For me this talk was a moment of crystalisation about how I feel about coffee right now, and what I want to focus a lot of my energy on.  I had initially planned to talk about how quality focused businesses were doing well right now, but in the process of writing the talk that seemed to shift.  I should add a final caveat to this by saying that I do love making and drinking espresso.

My talk was titled “How the coffee industry lost the public’s trust, and how good coffee can win it back again.”

My feelings about espresso changed dramatically around the time I first experienced coffee in Italy.  A few things struck me initially – the coffee was prepared reasonably well, it wasn’t astonishing or delicious and it was cheap.  I would later learn that the price of espresso to be consumed at the bar is regulated and never more than €1.  When I first made espresso for Italians I was initially confused by the fact that they never asked for espresso, they just asked for coffee.  Non-specific, without customisation – just coffee.

Like many people I had held a fairly romantic notion of espresso in Italy.  This was swept away and replaced by disappointment.  This has since given way to respect.  I think what changed my mind was a little perspective, and a better understanding of espresso’s history. ¹

This poster is probably familiar to everyone in coffee.  For me it summarizes pre-1948 espresso.  The innovation that espresso offered at this point was speed.  Suddenly a cup of coffee could be brewed very quickly.  So quickly, in fact, that you could grab a cup whilst hanging out of the side of a moving train.  The cups of coffee are full to the brim, and have not even the vaguest whisp of crema upon them.  This was nothing like espresso as we know it.  This was like having a big tank of water with which to make multiple moka pots.

Then of course we have post WWII espresso, we have Achille Gaggia’s espresso machine and we have the first mentions of crema.  Again – at this stage espresso didn’t suddenly become perfect little 25ml shots, full of thick dense crema.  The real revelation for me about this period was an almost throwaway sentence in one of Kenneth Davids books on coffee.  Post WWII Italy was not an economically strong place.  It is unlikely that the coffees bought during this time, during the birth of espresso’s tradition as we know it, were anything other than cheap and readily available.  It is no great surprise that naturally processed coffees from Brazil and robusta became the bedrock of the traditional espresso blend but we’d do well not to assume they were chosen because they tasted the best.  Espresso is pretty good way to brew these coffees.

The point that I am slowly working towards is that for all the romance, history and tradition, espresso is not special.  It is not luxury.  It is not gourmet.  It is just a way to brew a small, strong cup of coffee.

That of course changed, and in no small part thanks to Howard Schulz.  It is worth noting that in any description of his epiphany moment in Italy, where he saw a barista craft both an espresso and a cappuccino in a convivial and charming manner, does he describe being blown away by the coffee.  It was the experience that stuck with him, and the experience he thought he could sell. ²

He was, of course, quite right.  He could sell the experience, he could package it up and replicate it almost exactly across the world.  I have no idea how many different stores they have worldwide, but with 700 in the UK it is hard to argue with him.  However we did something else as part of this process.  We made espresso expensive.

Let’s say a single espresso in London costs £1.50, which is a little high but not by any means unusual.  Assuming it is a 25ml shot that works out at 6p/ml.

If you were to go to a pub and buy a pint of espresso it would cost you £34.08.  Or you bought a wine bottle of espresso it would cost £45.  That is a phenomenal amount of money.  Think about the drinks you can buy for that sort of price.  They are either extremely delicious or extremely alcoholic.

The problem is that a price tag like this is a pretty hefty promise.  Selling an espresso for this much implies that the experience will be of equal value.  Sip for sip it should be as satisfying as a great champagne.  The problem is that in this country, in London, in the vast majority of businesses – it isn’t.

Charging this much and delivering something so awful as the average high street espresso destroys any trust between the coffee industry and the general public.  This kind of price/experience discrepancy makes people feel stupid.  It makes them resentful.  It turns them into the kind of people that get very angry and leave vicious and dismissive comments at the bottom of news stories about speciality coffee posted online.  We’ve all seen those comments online, globally I might add, that follow a news story about speciality coffee.  Angry, bitter comments about what a waste of time and money this ‘fancy’ coffee is, that it is nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes and that coffee is just coffee.  These opinions come from specific experiences, we – the coffee industry – have created some very angry consumers.

