2020: A Year In Review

Wow. What a year. I honestly don’t know where to begin. This has been the most challenging year we’ve had as business owners. But through all of it, we’ve been able to survive thanks to our incredible team, and wonderful customers. We’ve taken a moment to reflect on this year, and make a list of some of our biggest takeaways.

This year is all about finding the rainbow in the middle of a storm.

1. Maintaining Andytown Jobs Throughout the Pandemic.

When San Francisco first entered Shelter in Place, we immediately closed three out of our five locations (one, in a private office building)—effectively laying off around 25 employees. Over the course of the next few weeks, we applied for wage relief grants, and set up donation distribution for laid off employees. Our generous customers donated over $9,000 in virtual tips that were distributed to staff based on their average hours worked before the pandemic. We launched our Coffee For Heroes program that allowed us to brew coffee and bake pastries for thousands of frontline healthcare workers. By July were able to rehire all Andytown employees who were laid off from our Outer Sunset cafes during March.

To date, we have been able to rehire or facilitate ongoing wage relief for every single Andytown employee laid off early in the pandemic. Throughout the shutdowns, we have also paid for everyone’s health insurance, whether they were working or not. This would be a huge administrative lift for any small business, but we were so fortunate to have an incredible team. We are grateful to our HR Coordinator, Carver Frazier, and Staff Accountant, Kat Miller, for providing vital communication to staff as we navigated the pandemic. Kat and Carver worked directly with employees to address their needs—financial, physical, and emotional—and worked with me to figure out how to apply for relief funding and distribute it to the employees who needed it most.

2. Coffee For Heroes Delivered Breakfast to 14,000 Frontline Workers

When the city shut down in March, an Andytown regular who is an ER Nurse reached out to see if we could deliver coffee and pastries to their hospital, as the cafes in the area had closed. From this need, our Coffee For Heroes program was born. We opened up a portal on our website to allow customers to purchase coffee for frontline workers. March through July, we brewed thousands of cups of coffee, baked thousands of pastries, and delivered them to frontline healthcare workers across San Francisco. This program not only provided sustenance to San Francisco’s healthcare heroes, it kept us busy. We were able to rehire several Andytown employees, allowing them to safely work away from the general public. We ended the program in early July as we reopened our Outer Taraval location.

Our cafe on Taraval and 46th Ave suffered major flood damage. But we were able to use the opportunity to rebuild it better.

3. A Flood Begets a Much-Needed Remodel on Taraval Street

A few weeks after we had closed our Outer Taraval cafe, Michael went to check up on some things only to discover extensive water and mold damage. A flood had gone unnoticed for weeks in the shuttered cafe, essentially destroying our counters. It was a cherry on top of the dog poop sundae that was 2020.

Needing to repair the damage, we used the opportunity to re-think our little cafe by the beach. We had long wanted to offer the breakfast sandwich at this cafe, but just didn’t have the time or resources to rearrange the cafe. We rebuilt the destroyed cabinets to fit a new refrigerator and purchased a new griddle. Suddenly, we were able to make our amazingly delicious breakfast sandwich at our Taraval cafe. Since we’ve reopened in July, the breakfast sandwich has become a favorite of the Taraval cafe. And while we were very much inconvenienced by the flood, we believe that the cafe is better than it ever has been.

A day of mail at the Roastery. Behind, you can see our cupping room that has been converted to a mail room.

4. The Shift to Online Allows Growth in the Roastery

If you told me a year ago that our website would be a sizable revenue stream, I would have thought you were crazy. But here we are, ending 2020 with hundreds of orders coming though the website every week. To accommodate this surge in orders, we have converted our cupping room into a mail room. The same place were we used to hold daily coffee tastings, sharing bowls with our entire staff (totally not a COVID-safe activity!), is being used to pack all of our online orders. How much have our online orders increased? Well, in 2019 we packed up 1,200 online orders. This year, we’ve surpassed 18,000. That’s a lot of boxes!

The growth of online means that we’ve been able to hire more in our Production Department, and we’ve been able to create multiple leadership positions, including a Floor Manager, Lead Roaster, and Customer Support Lead—all lead by our incredible Director of Coffee Production, Corey Turner. These positions were filled internally from Andytown employees who were eager to grow with the department, and we look forward to watching them grow more in their roles in 2021.

We think our drinks taste better than ever, and we have our cafe trainers to thank!

5. The Creation of Cafe Pods and Location Trainers

Before COVID, our barista trainers floated between the cafe locations and wholesale needs. When creating our COVID safety protocols, it was clear that we needed to restrict movement between locations to protect employees from too much exposure to new people. We gave each location a “pod” and restricted employees from picking up shifts outside of their pods. In doing this, we were forced to completely restructure our training procedures.

