yields. So they'll start to roast darker to increase their extraction yields instead of just trying to develop their own palette and try to develop like, how does it actually taste? I feel very, very lucky working with Casper and Peter in this company because they are so good at that. Admittedly, I could be that guy who would be out there and chasing something. But they're just like, I don't care. I don't care what some guy wrote online or what a new so-do scientific thing is saying this tastes better. And as I mentioned, Casper's really good at tasting. So and he trusts himself. So I think as a roaster, just really work on holding your skills of tasting and then let that be your guide throughout everything you do. That's a great tip. What would you like to say more of in coffee offerings? Like in roasters around the world, say kind of putting things out there. What do you want to say more of? I'm going to sound like a cliche now. I want to see more of just clean, washed coffees. And I mean it in the way that it doesn't have to be like, I think we got to start appreciating like all coffees. Like also, the really balanced,
Guatemala and Costa Ricans washed coffees. It doesn't all have to be gaseous and asales and new varieties. There's something really beautiful about just a really nice pebón or even a like a field blend of no typical varieties where you get like just a sweet clean, balanced coffee. It might not be these standout aromas but it has that like full clean cup coffee aroma. It has like hints that maybe chocolate and caramel and good nut leaners, not bad nutting essence. But where you kind of just like this is a coffees coffee. And I mean we are promoting so many different things in various the championships especially. We're promoting a certain style of coffee in admittedly our reigns as well. We're promoting like really wild coffees on our pink bags. You hear about competition coffees, about luxury coffees and so on. But that middle range out actually like us to see us as an industry promote that a little bit because it's really delicious. Like I love drinking a good balanced coffee on a Sunday morning at home in the garden. I don't necessarily need to be bombarded all the time right. And I've seen it in the beer industry. Like I followed the beer industry for many years. You know then they had IPAs was all the rage. Then it was sour. Then it was like darker beer right now. They're all talking about pilsner. Just a good clean pilsner. It's kind of the same right. It's like sometimes you just want something that just soothed you right. So I think let's let's try to work on that as an industry. I brought a bag of washed coffee into the studio before the podcast today and everyone was just so excited. They're like oh yes just a washed Colombian. It's kind of rare sometimes to find it. It's great. Especially when you work in the industry and you go to other people. Everyone wants to show you something that's like wild and in your face and doing them. I can have two sips of it and then I've had enough. Whereas you know a nice clean washed I'm like I can actually sit and sip on this and want to have another cup and want to enjoy it more. Mate you've talked a lot about how a coffee collective is grown and you've had this great success which is amazing. And I think if we look back you know 10, 15 years we've seen some coffee businesses really expand in size which is great. Is there a risk that scale can destroy the quality of a coffee's offering? Yeah absolutely a big risk. I talk about this quite a lot also in turning the company and with others about how when you grow and you become a chain like how many of you are excited about chains? Like I've always had this inherent kind of like chains that's not great. But we are a chain and we took a conscious decision many years ago to say do when we want to grow we always knew we wanted to grow as a company also to support farmers more. If we keep it small we're never going to have a big impact on farmers. So we wanted to grow and one model was growing and doing different businesses like different small entities and kind of masquerading a little bit as you know single operators. We feel like nah that's not really it doesn't speak true with us. We also actually want to grow the brand in a way where people can recognize the quality and what we're doing on a broader scale. And I think our success and what we want to achieve is to grow in scale but also grow in quality. And it means putting in resources into everything we do you know into barista training, machinery, educational programs and also educating the consumers. But of course as you grow you need more coffee. It can be hard to source those kind of micro lots that we could buy previously. So good example is that we we have worked since basically the inception of our company with one farm in Guatemala called Finkelevis de Amosa, a guy called Edwin Martinez. And it's not a big farm. It's a medium sized farm in where it's an angle in Guatemala. And he we used to present like the single fields from his farm one at a time rolling it out. So you could take the idli micro lot and the vista de Amosa like micro lot because we thought it was cool. You know over time we realized