Latest / Coffee People Podcast / Tom Koren and Tony Bitner of Rusty Dog Coffee Join The Coffee People Podcast. (Bonus Episode)

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Tom Koren and Tony Bitner of Rusty Dog Coffee Join The Coffee People Podcast. (Bonus Episode) · Coffee People Podcast

• 0:03
  Sliding into your screen is not just any coffee bag, it's a
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  your doorstep in no time. Now that was smooth.
• 0:57
  Hey Joe, I don't want you in the shot, but I want to say thank
• 1:00
  you for facilitating our visit to Rusty Dog.
• 1:04
  Hey everyone, welcome to the Coffee People podcast.
• 1:07
  The show is sponsored and supported by Roast our coffee
• 1:10
  packaging. Big thanks to them just for
• 1:13
  supporting the ability to talk to people and tell their
• 1:16
  stories. I'm your host Ryan Wolt and we
• 1:19
  are here at Rusty Dog Coffee in Madison, WI, a place I once
• 1:24
  called home and still feel at home in.
• 1:27
  I believe it's rustydogcoffee.com if I'm not
• 1:29
  mistaken. This show can be found on any of
• 1:33
  your apps, Apple, Spotify, whatever.
• 1:37
  Just look for Coffee People podcast.
• 1:39
  If you gentlemen wouldn't mind introducing yourselves, this is
• 1:41
  the only time I'll ask you to look at the camera, just so
• 1:43
  people know who we are. Sure.
• 1:46
  Tom Corin, founder of Rusty Dog back in 2013, I guess as a hobby
• 1:52
  business now commercial roaster, brought two friends into the
• 1:57
  business and here we are. And I'm Tony Bittner, I'm one of
• 2:02
  one of the owners of Rusty Dog as well.
• 2:04
  It's been an awesome world to be a part of for the past 7-8
• 2:08
  years, so we're excited to have you.
• 2:11
  I'm surprised it took us this long.
• 2:13
  Joe's been talking about you guys.
• 2:14
  I've seen you around. I think I mentioned to you off
• 2:18
  air that I first experienced Rusty Dog Coffee at a place
• 2:22
  called The Pickle in Wausau, WI, which is where I'm from.
• 2:25
  The pickle jar. I just call it The Pickle
• 2:27
  because there was a bar I went to in college called The Pickle.
• 2:30
  Which? Had a whole other name too, but
• 2:33
  that's what we called it. Tom, I'm wondering, you said
• 2:37
  this started as a hobby business for a few years, but what got
• 2:40
  you into coffee in the 1st place?
• 2:42
  To even think I want to go from just drinking it to roasting it
• 2:46
  and then selling it. Good question.
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  I'll start it out. I had a colleague on a airplane
• 2:53
  with a guy here in Madison who dabbled in used coffee
• 2:59
  equipment. Most of what he bought on the
• 3:01
  used market was junk, and he needed someone to make it to
• 3:05
  salvage it and make it usable. So I, me, as a engineer and a
• 3:10
  mechanic by heart, started working with him on nights and
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  weekends to restore and rebuild coffee equipment.
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  Industrial coffee, but roasters? Silos.
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  Baggers, grinder, big grinder, you know, roller mills.
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  And such. And decided I wanted to learn
• 3:29
  the other side of the roasting side of the business.
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  Thought it would be more fun and more profitable.
• 3:35
  I would say it is more fun, but not necessarily more profitable.
• 3:40
  You sound like everyone that's ever told me.
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  You know what? I think I'm going to retire and
• 3:44
  open a bar. Good luck.
• 3:48
  So started slow and small. Built a website.
• 3:52
  It was a hobby business, mostly friends and family.
• 3:54
  Didn't know marketing or advertisement.
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  Had a few people or stumble across the website.
• 3:59
  It grew just enough to be a pain in the ass once we had our first
• 4:04
  kid. Right now I had a crying kid
• 4:06
  upstairs and I'm trying to ship 7 coffee orders a night right?
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  It's not worth my time. I decided to grow it or kill it.
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  Thought hard about which Ave. to take and that's when I I dug
• 4:23
  through the rolodex and said who?
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  Who would I trust to be in this business with me and approached
• 4:29
  Tony and Manny and here we are today.
