Hacea's Green Coffee Column: September
Creating A Feedback Loop With A Dedicated Green Coffee Buyer
LISTEN!
Transcript below.
Topic: Creating consistency and saving time and money with a dedicated green buyer.
Coffee Smarter Expert: Jared Hales, Hacea Coffee Source
Connect: www.haceacoffee.com • @haceacoffeesource on Instagram
KEY TAKEAWAYS
This is a very relationship driven corner of the industry. Step one is to define the role of the green coffee buyer. Even if the person has dual roles as roaster or owner (or both), someone is buying the green!
Having a dedicated green coffee buyer may help our business stand out both to the sellers and the consumer, because having built a relationship at origin and with suppliers your will have better access to:
The best quality coffee lots.
Better pricing (potentially) due to your ability to communicate needs and margin.
You’ll save time!
Providing immediate feedback to suppliers translates into faster returns, and less time tasting samples that have sold out.
Creating a feedback loop with your green coffee importer helps build trust in regards to taste profiles, price points, quality, and more. This enables importers to be more selective in the samples they send saving you from having to sample more than needed.
Sometimes at Hacea Coffee Sourcethey taste 100+ samples of coffee per week!
If you’re small, an import partner, like Hacea Coffee Source, can fill some holes for you. Hacea Coffee Source is developing a tool for sourcing by season and creating a target for coffee arrivals.
Contact Jared@haceacoffee.com directly to access the green coffee ordering tool!
Full interview dialogue below.
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INTERVIEW*
R!WC: Hi, Jared. Welcome back for another session of Hacea Coffee Source's Green Coffee Column. I'm glad you're here. If anyone is out there listening and not reading, you can find the article from this audio on roastwestcoast.com. There, you'll also find the link to haceacoffee.com, where you'll find all kinds of coffee information, green coffee information, and just so much more.
Jared, I really appreciate you chatting with us about the more mysterious side of coffee. What are we learning about today?
Jared: So today, I wanted to take a minute and share what kind of an impact a green coffee buyer can have for a roaster. And I guess before we get into that kind of defining what a green coffee buyer is.
A lot of the roasters that we partner with are usually the owner or the head roaster that's also wearing that hat of the green coffee buyer, right?
I get it, too. As an independent business, we all wear a lot of hats.
I think a couple of things are worth noting on what that position is and why treating that position separately can have a really positive impact on a business.
You know, really, the primary thing here is saving money. It's a really relationship-driven [role], and even in recent years, it's becoming a bit more competitive to acquire really nice specialty coffees. So having a really good relationship with the producers and then really all the actors in between the producer and the roasters such as the exporter, the shipping, the logistics, the importer, and—
R!WC: I think that's true across a lot of craft product relationships. I know I had that as a beer buyer. Where when those one-off specialty products came out or like that seasonal thing that there's only so much of [came out] because we had a consistent beer buyer, I was able to get those sooner than maybe somebody who was just rotating through the flavor of the month, right?
Jared: Right, So by having [a dedicated buyer], your business is able to stand out right by having this limited product. It is totally the same in coffee, and it is getting—like I said—more and more competitive to acquire these nice coffees. So the relationship is pretty key.
Without having like a dedicated coffee buyer who's developing that relationship, you know, that then they're just...you can't really develop a relationship with a generic hello@email. You know what I mean?
Like it's, it's really about people and face-to-face, you know what I mean?
Not only does [having a dedicated buyer] give you access to those unique products, but also pricing. When you're working with people long term, you can really talk about the challenges that each other has.
For example, on the production side, what is your cost of production? What is the margin that you need to make to be happy to do this every year forever, right?
Obviously, that price is going to change a little bit as things get more expensive, like labor and cost of materials and whatever. Then, on the roaster side of things, we have to convince consumers to pay more for coffee, right?
If a consumer is not willing to pay that price, then it's not going to work for anybody.
So it's really about communicating needs and challenges and finding a common ground where it's a win-win for everybody involved all the way, all the way to the consumer, really.
And then beyond that, you know, there's a lot of other logistical things like shipping samples and things like this, where having a more dialed-in roasting program or a green buying program can shave off a lot of that.
And that kind of segues into another element of how having a defined green buyer can benefit your business, which is saving time.
Samples, again, are huge. It takes a long time to prepare samples and ship them, especially from another continent.
Having really concise and detailed feedback on those samples can save producers or importers a ton of time. So when we send samples, and we get feedback like, Oh, yeah, they were good!
You know, that does not help. That's not helpful. But saying things like:
Oh, I like this about this coffee.
I don't like this about this coffee.
These are the kinds of coffees I'm looking for in my espresso.
These are the kinds of coffees I'm looking for for my single origins.
You know, that kind of feedback narrows down the list so that on the next set of samples, we know what you're looking for and why, right? Which helps us make better recommendations. It saves time. It saves money. We're not shipping as many samples. You don't have to roast and taste as many samples as a green buyer.
So, really having clear feedback and a way to present that feedback can save a lot of time and money. That also kind of gets—yeah, you have a question, right?
R!WC: No, I just wanted to point out as you're saying it, what it makes me think about is, also, if the roasting program has a dedicated green buyer, especially for more than a short timeline, like a longer period of time, it creates consistency in that feedback loop.
