A Year of Production & Green Buying in a Global Pandemic
Production team over the holidays in 2020
As we cross the one year mark of COVID-19 being declared a global pandemic and the beginning of California’s shelter-in-place order, we’re taking stock of what we’ve been through this past year in production and green buying and preparing for what the rest of 2021 will bring. I’m sure we’re all feeling similarly hesitant to make specific plans, and yet we have balance that with being ready to shift our focus when it’s time.
Corazon, Michael, and I have an annual tradition of meeting to talk about our coffee buying strategy at the beginning of each year. These meetings are centered around the question of, how can we prepare our coffee menu for this year’s growth, and support as many producers as well as possible in the process? We have long-term goals of gender parity—at least an equal number of coffees from women producers as men producers—and to continue the same relationships year-after-year as much as possible, working towards more and more direct trades each year. We have a green forecast that helps us keep track of these goals without buying too much coffee, and we make a rough outline for that in these meetings as we brainstorm.
In past years, we had set out to buy more coffee from each producer as we grew, and hadn’t zoomed in as much on the numbers for individual menu items. This resulted in having a lot of coffee from producers who’s farms enter harvest early and late in the season, places like Ethiopia and Colombia, and not always having room for new coffees that come in the spring, summer, and fall. We had a list of folks that we wanted to work with in the future, and it hadn’t been possible yet. We had also structured our menu mostly around busy/slower times of the year, having a larger menu with more options during busy times of year, and a smaller menu during slower seasons. One issue with this is that coffee buying seasons don’t fit into retail theory—we were missing out on some really amazing coffees!
We decided to start 2020 with a new goal: Corazon and I had figured out what the smallest amount of coffee we would need to buy in order to make each piece of the onboarding process financially sustainable—every step from sample roasting and tasting for purchase to bagging the coffee for the shelves for the first time—as well as to support our producers and continue to grow our partnerships. We intended to try having shorter runs of each coffee by buying less, and to have a fuller menu throughout the year. We also limited the number of new partnerships we would be able to take on, intending to focus on growing our long-time partnerships a bit first.
This ended up having a huge hand in helping us survive the pandemic. As Lauren shared on Instagram last year, we totally shifted our operations to make them as slim as possible last March in the wake of California’s shelter-in-place orders. Corazon and I prioritized production over planning, and scrambled to assist the production team in fulfilling orders while also trying to meet new online demands and keeping coffee on the menu. We were lucky in being able to keep the production team on the entire time during 2020, our production space being closed to the public and able to adapt to safety precautions, but we weren’t sure how long we’d be able to continue that way.
In March 2020, our online sales were up over 2,000% from February 2020 (not counting Coffee for Heroes donations). Because we were trying to create new systems to accommodate this volume while also working to stay on schedule with fulfillment, the production team was focused on maintaining the wholesale orders for accounts that were able to remain open as well as our cafe orders while I made postage, planned daily production, and maintained inventory, Corazon handled customer support inquiries and quality control, and we traded off with the team to keep online orders moving. Green buying often looked like Corazon slipping away to slurp between rounds of fulfillment and me sending 30-second e-mails to confirm contracts. This season was incredibly challenging, but it strengthened our partnerships as we were able to lean on each other and stay in tune with the issues happening on the producer side of the supply chain as well as our own. It felt like everything we did was for the same goal.
With the growth of our online sales, we wanted to give our customers more information on what we were working on, and we needed more space to store our inventory. We began writing this blog, and we moved our online inventory into our cupping room. We created a new workflow to support the 50-100 orders a day that used to be more like 10, and with that our wholesale fulfillment station shrank to about half the size. Michael and I re-envisioned the space and brought about half of our ideas to fruition late last Spring, adding more pallet racks for storage and a new prep station. By Fall, we were grinding coffee for online orders and our Production leadership team had grown to add three new roles.
Honduras Maria Adela, ground for french press when we launched ground coffee online last fall!
Our new prep station!
In the end, the green buying strategy we began the year with helped us remain flexible, as we didn’t have too much coffee booked that we’d have to figure out what to do with in the event of further shutdowns. We booked more coffee from the producers who were struggling to get their coffee sold and were able to structure the menu around delayed arrival times in the process. The coffees used in our blends were a different story, as we often book those for the full year, but we were able to shift our cafe offerings around to feature blends to help balance out the increased sales of single origins online. Our goal of being able to buy more from our current partners worked out really well, because with increased single origin sales, we were flying through more coffee than we had in the past. We actually were able to buy more Indonesia Natural Bali Kintamani, more Mexico Bella Vista & Mexico Bella Vista Women’s Group, and Timor-Leste Ermera Letefoho last spring once these coffees sold faster than we initially expected. We already knew we loved them and our customers loved them, and there were more bags available, so it was an easy decision to make on the spot.
Coming into this year, it was great to have an idea for what sales would look like even if nothing feels totally certain and there are new changes on the horizon. We were able to budget for buying more coffee from the producers we worked with last year, as well as add a few new producers that we’ve been hoping to work with for awhile. 2021 comes with it’s own set of production-related challenges along with these silver linings, however. Many coffee-producing countries are facing challenges with harvest with unprecedented weather, locked borders and fewer pickers. Ports are also clogged worldwide due to increased demand of direct-to-consumer goods and consistent shortages of workers due to COVID-19, so shipments are being delayed by up to a month. This impacts all goods that ship around the world, not just coffee, and is an issue that unfortunately promises to get worse before it gets better.
Here at the roastery, we’re buying an extra cushion for each coffee we feature this year to avoid any gaps in our menu due to these delays. It’s an odd thing to be struggling to keep enough coffee on hand rather than worrying about it sticking around past peak quality, but here we are. We’re also expecting wholesale to begin reopening this year, and buckling up for another round of growth. Not much surprises us anymore, but it’s certainly a pleasant surprise to still be here after everything we faced in 2020. Thanks for reading along and here’s to brighter times to come!
