Blue bottle coffee and the next wave of detail-oriented coffee

Summary of the article: James Freeman is a maverick, and so is the blue bottle coffee he founded. Although it accounts for only 1% of the national coffee market, Freeman never seems to be in a hurry to attack and expand. In the face of the potential of the third wave of coffee, the "craftsman" who is obsessed with Camus has his own way of playing. How will Freeman conquer the most lucrative area of the artisanal food movement?

Control freak Freeman

This trip is sure to be relaxed and enjoyable. We will talk about philosophy and classical music, and we will appreciate something. I knew this would happen before I saw James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, come over. Dressed in a cardigan, tie and glasses, he looked like a professor with neat silver hair. Looking at his new cafe in Oakland, California, I expected him to be so cultured. Everything in the cafe is in order, quiet, simple and precise. The espresso you ordered cannot be taken out, the cup size is not optional, and the bagged coffee beans cannot be pre-ground. Oh, no. It's not because Freeman wants to instill in you his perfect way, but because he can't stand imperfect experiences. Because he cares too much.

As a result, the expansion of Blue bottle Coffee is beset with difficulties. The Oakland-based coffee chain with 13 stores has no financing problems. Perhaps the most technological thing about it is to record customer orders with iPad, but it is irresistible to Silicon Valley investors. Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Google Ventures, True Ventures and Instagram, Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and Chris Sacca, a former Google executive, are all investors in Blue bottle Coffee. At the end of 2012, Blue bottle Coffee received a $19.7 million venture capital fund. It received another $25.75 million from Morgan Stanley in January before Freeman figured out what to do with the first round of money. Even if you set aside $5 million for expansion in Japan, plus planning a bakery, opening a store in Los Angeles and buying Kohlberg & Co, which was bought in 2008. After all the shares, Blue bottle Coffee still had $29 million in cash in March, more than the company's annual revenue. In April, the company used some of the money to acquire Los Angeles coffee brand Handsome Coffee Roasters and coffee ordering service Tonx, but the money was still slow.

This is partly because Freeman is a control freak. It took him years to figure out a way to make his iced coffee suitable for sale at the grocery store, which finally hit the shelves at the California Whole Foods store in California. (the usual practice is to heat, pressurize, seal and bottle, while Freeman wraps the coffee in cartons like milk, with a shelf life of only four days. The new barista must pass the test in front of a jury, just like entering the conservatory of music. And unlike his competitors, Freeman refused to build his business model in the fastest and most reasonable way, which is to sell coffee to many other cafes or supermarkets. Only 20% of blue bottle's revenue comes from wholesale, and he estimates that his main competitor accounts for nearly 75% of the wholesale business. He quoted the French novelist Camus to explain the reason: "Happiness and absurdity are two sons of the same land." The process of striving to the top is enough to enrich the human mind. It should be expected that Sisyphus is happy. "

But Freeman could not really imagine this kind of happiness. He is worried that people in other cafes will make coffee in the wrong way or make hot drinks with beans that have been aged for more than 10 days. At an ice cream shop opposite a large Intelligentsia cafe in Los Angeles, he saw that the Intelligentsia name on the menu was misspelled, although the waiters of the ice cream shop could almost see the huge sign of the cafe from the window of his shop. The typographical error appalled him. Intelligentsia is Blue bottle Coffee's biggest competitor in the artisanal coffee movement.

"the wholesale business is like Sisyphus' boulder rolling down. If you are upset because a big stone falls, you are bound to be disappointed for the rest of your life. " He explained. He said this in a class at Stanford Business School and asked how many students in the class had read Camus. No one raised their hands, he said. It seems that Freeman is also doomed to disappointment.

The unique way of Coffee

He seems to be used to being a maverick among people who don't read Camus. Freeman grew up in Humboldt County, California, an agricultural center known for growing marijuana. "everyone listens to the Australian rock band AC/DC and smokes marijuana, but James is a maverick, not smoking marijuana, playing clarinet or listening to opera. If he gets beaten up, he can't wait to walk away, "said his wife, Catelyn." when we started dating, he had already heard of the Beatles, but he never listened to the Beatles. James is a nerd. " Catelyn is the cake chef of Blue bottle Coffee.

In 2002, after playing the clarinet in the San Francisco Bay area for a decade, Freeman realized that he could not be recruited into a large performing group, so he began to bake coffee in a pot shed a few miles from his apartment in Oakland. And sell it at a farmer's market in Berkeley.

The name of his stall comes from the 17th century Viennese cafe Hof zur Blauen Flasche, which can be called the ancestor of the cafe. Catelyn also has a stall nearby that sells baked goods. "he was married, his son was about to be born, and I had a cohabiting boyfriend. But we were all so obsessed with our business that our relationship with our partner went nowhere, "Catelyn said." our initial feeling was,'I like being with you, and you don't put pressure on me because I don't go to work.'"