As soon as the economy started to dip there were a glut of articles on ways to live more frugally, how to strip unnecessary spending from your day to day habits.  In every single list was coffee.  By and large lattes on the high street are overpriced, they are worth cutting out of the budget.  The frustration is that they don’t have to be. ³  I wouldn’t advise dropping the coffee from your routine, I would advise finding a place that makes one that is worth the money.

Yet still the industry persists in telling us that espresso is better.  At the Allegra talk I listened to to Rebecca Hemsley, the head of coffee for Pret A Manger, talk about how they offer (for the price conscious) a cup of filter coffee for 99p.  She added that they weren’t cutting corners – they used the same blend as they do for their espresso.  I should add that a single espresso at Pret is £1.25.  What message does that send to the consumer?  How does that affect their expectations of both the espresso and the filter coffee?

So I’ve written quite a lot already about espresso, and haven’t really gotten onto the subject of brewed coffee.  At this point in the talk I began brewing a small press of coffee.  I wanted to talk about where I thought coffee could go.  In the first talk of the day Darcy Willson-Rymer, the MD of Starbucks UK, had described value as being a combination of price, product and value.  I quite liked this, and say what you like about Starbucks but they’ve cleared managed to price their experience right for it to be the success it is. ⁴

I chose a coffee to brew that had very distinct and interesting characteristics.  I talked about where the coffee was from, and how it had gotten to the UK.  I described the coffee as having strong notes of blackcurrant, cherry and blueberry.  For me this makes an obvious promise, whereas a price makes a slightly less direct one.  A promise like this is a fairly big one but they pay off is also potentially huge.  We all have a salesman in our life that we completely trust.  They might not be an obvious salesman – they could be a bartender, a waiter, a sommelier or someone who sells stationary.  We trust their judgement, and we are loyal to them.  That trust was gained through making promises and keeping them.  Making a promise like this with a cup of coffee was what pushed us to work with Marco on the Uber Boiler but that is a slightly different topic.

As the coffee finished brewing I explained how much I’d like to sell it for a cup:  £3.  This wasn’t because it was vac-packed, or because it was airfreighted, or because it came in a nice bag with a nice logo.  If you like coffee, then I think that that combination of price, product and experience is good value for money.  Buying and drinking this cup of coffee is worth every penny.  I offered that one 8oz press to the audience for sale, and I am very grateful (and was somewhat relieved at the time) to both Darcy and Louie Salvone for paying £5 each (to charity) to split the press between them.

Brewed coffee is capable of such flexibility, such a range of experiences – from the satisfying, to the interesting, to the exciting, to the downright weird – that I think it is the most overlooked and underestimated weapon in the arsenal of those of us trying to build consumption of great coffee.  I am not saying it is better than espresso, but I do think a great cup of brewed coffee is less elusive than a great espresso.

Most operators believe espresso is somehow better than brewed coffee, and that brewed coffee is a second class experience that is suitable only for bulk brewing the nasty, weak coffee they serve at events where people aren’t paying for coffee.  Restauranteurs insist on having espresso machines even though the flow of a restaurant and its layout make serving great espresso virtually impossible even if the brewing is impeccable.

So I should wrap this up by saying that in the next year or two the proliferation of great brewed coffee, ideally by the cup, is a big goal for me – both personally and professionally.  If you are reading this and you can help then I really hope you do because I think everybody, from grower to consumer, wins.

1. Though I should say that my espresso history is far from authoratative!
2. Can I just take a moment to have a quick rant about the constant use of the word ‘theatre’ around espresso.  Theatre is entertaining, but there are only so many performances of the same thing that I am prepared to sit through and pay for.  If you have bought a commercial espresso machine mainly because of the theatre then your business may be in for some difficult months ahead.
3. That said, a large part of me is enjoying a market with more value focused, quality conscious spenders.
4. I am aware that is a childish and snarky dig at their product, but the whole point of this post is about serving great coffee which I don’t think they do.