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  The goal from day one of them investing and coming into the
• 4:36
  business was to go full commercial, not to not to stay
• 4:40
  small to to continue to grow and and be aggressive.
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  So luckily. It worked out, Manny Figaro who
• 4:47
  isn't here today. But thanks Manny for letting us
• 4:50
  do this here today. You say like full commercial and
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  I'm assuming that's because you had learned with your 7 orders a
• 5:00
  day and the kid that selling retail is hard.
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  It is. And when I say commercial I
• 5:06
  maybe that's not the perfect word, but we are not an open to
• 5:09
  the public cafe or roastery. Do people walk in to buy coffee,
• 5:13
  many of them repeat customers? Yes.
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  We do not have public hours. We are not guaranteed to be here
• 5:18
  everyday. We are not a a cafe with a with
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  a roaster in the cafe right. We are a wholesale roaster, but
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  we sell direct to the public also.
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  Sure. You said you looked in your
• 5:31
  Rolodex to see who you felt comfortable with bringing in
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  Tony and Manny. I'm wondering maybe from you
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  first, how did it feel like taking seeing he had a vision
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  for what he wanted? You either had to buy into that
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  vision or were you? Did you bring your own thoughts
• 5:46
  into it? How did you guys manage that
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  part of the Yeah. For sure.
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  So that's a great question. So we are currently going
• 5:52
  through our rebrands and I think that rebrand is going to
• 5:55
  establish Rusty. Don has the Rusty Dog, it is now
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  the Rusty Dog it is now has definitely changed from when
• 6:02
  initially had this idea and had this thought and had a business.
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  So he's welcomed us and I think he really put together an
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  awesome team. I think what I always explain to
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  customers is that Manny is very sales and customer focused and
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  that's really he's this side of the spectrum.
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  Tom is an amazing engineer. He has a mind that I've never
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  met somebody like that. And then I think I'm in this
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  middle of the road that understands what Tom's saying,
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  understand what Manny's saying, and I can weave and hopefully
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  make this path, I guess, more Gray than just white or black or
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  white on either side. So I think it's a wonderful
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  team. And yeah, it's been amazing just
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  to watch us grow. And, you know, it was hard at
• 6:48
  first. Tom and I both worked day jobs.
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  Manny's always been kind of this artful time guy, so we would
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  come here on nights, weekends, we would work 9:00 to 5:00 and
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  come here at 5:30 and. So one to more, yes.
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  And go back and do a nine to five.
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  Yeah. But you both have families.
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  You do. So how did, I mean, they have to
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  be on board with this, right, With the idea that you're going
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  to take the chance. I mean, what did they see or
• 7:11
  what did you see that you thought it's going to be worth
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  it nine years from now? I think where we are now and the
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  path we're going is what we saw. And I think it's always a
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  calculated risk. In college, I took a
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  entrepreneur class and I just remember the expression of the
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  calculated risk. So I think all our families were
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  on board with this calculated risk that we all decided to take
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  and and believe in, I guess. I think we were all done with
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  the corporate world and our and our wives knew that could tell
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  that. And you know that we were in
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  situations where our companies didn't want us to be
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  entrepreneurial, right? They wanted us, especially me
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  and Tony, working for a German owned company as this is the way
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  you do it. And don't, don't try anything
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  else. Don't use your mind.
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  Don't you know, just follow the follow the law, follow the book.
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  And it just. War on us.
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  You know, let's. Let's have some ingenuity.
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  Let's be entrepreneurs. Let's.
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  You know. Let us put our stamp on
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  something in life, you know so. And that come to fruition for
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  sure. With Rusty Doug, how does I mean
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  when I think engineer and all the engineers I've known in the
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  brewing world and now in the coffee world, they do follow a
• 8:22
  somewhat rigid set of testing. Try this test, try this, try
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  this. Do you find that you are able to
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  be more creative here than you were in your career?
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  Before. Or is that even part of a?
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  Goal for you. Probably less creative because
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  there's less money in the corporate.
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  World. There's more money, but I've
• 8:38
  I've always been the engineer that is quite a risk taker,
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  pushing like myself and my teams in the envelope, trying things
• 8:47
  that everyone says isn't going to work.
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  So I still do that type of stuff here.
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  So yeah, I'm probably different than a typical engineer.
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  You know, I'm also love the the web and e-commerce side of the
• 9:02
  business and the financial side of the business.
