JAMES HOFFMANN

James Hoffmann. World barista champion, co-owner of Square Mile Coffee, entrepreneur, author of The World Atlas of Coffee

1. You recently went to Let's Talk Coffee 2018 in Cartagena, Colombia. What was the feedback on your ideas on how to help the industry and keep the speciality coffee diverse?

Most of the conversations I had afterwards were with other roasters. I wasn’t alone in my frustrations and fears. Number of other roasters were pleased that someone was willing to talk about it. The producers ended up writing suggestions but right now it’s planting the seed moment. The plan is to keep the conversation going but it’s early days.

2. In your speech, you talked about introducing more stories behind coffee so customers understand that there is a number of people behind the product. I feel like we disconnect ourselves from what we consume.

Coffee is kind of weird in the urge to tell us everything. Very few other products actually do that. I think part of it comes from pride, part of it comes from insecurity. There is this need to tell micro, micro details. It is kind of fascinating. In some way it helps legitimise us that we know what we are doing and we are different. But in other ways it just puts this barrier to people. Do I need to understand what a 36 hrs fermentation means? Can I just drink it?

3. I’ve been to many coffee shops and sometimes I feel like we have to much information for a customer. It creates confusion and certain anxiety when it comes to a choice. I heard many times baristas asking so many questions about the beverage but Is this really necessary?

The rule for me is that you can answer questions but if no one asked about the product then you can’t really say anything about it. The one goal of a coffee shop is to improve someones day. You have to treat every person that walks through the door and ask what do you need to leave happier than when you came in. Thats what coffee shops sell the caffeine stimulation or beard, taste or other things. You supposed to make people’s day better. Where can you go any time, any day and be slightly improved as a person. This can be frustrating game of protective work and empathy. Every customer is different. Some of them don’t want to interact, they just want to be left alone. They just want to get their coffee and be quiet for a while. They’re having a break. This is their time to be alone and to be left alone. And It’s those times when we don’t identify those people and we want to talk to them and then… just please don’t talk to me. Other times I want to feel like you know me! Like this is my spot, we know each other, like we are friends, you know about my order and you know about me and I like that! But this can be the same person on two different days. Thats the challenge, to teach people that the skill of being a barista is fighting grinders and pulling shots but the truth is that this is a skill but the real big skill is : who is this person and what do they need? ten times, hundred of times a day. This is hard.

4. I was always interested in psychology. Particularly in peoples behaviour. So It was interesting to meet hundreds of people every day when I worked in the restaurant. I’ve been thought how to treat each customer individually and to create the experience tailored to their unique personalities. This is something that I often miss in this industry. I feel like there is a great coffee personality but absolutely no idea about customer service. Why is that?

Coffee shops have this challenge where we deliver the service of a nice restaurant but ultimately we have a model of a McDonalds. You line up, you look at the menu board, you order, you wait, collect, you take it to a table, you eat, you leave. There is some limits to what can be done and that’s another point of friction which is coffee as a quick service restaurant. Even high end coffee is quick service restaurant. We still want to be able to have hospitality of a great restaurant where people have time, their body language is different and are relaxed and we’re just trying to find where the middle ground is.

5. So the question is: How to make money when your average spend per head is significantly higher in the restaurant comparing to the coffee shop environment with similar time at the table?

Thats the thing. McDonald works because it’s cheap and you sell a lot of it. We’ve gone the same way. Relatively speaking, most coffee out there is cheap-ish so we have to do huge amounts of them. Which unfortunately then requires huge amounts of labour, which then takes away all of the profit that we’ve made because we spend it all on the people that made the drink. It is just a difficult model. It’s why I am pro of a little bit of automation. It gives a business a lot of a breathing room and increases the productivity of baristas without putting more physical demands on them. I want the barista to be able to make more and earn more be more productive without running their body to the ground.

6. We are now used to certain level of quality when we talk about speciality coffee industry. It is all possible because of the hard work of the farmers, roasters and baristas. How would you deliver those incredible coffee stories to the consumers so they understand every aspect of the process and convert it to sales?

