Issue 120: November | December 2023
Issue 120
From the Publisher
The founder and publisher of Roast magazine, Connie Blumhardt has spent 25 years in magazine publishing and has worked in the coffee industry for the last 20 years. Connie brings the same passion and commitment to this industry journal that is present within the roasting community.
With each issue, Connie brings insight and inspiration to the pages of Roast with this column.
Connie Blumhardt, Publisher
I saw a great cartoon not long ago. It pictured a long line of people in front of a kiosk that had a sign that read, “People who want things to be better.” Next to that was another kiosk with no one standing in front of it and a sign that read, “People willing to do the work to make things better.” If I were to redraw that cartoon, I would add our two Roaster of the Year winners in front of the second kiosk. They are doing the work.
What does it mean to do the work to make things better? For our Micro Roaster of the Year—Bridge City Coffee based in Greenville, South Carolina, and Waco, Texas—doing the work means equipping their employees with not just the hard technical skills of roasting, preparing and serving coffee, but also the soft skills of managing their own work and supporting their individual needs. They are one of the finest examples I’ve ever come across of a company acting on its mission to build employees through not just training, but a full system of support. The payoff for Bridge City? An extremely high employee retention rate across all facets of the operation. The payoff for “making things better for us all” is even greater. By focusing on hiring people who have experienced barriers to employment, Bridge City is providing the most powerful motivation of all—hope. It is far more costly for society to bring people back who have fallen through the cracks than it is to prevent them from falling through the cracks in the first place.
Our Macro Roaster of the Year is Verve Coffee Roasters, based out of Santa Cruz, California, with operations in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and Tokyo, Japan. For Verve, doing the work means decades of building not only direct trade relationships, but also relationships between farmers from different origins. A unique coffee plant nursery program provides opportunities to expand the size and number of farms in different origins. The payoff for Verve? Better quality and higher quantities of great coffee available to the company’s roasteries and cafes. The payoff for all? A model that can be applied to mitigate supply issues that will continue due to climate change and coffee economics.
I hope you read the profiles of our Roaster of the Year winners and take the time to fully appreciate the hard work it takes to make things better. The work is challenging, and the financial benefits aren’t always direct, but the payoff is immense.
Warmest Wishes,
Connie
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