NEITHER RAIN NOR SNOW NOR GLOOM OF NIGHT

Getting your coffee where it needs to go

ONE OF THE COOL THINGS about delivering your mail: you don’t actually have to deliver it yourself. You just write your letters and sign the checks, throw a stamp on them, drop them in the nearest mailbox, and you’re done. Someone else takes care of the rest—actually getting your mail from your hands to wherever you’d like it to end up.
     Wouldn’t it be nice if coffee distribution was like that? Just roast the coffee, put it in the right bag, slap a label on it, drop it onto a big box outside the door, and have someone else do all the rest—making sure the freshly roasted coffee gets from your roastery to every single one of your customers.

     Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your available time and resources), part of being a successful wholesale coffee roaster often depends on being able to deliver fresh coffee to your customers when they need it, come rain, snow, rush hour or Mardi Gras.
     Coffee distribution is a chain. From customer ordering and invoicing, to packing and labeling and finally to the actual drivers and delivery routes, every step needs to work well in order to get your coffee fresh from the roastery to your customer’s door.

At the Office

Distribution starts at the roastery, usually with you calling your customers or your customers calling you to place their orders. If your customers call you, it’s helpful to ask them to stick to the same schedule, week after week. For example, if you can teach your customers to call every Monday morning, then you can deliver all of their coffee on the following day, rather than spreading deliveries out over the week.
     “It’s very important for a business like ours to train our customers that we deliver to certain parts of town on certain days,” says Bob Arceneaux, roastmaster for Coffee Roasters of New Orleans, a company that distributes to restaurants, coffeehouses and specialty stores in the greater New Orleans area, covering about a 40-mile radius. “This way, they call us all on the same day, they know to expect deliveries on the same day. It becomes a habit. You just can’t go all over town every day. It’s a waste of gas, time and pay roll dollars.”
     Once the orders start coming in from your customers, the system you use to track those orders, deliveries and invoices is vital. There are as many different ways of keeping track of delivery as there are of doing it: paper invoices, 20-year-old computer programs, hand-held trackers. It’s just a matter of what your employees are comfortable with, what you can afford to purchase and train on, and what works best for your company. Often, finding the right system is a matter of trial and error.
     “We have used a number of different programs,” admits Barth Anderson, co-owner of Barrington Coffee Roasting Company, located in Lee, Mass. “Some of the programs didn’t give access to customer information that we thought was important, or it was too hard to search for and access certain kinds of information.”
     Your ideal program, be it on paper or computer, should include a number of features: it will allow you to easily keep track of and search through past and current orders, create and print invoices, and provide a place to record any notes on special orders, issues or concerns.
     Distribution isn’t cheap, once you figure in manpower, gas and vehicle purchase and care. In order to make delivery a profitable, or at least break-even, venture, many companies put a minimum order on deliveries, say 20 pounds or $100. Another option is to charge your customers a small amount per order to help cover delivery costs. “We deliver one day a week, and anything more than 20 pounds is free,” says Anderson. “If it’s less than 20 pounds, or they want us to deliver it on a different day, we charge them five dollars.” He also offers customers the opportunity to pick up their own coffee if they need it right away, or if they’d like to get it more often.