In recent conversations someone has said to me that they love a certain coffee, but not first thing in the morning.  Maybe mid-afternoon instead.  Initially I didn’t get it.  My very narrow mind assumed that good coffee was good coffee and that the rotation of the earth in relation to the sun shouldn’t have too much impact on how that coffee, my tongue and my brain all got along.

I remember doing an espresso tasting for a wine magazine a year or two ago now.  We tasted the espressos blind – the coffees rushed quickly into our room from the roasters themselves, set up on their own machines just outside the door.  I was excited to taste coffees like this, with other professional tasters and I remember my frustration when the journalist kept asking which espresso we had tasted would go best with chocolate cake, or would be best after dinner.  “This is irrelevant!” I thought, “I want to talk about how these espressos taste!  I want to talk about which come from clean, tasty green coffees, about which have been carefully and intelligently roasted.”  Except they weren’t interested in that.

I’ve written before that sometimes independent cafes are so desperate to be nothing like the chains they despise that they occasionally miss out on some of the smarter ideas and concepts that the chains use very effectively – having spent a lot of time and money researching and developing them.  I know a lot of us in the coffee industry are acutely aware that we drink coffee with a slightly different mindset to most consumers, and that we buy coffees in a different way too.

Does it devalue a great single varietal, single estate coffee to say that is great with breakfast?  If we say that it is a great morning cup are we missing a chance to say that it is an heirloom bourbon, a honey process coffee, part of only a 10 bag lot or that it has really nice red apple and red grape flavours in it?  Which is the most important piece of information to most consumers?  How are they going to enjoy that bag of coffee?  I’ve talked before about how the size of the promise we make is linked to the speed we build up trust with the consumer, but what about when we lose control of how the coffee is brewed?

I have become aware recently that I often talk about coffees in a different way, based on my own choices.  There are some coffees that almost require a little intellectual engagement – they are challenging and interesting and worthy of discussion.  There are also coffees that I drink when I don’t want to think about it, I just want to be satisfied and have a simple delicious cup. ²  Instead of talking about morning coffees – is there any value in talking more about why a coffee might be appreciated in the morning, to emphasize the tasting/sensory part more than the ritual part?

Last of all – what is your favourite coffee to drink around lunchtime and why?

1. That still does make me angry, and a bit frustrated.  It is probably the most common misconception – that the coffee itself has something to do with the strength of the cup.
2. We’ve touched on chuggability before…

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!

First and foremost – we don’t drink coffee like we drink wine. Broadly speaking we buy wine in two different circumstances: to enjoy ourselves and to enjoy with others. Generally we spend more, buy better, buy more interesting when we are enjoying it with others. We want to know more, want a little story, want something worth discussing. Wine’s great success was making it culturally acceptable/desirable to discuss what you drank at some length. Coffee isn’t quite there yet. We drink coffee in different circumstances – mostly it is a solitary affair, though sometimes shared but rarely the focal point the way a stellar bottle of wine can be. We experience it in different environments, with different goals and different focus on the sensory experience.

I also want to look at the route to wine’s success. In the UK certainly a higher spend may have been achieved but the real successes of the wine boom were producers like E&J Gallo. The £5 bottle of acceptable, non-descript, reliable wine. Compared to what had been easily available at that price range in the decades previous these wines were really pretty good. More than that – they made wine extremely accessible.

