[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 41 (Wednesday, March 12, 2014)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1577-S1579]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
VERMONT COFFEE COMPANY
Mr. LEAHY. Mr. President, Vermont is known for its small and large
businesses alike. Vermonters take pride in
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buying locally, and as a result, businesses like the Vermont Coffee
Company have been able to expand and become forces in their respective
industries.
When Paul Ralston started the Vermont Coffee Company over 30 years
ago in the small town of Middlebury, VT, he did so based on the belief
that coffee creates community. Today, he continues his commitment to a
high-quality farmer-friendly coffee blend by using only fair trade,
certified organic coffee beans from around the world.
Paul's passion for coffee has created an opportunity for him to forge
his own path to success, and he has expanded Vermont Coffee Company's
distribution to retail outlets throughout the Northeast and along the
Atlantic coast. His business continues to expand, and his success is
just one hallmark of the respected Vermont Brand. I congratulate his
success, and I ask that the text of an article appearing in the
Burlington Free Press on February 20, 2014, about his success be
printed in for the Record.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Burlington Free Press, Feb. 20, 2014]
Middlebury Coffee Roaster Still Growing After 30 Years
(By Melissa Pasanen)
Middlebury, VT.--Vermont Coffee Company in Middlebury was
ahead of the curve when it started roasting organic, fair
trade beans 30 years ago. Its continued success is based on a
simple philosophy.
In the front hall of Vermont Coffee Company's offices and
production facility, dozens of photos of happy people, some
with coffee cups in hand, smile down from the wall.
In keeping with the company's longtime tagline--``Coffee
roasted for friends''--these are not just customers, founder-
owner Paul Ralston clarified on a recent tour: They are
friends.
``Before there was Facebook,'' Ralston, 61, said. ``We had
our friends' wall.''
Ralston has always been a little ahead of the curve, since
his first foray into roasting coffee beans some 30 years ago
as a tiny bakery-based operation.
There have also been plenty of curves in the road he has
traveled since then, but this year Ralston expects Vermont
Coffee Company to purchase half a million pounds of green
coffee beans, which will be roasted in its recently doubled
15,000-square-foot facility and shipped to accounts ranging
from a small, highly regarded group of New York City coffee
shops to Costco.
Coffee culture
It was during his ownership of Bristol Bakery from 1977 to
1983 that Ralston first stumbled upon the smoky and aromatic
process of coffee-roasting in Manhattan's Bowery neighborhood
while shopping for used bakery equipment. The smells conjured
up memories of the strong espresso his Italian grandmother
carefully brewed every Sunday when he was a child.
When he came back to Bristol, Ralston serendipitously found
a classic turn-of-the-20th-century roaster, installed it in
the bakery's front window and began roasting batches of green
coffee beans well before the trend of small, local coffee
roasters swept the country.
After selling the bakery, Ralston returned to school at
Burlington's Trinity College to study business administration
and planned to pay some of his tuition bills by running a
Church Street espresso cart. But Starbucks was just opening
its first Seattle coffeehouse and most people didn't know
what to make of his cart. ``It was a huge flop,'' he said
ruefully.
More than a decade went by, during which Ralston spent time
in the San Francisco Bay area working in nonprofit arts
management and appreciating the region's vibrant cafe culture
before he and his wife, Deb Gwinn, returned to Vermont where
he helped grow the cosmetics and skincare company Autumn Harp
to $6 million in annual sales. That led to a job with The
Body Shop in England where, he noted, ``There was a coffee
drought, so I drank tea.''
Brown-bagging it
In 1997, Ralston and Gwinn returned again to Vermont and to
the antique Royal Roaster #4, which had been gathering dust
in their Bristol garage. ``I hooked it up in the garage and
started roasting and taking the coffee to gatherings for
feedback,'' Ralston said. As he developed his new business
idea over the next few years, he kept things simple, both by
design and by default.
Like back in the Bristol Bakery days, Vermont Coffee
Company used brown paper lunch bags to package the coffee and
a friend made a rubber stamp to label the bags. ``The brown
bag was the starting principal,'' Ralston said. ``When you
would get something fresh and from a local shop, there
wouldn't be a lot of packaging.''
``We started with just dark and decaf,'' he said. ``What
else do you need?'' And the coffee was available only as
whole bean. ``We refuse to grind coffee. As soon as you grind
it you start the staling process,'' Ralston explained.
Ralston's approach was also influenced strongly by his
former boss, Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick, who he
described as ``a pioneer in trade, not aid,'' cultivating
mutually beneficial trade relationships with developing
countries and communities to help them become self-sufficient
rather than simply providing financial or other aid. When he
first told Roddick he was thinking of getting back into
coffee, he recalled that she said to him, ``Your coffee
should be 100 percent organic and 100 percent fair trade.''
There wasn't a brand like that at the time, ``and it turned
out there was a good reason for that,'' Ralston said.
``Everyone thought I was nuts. At the time, organic was just
gnarly vegetables.''
Window of opportunity
Count Vermont coffee expert Dan Cox among those who thought
Ralston was a little nuts. Cox had been the first full-time
employee of what was then Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. He
worked there for a dozen years before he founded his own
Burlington-based coffee-testing business, Coffee Enterprises,
which does analysis for many major national coffee companies.
``Paul came to me and said, I want to learn everything about
roasting,''' Cox recalled. ``He told me he wanted to be like
Peet's [a leading San Francisco Bay area coffee roaster],
which is like the Guinness of coffee. I said, This isn't the
Bay area. The East Coast is not into dark roast. Like with
Guinness, for every customer you turn on, you'll turn four
off.'''
