Oct 2015 - Award Winning Coffee Blend - Suuweet

Date Posted:3 October 2015 

Suuweet

Every coffee roaster has a "heart and soul" blend. It's the coffee they favour, the coffee proudly put forward and the coffee they are always trying just that little bit harder to keep it super-competitive - often referred to as a "signature".
With a mind-boggling array of raw specialty grade coffees now available, there is literally no limit to how much you can spend to buy quality. Just open your wallet and pay stratospheric prices for the cleanest, sweetest and most complex lots.
But the commercial reality is simple - those show pony coffees are only available in such small quantities you cannot offer the product to your customers on-going - you can't roast it every night of the week and keep the quality/consistency/price parameters on cue.
Some coffee companies market their signature coffee as exclusive - which is another way of saying it's expensive and we are going to charge you plenty for the privilege.
We have a different philosophy - some of our best coffees are not the most expensive.
Suuweet is a blend that has been our cornerstone coffee for more than 5 years now. It's the go-to coffee for specialty cafes in Melbourne and we know that it can run circles around peer coffees that are far more expensive.
Centre Way and 8 Ounces are relative new, high performance blends that were specifically engineered to beat competitive coffees in the specialty cafe market - to give these cafes an edge - something that stands out from crowded retail areas.
Suuweet is without doubt our best everyday coffee we can produce. It's is more likely that Suuweet will resonate with a coffee lover for a very simple reason - it tastes just like a molten Mars bar. The rich chocolate finish on Suuweet is nothing less than amazing.
The coffees we use to prepare Suuweet are our best single origins that each score high in specialty grade. I'm not going to spell these coffees out because Suuweet has been a very long journey - both in blend design and roast profile.
Our customers tell us that Suuweet is one of the best value coffees on the market for a milk-based espresso coffee - tons of flavour, rich syrupy caramel body, clean sparkling acidity and that Mars-bar like long finish.
If you have been looking for that ultra-reliable, never-fail coffee that will please everyone - it's here ..... Suuweet

India Tiger Mountain

New lot from Tiger Mountain with a designate "special". This is the first of 7 ton select holding that arrived into our warehouse 15/10/15 and we are thrilled with the superior cup over the previous lots. This coffee scores 3 - 4 points higher than the previous and what impressed us most was the full, rich nutty flavor and the longer caramel finish.
The link to the new Tiger was here, but now we can offee Monsoon Malabar Indian coffee beans First roast is today (18/10/15) and we will be pumping out this baby 3 - 4 times a week over the next few months.

Tanzania - dark chocolate

We scored a cracking good Tanza the other week and it's been a real surprise package. Complex cup with dominant dark chocolate notes, a hint of berry and wild spice. This coffee stands up in the cup......Grab the Tanza here.

Packaging Update

Around 12 months ago we started the project to introduce zip locks to our coffee bag packaging.
My feelings about zip locks on coffee packaging hark back to many years ago when I published an article about the failure of zip lock mechanisms to provide an effective barrier to protect the loss of essential volatile compounds from the coffee bag.
The majority of plastics, particularly the materials used for construction of zip-locks experience a process called "effusion" and this makes them unsuitable for fresh coffee.
Surprisingly, the manufacturers of these bags had not known about this condition (or more astutely choose to be ignorant, or play dumb) and quite happily continue to market their products as providing the necessary integrity to preserve your product.
What this means in plain terms is that closing the zip lock does not ensure a lock in of freshness for coffee in the same way it might work for alternative food products. The zip lock is for short-term convenience only and compared to a metal, coloured glass or ceramic air tight container, the zip lock bag does not match those alternatives in terms of longer term performance - but it does beat the majority of all plastic containers.
Many of our customers have provided positive feedback on how pleased they are to see zip locks on our bags and it's the #1 reason we implemented this feature - to please our customers.
Technically, it poses some challenges for us because a zip lock is not designed to fit on a gusset bag. The zip lock is basically an "after-thought" that is sort of "glued in". This is different to a pouch style bag where the shape is more conducive to the fitting of the zip lock during the construction of the bag.
The paradox of course is that pouches are designed for stand up on a shelf and gussets are designed for packing into cartons. The 1kg pouch style bag is a large, awkward shape and difficult to fit into cartons - consuming far more space and with that comes the all important increased cost of freight - which is calculated using cubic volume.
Zip locks also present a difficulty when used on packing machines - the zips need to be opened by hand, filled and then closed by hand before sealing - so it's a slow and painful manual process that cannot be automated.
Our 1kg gusset bag with zip lock is the first generation of this design as we launched this before the broader market had adopted this bag. In fact today, the zip-lock gusset is still a minority.
The bag has performed well in the market for the last 6 months and just recently 2 customers informed us that the zip lock had sort of failed once the bag was opened - that is, the zip would not re-seal. This issue has been sent to the supplier and we think it was quite isolated. A new batch of almost 30,000 1kg gusset bags have been manufactured and are currently inbound to our warehouse.
For our 500g custom bag, we have changed from gusset to a pouch with zip lock and roast dates appearing on the front instead of the rear due to a different shaped bag. 10,000 of the new 500g custom bags have been manufactured and are currently inbound.
Despite ordering these custom bags many months ago, the lead times to make custom bags are highly variable and as you can never quite time these things perfectly, I expect we will run out of our current custom green Mycuppa bags for the 500g and 1kg in the next fortnight meaning there will be a short period whereby we will need to use a generic black bag as an interim whilst the new bags are inbound.

