Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
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persuaded to show non-kung-fu films like "The Big Lebowski." It's not fare that would marry well with cozies and crumpets, but it's the perfect videoscape for Gohring's palace of grown-up fun. For the past 26 years, he has made a name teaching tai chi and kung fu at his nearby martial-arts studio. The café is an extension of that business, reflected in video content Gohring sums up as "the visu- ally stimulating and artful presentation of martial-arts fighting." At Canada's Just-Us! Coffee roastery and café in Grand Pré, Nova Scotia, customers can visit a fair-trade coffee museum that occupies a large section of the space. Inside a replica of a humble corrugated-tin-roofed coffee producer's hut is a video screen that plays a 10-minute film giving visitors a basic understanding of coffee farming and the principles of fair trade. Melissa Stewart, director of sales and marketing and president of the Just-Us! board, explains that the video was shot by a film student on a tour of coffee co-ops, with the assistance of Just-Us! staff. "We use it as an educational tool," she says. "For us, TV is a medium to get the story across—the story of what is in your cup." GOOD CHI Most coffeehouse owners don't have time to travel to Iceland or Indonesia to capture high-definition video footage. They have no way to produce films in-house to articulate their philosophy. And they might not want Jet Li menacing their clientele. But the examples of Costello's, Just-Us! and Kick Butt demonstrate that with a little creativity, TV can be made to serve the ultimate goals of your business plan: building your distinctive brand identity and increasing your bottom line. This is where content providers can help. One unique source of content is Ron Hall, whose Minneapolis-based Festival Films sells packages of movies that are in the public domain. This is important because the use of first-run films and other copyrighted material for commercial purposes—i.e., as background in your café—is regulated or even prohibited. Festival Films' thematic bundles of old movies, trailers and cartoon loops are yours to keep, not to rent. "They're ideal for movie nights, film society meetings, or in the case of the cartoon and trailer compilations, just for run- ning in the background without sound," says Hall. At the other end of the spectrum, technically and financially, London-based Mindstorm will turn your walls, floors, counters and table-tops into touchscreens. Instead of having a TV on a counter, your shop would exist inside a matrix of digital imagery that you control from a computer or cloud. Mindstorm products such as the iWall and iBar are already being used in bars, restau- rants, hotels and cruise ships. It's only a matter of time before cafés discover how every flat surface could become a field for games, social media or digital effects. Hard numbers on the value added to a café by television are impossible to come by. For Gohring, the decision to include TV boils down to making sure the technology and the content it provides won't distract, and that they fit into the general concept of the store (along with kicking butt). Oh, and one other thing. "From the feng shui standpoint, the television could be like the fireplace," Gohring says. "It's good chi." Fresh Cup Magazine 53