In the Warehouse

On the Road

Believe it or not, the final step in the chain—getting your coffee from the roastery to your client—is one of the more difficult ones. It might seem easy—just throw it on the truck and take it there—but this process comes with its own set of issues.
     Groundwork Coffee Company, located in Los Angeles, Calif., delivers to about 100 accounts, including hotels, restaurants and cafes. “We do all of our delivery with the old-fashioned model of route drivers,” says Ric Rhinehart, CEO of Groundwork. “In some ways, it’s not a very efficient system. On the other hand, we get the coffee there while it’s very fresh and we have more communication with our customers.”
     The company has 10 distribution routes, and runs two trucks five days a week to get the coffee where it needs to go. This style has benefits—increased customer service—as well as downfalls—having to hire and manage full-time employees and maintain delivery vehicles.
     Although Rhinehart says that one option would be to package up the distribution side and sell it to someone, he admits he’s reluctant to put such an important element of the business in someone else’s hands. “I know there are people who are very good at that,” he says. “But I don’t have the confidence that we would retain all of our customers.”
     Of course, doing it yourself is not without concerns, especially in large cities where you have drivers who are juggling parking issues, commuter traffic and accidents. For Rhinehart, he has to trust his drivers to know their way around these obstacles and to make the best of it. “We have guys who do this every day, and they know the short cuts,” he says. “Even so, when traffic is bad, I know we’re just paying them to sit in a truck on the freeway.”
     And these aren’t the only problems with having drivers on the road. Rhinehart tells the story of a delivery driver who parked, and in the process of delivering coffee, had both his hand-truck and his cell phone stolen. “No one could find him, and we couldn’t contact him, so we had no idea what happened,” he says. “I finally called his mom, and just then he walked in the door. I said, ‘You better call your mom because I think I just freaked her out.’”
     Companies get around these obstacles in various ways, from sending two drivers per truck and installing vehicle alarms to planning routes and delivery times carefully. “We often send someone to ride shotgun,” says Arceneaux. “They drive to somewhere like The Quarter and one guy goes one way to deliver and the other guy goes the other way.”
     Arceneaux knows all too well the realities of juggling impassible roads and other traffic disasters. In addition to dealing with flooding and rebuilding issues, the New Orleans-based company also has to plan for regular occurrences such as Mardi Gras. “There are so many events here, and you have to keep on top of them all,” says Arceneaux. “We had Mardi Gras a couple of days ago. It was on a Tuesday, which is when we usually do our deliveries, so we sent everything by UPS on Monday. We couldn’t have rolled through that.” For other events, like the city’s large jazz festivals, the company also bumps production up a half a day and brings their drivers in early in order to beat the traffic and the crowds.
     Coal Creek Coffee Company, a wholesale and retail roaster in the rural area of Laramie, Wy., has the opposite problem. The company distributes coffee to local accounts, which for them means about a dozen places, including drive-throughs, natural food stores and offices. ”We’re in a very unique situation, being in such a rural community,” says John Guerin, president of Coal Creek Coffee Company. “The closest community is 54 miles away, and it’s not a big community.”
     One of Coal Creek’s main customers is the city’s university. There, they have the opportunity to practice one-stop dropping, delivering coffee to one place on campus and having the university disperse the coffee themselves to their various cafes. To keep costs down, they also use whatever vehicle is on-hand, as opposed to having a company delivery van. “It’s not practical for us to have even a small fleet of trucks,” Guerin says. “On the other hand, there have been times when we’ve said, ‘oh, we’ll just deliver that order,’ even if it’s out of state and three hours away. We do that probably four or fives time a year, to keep good customer relationships.”

Going Postal?

For many companies, distribution by delivery truck isn’t feasible in a financial or time sense. Instead, they opt for something a little less hands-on. Queensport Coffee, located near Atlanta, ships the majority of its coffee—even to companies that most would consider well within driving distance. “We tend to ship out all over the place,” says Derek Bunch, president of Queensport. “It’s far less expensive, and it’s very fast. With traffic the way it is, we could easily sit in traffic for an hour an a half.”
     Bunch admits there is a worry that customers won’t feel taken care of, but says they work hard to make sure that doesn’t come to pass. “The key is to make sure you stay in contact with your customers in other ways,” he says. “You’d be surprised how much you can communicate over the phone and via e-mail to keep those relationships strong.”
     Another alternative is hiring a full-service distribution company to do the work for you. Companies like Java Distribution, a company that delivers fresh-roasted coffee for Allegro Coffee Company in the Boulder-Denver area, can take the worry out of your hands. “We do everything, from taking the orders to delivering coffee and creating relationships with the customers,” says Holly McGee, owner of Java Distribution. “One thing that we do is really take the time to create relationships. You have to learn, just like in all sales, which customers want to chat with you and which ones just want you to deliver their coffee.”
     Often, companies experiment with a variety of systems before they find the one that works best. “We used to use the parcel service to ship,” says Anderson. “They did everything for us.”
     But for Anderson, shipping wasn’t the same as hand-delivering. He equates it to renting a house versus buying. “There’s great freedom in being a renter versus owning a property and having to keep it up,” he says. “With shipping, we didn’t have as much work and it was cheaper, so we could save up to buy a delivery van, but we just didn’t feel like we had the direct contact with our customers.”
     Often, for companies, this is what the final distribution decision comes down to: solving the equation of time and money versus customer service and contact. For Anderson, the new system of distribution has shown great promise on the customer service side. And the financial aspect? “We’re still evaluating whether or not it makes money,” Anderson says. “You have to have a vehicle, buy gas, spend time or have someone paid to do it…it’s still a little bit of an unknown.”