that's really tricky because it's communication. It's education. It's telling you know 100 baristas what is the difference between this field and this field. And something in the cup profile that you wouldn't really be able to pick out unless you have them next to each other. So we decided to say well let's like we blend these micro lots from that farm. It's still a single farm might do. It's not like and it's just a medium sized farm. So it is still like a very small lot but it just makes more sense. And now I think we you know we're at that position where we do need volume when we launch something. It is it is a lot of work to launch a coffee and you know do marketing material. Educated baristas about how did this like what created this coffee who's the farmer behind. And if you launch something and you only have it on the shelves for like one week. It's not really worth it like it's not profitable to put all that money into it. And so there is a risk as we grow that these outtrims these lots that we're buying need to become bigger and bigger. And it's something we're trying to address by having a line of you know smaller micro lots coffees on our pink bags that people will know they're only there for very limited time. And then on our regular filter range which is no less good. They're just coffees that you can be guaranteed. You can come in back in a month and you can still drink this delicious washed Ethiopian or whatever it is. It is funny when you start coming up with your own rolls like the pink bag. And then that becomes like well that must be the good coffee then you're like no no it's all good. I'm just trying to let you know this might not be around. The other stuff is still spot on. Yeah. I'm so. Exactly. We've talked about the values. We've talked about the actual bands. It's kind of going beyond the bands now. First up how do you know if your coffee offering is working? I mean you can always look at your sales numbers and see how you're. It's a good place to start selling it. If they were buying it. Yep. Yep. I mean that's your telltale sign. A good KPI to have. But I think for us it's one of the benefits and one of the reasons we also wanted our own coffee shops. It's because then you get this direct feedback. Where I mean if you're relying only on wholesale customers that can be more difficult. At least you have to work more in ways of setting up a feedback culture where you get honest feedback from those wholesale clients. In the coffee shops you get this immediate feedback. You can see what does the customers feel? How are they? I think like a small example are they actually finishing the whole cup or do they leave like half on the table? Because they can't finish it. If that happens quite a few times that's like uh-oh something is off here. When you have really good breaches who engage with customers those breaches can funnel that feedback up you know all the way to back to the sourcing team so they can learn about it. And we do a lot of like internal things. I have meetings by weekly meetings with the whole bar management group where all we talk about for an hour is quality. But none of the day-to-day operations that happens with a different manager on a different meeting. We just talk and focus on quality. So we can get feedback to Casper who runs the grocery. He is there pretty much every day with the whole roasting team around the copying table talking about that. He can funnel feedback back to Peter and his two guys and the country responsible people on the sourcing side of things and talk about which coffee works which doesn't work which has eight terribly which has actually been come better as they were in storage for a few months like some of the Ethiopians do. So I think yeah that feedback culture all the way from the end is really instrumental in knowing Dasha and you work. Have you ever looked at other coffee offerings and thought well that choice was a bit of a waste of time? Oh yes. It can get a point but I mean I look at some some roastries offering and just thinking what is going on. I know this size of the operation how they able to put out 30 different coffees and all these really wild things at one time. How does that compute? It doesn't work in my mind. Either they're really buying just one back of every coffee from every importer and just roasting like micro roasting or something. Or and then if you do that how do you work on your roast profiles like how do you actually like get to know a coffee and dial that coffee in your roast profile and make sure that you get the most out of it like as a breeze then knowing the importance of dialing in your espresso the dialing in of the roasting I think is just as important. So there's sometimes a look at those menus and it doesn't really make sense in my mind but they're selling coffee so it's really not to judge. There's something I can't make a sense of. And I think what I hear from that is when you see if you're a roastry that has a huge range of offerings and maybe people have already made that decision but if you're thinking about how many offerings do I need to have I think Classe's point here that is really important to bring home is that there's a whole heap of costs and considerations about bringing a coffee to market whether it be all the marketing collateral all the design work all of the internal staff training the QC QA that you only get with a minimum throughput right like if you're only touching it every now and then this can't control that and so yeah I completely agree that excessive range often does more to hinder than it does to help and so you know Classe you kind of talk about those feedback loops