I recently attended a chocolate and tea pairing, at Tea Smith, with the chocolates by William Curley. There were some toe-curlingly, giggle inducingly wonderful moments and flavours. Talking to both John from Tea Smith and William it is clear that these two commodities could fall into the wine model the way that coffee could. However do push them into that model wouldn’t bring to the fore the most interesting things about them. Microlots of astounding tea don’t fit into the wine model, despite coming from one estate and being one particular type of tea and having an interesting processing method, and listening to William talk about chocolate you felt you could swap chocolate for coffee and it would work as well – from sourcing to vintage machinery!  Yet high-end chocolate has adopted a different approach when it comes to marketing and consumer understanding.

We, as an industry, have yet to find the hook that will encourage the broader public to delve deeper into coffee – to discover the captivating and broad range of sensory experiences available in what is considered a humdrum, everyday drink. It is clear, however, that we can’t settle on trying to piggyback wine because it just won’t work. We must keep looking but I have no doubt that accessibility will be the key.

UPDATE:  Steve Leighton posts on Coffee and Wine.

You, the consumers, are to blame.¹

Now you certainly can’t take all the blame but consumers have an enormous power over the people making the coffee.  After all – you’re paying for it.  You are staggeringly tolerant of incredibly poor product.  You can do something very simple that would have a huge effect on the quality of coffee served:  when it is bad – take it back.

I’ve spoken to a rich mixture of cafe owners in my few years in the coffee industry, and if we look just at those who serve terrible coffee they all had one thing in common:  they didn’t know.

Worse still they thought that they did a great job, not because they tasted it and found it delicious but because (and to quote them) “not one of my customers has ever complained.”

This is probably true, most people don’t complain.  But what would happen if they did?  Initially not that much.  I’ve sent coffee back, they’ve remade it and it was just as awful.  I sent it back again.  If just one person does it then a business can shrug it off.  Now imagine if a dozen people a day complained.  The business would have their coffee supplier out very quickly – they’d re-examine what their raw materials, their machinery, their production skills.  The might change supplier, they might get some more training.  They’d be worried and they’d turn their energies and their focus onto serving drinks that made their customers genuinely happy.

I am not suggesting that you begin to bully your local cafe into doing exactly what you want, but sending back a terrible coffee is never a waste of time.  Businesses are listening very carefully right now and it may turn out to be in both of your interests.

My final point in all this is that you only earn the right to criticism when you take the time and effort to compliment good work and great drinks.  Let those businesses know – it really does make one’s day!

1. I ought to make it clear at this point that obviously consumers are not really to blame, but to start a discussion about the power of the consumer and also – heaven forbid – have a little fun with this topic!

To give an example of this in effect I want to talk about how many businesses react to having a fairly large queue. As they try and produce more drinks quickly things tend to go downhill – shot times start to drop, drink quality slides and overall service isn’t what it needs to be. To them the most important part of your experience is that you don’t queue for too long.

Now if they only put themselves at the back of their own queue. If they waited with everyone else until they got to the front and then you asked them: Would you like me to rush your drink or would you rather I did it properly? Which of these would justify the time you spent waiting? Which would encourage you to come tomorrow and wait in the queue again?

Rushing out drinks just doesn’t make sense. Why expose the most possible people to anything other than your best possible product? Cutting corners when you are busy is simply unacceptable if you are planning on building a loyal customer base.

Going back to being in your own queue – what was it like to walk in and order? Was it obvious where to go? Whilst you were queuing were there things to tempt you? Were questions answered before you had to ask them? I know this is blindingly obvious stuff – yet countless businesses don’t get customer flow right, or merchandising and upselling.

This is hardly new thinking. In just about every episode of “Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares” Gordon makes the restaurateurs have a meal in their own restaurant and the experience is often shocking and deeply revelatory.

I can’t urge cafe owners enough to take 10 minutes out from behind the bar, and go and stand in the queue and experience what their customers experience every day. How long did it take for someone to acknowledge you? Are staff asking the right questions?

Would you visit every day if you didn’t own the place?

Does this contradict the goal we have in the coffee industry of trying to educate our consumers?  Whilst contradictory does the above make sense and ring true with any of you reading?