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  I run the books. But yeah, I guess just not quite
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  the typical engineer. So this matches matches my
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  mindset well, because we can, we can do whatever we want.
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  You know, we just, we just launched canned coffees, right?
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  We're going to come out with Nitro canned teas.
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  We're probably doing this as a much smaller roaster than most
• 9:29
  people that get into. Into a product like.
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  This we're risk takers. Sure.
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  And this is, I think, ambition Nitro craft coffee, right?
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  Yeah, this is the oatmeal latte version.
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  Sweet cream version. OK, we have a black version and
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  then we're working on tea recipe.
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  OK, yeah, I follow the Rusty dog socials, so I saw it pop up.
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  Well, that this would be a good chance to tell people.
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  What is it that you actually do then here?
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  What are you providing to your customers?
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  And you know what's the goal with coffee, tea, and now this.
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  Yeah. Yeah, I would say coffee number
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  one. Well, actually number one is, is
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  we provide us right, like the three of us, like we have an
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  employee now too. There's four people here almost
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  daily, but you're, we, we offer ourselves to all of our
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  customers. When there's an issue or someone
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  thinks it's their coffee doesn't taste right or, you know, the
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  espresso machine's not working, they reach out to the owners
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  directly. So we offer, we offer ourselves
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  and our services and our input and our dedication, but coffee
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  is our number one product. Equipment, coffee equipment,
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  espresso machines, Brewers, grinders, probably a little
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  different than a normal roaster selling equipment because we
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  have quite a bit of in house service and support available to
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  installation water filtration, we offer refrigeration and then
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  the the tea, the tea and can ready to drink products.
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  Yeah, I think you hit it. I think our value proposition is
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  that when you work with Rusty Dollar, you work at the owners
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  and that will not change. So as we grow and as we build
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  our team, it will be an in house team and we are the ones that
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  know every aspect of our business.
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  So we'll be the ones that are still at the face and out there
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  in front working with their customers.
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  So I think we we win business based on that.
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  We bring people here, we have a beautiful space and maybe we'll
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  show them, I don't know. But really I think our huge
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  value proposition is that you work directly with Tony, Tom and
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  Manning. We can make decisions on the
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  spot. We can make decisions right with
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  you on the phone, so I think that's a huge part.
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  Yeah, we'll do. I can do a loop around if you
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  guys are willing to let me explore the space afterwards.
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  One of the the things that I was thinking about before I was
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  coming in here when Joe was telling me, hey, we, we, we can
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  get you guys together. You're roasting in a state,
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  Wisconsin, with fairly dramatic weather pattern changes
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  throughout the year. Coffee is beholden, especially
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  as it sits in a warehouse, to things like humidity and
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  temperature. How do you manage that or how do
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  you adopt that into your process?
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  Yeah, well adopting the the process is one thing.
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  The roast profiles are totally different in the in the winter
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  verse summer 95° green bean is reacts different than the
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  roaster than a 55° green bean, right.
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  So our charge temps are, are different, our air flows are a
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  bit different. The roaster in the winter, the
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  newer roastering technology self adjusts some of that.
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  But our, but our old roaster we're, we're, we have winter and
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  summer profiles right in the spring and fall we split the
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  difference. We do DVD humidifier.
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  So we have a large industrial dehumidifier running.
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  We do open the door on some days when the humidity's not quite as
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  bad, but we also make sure that we never we we source all coffee
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  in Grain Pro and keep keep the bag sealed to the best of our
• 13:05
  ability. We we've actually paid for
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  coffee to be re bagged into Grain Pro before it's come here
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  to to avoid it being exposed through the burlap.
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  Sure. Yeah.
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  One of the things that I know like, you know, small whiskey
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  distillery, bourbon distillery, they might rotate barrels up and
• 13:24
  down if it's close to a window or that you guys haven't deal
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  with any of that sort of adjustments here inside?
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  Not really. No, I mean we've run fans to
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  move air and like I said, we dehumidify.
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  We do load some grain into silos as you can see here, but only a
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  a day or Two's worth of product in there.
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  Yeah. But I think one of the
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  challenges being a wholesaler primarily as opposed to tasting
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  space or place people are coming in is your customers are wanting
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  consistency, maybe more so. Than.