So you're able to learn more about the flavor profiles they're (the buyers) trying to dial in. What coffees they might, you know, be more interested in. And you can actually go out and seek those types of flavors with them in mind.
Jared: Exactly
R!WC: Because you have this longer relationship, which saves them money, but also saves you money.
Jared: Right.
R!WC: You know, you're not wasting a bunch of time and doing a bunch of extra stuff that drives your costs up. So their costs stay down. I mean, I'm just seeing it in my head as this really fun logistical, operational loop, which is something I love.
Jared: It is. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm getting at here. My next point was actually by having really clear goals in your buying program...it just eliminates so much noise and wasted time by tasting coffees that, you know, you really are never going to purchase. And that takes a lot of time.
You know, for me, I assume that the process of receiving a sample, inputting all of its information, roasting it, cupping it, and providing feedback on that sample takes about an hour per sample.
When we're tasting like a hundred samples per week, that's a lot of time, right? By streamlining what we're asking for and knowing why we're asking for something, we can eliminate a lot of redundant or just not relevant samples.
On that same kind of topic, being decisive. If you know what you want, and you have that feedback [loop] back and forth, it's a lot easier to be decisive on the samples that are being presented to you.
Having things prepared, like knowing when you plan to serve it and what your target price range is. If you have a limit that you can't exceed, then that's the limit. Being able to actually pull the trigger on samples that you are tasting cuts out a ton of time.
Providing really good feedback and creating that feedback loop is super important. Having really clearly defined goals with your buying program—is very, very important.
And then being decisive. It's almost a result of having those things dialed in. Those save the time in addition to saving money.
R!WC: If I am like an independent roaster and I'm, you know, buying green coffee from Hacea Coffee Source, and I'm just not at a point where I can have like a full-time dedicated green buyer. I'm also running my business. So I'm busy, and [green buying] is only getting so much of my attention. Is that something where you have clients who trust you to make decisions for them in some cases, especially after you've been doing this with them for a while?
Jared: Yeah. So it's, it's always a process to build trust with people. That's something that kind of has to be done. And on our end, it has to be done at Origin as well.
So, we're always starting small with partners at Origin or roaster partners here and then building that trust and developing it. Even a small roaster that—let's just say the owner is the operator and doing everything—well, that person is still kind of the green buyer, right? They still have the final say on which coffees they're purchasing. So I would still kind of put that hat on them, even if they don't want to admit it.
But in that situation, we are definitely offering a lot more support, and these things only get more and more important, really. So if a roaster partner of ours can tell me exactly what they're looking for, exactly what the pricing is or what they need it to be, and what it's going to be used for, then I can really dial in which samples we're going to cut together or for which samples I'm going to send to them and try to eliminate as much waste of time as possible.
So let's say with all these things in a perfect world, I can put out five samples in front of you, and three of them are exactly what you're looking for, right? Rather than sending you fifty to get to the three.
R!WC: Yeah, and then you're overwhelming somebody who's already overwhelmed, probably.
Jared: Right, right.
R!WC: Very interesting. So, if we had to break it down and just say having a green coffee buyer is good or bad. We're going to say good. And, uh, the reason being is over time, it'll save you money. It'll create consistency with your vendors and make it easier to communicate all good things. It sounds like.
Jared: Exactly.
R!WC: Let's also acknowledge every coffee roaster has a green coffee buyer. So, the important thing here is defining that role and kind of putting in these frameworks to work with it, to be more organized and concise.
Jared: Yeah, absolutely.
R!WC: I know just going back to my own experience, one thing that was very important for me was we only had one person who was in charge of buying our beer for the bar that I was running. And for a long time, it was me. When I finally transitioned that to someone else, it was only them.
And even though I was the boss, I was like, no, that's their job.
I want them to be in control of it because then it's consistent.
Jared: Something that we're developing that's pretty relevant here is actually a tool to help roasters with their sourcing programs. We're still working on it, but we should have it done in the next couple of weeks. It may not be the prettiest-looking tool, but it will be functional.
Basically, it will help with understanding which coffees should be sourced during different months of the year and setting expectations of when those coffees will arrive so that a roaster can really map out which coffees they want to serve each month during the year.
R!WC: Sure. Well, I'll make sure to share that when that comes out or when that's available if I can, and I would point out that if you're a small roaster, that's how a major company would be doing it as well. I don't know a lot of major breweries or major roasters that aren't generally planned out a year in advance sometimes– even longer because that way, the people can go to work every day knowing this is what we've got to get done to be effective and efficient and make enough money to be profitable in what is already a tight margin business.
Jared: Yeah, exactly.
R!WC: That sounded all so adult. Jared, it was really nice seeing you again and having you back to teach us about green coffee. I'm looking forward to doing it again next month.
If you're listening and not reading this, check out HaceaCoffee.com. You can find the transcript here on RoastWestCoast.com, along with all of the links and a bunch of the details of things that we talked about today.
Jared: Thanks Ryan.
*This transcription has been edited for length and clarity. We use an automated audio transcriber. Then go through each line to make sure it makes sense and stays true to the voice of the speaker. It is a real pain in the behind.
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