Roaster Profile

CAROLINA COFFEE ROASTING COMPANY

The Importance of Experience and of Passing It On

by Jim Fadden

IN 1999, Jody White retired from a 30-year career as an information technology consultant and purchased the Carolina Coffee Roasting Company in Greensboro, N.C. White’s purchase included a retail shop, a roaster and the services of a very special coffee consultant, Floyd Pettit, Jr.
     At the time White purchased Carolina Coffee Roasting, the semi-retired Pettit was responsible for selecting, purchasing and grading the company’s green coffees, as well as roasting, blend development, quality control and technical sales consulting. Today, Pettit continues to provide guidance in these areas, drawing on his life-long coffee experience to give Carolina Coffee Roasting an edge in capitalizing on the growing specialty coffee business in the Southeast.
     Prior to helping out at Carolina Coffee Roasting, Pettit worked for 28 years at General Foods. The majority of that time, he worked in research and development for the Maxwell House division. His responsibilities ranged from developing new coffee products, such as the well-known International Coffees line (think “Celebrate the Moments of Your Life”), to setting up quality control standards for large soluble coffee plants around the world. His experience is complemented by a strong academic foundation, as he holds an undergraduate degree in organic chemistry from the University of Illinois.
     Pettit brings an encyclopedic knowledge base and a large corporation approach to consistency and process quality to Carolina Coffee Roasting. Not only does Pettit lend his experience to roasting operations, he is invaluable in working with the staff and the customers. “Every cupping, I learn something from Floyd,” says White. “He understands coffee, and he understands people. He connects with our customers simply by talking about what he loves—coffee. Floyd is the soul of our company.”

However, as White learned, there is a hidden danger in having someone as knowledgeable as Pettit in a small company, especially if that someone is semi-retired.
      “I came to realize that Floyd is both our greatest strength and our greatest weakness,” White says. “I knew I didn’t have enough time to run the business and roast; I knew I needed to develop talent, to reduce our dependency on Floyd, if I wanted the business to grow.”
     Based on her extensive business experience, White knew she needed to create a consistent, structured training and mentoring program to develop new roasters. Together, White and Pettit created a program that emphasizes both academic and hands-on training. New roaster trainees spend the first two weeks on academic background materials, covering areas such as roasting equipment and maintenance, general coffee origin qualities and coffee roasting. Cupping and green coffee grading follows, as well as introductory roasting and blending.
     White feels that this background is critical to developing serious roasters. “We don’t want to start them on the computerized system and tell them to drop the beans when the computer system beeps,” she says. “That’s not learning to roast.”
     However, the training of the first couple of employees provided an important lesson to White. “We invested a lot of time and energy into training employees who were not serious about a career in roasting,” she says. Consequently, they eventually left, forcing White to start over, determined not to make the same mistake again. She spent more time qualifying the interests of the next batch of trainees, who now are responsible for almost all of the roasting.
     With the roasting operations under control, White decided to focus all of her efforts on wholesale roasting. In 2003, she sold the retail operation and moved to a new facility in an old textile mill in Greensboro. The new facility has space for expansion, as White believes that the specialty coffee climate in North Carolina is on the upswing, “Even over the last six months, we have seen a huge increase in the number of retail shops in our area,” she says.
     Currently roasting 60,000 pounds per year on an Ambex YM15 machine, White is planning for the future. “As our business grows, my philosophy for expansion is not to upgrade to a larger roaster,” she explains, “but to add smaller machines similar to our current roaster. I want small-batch production, consistency between machines and redundancy in case of problems. I don’t want to add the infrastructure required for larger machines.”
     With a training and mentoring plan in place, Pettit’s extensive coffee knowledge, and White’s business experience and vision for growth, Carolina Coffee Roasting is well positioned to take advantage of the growing market in the Southeast.