Keys To The Shop : Equipping Coffee Shop Leaders

Some interviews we have on the show touch on so many deep, important, and impactful subjects that it is hard to stop the conversation. This was one of those. I wanted to talk about our guests' career and then see where it led us and indeed we ended up discussing an assortment of issues that are sure to inspire and spark curiosity in you as you listen. Today we sit down with the great mat North!

A seasoned veteran with over two decades experience, Mat's career has taken in the full gamut of the of the industry. Stints with both national and local chains as well as time in the consumables and engineering side of the business have given him a well rounded view of the coffee world. In 2013 Mat opened Full Court Press, a small specialist multi roaster coffee shop and now Nano- roastery in the heart of Bristol. His knowledge, passion and attention to detail ensured FCP quickly became a forerunner in the city's scene. It is FCP's excellent customer service, coupled with the team's ability to articulate their extensive knowledge in an approachable way that has ensured Full Court Press not only serve exceptional coffee, but have sparked an interest in specialty coffee among their customers. Having sold FCP in 2021 he's moved into the green side of the industry as part of the European office for Raw Material, a not for profit social enterprise working in all aspects of the supply stream. He is also the author of the acclaimed book, Coffee - A Modern Field Guide, and recently served as National Coordinator for the UK chapter of the Speciality Coffee Association.

As we chat I hope you take notes and continue to pursue the subjects discussed. From Mat's career evolution and lessons learned through business ownership - to his take on how the industry has evolved and what is key for us to prioritize in the future, this conversation is loaded with value and insights from start to end.

We discuss:

• Learning through early retail experiences
• Discovering what coffee could be
• Abandoning a phd in physics to pursue coffee
• physics and engineering training helping with coffee
• How to be inspired by unknowns and learn
• Starting his shop Full Court Press
• Curating a multi roaster program
• Feedback loos in QC
• Water in coffee
• Writing a coffee book
• Quantifying the art of coffee
• Marketing vs true innovation
• How consumers are leading the way in quality coffee
• Evolution of specialty retail
• The priority of price equity and leaving efficacy based models

Links:

www.matnorth.com

Instagram @mat_north

Related episodes:

• 242 : A Conversation with James Hoffmann
• 374: Opening a Coffee Shop: Fantasy vs Reality (w/ bonus commentary)"
• 349 : Talking About 21st Century Coffee w/ Kenneth Davids
• Sustainability Series #2 : Importing & Roasting
• 333: Bridging the Professional and Home Barista Gap w/ Lance Hedrick of Onyx Coffee Lab
• Learning -vs- LEARNING

Interested in leveling up your coffee shop?

Click here to schedule a free consulting discovery call with KTTS

Click here to book a formal one-on-one consulting call!

Visit our amazing Sponsors!

www.groundcontrol.coffee

www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

I am so happy to share with you this Founder Friday episode that takes a hard look at what is possible when you want to offer excellence at scale in a cafe setting. I am joined by the founder of the iconic and standard setting company, WatchHouse, Roland Horne.

Roland founded WatchHouse in 2014 after extensive experience running small-to-medium-size businesses, including luxury aquarium design consultancy Aquarium Architecture. He holds directorships with property development funds Verum Domus and Coutts & Partners and has a MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics. Roland is currently pursuing his Executive MBA at the University of Oxford. Over the past seven years WatchHouse has grown from one cafe on London's iconic Bermondsey Street to ten sites, and in August celebrated the one-year anniversary of the WatchHouse Roastery at 36 Maltby Street. A CEO with formative experience outside the speciality coffee sector, Roland has a unique and ambitious perspective on the sustainable expansion of the brand throughout the London and beyond.

In today's conversation we get to hear the story behind WatchHouse and how Roland has grown this brand through values and a desire to keep integrity of service and quality front and center. I think you will get a great deal from this chat.

