Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/158781
was a natural choice, and we agreed to operate a café out of the space from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day. When partnering with a business, it's ideal to enter into a mutually beneficial situation, and that is definitely the case here. Because we're open different hours, each business is essentially doing marketing work for the other, alerting potential customers to the fact that another entity operates there during another part of the day. And what's more, coffee and wine are complementary agricultural products that can attract similar customer bases. We use this parallel to our advantage by holding wine-and-coffee tasting events that provide additional exposure to both businesses. With customers primed to seek out quality in unconventional businesses, it's as good a time as ever for aspiring café owners to enter the market. As our new venture at Water Avenue proves, you don't have to break the bank to start a coffee business. SMALL FOOTPRINT One challenge of partnering with an existing business is figuring out how to set up your equipment so that your side of things can run smoothly without affecting the other entity. We chose a somewhat unorthodox solution to this problem by building a selfcontained coffee cart that we roll in and out of Enso's front bar space each day. The winery has a cavernous space with a back area devoted to wine storage; we're able to park the cart essentially in the middle of the room in a way that blocks the storage area behind us but still leaves about 1,200 square feet of seating and workspace in front of us. But because of the cart, we're able to come and go while having a minimal impact on Enso's existing operations. The cart is almost entirely self-contained: It only needs to be plugged into a power source to function. Inside of it is equipment for a full espresso bar, including a two-group espresso machine, two commercial grinders, an under-counter refrigerator and self-contained water. The barista stands behind the cart to serve guests and takes their payments via a tablet POS. We don't have enough space for much food storage, but pastries are delivered fresh each morning. We do use a couple pieces of equipment housed in Enso's space, but they are items we co-purchased in conjunction with our opening in the space and that are beneficial to both businesses. One is continued on page 50 freshcup.com September 2013 49