Coffee Break

Green Mountain Coffee Roasters does it again. According to this month’s Top 500 Guide from Internet Retailer, our favorite big market coffee roaster grew sales by 86.1% last year, making it the fastest growing web retailer in its niche, increasing dollar sales from $59.8 million to $111.3 million - in an economic downturn.

What’s Green Mountain’s secret? Aside from excellent coffee, the big secret seems to be a management arm that’s hitting all the right notes. They’re growing their Fair Trade and Organic lines just as the demand for Fair Trade and Certified Organic coffees is growing. They’ve linked their coffee with the most popular single-serve coffee machine on the market - the Keurig - to the point where the two are practically synonymous - and Keurig sales/marketing have really taken off. They’ve expanded operations in the U.S. market at a time when any company adding new US jobs is guaranteed great publicity for it. They offer their coffee in enough forms to make it “right” for everyone - whole bean, ground and K-cup. And did I mention that the coffee is great?

The biggest driver of online sales has been the growth of the Cafe Express Club, Green Mountain’s customer loyalty program. Cafe Express is Green Mountain’s subscription coffee club - and it’s about as flexible as you can get. You sign up for the club, order the coffee that you want in the amount that you want and set up an automatic shipment interval that can range from every two weeks to every six months. You’re not stuck with it, either. You can change your order or your shipment interval whenever you want with no penalty. By ordering through Cafe Express, you get $1 off each bag of coffee that you buy, $2 off each box of K-cups that you buy and 10% off any non-coffee items that you order. You also get a free gift when you sign up - your choice of a three bag coffee sampler or 2 free boxes of K-cups.

In other words, Green Mountain Coffee is on top of its market because it practices good old fashioned value in a new fashioned marketing venue.

This is a very special Only the Good Friday - and a different one. Usually, when I talk about a coffee company that is doing good and amazing thing, I shout their name at the top of the post and make sure that they get lots of great publicity for being such good people. I’m not going to do that this time. I’m not going to mention the name of the business at all because I sincerely believe that they are NOT doing this for the publicity. They are doing this because it is very simple a good and kind and compassionate thing to do. And it is a perfect fit for OTGF - for which I didn’t think I was going to have anything to write this week. Not that good things haven’t happened - we got an unexpected $900 which allowed me to replace my washer and dryer and take care of some bills, for instance. It’s just that the last few days I’ve been marginally involved in something odd and nasty and just plain… disheartening on so many levels.

I’m not going to go into it here. If you google Gloria Fox scandal, you can read up a little on it. I know a little bit about the background of this story - and I can tell you unequivocally that it is outrageously overblown and not at all the way it is presented by a reporter who didn’t do any sort of due diligence or fact-checking. It has the potential to torpedo a couple of organizations that do amazingly good work. So I really wasn’t up to looking for the good in much of anything.

And then, I received an email from a coffee roaster that is one of my favorites. I’m not going to tell you about it. I’m just going to reprint the letter in its totality, with the exception of the name of the company. Because… it’s not possible to read it without feeling like - damn, there are some GOOD people in this world.

Dear friends,

Let me know what you think.

I think that there are GOOD people in this world who go out of their way to make things just a little bit better for other people in this world. And these people are among them.

With Mothers Day gone and my birthday six months away, there aren’t any more holidays for people to buy me gifts, but that’s never stopped me from making up wish lists. Here’s 13 Coffee gadgets and gizmos I’d love to own.

A bag of Green Mountain Coffee Fair Trade Summer Safari Coffee . At $7.49 a bag, it’s a pretty cheap way to get on my good side, but it sounds oooh so good.

Isn’t it gorgeous? This Turkish coffee grinder would fit right in with my blue glass collection. The only way it could be more perfect is if it were copper and black instead of brass and chrome.

And speaking of coffee grinders - this one is just gorgeous. I love the sleek look and the hot red color. The grinder is in the top instead of the base which is just appealing to me.

A stovetop moka pot to replace the one that I bought for a buck at a yard sale. That one served me wonderfully well for years, until the day I put it on the burner and forgot to put water in it. Rubber gaskets do not hold up well to high heat.

$10,000 from Eight O’Clock Coffee Discover the Difference contest

A very cool travel coffee mug - or a dozen of them. Now that I don’t drive my daughter to school every morning, I’m cut off from my main source of cool coffee mugs - Dunkin Donuts. The best travel coffee mugs I’ve ever had have been DD promo mugs - and you can’t buy them online. You have to go to the store.

My ver own coffee tree, because I’d love to grow one cup of coffee from scratch. I’d also love to knit a sweater starting with the lamb.

A copper ibrik - like the one that I passed up from a little antique store about 20 years ago because I didn’t have $15 to spend that way. I wish I had it now.

A CD collection of Dunkin DonutsTV ads featuring They Might Be Giants - Perhaps Fritalian?

A monthly delivery of Dean’s Beans Ethiopian Yrgacheffe green coffee beans so I could roast my own all month long every month

A set of espresso cups - the thick-walled, just the right size for one shot cups AND a funky, decorated set that’s cool and functional

A plumbed-in espresso machine in my kitchen, complete with burr grinder and steam wand

A nightly reservation at a sidewalk table in Naples, with fresh espresso and biscotti

Just in case you haven’t seen it yet, this video is hitting all the coffee blogs - h/t to Patrick and Mike@dailyshotofcoffee.com for turning me on to it.

