What kind of office coffee services are you offering your hardworking employees?

Coffee is at the center of so many good ideas. It is in the middle of every break room table and front and center on the desk of the most efficient assistant. Coffee rings, coffee stains, no mind. A little coffee smudge on the corner of the monthly P&L report just shows how much effort went into it.

Here is a great heading for your next office newsletter or e-mail blast, “Organic Coffee Now Offered to Show Our Appreciation for Your Hard Work.” There is nothing like pampering your employees to show them how much you care. You do care, don’t you? I surely hope the office coffee services you are offering do not come in a generic black and white bag.

The coffee culture goes beyond the corner café. It goes beyond the poetic open mic nights and the political banterings of the coffee shop get together. Where the water cooler stands for gossip and the “things that should have been left out of the office,” the coffee station stands for ideas, staying up late, getting going in the morning, consulting and productivity;  what business would not want to cater to this?

More businesses are being eco-conscious these days. They are saving paper, recycling paper, watching their carbon foot-prints and recycling cans in the break-room. The big coffee conglomerates care nothing about the eco-system. They tear down trees to grow coffee trees that normally thrive under the tender shade of naturally growing trees. Coffee beans grown in the full sun are bitter and sprayed with pesticides for insects that would not normally attack them. When a plant is grown in abnormal conditions, it is more susceptible to diseases and insects.

Whether it is for the image of your business as an eco-friendly provider, a treat for your well deserving employees or to stimulate those money- making ideas in the conference room, think of the office coffee services you are providing. It just might make a difference to offer organic JumpinGoat Coffee or Tea next time.

I believe the most important thing to understand about specialty coffee is the care that is taken to purchase and roast specialty coffee.

Many people don’t realize that coffee is actually a fruit, and like most fruit…it has a shelf life. Great care is taken by JumpinGoat’s buyers to procure the finest quality coffee beans from around the world. I have found that JumpinGoat’s customers are people that care what kind of coffee beans they buy in the same way they care about the condition of the apples, oranges, or lettuce they may purchase from the produce section of their local grocery. The next time you go to the supermarket consider how you evaluate produce in relation to how you may evaluate your coffee. Do you select organic produce? Do you shop for firm, soft, no bruises, or perhaps you just consider ripeness? My bet is that your criteria is largely based upon the actual fruit or vegetable.
With coffee, you need to understand that cheapest is NOT THE BEST (it’s the cheapest). Expensive is not always the best either, but specialty coffee is typically the cream of the crop in relation to all the coffee sold.
Knowing your roaster and how they do things for you is a great start to understanding what you are actually drinking. For example, most decaffeinated coffee is done via a chemical chlorination process…and that’s just plain bad for your overall health. Mountain Water Process is an all natural decaffeinated process (no harmful side effects). Also, how long your coffee takes to get to market after its roasted, or the cocktail of beans in the container is anybody’s guess.
JumpinGoat can tell you where our bean comes from, when and where it’s cupped before we buy it, and perhaps most importantly how fresh it is before and after we roast it.

Our food preparation standards and our process are very important to us and to our customers. We wear hats and gloves when we are placing product in a bag for you to drink. We are not required to do it, we do it because we would expect it to be done if we were buying a food product. We feel that Specialty Coffee should be regarded in the same way that any other prepared foods are regarded. That is the JumpinGoat Standard, the transparency of How, What, Where, When.
We hope you tell a friend about your visit to JumpinGoat Roasters

We have a lot of fun at JumpinGoat’s new retail location, and we get to meet some pretty cool people.
Many times folks are amazed to learn interesting facts about coffee. I love to tell people about coffee, and I really like it when someone tells me something I did not already know about coffee.
• A coffee drinker averages 2-3 ounce cups of coffee a day or around a pound of coffee per week. JumpinGoat.com Coffee drinkers may average more because of the taste (tee-hee)
• Coffee is only grown near the equator, from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn, within a 1,000 mile limit. This fact is not 100% true because I am growing coffee in my building.
• 1,200 different chemical components are in coffee. More than half of these components make up the distinguished flavor of coffee, but who’s counting?
• There is between 80 and 140 milligrams of caffeine in a seven once cup of coffee. How many milligrams in 1,000,000 cups? That sounds like my a high school math problem.
• 400 billion cups of coffee are consumed worldwide, making it the most popular beverage. Actually, water is the most popular, but coffee is second.
• 91% of coffee consumed is taken at breakfast. Sometimes it is breakfast.
• 79% of coffee consumed is served from the homes of coffee drinkers. Do you know how much coffee it takes to fill up a home? That’s why it may be easier to serve it from a coffee pot.
• The second place where coffee is most consumed is in the workplace. That was untill I got laid off…now I consume it on a boat, on a train, on a house, with a mouse.

Well we are back from the SCAA conference and the coffee orders are caught up enough to give you a summary.

The SCAA conference in Atlanta was great.

Aside from a few testy security guards the show was packed with products, services, and experts from every part of the globe. The show was quite enjoyable.

Seven of us from JumpinGoat attended the show and to make the most of it we all went different directions with assigned task. My objective for the show was largely to purchase a new weigh and fill machine. I viewed every weigh and fill machine at the show and went through them all with great detail. We elected “Weigh Right” for its advanced memory capability, it’s accuracy, ease of use, and for how I was treated as potential patron.

Mike Phillips of Weigh Right truly understood our business needs.

If you need information on a Weigh Right weigh-and-fill contact Mike Phillips, he is the Director of Marketing & Sales, and tell him JumpinGoat sent you.
He’s a great guy, and he has the ability to simplify advanced machinery.
His Phone: 800-571-0249

If you are in the coffee business and would like to ask me questions about the Weigh Right…please call me anytime

I was recently asked to provide the best example I have found where money has been made from social networking.
This is part three of my blog series around social networking. You can subscribe to my blog at Http://www.JumpinGoat.com/blog It’s there you will find a delightfully appropriate mix of coffee and business.
Aside from Adsence, or Sponsorships, or using your network for marketing purposes I will provide one example from my industry, “coffee.”
As you would probably expect there are well over 1200 Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter profiles and groups with a devotion to coffee and teas. According to a recent article in a coffee trade publication by Rebecca Ragain, a well known coffee house made history by filling what was probably the first ever to-go-order placed by twitter. It was so successful; it was adopted as a regular service. Imagine folks on the back deck ordering coffee or refills without getting up. Maybe that’s just lazy, maybe it’s just smart business to provide such a service?
So there is your example.
I am interested in getting your direct e-mail about your experiences with monetizing social networks. What has worked for you?
Forrest Graves
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