Eventually, Freeman gave Catelyn a bag of coffee beans to use on the coffee machine at her stall. "it was the only time James tried to sell," she said. "he was definitely not a born salesman." Catelyn, who doesn't drink coffee and is not good at making coffee, finally gave his cart to Freeman, which was covered with a pink umbrella, and Freeman started selling drinks. In January 2004, when the American specialties Show (Fancy Food Show) was held at the nearby Moscom Exhibition Center (Moscone Center) in San Francisco, Freeman lined up 15 people in front of the stalls set up at the Farmers' Market in the Ferry Building (Ferry Building). There are always people waiting in line.

He opened coffee shops in San Francisco and Oakland and brought Blue bottle Coffee to New York in 2010, where he is about to open his seventh store opposite Bryant Park. He doesn't like long-distance transportation of coffee beans because of freshness and environmental reasons, so his expansion plans include investing heavily in a baking facility and then using the beans to open several stores nearby.

Like other third wave cafes (the first is the commercialization of coffee; the second is the coffee chain represented by Starbucks and Caribou Coffee and Peet's), Blue bottle Coffee buys high-end, single-variety coffee beans from small-scale producers and lightly roasts them, making the coffee more fresh and smooth, unlike the dark, oily coffee that Starbucks is famous for. And apart from mocha, Blue bottle Coffee does not make other flavor coffee. There are absolutely no milkshakes.

Blue bottle's three main competitors are Intelligentsia Coffee of Chicago, Stumptown Coffee Roasters of Portland and Counter Culture Coffee of North Carolina, but small local chains such as Philz Coffee appear almost every month. "now it looks like a good opportunity for growth." Said Bonnie Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant analyst at NPD Group. Although merchandise coffee sales have been mediocre for decades, boutique coffee sales, including chains such as Starbucks, rose 5 per cent in 2012 and 7 per cent last year. Like Blue bottle Coffee, Stumptown received a large investment from private equity group TSG Consumer Partners, Philz received an eight-figure investment from Summit Partners, and Sightglass received money from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey (Jack Dorsey). "when you see the financing needs of this coffee industry, some people might say, 'Wow! What's going on?' But for connoisseurs, our response is' that's the way it should be', "said Matt Lounsbury, vice president of Stumptown." We are watching significant growth outside Portland, in Sherwood, Oregon, and around the world. Just because people live in the suburbs doesn't mean they don't want good coffee. "

In response to the growth of the third wave of cafes, Starbucks acquired the company that makes Clover, a high-tech single-cup coffee machine, and used it with a single variety of origin beans in more than 750 stores around the world. Tony Conrad, a True Ventures partner who has invested in technology companies such as Fitbit and WordPress, persuaded the company to invest in Blue bottle Coffee because he believed the third wave of coffee would be the most profitable area of the artisanal food movement. "is it possible to open a third Wave Cafe across the street from Starbucks? Absolutely. " He said. However, at present, the proportion of blue bottle coffee is only 1%, and its scope is limited to "Lanzhou", mainly in the city.

Conrad met me at the first store of Blue bottle Coffee. The store is located in an alley called Linden Street Street in San Francisco. In the past few years, the place has become a fashionable paradise: a small brewery, a customized liquid nitrogen ice cream stall, a lingerie store and another third Wave Cafe called Ritual. A few blocks away, on another older street, there is an old laundromat, where baristas serve Verve coffee in a small window. Verve is the third wave bakery from Santa Cruz.

Conrad invests the company's money in blue bottle coffee, in part because he is a regular customer of blue bottle coffee. At the same time, it is also because Freeman has unique views on coffee culture. "We are looking for people who can create trends: Katrina Fick, who founded the photo-sharing site Flickr, James Parker (James Park) of Fitbit, a motion tracking device company, Matt Murenvig of WordPress, a leading blogger, and Bre Pettis of MakerBot, a 3D printing company. Did they invent these things? No. But they have become the face of these trends. James has a kind of magic. " He said.

Seriously, blue bottle.

If the atmosphere of Stumptown is cool, like motorcycle and hard rock, and Intelligentsia shows a rough, dynamic atmosphere, then Blue bottle Coffee is characterized by extreme seriousness, like a novel by Dave Dave Eggers. "there are a lot of energetic boys in those stores, playing a lot of dynamic music like Grrrr," Mr. Freeman said of his main competitors. "We don't have these in our stores." If you sell pajamas for $150 with a blue bottle of coffee logo on your pocket, you won't play too much music. The only obvious fashion for Blue bottle Coffee was the sale of espresso made by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy at its Brooklyn store in New York. Catelyn once made a cookie modeled on the sculptor Richard Serra's 1969 sculpture "Right Angle Plus One" at the cafe above the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, so he also received a stop letter from Serra, the closest blue bottle coffee to a "bad guy" image.

