Coffee Maker Focuses on Freshness to Attract Customers

Hey There,

The post today is about one of the most-consumed beverages in the world, the coffee. Coffee is a brewed beverage with a dark, slightly acidic flavor, which is prepared from the roasted seed of the coffee plant. It can have a stimulating effect on humans due to its caffeine content.

Step 1

Think about the following question and try to talk about it with a friend:

• Do you like coffee?
• How often do you have some coffee?
• Does it give you any burst of energy?
• How's coffee seen in your region?
• Is it important to the economy of your city?

Step 2

Watch the video and answer the following questions:

1. Who is James Freeman?
2. What was he interested in?
3. What's Freeman primary goal in the coffee business?
4. How long does coffee beans take to reach customers?
5. What does the wave Freeman feel mean?
6. What did Freeman do when he set up the company?
7. What is the biggest problem of the company?
8. How many cafes does blue bottle coffee company owns in both coasts?
9. What is necessary to the company keeping up growing?

Transcription

My name is James Freeman. I’m the owner and founder of BlueBottleCoffee company.I have no background in coffee or business. I was super obsessed with coffee when I was a clarinet player and I just took the plunge. I was sufficiently burned out and ignorant, I think, in order to not realize I didn’t have enough money or enough experience not to do it. So, ignorance is bliss sometimes.We place a huge priority on freshness. We like to get our coffee beans out the door into our customer’s hands within 48 hours of roasting, so customers know that everything they’re getting is really at its peak. It requires a lot of careful managers, ordering carefully, but we found we hardly waste any coffee at all. I feel like I was living in an alternate universe during the recession. And every time I would look at our shops, they were busier and busier, we were selling more and more coffee. I feel very lucky. I feel like it’s been this great wave that we’ve been riding.All I knew financially was my home checking account. I didn’t spend money I didn’t have. I started super cheap, I was really frugal through the whole process. When I started, I was in a 186 square feet, roasting coffee on a seven-pound batch roaster. And now we’ve got six cafes on two coasts, two roasteries, over a hundreds wholesale accounts.Our biggest challenge is definitely keeping up. Now we’re here in this beautiful building in Oakland, it’s really been helpful.We havetwo vintage roasters, and finally we can go home at a decent hour.You can’t run a company of a hundred employees the same way you ran it with twenty employees, so you have to build in a lot more mechanisms for communication.So like a long-distance romance, you have to work a lot harder. You have to call up, ‘Hey, honey, how’s it going?’I don’t think it pays to think about competition too much.If you think about what your goals are, in terms of your product and the success of your product, people will find you, I really believe.

Vocabulary

To take the plunge – to make an important decision after some hesitation

Burned out - worn out or exhausted, especially as a result of long-term stress
Ignorant - lacking education or knowledge
Bliss - extreme happiness; ecstasy
To ride a wave – to have a run of good luck
Frugal – not wasteful or lavish
A batch roaster - apparatus that roasts a given quantity (a batch) of coffee at a time
A roastery - a business or enterprise where green coffee beans are roasted
To keep up - persevere, carry on, prolong
At a decent hour – not too late

JC- Nevton