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  Maybe even what the best taste of the bean is, they would
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  rather have it consistent because that's what they're
• 14:01
  selling their customers. Or do you not find that to be
• 14:04
  the case? Well, I think I think that most
• 14:06
  consumers love consistency until they taste something better.
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  You know, sometimes the coffee crop itself is not consistent.
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  You get the same coffee from the same farm the next year and it
• 14:16
  just isn't the same. Sometimes it's a no buy, right?
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  Sometimes it was no buy last year, we buy it this year.
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  Their rainfall changes, their amount of sun changes.
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  Who knows what else changed. They fertilized different or
• 14:27
  didn't fertilize. So you see changes in the crop.
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  No matter what. With our certain with certain
• 14:37
  core products, we try to blend like our our blends, we tried to
• 14:41
  keep those pretty stable and finding origins to match those
• 14:45
  profiles. But we actually encourage change
• 14:48
  on our single origin products and we we only have a few
• 14:50
  blends. We're.
• 14:52
  Really single origin guys and we we love the change, right.
• 14:57
  We, we don't want consistency, we don't want the same Sumatra
• 15:00
  every year. We don't want the same food
• 15:01
  every year. You know, we want to offer
• 15:04
  change to our customers. So I think, I think we have to
• 15:09
  both embrace change, but try to hold the consistency on the on a
• 15:12
  couple of those blends that people for espresso.
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  I think that's important because our number one way of sourcing
• 15:17
  coffee is flavour. We cup and cup and cup and cup.
• 15:20
  We're constantly tasty. We just don't say, yeah, we'll
• 15:23
  buy that same bottom olives last year.
• 15:25
  We want to cup it and we want to make sure that it's going to
• 15:27
  represent Rusty Dog again this year and if it doesn't, we'll
• 15:30
  search the country to find something that does.
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  So we're always changing every year, every crop, but we always
• 15:36
  want our customers to know that it's better than the previous
• 15:39
  year because we taste everything that we bring in #1 that's when
• 15:43
  how we source coffee. So we've heard stories where
• 15:46
  where importers just tell us if people just call them and say I
• 15:49
  want something that tastes like blah, blah, blah.
• 15:51
  But we don't do that. We cut and taste and we approve
• 15:54
  everything. Yeah, our.
• 15:55
  Supplier. Our importers, our suppliers,
• 15:57
  our partners, some farmers we work directly with, many of them
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  have joked with us that we are like their pickiest custom on
• 16:05
  the cup and table. You know, we're good at finding
• 16:10
  diamonds in the rough. I guess we're we just brought a
• 16:14
  Mexico in that we couldn't the way a cup, we couldn't believe
• 16:16
  the price point. You know, it was great coffee at
• 16:19
  that price point and then we cup coffee at three times that value
• 16:23
  And it's like this is tastes like, tastes like.
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  Cardboard, you know. People, people are selling on
• 16:28
  name and origin too often and not the cup, but we are very
• 16:32
  picky on the cupping table. Luckily we get along very well,
• 16:37
  probably better than any other aspect of the business.
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  We are really like we we, we very rarely have any.
• 16:46
  Differences on the coffee. Tan, you know.
• 16:48
  There might be a time where two of us will cup and then Manny
• 16:50
  will cup tomorrow. We won't say anything about the
• 16:51
  coffees and then they'll they'll basically give us the same
• 16:55
  results that we were both communicating.
• 16:56
  So it's pretty interesting. When yeah, you've calibrated
• 16:59
  over the years together of what you what you like.
• 17:03
  You know, we do this show with the support of Rostar.
• 17:05
  They're supporting me, but by extension, the small businesses
• 17:08
  that we talked to, which I greatly appreciate.
• 17:12
  But I also have a passion for kind of advising small
• 17:15
  businesses or talking to them or saying, hey, this is how I
• 17:17
  failed. You know, maybe you can avoid
• 17:20
  that because it's such a a great community.
• 17:22
  I never coffee in particular. You rarely see one coffee shop.
• 17:26
  You mentioned this just before we got on the recording, but,
• 17:29
  you know, if you were out of something, you could call one of
• 17:31
  your neighboring coffee roasters and they would help you out and
• 17:33
  vice versa. So I'm wondering if you have any
• 17:36
  advice for, say, a burgeoning coffee entrepreneur, someone who
• 17:40
  says, ah, you know, I've seen what Rusty Doggies done.
