BUILDING A GREAT COFFEE PROGRAM

April 21, 2021

In his landmark though slightly outdated book “Good to Great,” the author Jim Collins writes, “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.”

There are plenty of products, business, ideas that have flashes of greatness — sometimes they last for weeks, sometimes for years. But true greatness in business cannot be fleeting, instead the result of a well-built foundation of sound principles. Furthermore, maintaining greatness comes from constant work, editing, improving, breaking down to rebuild. The stronger the foundation, the easier it is to continue to stay a “great” company.

At Summit, how we approach our coffee sourcing epitomizes our approach to greatness. There are plenty of spectacular coffees in the world. There are plenty of coffees and coffee products that customers get excited about, these TikTok fads and Instagrammable trends. And there are also companies doing great work with transparency in sourcing, ensuring they’re taking responsibility for how they buy coffee.

It’s the confluence of those three areas, though, that defines Summit’s ethos for coffee sourcing. Our coffee program, on a macro level, and each coffee that we import and analyze, roast and distribute, brew and drink, needs to stand tall in our three areas of focus: transparency, quality, and appeal.

Transparency

When I have sketched this paradigm on the whiteboard in our roastery office (I will spare you the graphics — it was shockingly difficult for me to draw a three-circle overlapping diagram), the top circle is for this area of focus. Storytelling, a word that I use very often in all aspects of Summit’s business, is the practice of bringing characters to life. It’s about having things to share, stories that you’re proud to have passed along from customer to customer, tidbits and photos and anecdotes that baristas and managers and franchisees are excited to broadcast.

Summit has a commitment to never sourcing a coffee without a very high level of transparency. That is, we must know at a minimum the cooperative where the coffee comes from. If it’s a cooperative, is it certified organic? How many farmers contribute to this cooperative? What are they doing in terms of community building, protecting the environment, and paying fair wages? We’ve visited our most significant cooperative partners, like Las Damas and Rutas del Inca in Peru, and Santo Domingo in Guatemala.

Whenever possible, we like to zoom in even further from the cooperative, to smaller organizations, or single farmers and families. People like Katia Duke, who we have visited in Honduras, and Jairo Quinones who we’ve been buying coffee from in Colombia since 2016.

We call our commitment to transparency the most difficult, and the most important, part of our coffee sourcing. It’s quite easy to find affordable, good coffees that don’t have good traceability … but it’s not something we can get behind.

Quality

Now while we love knowing our cooperatives and coffee producers, we also aren’t going to buy bad coffee. Specialty coffee is anything that’s graded 80 points or higher, according to the internationally used scoring system. Summit has an internal minimum of 84 points, because if we don’t want to drink the coffee we’re roasting, then we shouldn’t be roasting it.

One trademark that Donovan, our Director of Coffee, has put a particular emphasis on is freshness. Coffee is an agricultural product — it’s grown on trees, and freshness matters every step of the way: it should be picked when it’s at optimal ripeness, then processed carefully, before beginning the long journey to the U.S. This whole time, the coffee is slowly aging, and once it hits our warehouse in North Carolina, it’s imperative that we roast and distribute it quickly.

Technology and innovation have made it easier for green coffee to stay “good” for several months, but most coffees may only be “great” for a shorter window of time. Our commitment is to import freshly harvested coffees, roast them when they’re at their best, then move onto new crops when it’s time. That requires being super thoughtful and precise with projections, but when quality coffee is a tentpole for your ethos, this is a non-negotiable.

Appeal

At the end of the day, we’re in the business of serving coffee to our customers. That means serving things they can be proud of (transparency), things that are good (quality), but that also means things that customers want.

Speciality coffee companies serve a very, very small percentage of daily coffee drinkers. This segment is growing, but there’s a world of coffee drinkers out there beyond those who find themselves in Summit on a daily basis. We’re focused on walking the fine but important line of making coffee that is great enough to impress the most discerning of coffee consumers, but also appealing enough to make those less discerning feel welcome and seen.

We could source exclusively rare coffees, and charge $25/pound for them — but that’s not the foundation of building a great coffee business. We’re not in the business of serving every coffee customer, we know that. But we’re also not in the business of serving the smallest segment of coffee drinkers, either.

Coffee is a super personal experience. If you like your drip coffee with whole milk and some honey, great! If you drink it black, like I do, that’s great, too. But that doesn’t make either of us more right than the other one. We don’t want to tell you how to drink your coffee. We want to create a menu of great coffees that can be enjoyed by lots of coffee drinkers. That includes awareness of roast level, tasting notes, price, being cognizant of how it mixes with milk and sugar, and much more.

Summit has been around for 23 years, and under the direction of this current leadership team for almost 19 of those. We are building a great business from the foundation that’s established, so that even while we’re making headlines and getting a larger following for our expansion in 2021, it’s not a temporary spike in popularity.

Summit is committed to being a great business, in the present and also for decades to come. It’s for this reason that how we source, roast, and deliver our coffee is paramount to our success. We recognize there are easier ways to do most things that we do, and there is a whole lot of work going away from the public eye that would invite some shortcuts. But that’s not who Summit is.

Transparency. Quality. Appeal. Those are the three tenants of how we source coffee, which is a representation of who we are.