Mmm… good to the last drop!

When I was growing up, my grandmother’s coffee of choice was 8 O’Clock coffee from the A&P. Unlike most of the other coffees that came in a can already ground up, the A&P sold Eight O’Clock Coffee in bags of whole beans. You would bring the bag of coffee to the front of the store, where a cashier would open it and pour it into the big coffee grinder, turn the dial, and start up the machine that ground the coffee if you wanted it ground.

at Cooking.com $54.95

More often than not, my grandmother would take it home without grinding it, because she had a lovely wooden grinder with a drawer in the bottom and a handle on the side. You poured the beans into the top, turned a handle and the drawer filled up with ground coffee. I grew up on the aroma of freshly ground coffee beans because it was one of my morning jobs to grind the beans for coffee. That could be the reason that I fell back in love with good coffee the first time that I tasted it.

Anyway - back to Eight O’Clock coffee. A couple of days ago, Eight O’Clock Coffee started following me on Twitter. One of their first Tweets was about the Discover the Difference Contest that they’re running. Upload a photo and write a short essay about the difference that $10,000 could make in your life, and you could win - duh - $10,000. I entered, of course -do a search for “Jared” at the Gallery page to see how I’d use $10,000. Eight O’Clock Coffee is also running an Instant Win contest in conjunction with the Discover the Difference contest. Every time you enter, you get a chance to win prizes that include $2,500 cash, gift cards to places like Bed & Beyond and free Eight O’Clock coffee for a year.

But there’s even more goodies! If you drink 8 O’Clock Coffee, you can hop over to the Accumul8 Rewards page and earn  neat stuff by earning points for the 8 O’Clock Coffee that you buy. I’ve already ordered my designer 8 O’Clock coffee mug and I’ll post a picture of it when I get it in a few weeks. You can also accumulate your points to earn gift cards, including $25 Visa gift cards that you can spend anywhere. How great is the pricing structure? I had enough to get my 8 O’Clock Coffee mug with just the two bags of coffee I already had in the house.

So now I’ve got even more reasons to love 8 O’Clock Coffee - and you could, too. Wander over to the Discover the Difference contest and find out how you can enter and win $10,000 or free coffee for a year.

While many of us are enjoying our Memorial Day parades and cookouts, tens of thousands of our men and women are spending their Memorial Day doing what they do - protecting our country. Most of them will return. Some of them will not. This is the day that we set aside to remember and honor those soldiers who gave their lives for our country. For a lot of us, that will mean visits to graveyards, moments of silent prayer, visits to monuments that commemorate their sacrifice. Those memorials and rituals are important, but I believe that one of the best and most enduring ways to honor our fallen soldiers is to support our soldiers who are still living, out there doing their job.

That’s why today I’m posting links to coffee companies that do their part to support our soldiers and their families and ask you to patronize them in whatever way you can. (more…)

Have you ever thought about opening your own coffee shop? I’ll bet most coffee lovers do at some point or another. I know I have - often enough that I tend to watch for locations that would make a great spot for the kind of coffee shop I want to run. Of course, when I have trouble saving enough money to make sure the kids have lunch money all week, opening a coffee shop of my own isn’t even a pipe dream - just an idle thought along the lines of “If I won the Lottery tomorrow…” (more…)

Inspired by watching too much Morning Joe (I really shouldn’t rot my brain that way), it’s Coffee News You Can’t Use, a collection of odd coffee-related newsbits.

The International Institute for Species Exploration just introduced their Top 10 New Species of 2009. Included: the first caffeine-free Central African coffee plant. It was found in Cameroon and could be used to grow naturally decaffeinated coffee. No comment on taste in the publication.

A couple of Chicago cops got more than they bargained for when they stopped at a 7-11 for coffee on their way home from the night shift. As one cop headed for the store to get their pick-me-up, the clerk ran out yelling that he’d been robbed. The officer reached out and grabbed the robber, who had just run out the door, and shoved him back into the store. The other officer backed their SUV up against the door, effectively trapping the robber inside where he was arrested. The moral: Never get between a cop and his coffee.

If you live in Vancouver, you’ll soon be able to buy the world’s most expensive coffee. It’s a gourmet version of kopi luwak, which is already gourmet at $200 a pound. Doi Chaang coffee is guaranteed to be harvested from the poo of wild civets rather than those kept in cages or from regurgitated beans. And it will only set you back $12 a cup or $500 a pound.

That’s cheap compared to what one dedicated Starbucks fan paid to drink a cup of coffee in a Starbucks that was about to close. A guy who calls himself Winter booked a $1,400 flight to Toronto so that he could have a cup of coffee in a Starbucks store there that was slated to close in a few days. Winter has spent the last 14 years on a quest to visit every Starbucks store in the world at least once. So far, Winter has visited 8,414 North American stores and 664 international stores. He estimates that he spends about 1/3rd his income on his quest to visit every single company-owned Starbucks store. He’ll be heading out on a world tour on May 26 when he plans to hit Starbucks stores in Ireland, England, Europe and then…. who knows?