Now, each location has their own barista trainers—Kevin Tran at the Taraval Cafe, Maxine Cook at the Roastery, and Muhammad Khalid at our Lawton location, guided by Andytown Director of Quality Control Corazon Padilla. These trainers are responsible for the barista training and overall drink quality at their location. They make sure their baristas are knowledgable about our constantly rotating menu, facilitating tastings and helping their team dial in each coffee. The result of this restructuring is the highest drink quality we’ve ever seen. Each location has their team totally dialed in, and we think our coffee has never tasted better. We are pretty sure that if it wasn’t for COVID, we would have never restructured the training department in this way, and while we are devastated by the negative affects of the pandemic, we think that having location-specific barista trainers is a clear silver lining.

On June 2nd, we closed the cafes early to march with our neighbors on The Great Highway.

6. Internal Focus on Equity and Inclusion

In the midst of a national outcry for justice for Black Americans murdered at the hands of police, restaurant workers took to social media to anonymously call out businesses who mistreated employees of color. (Read more about this movement from The San Francisco Chronicle.) In July, Andytown found ourselves listed on an anonymous Instagram account, stating we had done a number of wrongdoings. We wanted to understand, so we listened. We took it in. We took a hard look at our company. We facilitated hard conversations with our employees of color. We listened as they shared the struggles that they have faced within the specialty coffee industry, and within Andytown. We educated ourselves on implicit bias and white privilege. We learned about what it means to be anti-racist.

This summer, we held an internal all-hands meeting and committed to be an anti-racist company. We promised to work harder to make Andytown a company that our employees of color were proud to work for. So far, we have updated a number of staff policies to help breakdown barriers for our employees of color—including bolstering our internal promotion processes, adding an explicit zero tolerance policy for racism to our employee handbook, and refining our policy on calling the police for non-lifethreatening emergencies. In the fall, we held a mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training with coach Vaneese Johnson, and we are continuing to create inclusive policies and systems for accountability to enforce them.

This process has not been easy, but we believe we have become a stronger company because of it. We understand that anti-racism is a path you must actively walk on, not a checkbox to mark. We are nowhere near done with our anti-racism work, and will never stop striving to be a better company. One day, I plan to share more about Andytown’s anti-racism journey, explaining some of the tangible steps we’ve taken and results shown so that other small businesses can walk with us on this path. We know we can’t get it right all the time, but we can try. And we will continue to try.

St. Anthony’s Foundation provides food and clothing for San Francisco’s most vulnerable.

7. Andytown Fundraisers Raise Thousands of Dollars

Despite the struggles that we’ve had as a business this year, we have been fortunate to be able to continue to give back to our community. Aside from our Coffee For Heroes program, Andytown has continued to donate to local schools and organizations that enrich our community.

In November, we gave a dollar from every bag of Shore Leave Hook sold to the St. Anthony Foundation to feed San Franciscans in need. While the tally is still being counted from our grocery distributor partner, we estimate that we raised over $2,000 for St. Anthony’s.

Since learning that our Roastery Lead Barista, Robbie, was diagnosed with Lymphoma, the Andytown community has donated over $7,500 to Robbie’s GoFundMe and Andytown has raised an additional $3,668 (and counting) through the sales of our gold-label Costa Rican coffee. We are giving all profits from this amazing coffee to Robbie to support his recovery. You can still grab a bag of the Costa Rica Black Honey Los Cipreses here.

Our adorable Snowy Plover Wear a Mask stickers have raised over $600 for Masks for All California to provide face coverings to Californians in need.

Most notably, we’ve raised hundreds of dollars for non profits through the Bakers Against Racism project. Our bakers made handpies and raised $900 for Farms to Grow, and another $900 for Sunset Youth Services. At Lawton, our team designed custom informational flyers to include in every box, and distributed them to our amazing customers who supported our bake sale. Nationwide, bakers raised over $2 million for Bakers Against Racism. That’s a lot of dough! (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Early in the pandemic, I was a guest on the KQED Newsroom.

8. Finding My Voice as a Business Owner

I’ve always been pretty insecure in my role as a business owner. Coming from being a barista, imposter’s syndrome has always been extremely present as I navigate my job. The COVID-19 crisis has pushed me to use my voices as an owner to put the needs of small businesses front and center. Early in the pandemic, I spoke with a number of news outlets about the crisis, begging politicians and policy makers to provide relief for small businesses. I’ve since become more vocal, being a guest on a couple of podcasts and speaking directly to my local San Francisco supervisor’s office. I like to think that my advocacy has helped share the struggles of small business during this crisis, and I hope to continue to use my voice into 2021.

One of my favorite silver linings of the pandemic is this very blog. I had been meaning to start a company blog for many years, but never got around to it. I plan to continue to update this blog regularly through 2021, documenting all of the fun and exciting things that Andytown is doing.