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/71652
% ow might be a good time to think small. No, not minia- ture cupcakes or piccolo lattes—we're talking about your four walls. Big-box architecture may have been the child of a more stable economic era, but today, as the market slowly builds back up, scaled-down retail and service are gaining popularity. The seg- ment of the specialty retail market represented by small, portable "pop-up shops" grew by more than 14 percent for the first six months of 2011, according to figures released by Specialty Retail Pulse last fall. In a list published on Restaurant Magazine's Web site of last year's top trends, "beyond bricks and mortar" came in at number two, and 30 percent of the 1,500 chefs interviewed declared a mobile approach to service as the "hottest operation- al trend" of the year. In ad di t i o n, Entrepreneur magazine reported that there were more than 5 million food carts and approxi- mately 3 million food trucks in operation in the U.S. last year. L.A.'s famed Kogi BBQ burst onto the scene in 2008—seem- ingly kickstarting the mobile movement in the process—and food trucks are still as hot as kimchi tacos. From Kogi to New York's Big Gay Ice Cream Truck, these moveable feasts have become a "roving party, bringing peo- ple to neighborhoods they might not normally go to, and allowing for interactions with strangers they might not otherwise talk to," as a 2009 article in the Los Angeles Times summarized. Coffee ventures that follow suit can grab the hearts and attention of busy urban dwellers looking for new and convenient food experiences. For David Wasserman, owner of the Joes on the Nose coffee !@6D @? E96 %@D6 :? *2? :68@ As to whether he has plans to "go brick," Wasserman says the truck in San Diego, the mobile coffee concept turned a passion into a livelihood. Before he launched the company, Wasserman was just another SoCal surfer who needed something to warm him up after hours in the Pacific. "We'd look up the hill, expect- ing … a glowing coffee mobile to come down," he writes on the Joes Web site. Wasserman started drawing "strange little pic- tures of trucks with coffee machines in them," and his "grown-up ice cream truck" began to take shape. truck is one of the business's best assets. "It sounds cheeseball, but you can go where the customers are," he says. "Instead of the old adage 'location, location, location,' for us it's more like 'loca- tions, locations, locations.'" Wasserman started out by visiting regular spots and assuming people would find the truck. Now he often heads to specific events and relies on Facebook and Twitter to alert fans of Joes' whereabouts. It's a similar story for Marley Coffee—a project from Bob Marley's son Rohan—which recently announced a partnership with BikeCaffe, an organization that delivers coffee on two wheels. BikeCaffe operates in select cities in the United States and Europe, and it will soon add new Marley Coffee-branded bikes to its squad. "BikeCaffe represents what we're all about," says Anh Tran, president of Marley Coffee. Citing BikeCaffe's emphasis on continued on page 40 freshcup.com July 2012 39 After tinkering with his eBay-scouted truck for a year (it had no reverse when he bought it), Wasserman took off in the same orange coffee rig the company uses today—five years later. "We pre-dated all the big L.A. food trucks by at least six months," he says, proud to be part of a movement with roots in a place other than Tinseltown. Wasserman says that when he started, the Southern California specialty coffee world was far from devel- oped, but he cupped and tasted his way through the learning pro- cess. From the start, Wasserman has used San Diego-area roaster Bird Rock Coffee.