Relationship Coffee: It’s Not What You Think

There is a phrase in the specialty coffee business that you hear a lot: "Relationship Coffee"

And I love the idea.

The picture that comes to mind is pretty wonderful. I fly down to Colombia, climb into an old truck, bounce up a dirt road into the mountains and eventually arrive at Señor Valdez’s family farm. We walk through the coffee trees together. His family joins us for lunch. We cup the new harvest. I shake his hand, buy a container of his coffee, and promise I'll be back next year.

It's a great story.

It is also pretty far removed from the daily life of most small coffee roasters.

I've been in the restaurant and coffee business for three decades, and I can assure you that most mornings aren't spent walking through coffee farms in Colombia.

They're spent figuring out why a grinder isn't working. Or somebody called out.  Or we're working on payroll or fixing the website. (a different Blog post) 

So this isn't an argument against relationship coffee.  Quite the opposite.

I think relationships are one of the most important things left in this business.  I just wonder if we've been looking for the relationship at the wrong end of the bag.

Who Roasted Your Coffee?

The specialty coffee industry has done a remarkable job teaching us to care about where coffee comes from.  And we should.

We should care about the farmer. We should care about how coffee is grown. We should care what farmers are paid. We should care about the importer and exporter and the people who move that coffee halfway around the world before it ever reaches Bisbee.  Those relationships matter.

But there's another relationship that doesn't get talked about very much.

Who roasted your coffee?

Because there's an interesting reality to this business.

A coffee company large enough to purchase one or two entire containers from a particular farm may very well have a wonderful relationship with that farmer. They may visit every year. They may know his children. They may have been buying his harvest for a decade.  That's real.

But scale works both ways.

As a company becomes large enough to develop those enormous purchasing relationships upstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the person roasting the coffee to have a relationship with the person drinking it. That relationship matters too!

Relationship Coffee at B.C.C.

Here in Bisbee, our version looks a little different.

Your coffee is roasted on a relatively small machine in a little mountain town in southeastern Arizona. There aren't twenty anonymous people standing around a giant production line.  Although during Christmas we employ our kids and relatives and unsuspecting friends somewhat indiscriminately. It gets busy!

There are two (2) roasters, Ly and myself. (we also bag, box and ship) 

People who love coffee, manage family, have good days and bad days, worry about getting the roast right and genuinely get excited when somebody tells us they loved a particular coffee.

And here's the important part:

We can actually know you.  Not your customer number. You. 

We can know what coffee you like, what you ordered the last time, notes about your favorite blend or what you’d like to see in the future.  We enjoy emails, and if you’re brave enough to call, we will answer or call you back pretty quick.

And sometimes something happens that reminds me just how unusual, and valuable, that has become.

Recently, one of our customers received a personal note from Ly with their coffee. (no names but she's hopefully reading this!)

There wasn't an algorithm behind it and it wasn’t a part of a marketing campaign.

Ly wrote somebody a personal note.

The customer was so touched by that little gesture that they sent Ly a bouquet of flowers. Think about that for a moment.

A customer sent their coffee roaster flowers.

Yesterday we received another phone call.  Bisbee has been dealing with flooding, and one of our customers had heard about it.  They weren't calling about an order.  They weren't wondering where their package was.

They called because they wanted to make sure we were okay. 

That's relationship coffee.

At least that's what I've come to believe it is.

Small Isn't Automatically Better

I also don't want to turn this into another romantic coffee story.  Small isn't automatically better.

There are enormous coffee companies doing extraordinary work. There are large roasters sourcing beautiful coffees, paying producers well and roasting coffee with an incredible level of precision.  They deserve credit for that. 

But scale changes things.  And one of the things scale changes is distance.  Small allows us something different.  It allows the person roasting your coffee to know the person drinking it. That's not better because it's quaint.

It's valuable because it's increasingly rare.  There was a time when we knew the baker who made our bread.  We knew the butcher.  We knew the mechanic.  We knew the person who made the things we brought into our homes.

Modern commerce gave us extraordinary convenience, selection and consistency.  But somewhere along the way, we lost some of that connection. We're not going to fix modern commerce with a bag of coffee. But maybe we can restore one little piece of it.

When you open a bag of our coffee, somebody here touched it.  Somebody roasted it.  Somebody packed it.  And occasionally somebody wrote you a note.

And if you call us, there's a good chance you'll talk to one of those same people.

Maybe that's enough. Maybe relationship coffee isn't merely knowing where your coffee came from.

Maybe it's knowing who you're entrusting it to along the way.

The yellow roses sitting at our roasting house reminded me of that.  And so did a phone call from someone hundreds of miles away who wasn't calling to buy anything.

They just wanted to know if we were safe.

I'll take that kind of relationship coffee any day.

Cheers!

Rob

P.S. in the day and age of A.I. it would be hypocritical of me to talk about relationships without mentioning that A.I. edited this piece and was highly critical of my flowery tone and run on sentences, bad punctuation and the length...to which I have somewhat ignored except for the spelling and punctuation.  The picture is unedited (she's really that pretty) and it's taken in Ly's kitchen where many of our videos are shot.