And you also talked about how widely dispersed your coffee is from a wholesale and e-commerce kind of the web shop point of view. What's the most surprising piece of feedback that you've received from coffee as it goes out into the world? Hmm. That's a good question. What is the most surprising? It was an Australian. One thing? It was ordered in double restorative. Yeah. I think one of the surprising things has been actually from some wholesale customers in terms of like that they've been very adamant in asking for lower acidity in coffees. Where I mean, I'm all about acidity in coffee. I think acidity is what makes a coffee come to life. I think acidity is the backbone in some ways of really good coffees, of course, with a lot of sweetness. I also think that quite often people mistake acidity for bitterness. And sometimes what they're actually just looking for is not less acidity. It's just more sweetness in a coffee. So that's been surprising as sort of the feedback where they were asking for something that we are not really looking for. And then of course what has really surprised me sometimes we put a coffee on the website and then seeing that people in far away places like in Hong Kong and Seoul and Tokyo order like 20 bags of our like most expensive gaysia and like pay through the roof for shipping and they just wanted. To the degree where I'm like, whoa, this is crazy. And we actually had to put a cap and a limit on single orders of some of these coffees because I mean, we want to share it with as many people as possible. We don't want to just like one person taking like half our stock and maybe reselling it or something or yeah. Now this is a question to kind of help our listeners and roast the families that are out there outside of the green coffee itself. What are the crucial cost considerations you have to make? So we're looking at like F.I.B. marketing, packaging. What are the things you have to think about there? I mean, there's a lot of things as you mentioned like shipping rates, you know, went through the roof a number of years ago. Packaging material can be very expensive as well. It's one of the reasons why we like try to actually minimize our packaging material. It's both cost but also the sustainable part of it and not have too many boxes and things around it. I think you really have to think about like what do you need to put into marketing as well? Like it might seem like this simple thing but you know, doing a launch video and recording that and editing it and sending it out. That's a lot of hours of work for each individual coffee. We write, you know, for subscriptions, we write a subscription newsletter that is put out with it with like more information that's supposed to work on the sourcing side of the team that have to get that information, putting it into writing. Because someone with a marketing have to like, you know, write it nicely and put it up. Of course in the QC part of it in the grocery, you know, you will have occasionally a mis-roast, something that you're not entirely happy with. That is money out the window for you as a roaster. So I think there's a lot of, you know, there's a lot of cost inherent in the product. It's one of those things that when we started putting the, you know, opening our books and putting the money that we're paying to the farmers out there. You kind of worry that the customer will be looking at that price and say, "When I'm in it, you pay this and like calculate the difference and be like, I'm paying this, what happened?" You know, like you're ripping me off. That's not happened any like a single time, which is actually really surprising. Because people like, first of all, I think people just trust that, okay, they're willing to put this money out there that must mean they're proud and, you know, are paying well. And secondly, people know that there are all these costs inherent in the product before it reaches you at the end. They know that there's like, you know, there's some laws along the way. They might not know that there's an 18% rose from green to rose, but they know that there's expenses and there's salaries and rents and all these things going into the final product. That's great. I mean, I think what we want to probably do is start thinking about the implications as you put together your business model for a roastery or if you're going to change it. And if you're existing, I know how much inertia there is with some roasteries of like, no, we have to offer this whole range. Really have a hard look at like what's actually selling going back to classes like through line in this whole conversation is like, do you actually even crap about it? You know, are you passionate about offering these coffees or this product? Because otherwise you're probably just tick boxing