How Coffee Companies are Adapting in the Crisis – COVID-19 Interviews Pt. III
In our final pandemic series article, Sovda follows the stories of coffee shop owners and roasters around the world.
As you know, during this time, small businesses have taken a hard hit – especially within the coffee industry. However, as the weeks during the pandemic have passed, these coffee businesses have come up with creative solutions to keep themselves afloat. Today, we share stories from two of our Sovda demo site partners and customers: Camel Step in Saudi Arabia and Onyx in Arkansas. When reading these stories, our goal is to inspire in you a sense of connection and hope.
Camel Step
Located in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, Camel Step opened in 2014 and is one of the first specialty roasters in the region. They have 2 locations with a roastery and coffee shop in both Riyadh and Khobar in Saudi Arabia.
Abdullatif Alwshigry, the CCO of Camel Step said that this virus has “hit us to the backbone” because in Arabian culture the communities are like “tight-knit families” and it is so hard to isolate from one another. It is particularly difficult that coffee shops have shut down because they are “known as the place where people gather.”
Even before the virus hit, Camel Step set up their business model in such a way that they became "the first ‘grab-and-go’ café” in the Gulf region. When asked about how the virus has affected his business Abdullatif says: “are we affected? For sure. Is it a massive effect? Yes, but not as much as some other coffee shops.” This in part is due to the fact that Camel Step has set up “different business channels” such as “website sales, coffee sales, and b2b sales.” He says that “having this ready in a crisis enables us to yield some profit.”
Compared to Camel Step, Abdullatif says that many shops were not as prepared: “If you own a coffee shop, you will be massively impacted, if you own a coffee roaster, the impact is lower – but you have to have the right permissions from the government to keep running. [A hybrid of the two] will shut down their coffee shop, but keep running their little roastery and pre-selling their coffee beans.” He says that being able to survive in this pandemic ultimately comes down to having a “portion of your business come from b2b and a portion come from b2c.”
When the shutdown hit, Abdullatif had to make some critical decisions about his business. The first was that in order to follow social distancing practices, Camel Step decided to shut down their café and redistribute labor among their staff. With these new teams, the labor is divided in “three main areas: production, customer satisfaction, and online sales.” Currently the Camel Step team is mostly focused on “online sales” with “more than thirty [of them] working on processing and packing orders at a time.” However, they are working reduced hours and have to “follow correct procedures” to keep things safe and sanitary.
CAMEL STEP’S PRODUCTION SPACE (feat. SOVDA PEARL MINI)
As a result of the crisis, there is an influx of shipping orders. Abdullatif says that in order to handle the volume that they “have signed agreements with logistic partners where we offshore ninety-five percent of our deliveries and have focused on the [remaining] five percent of deliveries to be taken care of [locally] by our drivers.”
Instead of seeing the crisis as a destruction to his business, Abdullatif sees it as an opportunity for growth. He says that “the second part of the team is responsible for development...we have to utilize this crisis to build something new.” Currently this part of Camel Step’s team is focused on “building a new website, new development, new integrations, new systems, new automation, new processes, [and even] building a new product with factories outside of the country.”
In fact, because his team was able to innovate and act so quickly, Abdullatif says the website “reached the maximum amount of orders that it could handle.” At this point, they were forced to pause online sales so that their logistic partners could handle the sheer volume of orders. Even so, these are just b2c orders. Ultimately, Abdullatif’s goal is to get back to a balance where he is roasting and selling coffee in bulk along with coffee equipment to other businesses.
Abdullatif predicts that after this crisis is over, people in the coffee industry will have a dramatic spike in “strange market behavior,” meaning that people will be introducing new products at cheaper prices in order to gain profit before returning to equilibrium.
For now, Abdullatif says that the best way to support small cafés and roasteries is to “continue drinking coffee.” Particularly in the middle east, coffee is such an important part of people’s daily routines that “they can reduce their food consumption but cannot avoid drinking coffee every morning.” His advice is to turn coffee into “a positive part of your day” and to enjoy the “aroma and process of making it” as a welcome distraction to the pandemic. Abdullatif also urges people to think about “not just coffee shops, but the coffee supply chain.” The livelihood of growers and farmers ultimately depends on our choice of drink in the morning.