We discuss:

• From luxury aquariums to coffee
• Defining modern coffee and evolving
• Focusing on your unique value proposition
• Why you need to focus on the MLP
• Big concept in an initially small space
• Making hard financial decisions and listening to customers
• Beginning to roast
• Scaling and customizing for the community
• Living wage and following through on delivering value
• Getting better as you get bigger
• Staff structures
• Overcoming the assumption that big is bad
• Providing spaces for Happiness

Links:

www.watchhouse.com

Instagram @watchhouse

Related episodes:

• 320 Founder Friday! w/ Francesco Sanapo of Ditta Artigianale, Florence, Italy
• 171 : Founder Friday w/ Matt Chitharanjan and Namrata Asthana of Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters in India
• 348: Founder Friday! w/ Benito Burmudez of Cafe Unido, Panama City, Panama!
• 263 : Founder Friday w/ Mike McFall, Co-Founder of BIGGBY Coffee!
• 017 : Founder Friday w/ Jonathan Rubinstein of Joe Coffee: Entrepreneurship | Coffee Business | Hiring | Barista Culture | Growth

Visit our amazing Sponsors!

www.groundcontrol.coffee

www.pacficfoodservice.com

It is that time of year where cafes are all but expected to have the ubiquitous PSL in their menus. But there is so much more. Beyond this staple drink specialty cafes around the world have developed both wonderful signature creations and others that don't really resonate.

Today on shift break we will be chatting about signature drinks and I will be offering some tips on how to approach curating and creating your specialty drink menu so your beverages are more likely to succeed.

Related episodes:

• 274 : Crafting Specialty Drinks in your Shop w/ Matt Foster"
• 317 : Encore Episode: Death by Comparison
• 282 : How to Listen to your Customers
• Taste the Rainbow! : Menu knowledge, tasting, flavor, coffee cupping approach to your offerings
• Don't fall into FOLO! (Fear of Limited Options)

Visit these amazing sponsors!

The best espresso machines in the world!

www.lamarzoccousa.com

Custom branded mobile apps for your shop!

www.espressly.co

Should you open a coffee shop? How hard could it be anyway? Thousands of people around the globe have a dream to open a cafe. Once open however that dream can quickly become a nightmare. I am thrilled to have been able to collaborate with fellow podcasters over at the Adventures in Coffee podcast to put together an episode that deals with this subject head on.

In this episode you will hear from several aspiring, and experienced entrepreneurs as James harper, Scott Bentley, and myself take you through the 3 major areas of inspiration and focus cafe owners need to be aware of. The money, the scene, and the dream.

This was awesome to get to be a part of and i hope you enjoy this very important and entertaining show!

Links:

Adventures in Coffee

Slate article: My Coffee Shop Nightmare By Michael Idov

Related Keys to the Shop episodes:

• 283 : 5 Bad Reasons to Open a Coffee Shop
• 223 : Building a Financially Resilient Business w/ Andrew Carroll
• 239 : 5 Best Practices for the Best Small Business w/ Henry Lopez
• 141 : The 27 Challenges Managers Face w/ Bruce Tulgan

Interested in leveling up your coffee shop?

Click here to schedule a free consulting discovery call with KTTS

Click here to book a formal one-on-one consulting call!

Visit our amazing Sponsors!

www.groundcontrol.coffee

www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

How long should you let your coffee age after roast? Is freshest always best? How can we ensure our customers get the coffee at its peak? These are some of the questions that we explore around the topic of ideal resting times for roasted coffee, the myths around freshness, and the best practices for managing your coffee's flavor life cycle.

In this episode of RoR from Roast Magazine we are exploring the new data associated with ideal resting times for coffee based on a study recently conducted and written about in Roast and the implication it has for you, the customer, and the farmers. We are talking with the person who conducted this study, President of Cafe Kreyol, Joey Stazzone.

