Playing the Hits
Longtime Dispatch friends and admirers may be experiencing some déjà vu these days. Kossa Geshe? Isabela Marcos Gaspar? Santa Margarita? Sin Net Chaung?! Haven’t we seen this film before?
Don’t worry - you’re not going crazy. And neither are we! A fair amount of the company we’re keeping this winter consists of familiar faces, and this is neither coincidental nor complacent. In fact, since we began sourcing and roasting our own coffee, we have aspired to cultivate deep relationships. Relationships between us and you, between our different team members and departments, and with our allies up and down the coffee supply chain. And though a coffee company can uphold some of these relationships and still approach each buying season as a blank canvas, we feel that this would prevent us from living up to our full potential as impactful actors in the supply chain.
In coffee, as in countless other contexts, collaborators build trust through sustained, mutually beneficial work together. Despite the distance and intermediaries that separate us from Abdul Wahid Sherif, owner of the Kossa Geshe estate, we count on each other. As a small and impact-oriented coffee roasting company, we believe that we contribute the most meaningful value to our partners by dependably supporting them. And as we grow, we hope that this support means more and more.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that our coffee program has been on auto-pilot since day one. Oftentimes, we believe that we’ve found a coffee that perfectly fills a particular niche, but for any number of reasons, it may not perform as well as intended on our menu. Sometimes, we believe that a coffee’s quality ceiling will be higher than it turns out to be once we start dialing it in for production. Other times, we may find that the coffee and the producer narrative are beautiful, but that the importer is challenging to work with, or the logistics are exceptionally irksome. And sometimes, a coffee that we loved last year is simply not available to us the following year. These and many other factors make it foolish to assume that the start of a good relationship is a guarantee that it’ll last forever.
And that’s exactly why we’re proud of relationships that do stand up across multiple seasons. Becoming better partners in the supply chain while also upholding a diverse and versatile menu for you are two of our biggest picture goals. And right about now, taking a look ahead to all of the return favourites gracing our menu in early 2021, we hope you feel that sense of sweet familiarity that’s been so darn elusive for most of the past year.
