How to Give a Roastery Tour
It doesn’t matter if your roast works is 4,000 square feet or 50, that space where the magic happens, where coffee transforms from something most eyes only vaguely understand into something almost everyone knows, is one of your very best branding, marketing, and sales tools.
Fascination with coffee roasting can last a lifetime, but when you’ve spent a lot of time around coffee roasting, the sights and sounds and smells become part of your everyday normal. It’s easy to forget that while we produce a ubiquitous product, the process is experienced by a relatively tiny number of people.
It wasn’t always so. A hundred years ago there were “roast-houses,” to be sure, just as there were bakeries, but it was not uncommon for people to also roast coffee (or bake bread) at home. While most people still have some sense of what is involved in baking bread, our coffee roasting brain lobe long ago evolved into something else. So, while your brain has been happily reconnected with its coffee roasting past and considers the whole thing normal, coffee roasting remains magical and mysterious to most people. Even among those who retail coffee, roasting is the backstage to their act.
Backstage is actually a good way to think of your roastery when it come to giving tours. You are inviting people backstage and although it might not be a privilege, exactly, it’s certainly not a place just anyone gets to go.
There are all kinds of “tour groups” that might come through your roastery for different reasons. The most common are probably potential customers invited to come see where the coffee they might buy comes from and, more importantly, meet the people responsible. The most important part of any roaster operation are the people and the people are the most important part of any tour. Existing customers bring new employees through. Sometimes community groups come through, or student groups, or the landlord’s niece and nephew. Then there are the drop-ins.
A note on drop-ins. Even if you’re not a roaster-retailer, people will show up at your door for coffee because their smart phone pointed them to “coffee.” Always be welcoming to the drop-ins and whenever possible give them a tour, even if it’s just the dime tour, and a cup of coffee. Don’t have a cup of coffee? Well, that’s weird. Why not? Anyway, because you don’t know who they are, you don’t know who they are … or who they know or who they might tell about you and your coffee and how nice you were even though they dropped in unexpectedly.
Follow the Coffee
A tour of your roastery should start where the story of coffee begins when it comes into your possession, on the dock, or whatever passes for a loading dock in your operation. What is there to say about your loading dock?
“Coffee from all over the world comes through this door, from Africa, South America, Central America, even as far away as Indonesia ...”
See, like that. Again, it’s easy to take these things for granted. But on a regular basis, you have bags of coffee from places most people will never visit arriving on your dock. It’s interesting. And when you’re giving a tour to potential customers it’s good to remind them that you will be their link to a complex supply chain. This is where you talk about your green coffee buyer and how they buy coffee.
Then your tour should follow the path coffee follows through your roastery, whether that’s a walk, just a few steps, or just a turn of the head.
It’s In The Bag
The area where you have your bags of green coffee stacked and stored is interesting too (yes, it is). It doesn’t matter if it’s a few bags on a pallet or 1,000 bags on pallet racks, you want to talk about seasons, when coffees are harvested and how they are milled and sorted. As you move closer to the roaster and there are open bags, dig in. Show them what a handful of green coffee looks like and then show them how coffee from one country or region doesn’t look like coffee from another. Talk about defects and how they are removed and how removing defects by any method increases the quality and the cost.
When the folks on your tour have eyes on the green coffee and can see the different colors and sizes is when you talk about how every coffee requires its own roast profile. They’ll understand because they’re looking at the beans and they all look different.
People touring the Starbucks Reserve Roastery & Tasting Room
The Main Event
Hopefully, people feel free to ask questions at any time, but as you move toward the roaster or talking about roasting, be sure to pause and ask if there are any questions. You’re here to sell coffee, right? It’s okay to have elements of performance in your roastery tour. The roasting process is the star of the show. This is what people want to see. During the first two stops on the tour, people will hear and smell coffee roasting and cast glances at the roaster. As interesting as green coffee is (and it is), roasting is magic. It deserves a small dramatic pause.
Before talking about the roasting process itself, talk about how coffee orders are taken and how a customer’s order actually becomes green coffee going into the roaster, whatever that process is for your company and the aspects you want to highlight, such as freshness standards, roast to order, customer service.
The level of geek applied to your description of the roasting process will depend on those to whom you’re speaking but generally, keep it simple and focus on the importance of the person roasting the coffee. Talk about how the roaster is listening to the coffee, looking at the coffee, smelling the coffee. Explain why the coffee needs to be cooled (the barbecue folks will all understand when you talk about how the coffee will continue to roast if we don’t cool it down).
Always Finish With Coffee
Depending on your operation and the level of interest among those on your tour, there might be more equipment to talk about around roasting itself. Otherwise, it’s on to packaging, which is your chance to talk about local delivery, how quickly coffee arrives from order date, grind options (if any). Then it’s time for the “auxiliary” tours, your cupping lab/room/area/table and your customer training area if you have one.
Cupping is almost always called for with potential customers when time permits. In every case, the tour should finish with people tasting coffee one way or another, even if it’s just a cup for the road.
It’s not unusual for a roastery tour to close a sale but it’s worth remembering that it’s not usually the coffee that clinches the deal, or how clean your roasting plant is or your brilliant inventory management skills. Sure, all those things can contribute, but the thing that will always contribute more than any other to winning new business is the real reason you should always be open for roastery tours. Your people.
