Coffee Maker Focuses on Freshness to Attract Customers

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 have two 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.