and you're kind of handing the control of your whole business over to the consumers or over to the market to define it. And then you'd end up having like your saying class something a little bit bland. So think about those costs, but also have that passion. Well, we've talked a lot about the background of coffee and some different ideas. What I want us to do is shift our vision here to the future of coffee roasting with a few quick flyer questions for you. We're just looking ahead, looking ahead. So do you have a prediction for us about what the future of coffee holds? Absolutely. I think we'll see more division between luxury competition kind of coffees, specialty coffee. And then of course you'll always have this like need of caffeine commercial kind of coffees out there, but we'll see further division in that. What advice or knowledge do you wish you had when you started coffee collective? They write down everything, write manuals, write procedures, write structures and then stick to it. Doing that right now. Good girl. And what or who has been your biggest inspiration in the coffee industry? Well, this is going to sound like my mom and dad kind of question or answer. But honestly, Peter and Casper are still big inspirations to me. And outside of that, to not just say mom and dad, I really say George Howell has been a huge inspiration in terms of sticking to beliefs. He's an American roaster that everybody on this podcast should know about. Definitely going to check out amazing coffees from hell. If you had to pick one coffee from your offering to drink forever, what would it be? Aga from Yegachiff in Ethiopia. Easy answer right now. I was like quick fire answer right there. I was sure you were going to say Keani, but you know, it's okay. Right now that Aga is just unbelievable. What is one idea or piece of advice that you'd ask a roaser to remember from our discussion today? I'd say believe in that you can also do transparent direct relations with farmers directly. I really think you can do it. We did it when we were in little shit and started with no money. So certainly you can do it too. All right. Just quickly on that though. Are you coming in as a stupid person? Where does the ease of like where you're located and that come in? Is there any difference of getting direct trade based on where you are? I know we had the guys from old quarter on and they were doing specifically like Southeast Asian coffees and that kind of thing. Is there a balance of where you are and how easy that can be? Or I mean, I guess you don't need to because you're not, but if you're going to origin, I guess. I mean, there's challenges in terms of how you define the direct trade process for yourself and what that actually means. And like when we talked with Katie from counter culture, she talked about how the definition of direct trade also included a number of visits over a certain amount of time, which obviously goes into the cost like class was talking about. You have to ameliorate that over all of the coffee you buy. I don't think that there really is kind of a limit necessarily in terms of location. Yes, Australia is very far from everywhere and very expensive. That was my main question. But, hey, Indonesia is in our backyard. Absolutely. Indonesia is super close and has an incredible range of coffees. I think the point is maybe that class is making is you get out there and make direct contact with the people who are directly responsible for producing the coffee and you can do a lot of that work from different sides of the world. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And you can work directly in the number of ways. You can also get direct contact with producers and still work through importers. Again, it goes back to make sure you take them on yourself to trace the money flow back. But that your inherent belief is also that you meet as equals. That means that you got to learn from them. You're not there to tell them how to produce coffee. You there to absorb, learn, bring that knowledge back to your guests, be humble about it and think that you have an opportunity to engage with these people who are producing the premise of everything you get to do. So in joy, that's fuck out all that knowledge that you can. Ben, we've had a few coffees today. Maybe I think I've had eight coffees. I'm starting to feel a little flushed. I'm starting to feel a little hot. A little hot. A little, a little hot. I think it's time for an extra hot take with two sugars. A hot day. There we go. What a segue. I tricked you all with my fake illness. And now it's time. This is the segment on the show, class, where we say a little bit of a hot take around the coffee industry, around our feelings could be on this topic, could be anything. But as you're the guest, I'm going to put you in the hot seat and hear what you have to say. Yeah, I think one thing that's been on my mind lately is this is going to be a hot take that's going to upset some people. I think births that are overrated. Oh, expect further. Tell me more. I think we've been so focused lately online and in breach the communities and so on. On finding exact births, and how they're different, and how they taste, and buying, modded births.