I think one of the gravest mistakes the speciality coffee industry makes is to try and forcefully educate its consumers, putting those of us behind the bar in the position of educator or teacher.  That mental balance of power is why “educating the consumer” often goes so wrong, with strong angry and adverse reactions to our efforts.

I think we need to change the goal, change the mindset around this interaction.  The goal isn’t just to create a consumer with a better understanding, it is to create a loyal consumer.  If you do a great job education is a lot about getting them to appreciate that.

Back to milk again – we fight the constant battle of customers wanting hotter drinks.  We often tell them that overheated milk doesn’t taste as good, and they often feel that they want their drink their way.  Once they understand that milk done this way is sweeter, tastier and feels nicer to drink they aren’t just educated – they are now extremely limited in their choices for where to go and get a good cappuccino.  That is the really great news.

I confess I take a little pride when people come back after an initial training course complaining that they can’t buy coffee anywhere anymore.  Everywhere they look they bad milk, bad technique, terrible and tasteless drinks.  They are now less price sensitive, educated and if I can put great milk drinks in front of them consistently I could well have a very happy customer for life, perhaps even the type of customer who becomes an ambassador for your business or in the term of Kevin Kelly – a true fan.

To turn it back to you being a customer again – think about the formal learning you’ve done, be it school or university or college.  Subject matter was important, but not as much as enjoying the process of education.  We all had teachers that changed our minds from hating a subject to loving it (and doing well in it too) and sadly vice versa.  What is it about those teachers that made their classes a pleasure?

Telling people that what they want is wrong is not education.

Telling people what you think is right and important is not education.

Showing a customer what is great about what you do, and how it matters to them is my kind of education.

Over the last few years I’ve done a lot of very varied barista training.  The vast majority of people I met were having their first introduction to brewing coffee carefully and well.  I hope this isn’t an arrogant statement – most of us grew up, myself included, with a “coffee’s just coffee” mentality that had to be shattered at some point when we realised it was a fresh food of variable quality that we could influence through preparation.

Milk texture is the “a-ha” moment for a lot people.  The first time they sip a cappuccino with thick, tight-knit bubbles, with that velvety texture and surprising sweetness a penny drops and they get a little bit excited at how good coffee can be.

Then something terrible happens.  They start worry about their customers expectations.

“This doesn’t look like my normal cappuccino, my customers expect something a bit frothier.”

And that person is right – their customers do.

Let’s re-assess expectations for a moment:  If I chose to eat out in a restaurant in a touristy location in London, let’s say Leicester Square, I expect an average meal, with poor service and an extortionate bill.  Meeting my expectations is not a good thing.  As a consumer I want you to exceed them.

If I walk into a cafe chosen at random then I will likely expect to be served that sea-foam, dry and overheated cappuccino that we see in marketing every day, on tv, on billboards and in lots of other cafes.  Lots of cafes meet my expectations – and those of their customers – but it is worth remembering that those expectations have been set pretty low after years and years of pretty poor coffee being normal.

I think meeting customers expectations has been reinforced by the idea that the customer is always right.

The customer is not always right.

The customer should always be treated with respect, intelligence and made to feel welcome and looked after within your business.  This does not mean that we should bend to their every whim.  I’ve been wrong as a customer countless times, and I will be in the future.

Going to the Fat Duck and expecting roast chicken is wrong.  Asking for your Big Mac medium rare is wrong.  Asking for espresso to go is wrong.

There is a way to say no to me as a customer and to exceed my expectations of you and your business.  I can walk out satisfied and (more importantly) likely a new, loyal¹ for your business.

The benefits of exceeding someone’s expectations are huge, and in an economic climate where business are looking for a competitive edge then offering something different and desirable has rewards that more than compensate the risk.

1. Customer loyalty, and education, are another topic I want to look at in a future post

I hope you don’t mind if I use two theoretical espresso establishments.  One sells a shot of espresso for 60p, they carry no obvious branding as to which coffee they are brewing.  The second place sells its espresso for £1.80, three times the price.