Onyx Coffee Lab
Onyx is located in Northwest Arkansas and owns a roastery, 4 cafés, and offers coffee education. Mark Michaelson is Onyx’s head roaster and shares his perspective on how their business is being affected, particularly from the production angle.
Mark says that when the pandemic started in Arkansas “the governor had decided finally to start locking things down” as cases were on the rise. This meant that Onyx could no longer be open “in-store.” However, Jon and Andrea (co-founders of Onyx) “came up with the brilliant idea to switch the roasting teams.” There are five roasters, one of which “went back to production,” leaving the other four to split up the work. Mark and his assistant roaster Nick “roast on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday” while the other two team members “roast on Monday, Wednesday, Friday” in order to limit contact with each other. They also require that employees “wear masks in the buildings regardless” because in order to “facilitate the roasting, packaging, shipping we needed to have our production crew.” In this situation, it’s hard to keep a six feet distance from coworkers because there is a lot of heavy lifting that requires collaboration. However, the team does their best to be safe by “wash[ing] our hands two to three times an hour” and “sanitizing [equipment] every day multiple times a day.”
Although they had to close their storefront, “production and roasting didn’t stop.” Luckily for Onyx, Mark says that “around seventy to eighty percent” of their business is wholesale – “we're in over 50 countries around the world even still.” At first, these numbers fluctuated and “[in] the first couple of weeks we felt [the effects].” However, Mark says that while many shops in the area might have to close permanently, Onyx is able to start “getting our numbers back to pretty normal pre-COVID.” They even have coffee shops reaching out to them that haven’t been customers before that are “now using [Onyx’s beans] because we've just been able to stick it out during the pandemic.”
In regards to their staff, “Onyx was really fortunate” because they continued “to roast five days a week.” For members of their team who couldn’t continue working in their current position “they gave them the option to fill in other positions.” For example, Mark would have a barista “come in and work on a special project with me or with production” so that they could continue to “get [their] hours.” Onyx has also been flexible with their employee’s hours, allowing team members “to work when they want to or if they want to” or giving them time “to take a break” or “spend time with their kids.”
ONYX’S PRODUCTION SPACE (feat. A SOVDA PEARL MINI)
Mark says that the pandemic has opened some opportunities for Onyx to focus on things that they didn’t have time to do before. This time has been helpful for their QC by being able to “mess with Sovda [machines]” and to experiment with “profiles.” They have even taken the time to get the entire roasting facility “hooked up to solar energy.” He says that Jon is “a visionary” and that he and Andrea are always “looking at things that weren't necessarily a problem, but something that we can even do better at.” The team as a whole has adopted this attitude of asking things like “is what we're doing working well?” and “how do we become even more efficient at what we're doing?”
In order to keep in contact with their customers, Onyx “started doing curbside and then within a couple of weeks after that, we started doing delivery to different businesses.” He praises both Jon and Andrea for being “fashionable...they just know things.” As a result, they always stay ahead of the game “which is really cool because it makes my job so much easier because I can just roast the coffee and not have to worry about an outlet” to deliver it.
When asked about how he sees the future of the coffee industry progressing, Mark predicts that “consumption by the consumer standards will [not] change.” However, he thinks that “the main difference is you'll see a lot less” coffee shops around town and that it will “clean up some of the industry that was out there.” The negative side to this is that cafés who “were serving in communities that were a lot smaller than ours are now forced to go outside of where they were because some of those jobs aren't coming back.” He reflects that “while I know not everybody is the best or even adequate roasters, at least they were performing something that they loved doing and providing for their communities.”
Ultimately, Mark says “I do have hope that those of us that are still here are coming back.” He says that when things start going back to normal, “we'll come back with an even bigger vengeance because we also realize how important our role is now.” At this stage in the crisis he sees an opportunity for growth, asking the question of “what can make me [more prepared] for the next time there's a pandemic or when there's something else going on in the world?”
We at Sovda want to express our gratitude to these wonderful cafés and roasters who have been willing to honestly communicate about their stories with us. Included are links to their online shops so that you too can support their businesses wherever you are in the world.
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Thank you for reading,
Your friends at Sovda