Joey Stazzone is the President (and Chief Coffee Hunter) of Cafe Kreyol. In 2012 Stazzone took his experience with chemistry, cross breeding, and backyard botany, and began working in developing countries with the goal of creating sustainable employment, through specialty coffee. Through a decade of hands-on experience working with producers, he has become an expert in fermentations and post harvest processing. Stazzone has been a licensed Q Grader since 2015, and became a CQI Lecturer on Quality Evaluation in 2022. He has been on the international jury for the Bolivia Quality Cup Presidential Tournament 4 times, and has given dozens of lectures on Direct and Transparent Trading as well as Fermentations and Post Harvest Processing. Through his work at Cafe Kreyol, he provides consulting to hundreds of producers a year, conducting experiments on coffee fermentations, pH testing, and post harvest processing, in order to help them develop the best possible product. Recently his company completed a scientific study on post roast resting times, and the impact on sensory evaluation which can be found HERE

In our conversation we cover:

• Standard understanding of resting a degassing
• Relaying accurate information
• Cafe Kreyol's experiment and results
• Tools and methods for evaluation
• How to use resting data in your Roastery
• Surprising results of long term degassing
• Roasting fast or slow and the impact on degassing
• How does this work with blends?
• Freshness and Marketing

Subscribe to Roast Magazine! Use code "ROR" to get $5 off

Links:

• www.cafekreyol.com
• www.roastmagazine.com

Related Episodes:

• RoR #1: A Conversation w/ Anne Cooper of Equilibrium Master Roasters
• RoR #2: Exploring Quality Control w/ Spencer Turer of Coffee Enterprises
• RoR #3: Making Contingency Planning a Reality w/ Andi Trindle Mersch of Philz Coffee
• RoR #4: Practical Thermal Dynamics w/ Candice Madison of Royal Coffee / The Crown Oak
• RoR #5: Time and Color in Roasting w/ Morten Munchow of Coffee Mind"
• RoR #6: Buying Less and Doing More w/ Ever Meister
• RoR #7 Illustrative Sample Roasting w/ Mike Ebert of Firedancer Coffee Consultants
• ROR #8 How Post-Harvest Processing Impacts Flavor w/ Siva Subramanian and Byron Holcomb of Olam Food Ingredients
• RoR #9 Inside the Roaster's Tool Kit w/ Kat Melheim of Black and White Coffee and The Coffee People Zine
• RoR #10 : What Your Broker Wishes You Knew w/ Scott Merle of La Minita Coffee
• RoR #11 : Exploring Scent w/ Sandra Elisa Loofbourow
• RoR #12 : Inside Coffee Packaging w/ Ever Meister
• RoR #13 : The NORM ROAST Protocol w/ Dave Baxter
• RoR #14: How to Roast New Processing Methods w/ Mike Ebert
• RoR #15 : Managing LTL Freight and the Nuances of green Shipping w/ Evan Gilman of Royal Coffee

The work of running a cafe seems to never be quite complete. While we know that chasing " perfection" is not the goal, we would do well to embrace the idea of dial in and refinement in our work.

Today on Shift Break we will be talking about what a summer woodworking project from years ago taught me about refining what we do in our cafes.

Related episodes:

• Higher Degrees of Imperfection
• 373 : The Owner's Role: 5 Behaviors for Effectiveness
• Feedback Culture : Making feedback a part of what you do not just something you sometimes do
• 181 : Organizational Self-Knowledge
• Turning Radius

Visit these amazing sponsors!

The best espresso machines in the world!

www.lamarzoccousa.com

Custom branded mobile apps for your shop!

www.espressly.co

The coffee shop is made up various tasks and roles that all work together to create something magical. Wen those roles are not clear or followed through on then the we lose the magic and gain frustration. No role in the cafe is as important than that of the owner (arguably managers but that's another topic), yet we rarely see owners having job descriptions let alone a schedule organized according to both the administrative / financial needs AND the areas of operations, quality, and people.

In today's episode we will discuss the 5 behaviors that are necessary for owners to successfully and effectively lead and manage those 3 areas so they can facilitate and create a thriving coffee shop.

We cover:

• Operations, People, and Quality
• The need for detailed scheduled work
• Constant curiosity
• Tension as needed structure
• Honesty at all costs
• Using problems to discover and institute solutions
• Crafting systems needed for operations that serve the people

Related Episodes:

• 314 : The 6 Essential Qualities of Coffee Shop Leaders
• 368 : Walking the Line Between Leadership and Friendship
• 307 : 10 Simple ways to Level Up your Coffee Shop
• 253 : Mindsets that Sabotage Success
• 248 : The 5 Elements of Resourcing your Team

Interested in leveling up your coffee shop?