In addition, Cox remembers Ralston outlining his ``folksy''
marketing plan with the brown bags and emphasis on selling to
friends. ``I said, That's a little far-fetched, pal.' And he
said, That's all I've got.'''
Ralston spent six months learning how to evaluate green
coffee beans, blend, roast and control quality and despite
Cox's initial concerns, he carved out a niche and grew
steadily. ``He was still there in five years and then another
five,'' Cox said. ``He was very savvy, always asking for a
better way to do something . . . and he has stayed true to
his style. His packaging is still relatively unsophisticated
but it works for him. He makes a respectable coffee and a
pretty darn good decaf.''
A few other factors worked in Ralston's favor, Cox added:
``Number one, he had a passion for it, and number two, nobody
really came right after him. He had a window of opportunity
that doesn't exist today.''
Solid focus
As Cox noted, the competitive frame is very different today
with new micro-roasters popping up regularly, but Ralston has
stayed focused on his initial vision.
Since its official launch in 2001, Vermont Coffee Company
has expanded to retail outlets all over Vermont, as well as
New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Hampshire with
distribution growing at a healthy clip around the Northeast
and down the Atlantic coast. The company has about 23
employees, about half of those full-time and many part-time
by choice, older and partly retired or younger with children.
``Part of our business model is a flexible workforce,''
Ralston explained.
Ralston, who is sole owner, would not share sales figures
but Vermont Coffee Company projects 20 percent growth in
2014. The flagship line of retail packaged whole beans
remains simple and straightforward in its descriptors: Dark,
Medium, Mild and Decaf. The down-to-earth brown bag packaging
remains, although it takes the form of a brown box for
Costco.
With the exception of one line from the Dominican Republic,
rather than emphasizing single-sourced coffees from specific
regions like many other small roasters, Vermont Coffee
Company has always led with its blends.
``We are blenders. There's nothing magical about our
beans,'' said Ralston. ``The goal is to keep our blends
tasting the same, month to month, year to year.''
Vermont Coffee Company buys certified organic beans
following principles set by the International Fair Trade
Federation, Ralston said. The annual coffee harvest occurs at
different times in different climates and over a year beans
could be sourced from Ethiopia, Indonesia, Peru, Bolivia,
Guatemala and Nicaragua, among other countries.
The beans are stacked high in burlap bags in a large
storage room in Middlebury all tagged with their country,
producer, and lot number. As he demonstrated how the beans
are pulled for evaluation through a long hollow spiked tool
that can dig deep into each bag, Ralston explained how
different beans contribute to the overall blend. Coffee from
Guatemala, for example, he said, ``We call them our spice
beans. They add fruity and floral notes.''
The company's modest marketing budget still emphasizes
grassroots relationship-building (now via social media),
coffee sampling and offering loyal customers Vermont Coffee
Company merchandise such as t-shirts and mugs for returning
proof-of-purchases, which they do by weaving strips of brown
bags into quilts, folding them into origami and even, in one
case, using them to craft a collage of Johnny Cash drinking
coffee ? black, of course.
Another thing that has not changed, Ralston noted with a
smile: ``We always smell like coffee. When we go to the bank,
they know who we are . . . It's a sensory business. We're in
it for what it smells and tastes like.''
Slow roast, slow growth
Changes have come gradually, many in the form of process
improvements such as the
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adoption of the Japanese production scheduling system,
Kanban; new pieces of equipment to mechanize jobs previously
done by hand like bag-folding; and increased roasting
capacity.
In the roasting room recently, a brand new, shiny stainless
steel roaster with capacity of 150 pounds was in the process
of being installed. It cost about $350,000 to purchase and
install and would double Vermont Coffee Company's roasting
capacity, Ralston said.
``The thing that makes it big, bold coffee is how we roast
it,'' Ralston explained, pausing in front of one of the
company's two smaller roasters where a small circular window
gave a peek into the pre-roasted, dull grey-green beans while
the glossy dark brown, roasted beans swirled below. Vermont
Coffee Company roasts its beans about twice as long as many
other larger roasters, Ralston said. He believes the longer,
slower roast is key to building rounded flavors, similar to
slowly caramelized onions or the depth of a long-cooked Cajun
or Creole roux sauce base. ``It's a long, slow caramelizing
roast,'' he said, ``which results in coffee with more body
and sweeter, chocolate, caramel notes and a smoky tang and
lower acidity.''
With a similar careful approach, Ralston has planned and
budgeted for growth. Over his varied career, Ralston said,
``I've made all the mistakes you can make.'' He has seen
firsthand, he said, that ``growth offers new ways to screw
up.''
``We follow a model called bootstrapping,'' he said. ``We
use yesterday's cash flow to finance growth. We're not
extravagant.'' The company's credit line, he said, usually
has a zero balance. An additional challenge these past four
years has been Ralston's commitment to the Vermont
legislature to which he was elected in November of 2010. He
ran, he said, because ``I think there is a need for more
people with active business experience in the legislature.''
He feels good about what he has accomplished there, he
said, but it's been ``very hard'' balancing the four-month,
four-day-a-week commitment with running an actively growing
business. ``I think we would be further ahead if I hadn't
done it,'' he said.
Looking ahead 15 years, Ralston said with a smile, ``I hope
to still be grooving on coffee.'' He also hopes to be able to
spend more time ``at origin,'' in countries where coffee is
grown. ``It happens to be warmer than here,'' he added.
At home in Vermont, Ralston imagines a slightly bigger
office ``with a wood-burning stove, a couch and a bigger
coffee table where friends will come by to visit and sit to
have a coffee.''
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