Does someone have to understand to enjoy it? I think that we all have a limited amount of care. We all can be passionate about few things. and sure, most people in this room have a thing for coffee but most people walking past this cafe don’t care. They like it, they drink it but they don’t care about it. If we make caring about a barrier then we exclude those people and they’ll go and buy from main stream chain because it’s to hard to buy from us. It’s expensive, it’s slow, it’s difficult and they want me to say weird words, I don’t understand, I can’t pronounce half of the things on the menu. It’s all alien to me. So I don’t think we should have to make people understand. We talk a lot about story telling in the industry but we don’t do it quite right. We talk a lot about the statistics about the product but there is no story. We talk about the producers and that they are passionate, they do all this work and now its really good. Thats not a story. I didn’t learn anything from it, It wasn’t clear narrative, nothing about it made a good story but we tell you that story over and over again. And thats just one roasting company but what if you come to ten roasting companies? We all tell you the same story again and again and it’s just not interesting. We are not telling stories that people can learn from or connect to. Broadly the message may be understood that this is special and expensive because it tastes better but thats the simplest story we managed to tell.

7. With plant based movement on the rise, have you been to any vegan cafes recently?

Yes. I have a studio space which is above a vegan cafe which is next to a vegan market. So I am extremely aware of the rapid rise of plant based food. It is fascinating but I don’t necessarily understand it. Last 18 months has been a real interesting uptake in the demand. I believe this is the future. I think there is an acceptance that one, we can’t keep going the way we’re been going and sustainability facts more strongly now in the new audience than animal cruelty did in vegan audience 5 years ago. We eat less meat because it’s a sensible thing to do. I hate this word but we also see a lot of flexitarian. Where you’re mostly plant based but occasionally a little bit of fish or a little bit of meat is ok. That sort of thing speaks to me like I need to eat more sustainably. I love meat and eating meat but I eat very little of it. I don’t really care for milk but I care for milk based things.

8. Milk is a difficult one. Most of the alternative milks I tried with coffee, commercial or even my own, home made ones don’t work well. There is not enough fat or protein to bond with espresso and it either curdles or just taste sour. What works best for you?

Milk is biologically and evolutionary advantaged. There are two things which exist to be only food. It is milk and honey. Everything else what we eat have another purpose. It might be creature that lives it might be seeds of a fruit but milk and honey exist solely to be food. Milk is perfectly sweet naturally so it’s enjoyable to consume but not sickly and it has bitter blocking capabilities because some of the calcium based nutrients in milk are bitter. So milk is designed to reduce bitterness. There is certain amount of research done about bitter blockers. There are some out there but they all last to long so you get to taste them for few hours. Diary is diary… it’s designed to be perfect. Plant based things are always going to be below in delightfulness. They may have proteins which allow foam but fat content will always be low and fats allow this kind of mouthfeel that you want. At the moment oat seems to be the choice.

9. Did you do any research towards the coffee waste? If yes, what is the industry approach to this problem today?

Bio Bean It’s probably the most interesting company in terms of taking spent coffee grounds and turning them in to stuff like bio-fuel, briquets etc. I look at waste in coffee shops and there is a lot. Lets put it this way, every liter of milk you waste is about tree kilograms of CO2 emissions. How much milk waste we have in cafes ? Way, way, way too much. At Prufrock we are pretty good. We have milk dispense so we shouldn’t have much waste but there is a big stuff which is hard and the small stuff which we try to deal with.

10. As an owner of a roastery and coffee shop. What do you think are the main reasons behind your business success and what do you do to survive in a saturated London coffee scene?

Broadly speaking, I don’t thing people ever know why they succeeded. You get a lot of talks of people telling you why they won but I don’t think you really know. You know when you screwed up. You definitely know when things went wrong and why. I guess we tried to set out to be our own ideal supplier. The sort of thinking was, if we had a cafe what would our ideal coffee suppler look like, act like, be like. Thats why we focused on not always the sexiest parts of coffee business. We try and do what we do extremely reliably. Consistent and reliable. No one gets excited about those words but actually they’re really important to a coffee shop. We have authentic, thoughtful and skilful customers which are very aware of how consistent or not we might be. So we’re just trying to do a good job of helping our customers succeed. We always felt that our success is tied entirely their success. The more coffee they sell, the more coffee we sell so lets help as much as we can for them to thrive and sell loads of coffee and make loads of money. I want my customers to be wealthy. It is hard to do it in the coffee shop, right? But my goal is for them to make way more money than me because ultimately that is where Square Mile wins. They’re all super successful, they’ll keep buying coffee, they’ll keep opening, they’ll grow. We’re entirely in the hands of our customers.

