This week’s offer
Ok so I’ve tried to be creative about this week’s offer. But, as you’ll see, I’m definitely lacking inspiration. So here it is: half off, 50% off, get twice what you pay for, buy 1 get 1 free, etc. Just use HALFMARCH at checkout Virgin Hill
Always wanted to try something new? Buy your regular coffee and try maybe the Hatley blend (or whatever you want) for free.
The code is good until March 30, 2011.
Kona Coffee Expedition
We were very fortunate last month – we went to the Big Island of Hawaii, the one and only home of Kona Coffee, for a lesson in coffee. We obviously know all about what happens after getting the green beans but we’ve always wanted to see the first phase, from growing the coffee.
The Kona Coffee belt is located on the west side of the island. We were staying near the beautiful reefs in Kopoho, on the south east side so it was about 3 hours to drive to Kona. In true form I had the day planned out for Matthew and I of course 🙂
First we went to visit an acquaintance we had met through HomeAway. We had wanted to rent his home, which is gorgeous, but out of our budget. Here’s the view of the pool:
Needless to say it was amazing. If you’re interested their site is: Kona View Estate Randy and Atsumi are wonderful hosts and the place is truly incredible. Plus there’s the added bonus of staying on a coffee farm. Anyway, Randy made us a beautiful cup of his coffee and showed us around the estate. They’ve done so much work and it’s beautiful.
They were using the Fukunaga pruning method, this is a method of pruning back every third row of trees so that they are on a three year rotation. Pruning is essential in growing coffee to keep up the quality and quantity of each tree so there’s been lots of testing various methods. There is also the Kona method, but we didn’t actually see any farms using this system. It’s a shame I can’t remember how many trees their farm has – I do know that 1 tree produces about 1 pound of roasted coffee – all that work for 1 pound!
After a lovely visit we went on to Hula Daddy,just down the road. The manager, Debbie, was so kind and took us on a separate special tour of the farm. This is where we got to see all of the steps of the bean:
We picked some beautiful rich-colored ripe cherries and squished out the bean. The cherries grow in clusters very close together – when they are ripe it looks like it would be the perfect Christmas decoration! I was quite surprised to see that covering the bean is a very slimey, sweet goo – the parenchyma. So after the cherries are picked they are “washed”, the process where the bean is removed from the rest of the fruit. Unfortunately we didn’t get to see this process as it is done offsite. There are still a couple of layers that need to be removed from here though, one is the parchment. This comes off easily during milling which is after the beans are dried. The beans are dried on big tables out in the Kona sun.
The dried beans are then run back to Hula Daddy where they sort them by size to be graded: Kona Extra Fancy, Kona Fancy, Kona Number 1, Kona Select and Kona Prime as well as Peaberry (Matthew loves peaberry).
Something weird and unexpected we got to see was a wild turkey fight. It was mating season and there were two males duking it out right in the middle of the coffee trees.
We ran out of time of course so made another trip to Kona where we got to see the UCC operation. The Ueshima Coffee Company was founded in 1933 and touted as the leader in Japanese coffee. Their visitors centre is beautiful and offers a custom blend that you get to roast and label yourself.
Our coffee trip was incredible – we learned so much and will never forget the warm Hawaiian welcome we received. Aloha!!
Matt & Tara in coffee heaven
Ski blend
Probably a bit late this year but we’re thinking about doing a ski bum blend for next year. It would give you a good kick in the rear to get you hitting the fresh virgin slopes early (like how I did that?). We’re thinking online only. We’ll let you all know how it goes!
Some website bugs
Although it’s gone really well, we’ve had a bug with our website giveaway. But that’s what this first little bit was about- identifying the problems and fine-tuning. We’re pretty sure it’s because paypal won’t accept a 0 dollar amount. But then we do have orders in so it worked for some. We tried replicating the problem last night and were able to but we weren’t able to find the fix either. I think we’ll close down the giveaway soon and offer something else next week that will hopefully solve the problem.
Not to worry – next week’s offer will be great (although there’s really nothing better than free of course!). We’ll let you know what it is shortly!
In the meantime thanks for your orders, help, patience and support. We’ll be shipping your orders this weekend.
Free Coffee!
We’ve been a bit quiet around here. Actually, I’ve just seen that our last post was done a year ago. TBH we were never really happy with our site so never felt ready for a real internet presence. The site was nice to look at and fairly well-organised but it didn’t do what we wanted it to. So we went back to the drawing board and with the help of a pal (thanks Colin Boyd!) saw what we could actually do. He worked his stuff and here we have it – our kind of new, definitely improved, super duper site: www.virginhillcoffee.com
So what do you think?
We’ve used Magento’s platform and it’s fantastic – we’re really happy with it so far. There are so many add-ons available and Matthew’s next project will be to put on coffee subscriptions. We’re still needing to upload Fair Trade Coffees – the delay is because we’re also Rainforest Alliance certified so want to go in with that instead.