What is interesting about this is that the 60p shot is probably less appealing than the £1.80, but you wouldn’t necessarily expect the £1.80 shot to be amazing or three times better.  In a world where most espresso is no good, the chance of finding a great one at that price (60p) seem absurd. ¹We still make judgments on coffee’s quality based on its price but we’ve learned to limit our expectations when the price goes up.  There is, however, a threshold limit to that expectation.

Imagine now a place with a £4 single espresso.  As you receive the drink you probably say out loud “This better be good.”  Quite rightly – it had better be good, because this business has made an implied promise of how good your experience will be.

Those of us in the industry are always frustrated when coffee news on blogs and news websites receive hundreds of surprisingly angry people deriding the very idea of quality coffee, angrily denouncing coffee “snobs” or mocking those businesses trying to do better.

No, what will happen is that these people will go to the training sessions and forget them very soon after. Why? They work in coffee shops and it really doesn’t matter. It’s just coffee.

I think the coffee industry has to accept that we created these people, their anger and bitterness a result of our actions.

These people have probably tried to buy a better cup in the past, and in trying to do so have probably bought a more expensive cup.  It might be that that experience was in a Starbucks, or perhaps in an independent.  Either way they were so disappointed that they still feel the need to vent that anger on message boards.

Coming back to setting prices, and what we communicate with them.  If you own a cafe then look at your prices – what do they say about your coffee?  What did you base those prices on?  Was it on the chains you compete against or was it based on the prices listed in a business whose quality you want to emulate?

At this point I want to clarify that I am not suggesting pricing coffee in such a way that it develops the tag of exclusivity any further than it already has.  I hate seeing coffee as something exclusive – I want coffee to be inclusive.  We need to drive consumption, as higher consumption of better coffee is pretty much a win/win for everyone in the chain – from consumer back to producer.

That said I do want to wrap this post up by saying that I think we often fail to communicate properly through our pricing.  One of the last things we think about is: “What is this cup of coffee worth?”

1. It is worth noting that a few places in London that do great espresso do it very cheaply – I am not saying cheap and delicious espresso is impossible

I am going to start with trust.  This might seem an abstract word, but I hope at the end of this it will earn its place as a fitting title.  What I really want to talk about is the state of relations between the average consumer and the average cafe.  In my eyes we have, by and large, lost the trust of the consumer.

To start with I want to use the example of restaurants:  Let’s put you in the situation of being stranded in a strange town, full of independent restaurants and you are very hungry.  You scan the menus outside of three or four places and from this you will make some judgments on those businesses.  Two key factors here will influence your judgement – what dishes they serve and their price.

The first is really quite obvious – from the dishes you’ll know whether to expect home cooking or whether to expect Michelin level cuisine.  However this won’t really give you a very strong indicator of the quality compared to the prices.

Now let’s skip to the end of the meal.  You chose the place with the fancy cooking, and you’ve racked up quite a bill.  What’s more the food wasn’t very good.  In fact it was terrible.  How do you feel?  Angry?  Taken advantage of?  Disappointed?  Betrayed?

When restaurants do this they completely lose our trust – we’ll likely never spend any money with them again, and probably go out of our way to make sure family and friends don’t fall into that trap.

Hopefully you can see where I am going with this – think about the coffee you’ve bought in the past, and the prices you’ve paid.  How often has the price been correctly tied to the quality?  How often have you had your trust abused?  I am sure I am not alone in being extremely distrustful of most places selling coffee (globally I might add).

If you own a cafe then ask yourself if your customers trust you.  I mean really trust you.  If a regular came in and you had an unusual (but excellent) coffee in your grinder, or to drink as a french press brew, would they buy it on your recommendation?  If you found a coffee you thought was worth £5 a cup, could you sell it to them?

The advantages of trust are obvious – increased loyalty, increased customer spend, easier ethical/helpful upselling and a win/win for you and your customer.

I’ll aim to continue this next week…..