and so on. I think it matters very little for your daily coffee if you're not focused on the quality that you're behind, quality all the way from green to roasting through everything. And even with the same coffees, I feel like there's actually a lot more to gain from looking at your water and other things than just the burset. And I've actually found myself testing out a lot of bursets and going back to the stock burset from a lot of producers. So I'll leave that out there. I know I'm going to get killed in the comments. I think there I think it'll be 50 50. I think there'll be people that'll be like siding with you on that because it is becoming this consumerism thing of just the constant and endless upgrade game of what's the next thing. And even the amount of people I get messaging me who have a great grinder and they're like I need to upgrade grinder. What I'm like what you have is fine. It is fine for what you need. They'll change the bursets. Upgrade to a new one. Just work with what you have and you'll get some great results out of it. Like you said, there are some other things that we can focus on to kind of improve that quality. All right. You want to go next from I'm going to go next and there's I mean this one. I don't know for the comments are going to help you. There may be class will. So no one reads transparency reports and I don't think a lot of people really care. Oh, that's a great hot tag actually. And something that I mean to some extent. Yeah, I think you're right. Like I think when we look at the amount of effort we put into transparency reports and transparency table and try to cram it down people's throat. Think a lot of people like I don't care and I'm just here to enjoy coffee. Does that mean we shouldn't do it? That's the question. And I agree with that. I think it's to your point before you were talking about don't underestimate the customer and don't you know I think they're busy though. I think not everyone can be like I'm going to know the value practices of the cafe that I go to. But I think they look for little virtual signal. They look for signals, right? They look for markers that align with what they need. And if they're going in there and they can trust the people behind the bar and trust that experience. Sure. Sometimes you might get burned and someone's doing something dodgy. But I think they're still looking to do the right thing. They're just maybe not going to read a full report on the traceability of the coffee and where it was grown and how it was and what the person's name is. And I think that's the point is that when you put it out there, you show that you have nothing to hide. Yeah. You buy a close-up action. You also show that everyone who doesn't do that, they have something to hide. So you're telling people that you know, okay, these are trustworthy. They're willing to open their books and these other ones don't do it. So why are they willing to do it? Or do they do something else to to game trust basically? But I feel like you're probably always going to have these people though, right? That they try, like you come in like we're trying to fix a problem and try to do it better. And then people come up with like transparency reports. And then other businesses that aren't trying to do the right thing, like we've got to release a transparency report. That's maybe not super transparent. Yeah. And so it's kind of always left on people like yourselves shoulders to be like, how can we keep pushing further to do the right thing next and come up with a new way? You know, you're chatted with Katie the other way and they're like, well, we couldn't call it direct trade anymore because other people started doing it, not really doing it right. Exactly the same for us. We had direct trade mark in Denmark to try and protect it from the advice that we actually got from counter culture and until the genshi back then because they had already seen it being misused. But then you had a really big international, your own coffee chain from Sweden moving into Denmark. And their lawyers just said, like, are we going to fight you on this? And we were like, don't want that fight. For the next thing you concentrate on what you do. And I think it goes into this like constantly trying to push things. We became becorp certified as I think the 11th business in Denmark, like we're completely first move us now and then slay and Eli is becorp certified. So it doesn't really hold the same value to promote it for us anymore. Doesn't mean we're not proud about having been there, you know, five years before developing pushing it as a as a means of looking more holistically on your company. You just got to constantly push for the next thing as well. Well, my hot take is kind of in a similar thread here. My hot take is that listing FOB prices on your coffee bags is pointless. And I don't know. Class is going to fight me about this one as well because they list FOB prices on their bags on our way. I don't. Yeah. So I'm going to fight you on that because I don't think it's pointless. I think it might. It's not the golden key or the answer to to everything for sure. But I think the point is to initiate a conversation with people like nobody knows what an FOB price is like that's for sure. Like the customer is going to come in like what does that mean? Then you can start to explain it and you can explain what is an FOB FOB is free on board. So it's the price when you're ready for exporting the coffee basically. So it's not even the producer price. So we list both in our transparency report. But I think like it's again, we have I mean, I'm not to say that we've solved all the issues in communicating this to the customers at all. But we are definitely willing to try out different things. And I think it has an effect that people will read this and they'll ask the barista question or they'll be a wholesale customer and ask talk about this and then start to think about when you're buying a back of specialty coffee. You're paying a lot of money from it. How much of that actually went back to the