As a last point – we’re giving away coffee (see the title wasn’t misleading after all!). To celebrate the re-launch of our site we are offering a $7 bag of coffee (227g) for free to all of our Canadian friends. We’ve even thrown in free shipping. You just need to use the code LAUNCH11 in the checkout and there you have it! We would ask if you could please leave a review of the coffee once you’ve tasted it that would be great. Enjoy the new site and our free coffee offer!
Lightning never strikes twice, well maybe not…
Surviving While Rebuilding
While we went about the task of building up our assets to roast coffee again we had to come up with a way to supply our existing customers so that delivery to them wouldn’t skip a beat.
When you think about it – how many business owners make a Backup plan for things like total business devastation? I think most people depend on insurance and leave it at that, which is fine if you don’t mind collecting the money and walking away. But if you plan on continuing on then you need a way to supply customers so that they don’t feel the heat from your fire (I will try to keep the puns to a minimum) and look elsewhere for supply. Also, this is where clients get worried about using small companies. So this was our chance to prove that just because we were a small, new, local company we weren’t going anywhere.
Anyway, we needed a way to keep our customers happy. We began calling our coffee roaster contacts to see if we could borrow anybody’s machine. We ended up going to an outfit just outside of Montreal. For a premium they allowed us to use their coffee roasting facilities. It was certainly challenging getting used to a new machine and we went through loads of coffee trying to get our roasts right but we managed fine in the end. Now with ourselves covered we needed to address our customers.
Being in the country we knew it was only a matter of short time before our customers started hearing the news about the fire and worrying about their supply. We called all our customers and let them know what had happened and assured them all that their supply would not be interrupted.
Now we had to get on to sourcing our equipment.
Free Shipping!!!
For those of you who haven’t seen, we are shipping free of charge if you spend more than $25 on your order. The free shipping will be calculated at check-out. Thanks for shopping!
The Aftermath
Once we saw the extent of the damage the fire did to our coffee roasting business we had to decide what route we wanted to take. Two weeks before the fire we had discussed insurance options and, unfortunately, kept our insurance as is so we were only covered for a third of what we lost. We were left with a few options:
1) Collect the insurance money and call it a day. Close up shop for Virgin Hill Coffee. I’d have to figure out what to do and unfortunately I’ve worked for myself for so long that’s what I’d like to keep doing
2) Continue on selling Virgin Hill Coffee but figure out a lease or partnership type of arrangement with somebody else’s roaster and packaging equipment
3) Secure funding and rebuild the asset part of the business from scratch
Obviously we went for rebuilding Virgin Hill Coffee’s roasting facilities. There were others involved in the decision but to me it really was the only thing to do.
With the decision made we set about searching for a new facility. To service our current 100 customers with a view to moderate expansion we needed 5,000 square feet with 18 foot ceilings. Ideally there would be a loading dock and location-wise we needed it to be close to Highway 10. We searched towns and small cities within 50 kilometers of our original plant in Waterloo Quebec. Knowlton, Cowansville, Bromont and Granby were considered. However, we didn’t expect to find what we did.
Less than two days after the fire we were sadly looking over the ruins of our business. We left with our heads down and took a different route home, circling the block. There it was, not a kilometer away from our former location in Waterloo – the perfect building. A standalone warehouse with our requisite 5,000 square feet – 4,000 for roasting and packaging and another 1,000 in office space. We secured the lease for $200 more than what we had been paying on a 10 year lease. The place was perfect for the rebirth of Virgin Hill Coffee. And with that, we were back in business.
Were Back!!
Well it has been a whirlwind of a past year and even so, I am embarrassed to see that my first (and last) blog post was 9 months ago. I am sure I’ve just experienced what many bright-eyed, enthusiastic, good-intentioned first time bloggers have; a very long blogger’s block. Also known as “oh man I really need to write a blog – hmmm rebuild a business or write my blog?”.
Yes, that’s right, rebuild a business. And I’m not talking in metaphors either. In mid-July the plant housing our roasting facilities burned to the ground (http://www.cyberpresse.ca/actualites/200809/08/01-657016-incendie-suspect-a-waterloo.php). We lost everything – our packaging, our green and roasted beans, our equipment and most significantly, our roaster. When all was said and done we lost about $300,000 worth. There were also those little things that kept coming up like all my tools and the years of gathering those invaluable nuts and bolts – things that only time can replace. There was also stuff that we had been storing for people – like all of my sister’s belongings and my father in law’s couch (ouch!).
So my blog will be taking a different route than what was initially planned. The next few installments will be dedicated to how we rebuilt our coffee biz from scratch. I’ll go over how we sourced our roaster and what we did as an interim measure to keep our business going without skipping a beat.
Personally we also had a very busy summer. Our second son Dexter Jack was born in May. The following month we moved into our newly renovated house (without a kitchen I might add). Then, of course, the month after that was the fire. It has been grueling but we are all healthy and happy and the lot of us has had a fantastic attitude. We were at the point in the business where expansion was a possibility and we took the fire as a chance to move forward to invest in a bigger roaster and expand our roasting facility. I look forward to sharing how we went about it with you.
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