Nonetheless it has been interesting to see what they industry press are writing about, what advice is being offered, what strategies are being deemed wise.  A word I am seeing more and more is ‘diversifying’.

Starbucks are in a mess right now, and they have been for some time.  To me the problems are linked to a gradual loss of identity over the last few years.  Right now they are putting out mixed messages – on one hand promoting better coffee, on the other hand discounting it. Worrying about breakfast sandwiches, selling CDs, whilst still trying to claim that they are all about the coffee.

Photo by tonx

For a while, in the UK anyway, McDonald’s were all about salads.  Big money on big advertising campaigns telling us what a good idea it was to buy a salad at McDonald’s.  It didn’t work, that isn’t why we go to that place and walking past a branch on my way home I didn’t see a single salad image on display and I have no idea if they even still serve them.  The saw salad’s as a way to help stop declining sales, instead of actually making the food they had served very successfully taste, and be, better.

We’ve all visited businesses that have scrambled for turnover through diversification – coffees, teas, smoothies, soft drinks, pastries, panani are only the beginning.  Every item added seems to drag the average care and attention for each item down a little.  Nowhere does a huge range of things exceptionally well.  In the end, desperate to catch all consumer demands the business looses all identity.

Imagine I showed you a menu for two different Chinese¹ restaurants.  The first has a typically huge menu of maybe 50 or 60 dishes.  The second menu has a total of 15.  Would you expect a difference in quality between the two?  Would the smaller menu imply a lack of imagination or greater care and attention to each dish?  If each restaurant does two dishes incredibly well – in which menu do you have a better chance of a great experience?

Starbucks do the desert in a cup very well.  They brand it well, they sell it well and if you have a sugar craving then it probably tastes pretty good.  The gingerbread latte has become weirdly iconic, and endlessly imitated.  Those drinks built the Starbucks expansion, and for many consumers they justified the premium price. ²

Starbucks have done a poor job of redeclaring their own identity and it continues to hurt them.  Businesses are looking at a bleak year ahead and I think having a strong identity is key.  You need customers loyal to your business, customers that have a connection with what you do, with the positive experience they associate with you.  Diversity may be a way to sneak up the average customer spend, and I am not saying it can’t be done well, but often it reeks of desperation or overreaction to a natural dip in sales (such as in January…).  Coffee is still a long way from being written out of people’s budgets – as long it is worth the price per cup.

Dropping coffee sales say more about what people think your cup is worth to them than it does about your customers think about the size of your range of products.

1. Or any cuisine with a typically very large menu
2. I justify that simply by the numbers they sold!

The route down is quite boring with occaisonal pockets of beauty.  It must be a road full of accidents though because it is so straight and dull, there is no real driving to be done.  Anyway, from time to time you see something quite photographable.  I quite liked this alien water tower:

Ah but the coffee, what of the coffee?  Well we arrived into LA without much in the way of caffeine urges and we just hung out at the (now) legendary Intelli bungalow with the crew (Kyle, Ryan, Nick, Devon, Colin and Tony was around too) before having a quick look at the cafe in progress, getting some drinks, some damn fine tacos (I could get very addicted to them) and then hanging out and talking rubbish til late into the night.

The next day we went down to the roasting works which are absolutely stunning, the roaster looks so damn good it is criminal and the training room and cupping room both are great.  I was delighted to cup there and there were some great coffees on the table, especially their Idido Valley Natural that was a crazy cup of coffee – when it was hot it had this incredible pineapple (to me anyway!).  The Panama and Kenyan on the table were pretty damn good too.

I was relieved there was no latte art smackdown to be had, as my one pour there was so bad is was funny.   A highlight of the day was a little Gelato at a great place working with Intelli to do single origin ice-cream – a Bolivian and a Kenyan, and it was weird how much the characteristics of the coffees came through.

Our final day was spent with Tony as the rest of the crew had to head to the Roasting Works for training.   It was nice for Anette and I to just hang out with him, he’s so great and I loved chatting to him about all things coffee and all things not coffee.  He tooks us down to Venice beach so we could dip our toes in the Pacific.  It is not my place to comment on Tony leaving Intelli, but I do think that whatever he does next will be amazing and I hope to keep in good contact with him.  He’s truly awesome.

From there we were pretty close to Caffe Luxxe so we went in for our first coffee of the day.  They have a couple of three group Synessos on the bar (under a great skylight) and I had a great macchiato (which was a proper macchiato with just a little marking of milk not the new macchiato that seems to be everywhere where you pour essentially a mini capp, popularised no doubt by it being an opportunity to pour difficult latte art).  Tony’s capp had some nice latte art and we chatted to Mark about coffee and some incredible bars of chocolate he was stocking.

From there it was to the airport and spending 11 hours in a tiny seat pretending to be luggage.

Thanks to everyone in LA, it was a shame I didn’t get to say goodbye to Kyle (who I’d love to chat to more as well) and we lose Stephen to Intelli for a month or so til he comes back to help me in the final stages for WBC prep.

So now I am back in the UK, I have one more post on the roadtrip to come (which is kind of a best of) so if anyone has any questions then go for the contact form or leave them in the comments.

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