Serve a Cup of Marketing

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by Tom Finan
Jim Cleaves has a marketing concept for your club's restaurants that he believes will help to improve member satisfaction and your bottom line: Cleaves thinks that you should emulate Dunkin' Donuts.

Before you start ordering pink Formica counters and stocking custard filling for Bavarian creme doughnuts, it should be noted that Cleaves is referring to the COFFEE at Dunkin' Donuts. Now your eyebrows are really starting to rise: "My club should serve coffee like that at Dunkin' Donuts?"

You should be so fortunate. Actually, what Cleaves, roastmaster for Sara Lee Coffee, is saying is that the coffee you serve, and the manner in which you serve and promote it, can help define your club's dining experience, provide great word of mouth marketing, and generate low-cost revenues. Looked at from those perspectives, Cleaves said, Dunkin' Donuts has got it down cold.
If you watch any amount of television, you've seen the commercials with Dunkin' Donuts customers using stir straws to sip up the ring that their cup left on the desk. But the doughnut chain has been touting the "World's Finest Coffee" since Nixon was running for president.
"The most successful retailer for coffee is Dunkin' Donuts," stated Cleaves. He said that the coffees and brewing methods used in the chain's coffee are of the same high qualities and quantities used to produce the designer chains' specialty coffees. "But their message is absolutely not 'This is specialty coffee,'" Cleves said. "They just make a really good cup of coffee."

What constitutes a "really good" cup of coffee will vary for every foodservice operation, Cleaves explained. "I can safely say that coffee in many foodservice venues suffers from being viewed as a commodity by the decision makers," he said. "What has to happen before a club can get a meaningful application of the concept behind specialty coffee is that they have to look at in the same way as the other items they serve. What's the right coffee? The answer is going to be different with burgers than with fancy desserts.

"We can help to define what's the right coffee program. Everyone tends to focus on what's the blend, what's the roast color. It needs to be a reflection of the marketing concept. In clubs it's pretty safe to say that the members are affluent, educated, well-traveled, and appreciative of the finer things. There is an opportunity for clubs to have a more noticeable coffee program. Sometimes you have good coffee and nobody notices."

That doesn't mean producing a coffee menu that reads like a wine list, Cleaves explained. In fact, the snobby aspects of the whole specialty coffee milieu may be a turnoff for some of your members. It might be something as simple as using the phrase "100 percent Arabica" or "100 percent Columbian" in front of the word "coffee" on your menu, he said.

The basics of selecting a good coffee are pretty straightforward, the roastmaster explained. The two species of coffee are Arabica and Robusta. "Robusta is useful because it provides a lot of flavor and doesn't cost much money." Any specialty or gourmet blend will be 100 percent Arabica. Whether your club goes with 100 percent Arabica, or maybe to a darker roast, is a function of the marketing concept that you're trying to achieve.

The next issue is how strong the coffee is brewed and how it is served. When Cleaves worked in cafes, customers would tell him that they couldn't brew coffee as well as the restaurants'. Cleaves would tell them to use more coffee. Depending upon whether the concept is to save money or to deliver flavor, there are a wide variety of bag sizes available, he said. While the old standard was 1.5 ounces for half a gallon of coffee, a robust brew will require a 2.5-ounce bag.
Standard small brewers, particularly older ones, are not equipped to handle that much coffee, Cleaves stated. But recent years have seen the emergence of manufacturers whose products have bigger brew baskets and beefed-up filtration systems. "Good coffee is a simple story, with honest delivery," he said. "Instead of 1.5-ounce Robusta bag that's left on the burner for an hour-and-a-half, you clean the coffee maker and brew 2.5 ounces of Arabica that's stored in a thermal container."

What's all of this going to cost? By way of explanation Cleaves recounted an early experience from his career in the coffee business. Originally from New England, Cleaves started out as a representative there for a high-quality specialty roaster that, oddly enough, did a lot of business with quick stop stores.

While his customers were generally satisfied with his product and would acknowledge that the upgrades he was suggesting tasted even better, he couldn't get them to look further into providing a better coffee experience for their customers. Cleaves learned to let the numbers point his customers in the right direction.

"If you asked them, they could tell you what they paid for a pound of coffee, but they couldn't tell you how much they made on that pound,"he said. So Cleaves would stand in the store with his clipboard, keeping track of all the details -- amount brewed, sales, consumption, and throwaway. The stats would show that they made in excess of $40 per pound.

Next question: How many more cups would they need to sell a day to upgrade to the higher quality brand Cleaves was suggesting? Answer: Five. This information, Cleaves said, was highly liberating. "It gave them the ability to start thinking about 'What's the right blend for me?'"
That kind of relationship is the final component of a good coffee program for your club. Ideally, he said, you'll find a coffee rep for your club who -- long before any discussion takes place about what goes into your brewers -- is interested in your club's restaurant operation as a business.
"They need to help the manager look at concept, at throwaway, at all the components. There needs be a relationship where the manager sees us as trustworthy partners who will help the club arrive at a coffee solution."