In terms of Coffee. We are proud of what we buy, we are comfortable with what we pay for it. The upside of growing a little bit is scale to make that end price more approachable to consumers. If we were a smaller company our coffee would be 10 - 20 % more expensive. I want coffee to be accessible and It’s difficult. Very few people are trying to do the thing where I want to be premium, good quality and not cheap but I want to be accessible. There is this tiny gap there and thats where we are trying to live. There is Not enough daily drinkers of nice, delicious coffee. There is a lot of coffee drinkers but they drinking other stuff. If we want to win, if we want to grow, we have to bring them in and I can’t do that by making coffee super expensive. The goal for us is not to make the end price cheap. I don’t want to devalue the hard work of everyone in the chain but in the same time I want to be efficient enough that I am not inflating the price unnecessarily and making it inaccessible to people. We need a broad audience.

11. What in your opinion are the biggest challenges in coffee industry today?

The biggest challenge is It’s became a saturated market and while London might be the most saturated, certainly you see it all over the UK where there are small pockets of consumers and there is a lot of supply. For the customer is pretty good right now. For the business it’s really hard. To genuinely be sustainable we have to grow our audience. We have to be reaching out to people which don’t care about what we do and find what we can offer them that is competing enough to pay the tiny premium 20, 30, 40p over mainstream to come to us. Whats the answer to that question I don’t think anyone is actively trying to ask: Why people don’t want to come and see us ? Why people keep going to the other places? Just because coffee is nicer isn’t enough. It’s something else. half of the time is speed, half of the time is service, half of the time is convenience. Being on a high street is actually a very big deal. Most independence can’t afford to be on a high street. They just can’t get to those consumers. What else can we do to bring them to us? I don’t hear enough in the industry about that. I don’t thing there is enough worrying about it. We probably think more about how do I keep my customers? how do I steal some from the other cafe which got some good ones. Not how do we grow them. Independence needs to work together.

12. Congratulations on releasing the second edition of The World Atlas of Coffee! It’s an exciting title full of great coffee knowledge! Can you explain briefly whats new, who is this book for and what can you learn from it?

I want to be clear with people. I am not trying to sell to people who bought the first edition to sell the second book. With these things is important to me and the publisher that you keep up to date. It is an update, it is not a new book. The best explanation I have is that it is like an iPhone and this is the “S” here. It’s still the same phone but it’s a little bit quicker but you don’t need to upgrade unless you desperately want the newest updates. There is 16 counties added. Few up and coming like China, D.R. Congo and then countries like Uganda which was enormous producer for a long time but speciality just started to happen in those kind of places in the way which is meaningful. Then Thailand same situation here. Relatively new production. And then the Philippines which is a big producer.

There is two to tree audiences for the book. It is for anyone who works with coffee. It’s definitely written for them and how they need to talk about the coffee potentially to their customers. They often get some information from their suppliers regarding where the coffee is from but maybe not the context of what that region means or history about origin so The Atlas of Coffee is definitely written for coffee professionals. And the first part of coffee to cup journey, my goal was to offer a helpful language and ways to talk about what we do which isn’t to nerdy. Then the main audience is people who like coffee. You like coffee, you drink coffee, you know it’s from different places and you’re a little bit interested. The book can be a thing where you don’t read cover to cover. If you come in and you picked a bag from Kenya, you came back home, you brew it in the morning, you got time open the book, just give yourself a little bit of context in that moment. There is touches on brewing but I hate to ask people to do work. I hate work so I want to get the most useful shortcuts to great coffee. I am all about finding the best and easy way to get you to better tasting cup of coffee. I can’t hold all that information in my head. I kind of like to have it next to me on the shelf so when I need this information, I just go and get it.

You can get a signed copy of The World Atlas of Coffee from @squaremile website which I highly encourage you to do!

https://shop.squaremilecoffee.com