Shipping and Freight Update

When we started shipping parcels to customers almost a decade ago, we dreamed that logistics in Australia would eventually improve - you know how it goes......things can only get better.......services improve......features are added, etc.
We had hoped (and continue to be optimistic) that in the future increased competition in the freight sector would enable us to be faster, cheaper and more reliable when viewed "end-to-end".
Roasting coffee is not easy......but logistics in Australia is far more difficult - amazingly broken for such a 1st world country and you have to wonder how cities like Melbourne win "most livable city" awards when it can be at time literally impossible to move freight around promptly.
As we sit here today, we are proud of our consistent performance operating at extreme speed in our end-to-end process - that is, the stuff we can control and influence is optimised and the most efficient possible.
Fresh coffee moves at a frightening speed through our facility and at times we are forced into twice daily cycles of roasting. This is in stark contrast to the majority of our peers in the industry who may only roast coffees a few days a week, or weekly....or when they feel like it.
The part we can't control is the most frustrating and for a few years now I've been vocal in my opinions about domestic freight services in Australia. There is a reason for that.......an inevitable response to the daily frustrations of relying upon an expensive and inconsistent service that I'm sure many of our customers also share these same frustrations.
The market monopoly held by a single provider creates a lot of problems for Australia. It's well known that only competition drives efficiency improvements. In the absence of competition a market monopoly will ultimately end up with a service that is expensive, slow, inconsistent and in some cases fails.
Freight prices have risen again this week - as they continue to do so each year at rates that exceed the National CPI averages.
The good news is that Australia Post is currently adding a second X-ray system in the central Victorian parcel hub. This is likely to come online before Xmas (they are commissioning it at the moment) and we are hopeful that some of those 24+ hours time penalties we often see with parcels sitting in AusPost awaiting scanning at the MPF will start to disappear and the service resumes back to where it was 18 months ago.
We have continued to look at alternatives and currently we are working on a range of new freight services that involve options for our customers to select a faster delivery time frame. However, let me be very clear - price and speed are poles apart so please do not think that there is a cheaper and faster service out there.
Historically, we have been reluctant to offer express freight for 3 simple reasons - it's ridiculously expensive, it's rough on handling (alarming damage percentages) and sometimes it fails to arrive within the promised time frame - triggering requests or claims from customers for a refund of the express premium which in turn can tie everyone in knots.
However, we are forging ahead again in the realm of express freight services.
One thing you may not have known is that for many of our larger customer orders - typically orders greater than 15kg, we have been sending these via TNT Road Express for more than 12 months now - but this has been limited to certain destinations and customers only.
The TNT service is super fast but the consignment cost of a TNT Road Express is expensive, meaning it's not viable for small parcels less than 12kg or for some areas of Australia.
I think it's also important to emphasise a few key points about how we offer freight for Australian customers:-

1. It's not free - it's astounding the number of people who ring every day and literally beg for free freight.

2. It's not cheap - we already subsidize the cost of freight by up to 20% on each order and we take most, if not all of the risk. We have also not passed on any freight price rises for more than 3 years - a saving of an additional 15%.

3. Comparing us to other online merchants - sorry, this is a faulty assumption - there is a simple "smoke and mirrors" trick often used by merchants that subsidize freight costs from far higher margins in their product pricing - rarely is it an "apples for apples" comparison. A friend sells a well-known brand of footwear online with generously fat 200% margins .......so they tip in $$ from their product price so they can appear to offer a cheap freight charge to compete against the traditional Shopping Centre footwear stores who are their primary competition.

4. Generally speaking all merchants are playing from quite similar freight rate schedules - there is minimal difference between a merchant sending 500 parcels and someone like us sending 20,000 parcels a year - the discounts on offer for large customers are more than diminished in the scheme of managing the associated issues of customer service and maintaining high levels of support.