farmer? Yeah, Ben. Yeah. I'm with class. You're an idiot. They're starting a conversation. Well, you know what? Do you want to go start a podcast together? Well, look, I have to admit, I probably was not fully committed to that hot tank. But I really just wanted to hear class defended. So I threw it out there. Thanks for that. Yeah, take it back. That's right. Journalism right there. Yeah. Pulling out answers. Just the spicy. Look, I completely agree. I think people don't know what it means. But eliciting the conversation and getting that going is pretty important to how we keep building value within the coffee industry. And I do have to say, speaking of building value in the coffee industry, our dear friend, Ben, joined the podcast and he's like, you know what, we need you doing your hot takes. But we need a little love. I want to give a moment for our guest who's coming on to shine a light on someone in the coffee industry that they think needs a little extra love and is doing an amazing job. So class, do you have someone that you want to give a little shout out to now? Yeah. And there's so many I wish I could join, but I picked some friends of mine who run a roaster in Canada called Phil and Sebastian. They are, they are Phil and Sebastian and they are lovely guys and everyone on their team is amazing human beings. And they do the right thing. They really spend so much time at origin. They work so hard on helping producers. It's well increasing quality. They're super geeks as well. I don't think they get enough credit in the international coffee community. So really, which is want to give them a big shout out and think that because you're trying to go online and find them in order, some of their coffees and taste for themselves. Yeah, to our US and Canadian listeners jump on there. It's not balance, Sebastian. No, that's true. You can listen to balance, Sebastian. Yeah. While you drink, Phil and Sebastian. There you go. Yeah, we might have to order some drink some on the next podcast. That's a great idea. And I guess lastly, Clouse, you've kind of shared so many different great insights and perspectives here with the audience. We've got coffee roasters, want to be coffee roasters, listening into the pod now. Is there any last thing that you'd like to kind of say to them or an ask that you have of them that you really want them to leave the podcast thinking about? Yeah, I would ask them to try to be try to halt the banner high in terms of actually getting more value out to producers. It's a risk of me sounding like a broken record right now, but I really think that is what we have to do. And I don't mean just the producers already getting really high prices. I mean, all the producers out there that we work with, as I mentioned before, the ones that produce also just the clean, balanced, everyday kind of coffee. Let's try to put the banner high and say we gotta get more value out to them so that we can also enjoy really good coffee in the future. Word to that. Yeah, absolutely. And I have to say, class after like coming into this podcast, I obviously didn't know as much about the background as Ben coming in. So it was really special for me to hear all of that. You're kind of ready with the questions and ready for like the stock standard response that you get. But everything that you kind of answered had such a purpose behind it and such a unique vision. And even if there are other people out there listening that can't get to that fully defined position that you are, I think there was so much in there that is going to inspire and push a lot of people and roses that are listening or just people working in the industry in general. So thank you so much for your time and giving that to us. It was great. What else do we have? Where can we find you? Have we done that? Yeah, no, we haven't. Where can we find coffee collective and class Thompson? Yeah, well, you can find me on Instagram as a class Thompson. I hope I don't have to spell that out. And coffee collective with, you know, an F at the end. It's a long story, but we were a little late to the Twitter Instagram game and and called the collective spelled all the way out was taking so it's called the collective. Nice. It's very creative. It's very creative. That's great. It's so stupid as what it is. But yeah, and you may well be one of the 50 plus countries that the coffee collective web store ships to. So you know, order in a little bag of coffee, taste what they're doing alive and go and support some really great people doing great things. Thank you very much. We need to get ahead of the game and make sure that we have the car. I want to be sitting here drinking some coffee collective. What are we doing? We don't get on top of that. We do need to get ahead of that curve. We'll have to our people will call your people. Thank you so much for joining us, class. If you have any questions that you want to hear from us, make sure to hit us up at hello at It's a great day.
It's just coffee pod dot com. You can hit us on all the socials. If you're listening now, make sure to subscribe. And also, if you like this episode, send it to a friend. Someone working in the grocery is that the person standing behind you, is it the person who started the chaff fire in the grocery that you wanna let him know how to do it? You know, send it on. We love doing this for you. Clouds, what a guest to have. We're trying to bring you the best people in the industry and we appreciate all of your support as we do that. And Ben, you actually had some bad news that you wanted to break just at the end. I don't wanna bring the pod down on the low bit. What was it that you wanted to say? Well, earlier today, I caught Liam that produced pudding cold flocking on coffee. Oh, I thought it was coffee. It was cold foam. I caught him. He was making some signature drinks on it. I'm sorry, I was a beautiful coffee, but then he ruined it. Yeah, the cold flocking foam. All right, we'll see you next time, people. See you. Thank you. Thanks, everybody. [MUSIC PLAYING]
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