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Perfecting a Craft in Minnesota
When Deborah and Nessim Bohbot launched Alakef Coffee Roasters more than a decade ago, they knew that sourcing quality coffee beans at a fair price and mastering their roasting techniques would be essential to their success. Their business decisions proved to be right on target.by Julie A. Miller Some days, when the breezes blow from Lake Superior and up the steep slope of the Duluth hills, they carry the aroma of roasting coffee to the houses above. That scent comes from Alakef Coffee Roasters, a specialty coffee company that was founded in Duluth, Minn., about 11 years ago. It all started with the quest for a really good cup of coffee. Nessim Bohbot, born in Morocco and raised in Europe, said he couldn't find coffee he liked in the United States. His wife, Deborah Bohbot, found a solution. She says, "One day I brought him a little home roaster so he could do coffee the way we thought it should be done." After roasting coffee at home for several years, they did some research on the coffee business and decided it had potential. They moved to Duluth when Deborah was offered a job as an audiologist in the Duluth Schools, and never expected to live there permanently. When they started their business, they first considered the Twin Citiesthe Minneapolis-St. Paul areabut decided to stay in Duluth. Deborah says, "It was easier to find employees. Eventually we were going to get ready to do that." She added that the quality of life was another factor. They had discovered the beauty of the area, particularly the nearby Boundary Waters canoe area. They bought a small, used roasting machine that Nessim says looked handmade
out of somebody's garage, and started the business in a tiny space. Deborah
kept her school district job. Nessim says his wife kept her day job at the schools
and took care of the roasting business books, while he did the actual roasting
and everything else. Pierre Saillard, a staff member at Alakef, marks a bag of coffee fresh from the roaster. They took the orders and communicated with each other by means of an answering machine and an early cellular phone. Nessim says, "We kind of had all the hatsdriver, delivery man, roaster, buyer, packer." Duluth might seem like an unusual place for this type of business to succeed, but Nessim says, "People here, all the businesses in town, were very willing to try to sell our product and support our product." He adds that the timing was also right. "Eleven years ago the specialty coffee business was coming in and this part of the country was not as dramatically busy as it was on the East Coast and on the West Coast." Right from the start, quality has been the most important feature of Alakef's coffee. Nessim says, "Right away we went for the specialty product at high gradesthe best coffee that we could buy. At that point we had to find good brokers selling great products and that was part of our business. It was something that was unique and at the same time quality driven." Hits the Spot The company name reflects that emphasis. The Bohbots, who lived in Israel
for a time, called it "Alakef." Deborah says it's a Middle Eastern termslang
for "Hits the spot," "It's great," or "The best." Roasting is done with a 60-kilo Samiac model roaster. As the business grew, they were able to take what Nessim describes as a huge stephiring an employee to pack the coffee. "And from there we built one employee at a time so that we could be more focused on growing the business than on being in the business." Servicing Smaller Retailers Alakef concentrates on the independent coffeehouse market, with most of its business coming from the Twin Cities, although they do have clients in other places. Nessim says clients call in orders before noon and receive coffee roasted that day. In Minnesota and the Upper Midwest they receive it the next day via UPS. "It's really a daily business. We start from scratch every day. How fresh the product we sell is, is very important to us," Nessim says. Most coffeehouses order a special house blend and Alakef works with the owners to customize it. There is a lot of sampling and tasting involved in finding the perfect coffee for each coffeehouse. There is no typical end-consumer of Alakef coffee. Deborah says that the individual independent coffeehouses are different and that they all have a diverse clientele drinking the coffee. "That's what's really fun about it," she says. "You can go into five of our customers' stores in the Twin Cities area, for example, and they're all going to have a different look and feel to their coffeehouse."
The unique look and feel of the mom-and-pop coffeehouses are what differentiates them from the chains, Deborah says, and adds, "What we're hoping we're doing is giving them the quality coffee they need to compete and win in the market." Training coffeehouse owners and employees is an important part of maintaining the quality of the coffee. "It's very important to us knowing that once the product has left our place that the retailers also have the formal training to ensure the quality of the product all the way to the cup," Nessim says. The Bohbots call it "seed-to-cup" training. They teach customers about the coffee business so they understand what happens each step of the way, beginning with the farm. Deborah says, "We'll help them in any way we can. We will give them traininghow to make the coffee. We invite them up to do coffee cuppings. We really feel that we are an integral part of their business and that we're helping to make sure that the cup of coffee they serve is the best." The cupping process is a crucial part of the coffee business. Nessim says,
"It is part of our daily routine. Every day we have to sample either new products
that we're buying or the existing products that we roast. We want to make sure
that there is a consistency in the roasting process. We roast a certain product
a certain way and we want to make sure that we always roast a certain way."
He adds that there is no computer to roast the coffee, rather, it requires a
person who is focused and pays attention to the art of roasting. To inspect for quality, the Bohbots use a small sample roaster in their cupping room. The Bohbots don't rely solely on their own palates to maintain product quality. All of their employees12 including themselvesparticipate in the daily cuppings for quality control. Deborah says, "We have also hired an outside consultant who does a blind tasting and gives us an unbiased independent opinion, because we don't want to leave anything to chance. We want to make sure that what we are doing is absolutely the best we can." The focus on quality seems to have paid off, as most of their business comes from word of mouth from coffeehouse owners and equipment sellers. Deborah says this is the first year they have done any advertising other than a listing in the yellow pages. As part of the focus on quality, Alakef buys both organically grown and certified Fair Trade coffee. The Bohbots put a lot of emphasis on the farmer. "We believe in a market where the farmer is the most important person," says Nessim. "We make sure that he is fairly compensated for the coffee that he cultivates and works hard at producing." The company made a conscious decision not to go after the lowest prices for its coffee. "We decided that we're going to do what we can to keep buying quality coffees at whatever price we need to," says Deborah. "We're not going to be out there trying to beat everybody down on the price. It's not going to help the industry as a whole." Nessim explains that coffee is a commodity and the prices are volatile. Over production causes prices to collapse. "I've always been telling whoever wants to listen that we, as a specialty coffee industry, should move away from the commodity market and create a market totally related to the growers, and provide fair prices," he says. "That will make the farmers more focused on the product they are growing rather than being aware of what the market is doing every day." One of the ways the Bohbots work toward that goal is by participating in the Community Coffee program in Colombia and other similar programs. A percentage of the price of coffee goes to help farmers. Nessim says that growing coffee from seed to production takes almost three years and is very labor-intensive. If a farmer is not making enough money, he will not be able to afford helpers and will have to cut corners. Quality suffers and many farmers have to stop growing coffee. Everything Deborah and Nessim Bohbot do, from working toward fair prices for farmers to roasting coffee, is aimed at providing the best product possible. That has been the secret to the success of their business. *
Copyright
© 1999-2002 Adams Business Media, Inc. Please
Note: Some pictures or diagrams are only Originally
published - March 2002
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