Click here to schedule a free consulting discovery call with KTTS

Click here to book a formal one-on-one consulting call!

Visit our amazing Sponsors!

www.groundcontrol.coffee

www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

Finally. It is time to get meta and have a Shift Break conversation about...shift breaks.

We all go to work with a finite amount of energy to use on that days tasks and responsibilities. Trouble is that we also tend to work well beyond the point at which we have used up our energy and subsist on coffee and fumes. The shift break is supposed to be something that allows for some respite in the midst of a busy day but is often more an idea than a regular and well resourced practice.

Today on Shift Break we will talk about the shift break, its role in the cafe, the reality of how we tend to minimize it, and why making it a reality for your staff is a critical part of caring for them and your business.

Related episodes:

Shift Break:

• Four Steps to Inspiring Your Staff
• How to Talk to Each Other
• The Importance of Debriefing
• Reasonable Expectations

Main

• 248 : The 5 Elements of Resourcing your Team

Visit these amazing sponsors!

The best espresso machines in the world!

www.lamarzoccousa.com

Custom branded mobile apps for your shop!

www.espressly.co

Every day on bars across the globe baristas are using milk to create amazing drinks. For almost as long as coffee has been served in coffee shops, milk has been a staple ingredient. Yet, in spite of its ubiquity in coffee culture, we tend to focus (understandably) more on understanding and crafting coffee than we do the milk that today makes up such a. large portion of our menus.

Today you are in for a treat. We will be diving into the subject of milk from both a scientific perspective and a craft perspective. To do this we talk with two establish authorities on the subject, Morten Munchow and Emilee Bryant.

Morten Munchow is the Founder of Coffee Mind a coffee roasting academy, research, and consultancy company based in Denmark. Morten is a scholar of biology who through over ten years of intense practical and scientific research and application gained a unique insights that have pushed the specialty coffee industry forward worldwide. He is a sought after speaker and presenter having published several papers in scientific journals.

Emilee Bryant is a long time award winning barista, latte art champion, internationally revered coffee content creator, and trainer with Counter Culture Coffee in NYC. When it comes to breaking down the craft of coffee, milk steaming and latte art, Emilee is second to none in effectively communicating concepts that lead to consistently great results.

In both conversations we get very technical and specific about the how what and why of milk as a product and then the practical steps needed to craft that milk into a beautiful texture to add to our coffee.

I hope you listen deeply and leave this episode with more clarity, understanding, and confidence regarding the science and craft of milk!

Links:

Morten:

• www.coffee-mind.com
• Instagram

Emilee:

• Youtube
• @emstagrim

Related episodes:

• 047 : Mastering Latte Art : Some of the worlds best latte masters weigh in!
• 333: Bridging the Professional and Home Barista Gap w/ Lance Hedrick of Onyx Coffee Lab
• RoR #5: Time and Color in Roasting w/ Morten Munchow of Coffee Mind"
• 339 : What Good Barista Training Produces
• 119 : Barista Training Masterclass w/ 2009 WBC Champion, Gwilym Davies

Interested in leveling up your coffee shop?

Click here to schedule a free consulting discovery call with KTTS

Click here to book a formal one-on-one consulting call!

Visit our amazing Sponsors!

www.groundcontrol.coffee

www.pacficfoodservice.com

www.coffeefest.com

I got a great question in from a listener. "How should managers be appraising staff?" I love it because it gets beyond the trope of the holy trinity of delegation (Schedule + Inventory/ordering + Shift coverage) and assumes correctly that a manager should be involved in the development of their team.

So today on Shift Break we will be talking about the how of apprising staff as manager as well as the preparations necessary to be effective with your coaching, feedback, and reviews.

Don't miss this one!

Related Episodes:

243 : Encore Episode! "The Sleepwalking Barista (Owner)"

The Difference of Deference to your Staff

Visit these amazing sponsors!

The best espresso machines in the world!

www.lamarzoccousa.com

Custom branded mobile apps for your shop!

www.espressly.co