Business Spotlight: By the Pound

In its first year in operation, Brick & Mortar Coffee LLC beat owners projections by focusing on the business of its clients.

Wholesale is the name of the game for co-owner Jonathan Putnam and crew, and a tasting room on the Mother Road provides the cream on top.

From its 1666 St. Louis St. shop, Brick & Mortar roasts coffee by the pound via two machines designed to cook all day, if necessary. The store serves as a pickup point for local customers, and Putnam ships through UPS Inc., with custom boxes from Ozark Packaging Inc.

“We’ve focused on a concentric growth business. We’ve started with the greater Springfield area – Ozark, Nixa, Strafford – and now we’ve expanded that to the greater 417 area,” says Putnam, whose father Dr. Wayne Putnam is a silent partner in the business. “We ship nationwide; we just aren’t pursuing sales outside of our target region right now.”

In its first year, Brick & Mortar sold roughly 10,000 pounds of coffee, and the wholesaler now supplies some 1,400 pounds a month, above the 1,000-pound projections when business began in August 2014. The company grossed $200,000 in first-year sales, about double Jonathan Putnam’s projections.

To guard against rising too quickly, Putnam says Brick & Mortar’s growth has been organic, largely through word-of-mouth.

Commodities education
Since all of Brick & Mortar’s coffee is sourced internationally, Putnam learned to follow the commodities market.

About half of the wholesaler’s coffee is purchased through Minneapolis-based Cafe Imports. Putnam says his company pays the importer between $2.50 and $15 a pound as a “green price,” based on the day’s commodities market.

“They stay on par with keeping their coffee seasonal,” says Joe Marrocco, Cafe Imports’ senior sales associate and director of education. “As coffees are going out of season, they’ll switch to coffees that are then in season, which is a really smart way to go about running a coffee business.”

Marrocco knows Springfield coffee roasters. He says wholesaler Heroes Coffee and downtown coffee shops Mudhouse and The Coffee Ethic also buy beans through Cafe Imports.

Given the variables in commodities, Marrocco says Cafe Imports often fills the role of consultant for its clients while negotiating coffee futures contracts.

“We are always asked for advice and wisdom,” he says. “We try to be as neutral as we possibly can, but then at the same time, when there are opportunities that are no-brainers, it’s tough to not share that information with a client.”

At Brick & Mortar, Putnam also buys green coffee beans through Kansas City-based direct trader Kapeh Utz and directly from a farm in Brazil.

That, he admits, took a bit of luck. Enter Caio de Castro Pereira, a Missouri State University exchange student whose family owns a few hundred hectares in Carmo de Minas, Brazil. A fifth-generation coffee farmer, Pereira knew that side of the business but not a whole lot about roasting.

“He hooked us up with his family, and we built a good relationship,” Putnam says. “We get a couple thousand pounds of his coffee every few months.”

The Brazilian connection was another projection-beating moment. Putnam didn’t expect to have a direct-trade deal in place for two to five years.

Through its sources, Brick & Mortar sells beans harvested from Colombia to Costa Rica to Ethiopia. The wholesale price for customers typically starts at $9.50 per pound.

Coffee craftsmen
With a decade of experience working at Dancing Mule Coffee Co. and Classic Rock Coffee, Putnam says Brick & Mortar’s goal is to improve the region’s coffee culture rather than compete directly with local shops.

In the company’s tasting room, baristas serve coffee brewed in methods known as full-immersion, gravity pour-over and nitro-infused. The latter is chilled in kegs and served on tap.

Coffee purists are welcome here. But representing only about 28 percent of revenue, the tasting room exists to train customers in best practices for making and presenting coffee.

“When you do follow a more collaborative business practice, you draw in a wide array of people with different experiences to not just make coffee better but make the culture better,” Putnam says. “We entered into it with a heart to do consulting and training and roasting to be the three-pronged approach to up the coffee game in any shop we partner with.”

Among Brick & Mortar’s largest clients are MaMa Jean’s Natural Foods Market, Flame Steakhouse, Homegrown Food, Ben’s on the Square in Ozark and Walkabout Coffee Shop in Nixa.

Jeff Anderson, who manages operations at Aviary Cafe and Creperie LLC, said its two restaurants and event center switched to Brick & Mortar about a month ago from Farmer Brothers national food service.

Anderson said Aviary averages 200 pounds purchased a week at a bulk rate of around $9 a pound from Brick & Mortar. At that rate, the company is budgeting to buy $7,700 of coffee each month.

“Being able to be proud of who we’re offering when we tell our customers where our coffee comes from is always better than coming from a national chain,” Anderson said, noting Aviary also stopped selling Illy coffee. “That was coming out of New York. You can buy that at T.J. Maxx.

“We wanted more of a local tie to add to the Aviary.”