mycuppa October 2015 Newsletter
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 a little bit harder to keep super-competitive - often referred to as a "signature".
With a mind-boggling array of raw specialty-grade coffees now available, there is 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 - another way of saying it's expensive and we will 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 five 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 relatively new, high-performance blends 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 a doubt, the best everyday coffee we can produce.
It 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.
A coffee prepared using our best single origins that each score high in specialty grade.
I won't 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 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're searching for a coffee that always satisfies you, try this Suuweet!
India Tiger Mountain
A new lot from Tiger Mountain with a designated "special".
We received the first shipment of 7-ton select coffee on October 15, 2015, and we are extremely satisfied with its quality.
This coffee has scored 3-4 points higher than our previous lots.
We were most impressed with its full, rich, nutty flavour and longer caramel finish.
The link to the new Tiger was here, but now we can offer Monsoon Malabar Indian coffee beans.
The First roast is today (18/10/15), and we will pump 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.
It is a 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 against the loss of essential volatile compounds from the coffee bag.
The majority of plastics, particularly the materials used for the 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 chose to be ignorant or play dumb) and happily continued to market their products as providing the necessary integrity to preserve your product.
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 most 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.
From a technical perspective, some challenges are fitting a zip lock on a gusset bag.
The reason is that a zip lock is not originally designed to work on a gusset bag; it is added later.
This differs from a pouch-style bag, where the shape is inherently more suitable for including a zip lock during construction.
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.
Today, the zip-lock gusset is still a minority.
The bag has performed well in the market for the last six months, and just recently, two customers informed us that the zip lock had failed once the bag was opened - that is, the zip would not re-seal.
This issue has been sent to the supplier, and 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 a gusset to a pouch with a zip lock and roast dates appearing on the front instead of the rear due to a differently shaped bag.
Ten thousand 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, improvements, 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 are 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 times, 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.
Influence is optimised and the most efficient possible.
Fresh coffee moves frighteningly through our facility, and we are sometimes forced into twice-daily roasting cycles.
This is in stark contrast to most of our peers in the industry who may only roast coffee 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.
I'm sure many of our customers also share these same frustrations.
The market monopoly held by a single provider creates many 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 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.
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 there is a cheaper and faster service out there.
Historically, we have been reluctant to offer express freight for three 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 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:-
- It's not free - it's astounding the number of people who ring daily and beg for free freight.
- It's not cheap - we already subsidise the freight cost 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 three years - a saving of an additional 15%.
- 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 subsidise 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, which are their primary competition.
- 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.
