Bakery April 6, a talk with Blake

Friday, April 6

Blake came in early for his evening shift, so we had a chance to talk. He'll spend the summer in the States, plus a trip to Guatemala to take care of personal family business. He'll set up contacts through his parents to meet with 'coffee people' in Costa Rica. 'Everyone drinks coffee in Costa Rica, they all know about coffee.' He thought he'd try to get three roasts; regular, french and espresso or dark. I introduced the idea that within coffee bean culture there are a lot of different varieties of beans. 'Oh.'

He talked more about the pastries and funnel cakes and muffins. I asked if he planned to take a pastry course while he was there during the summer. 'Sure.'

Finally, after 20 minutes, he asked, 'What do you think?'

I said I had something much simpler in mind. That for years I have wanted to teach the Chinese how to enjoy simple coffee with all its subtle flavors. That I was tired of Chinese saying coffee was bitter, when all they'd tasted was low-quality espresso.

Hence what we should be looking at are comparisons in cost and feasibility between importing and then roasting our own green beans, or importing already-roasted beans. Since I was doing all the research and incurring expenses for the bread-making end of it, and since he has said all along that he could access Costa Rican coffee easily, I was leaving the coffee research up to him.

I pointed out that if we had a small cafe, five or seven tables, offering different brewed coffee flavors with or without milk and sugar, offering only cookies and muffins to go with the coffee, and sold a limited number of whole-grain breads to go, our overhead would be much lower. If we failed, we'd lose less.

My unexpressed thoughts were that if we have the Chinese Mike and Sophia investing in us for a big spread, they would then exert pressure on us to conform to the Chinese taste. While that made good business sense to them, I believe that if we offered something truly unique it had a greater chance of creating a new trend, which is after all what $Mike$ was after.

We'll see whose opinions prevail.