The atmosphere of blue bottle coffee is conveyed to customers in a subtle way: the words "organic" or "fair trade" never appear on the menu. All this is taken for granted. There are no discounted items and no Wi-Fi in the store. Starbucks wanted to create a "third place" that was neither a workplace nor a home, but ended up becoming a low-cost office for freelancers. Blue bottle Coffee uses the restaurant model: enjoy your drink and leave quickly. Freeman doesn't want you to be intimate with your computer, or even to facilitate communication with other customers. He wants you to talk to the barista. What we're talking about is coffee.

"people who buy a large iced latte in a takeout cup and sit in front of the computer don't seem to care much about the level of coffee production." Catelyn explains her husband's ideas in this way. His obsession with coffee may annoy people. "they don't want to sit there and worship the tattooed boy who made them lattes. People's attitudes may be diametrically opposed. "

Each store feels like an independent restaurant, rather than the kind of chain store where people knock on computers, and Freeman wants to make each cafe match the style of his community. In fact, Freeman's greatest ability is not just to make the best coffee, but to choose a location. The main reason why he chose the site was that he thought something seemed interesting. Although his father was an accountant, Freeman himself was not good at numbers, and he relied on his own frugality to keep the business running until he finally hired a chief financial officer less than two years ago. He is more interested in protecting his brand than quarterly earnings. He has no specific revenue targets and only requires each store to be profitable within a year or two. Even the people he hired to help with the business don't seem to care much about numbers.

After choosing the location of the new coffee shop (usually in relatively old parts of town), he spends a lot of time making slides to show the feeling he wants: a shop in Brooklyn is inspired by the bedroom of French writer Proust; a shop in Chelsea, Manhattan, is inspired by American composer Burt Bacharach. He hopes to open a new store in Culver City, Calif., in an old Datsun showroom that gives the impression of Margot in a Lacoste mini dress in the Wes Anderson-directed movie The Royal Tenenbaums. You can see why he was always beaten up in high school.

The cafe I met with Freeman at the W.C. Morse Building in Oakland was also inspired by Wes Anderson. This place is not suitable for upscale cafes at all: there are no pedestrians around, facing a high school. However, it is always full here. The people inside look like Freeman's friends. "there was a lot of news when I rented this place," Mr. Freeman said. "Architecture is sometimes a factor in success." As he spoke, a man named Joackim walked around with a wooden tray for people to taste samples of coffee in small glasses. The building, built in 1922, has been vacant for 25 years and used to be the first truck showroom in Oakland. At the back, a mechanic is repairing an old-fashioned home espresso machine, which fits in well with the atmosphere that used to be used as a showroom for car dealers. "I think the Oakland Mountains are full of broken La Pavoni coffee machines." Freeman said. Three customers who delivered coffee machines for repairs were turned away in the morning because they had 14 machines to be repaired in front of them; they wanted to rent another coffee machine.

Freeman and I drank Cascara Fizzes, a $3 soda made from coffee peel and lemon in Blue bottle Coffee. ("this is one of my most successful subdivision products," Freeman argues that making such a product is a far cry from pure coffee. "it's not 'what happens with pumpkins in our coffee!' That kind of whimsical thinking. " (then a customer came over. Andrea Restrepo Restrepo asked if she could open a blue bottle coffee franchise in Newport, Rhode Island, and the answer was, of course, no, because the franchise would deprive Freeman of much of his control. Restrepo compliments that the low-key signs of these stores are difficult to detect, giving them a sense that they are exclusive to experts. Freeman explained that this was not his intention. He actually bought a big flag for the store for $400, but he said, "the background is too dark." We are not good at signs. We should have bigger signs. This is not to be exclusive to some people or difficult to find. I just haven't found my favorite sign yet. I don't like extra things. "

All the drinks in the store are made behind a huge stainless steel table, which is connected to the floor by seven thin pipes through which all water, electricity and data are transported. Freeman pointed out a design flaw that was inevitable because of health regulations, and it took me almost a minute to see that two of the seven pipes had small washers on them. "they didn't affect me." 'but it obviously has an impact, 'Mr. Freeman said.

I asked him what the maximum price people would pay for a cup of coffee was, and he began to answer the question, but soon became distracted by what he thought was a more interesting thing, which was how to make the perfect sign. "I never liked blackboards, so it became a problem. How to present a menu that changes frequently? Printing on strips of wood is a fairly low-cost way. We have printed the (selection of coffee beans) for the next few months on the sticks. " Then, before I could repeat that question about coffee economics, he took out his iPhone and searched for his photos of Japanese noodle restaurants hanging menus on wooden strips. It would be a pity to stop him, and it would be useless. Freeman cannot focus on economics. He has a lot of details to pay attention to. The cash in his hand seems to be overstocked for a long time. Author / Joel Stein Editor / Zheng Yuanlin Translation / Wang Ze