• 17:42
  I don't want to do the same thing, but I want to get into
• 17:44
  this industry and this business. Any piece of advice you can
• 17:48
  share you know with them and. The first thing that comes to
• 17:51
  thought is it's always harder than you think it's going to be
• 17:56
  and and usually harder. You know, usually you're going
• 18:00
  to deviate from your business plan many times.
• 18:04
  You know, on paper we had to put together for our landlord to
• 18:06
  trust us on this building when we had.
• 18:10
  Well, actually we were. Losing money and have very, you
• 18:12
  know, as a business, we're losing money because of having
• 18:14
  to invest in our future. We had to put together business
• 18:18
  plans to convince this landlord to let us sign this lease.
• 18:21
  And did we fall a little behind that in the first couple of
• 18:25
  years? You know, did we blow by it now?
• 18:26
  Yeah, right. But you know.
• 18:28
  But. But don't get, I guess don't get
• 18:31
  frustrated with yourself if you don't match your business plan
• 18:36
  and your financial plan and just be ready to pivot and try
• 18:40
  something different. Don't give up.
• 18:42
  Yeah, I think for me, when I, I guess what I think about is when
• 18:48
  I stopped my day job, of course it was a plan with my family and
• 18:52
  the health insurance and blah, blah, blah.
• 18:55
  But the day I gave my notice, it was just like, I should have
• 18:59
  done this years ago. So I think it's scary.
• 19:03
  It's a calculated risk, as I've said before.
• 19:05
  But I think just don't give up. Stick to your guns and you'll
• 19:09
  make it work. I want to ask about the
• 19:12
  packaging. Is this the new brand rebrand
• 19:15
  you mentioned? Or brand refreshed.
• 19:17
  Can I, can we share this? Oh great, because.
• 19:20
  It's not launched yet, but. It's so I'm wondering with this
• 19:24
  new packaging, what was the difference in the story you
• 19:27
  wanted to tell from the old packaging?
• 19:32
  Forgot to turn that off. On location, that's all, it's
• 19:35
  fine. That's all it works.
• 19:37
  OK. So back to these packages.
• 19:39
  This is the original. This is kind of our refresh.
• 19:43
  Well, it's not the original. Not the original.
• 19:45
  This is our current and refresh. One, why do why even do it if
• 19:51
  you're not selling, you know, as often directly you're more of a
• 19:54
  wholesaler. But two what's the story that
• 19:56
  you're trying to tell with the new band?
• 19:58
  So first of all, let let's address selling directly.
• 20:00
  So we take our product to market in three ways.
• 20:03
  We have wholesale customers that are cafes and restaurants.
• 20:07
  We have robust online business. So we ship coast to coast every
• 20:10
  day. We offer subscriptions, you can
• 20:13
  subscribe to whatever you want. We have preset packages that
• 20:15
  ship first and third week of each month.
• 20:18
  So we do sell direct that way. Got it.
• 20:20
  And then we also do self distribute to grocery stores in
• 20:24
  the Madison area, right, And markets and yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 20:27
  yeah, yeah. We can do private label stuff
• 20:29
  from gift shops and gift shops. And yeah.
• 20:33
  So then the second part of your question was.
• 20:35
  Well, the second part is, is what's the story we're telling
• 20:38
  with the new kind of refresh? Well, the 12 ounce bag just to
• 20:41
  add to that gets it's in a lot of people's hands.
• 20:43
  Like Tony said, we don't sell. We don't sell direct.
• 20:46
  We're not open to the public, but we do sell direct to
• 20:49
  consumer heavily through the website.
• 20:51
  So that 12 ounce bag gets in a lot of people's hands direct
• 20:55
  through mail order. It also gets in their hands from
• 20:57
  grocery and gift shops and markets and and wherever else it
• 21:03
  might wind up. Hair salons, bike shops, you
• 21:07
  know, we have places all over selling that product.
• 21:09
  So that bag is getting in a lot of people's hands, 3040 thousand
• 21:15
  bags a year. It's getting getting into
• 21:17
  people's hands. The story, it's the bag's a bit
• 21:21
  more about us. We are fairly colourful people,
• 21:26
  right? We're fun to hang out with and
• 21:29
  and people come visit us and hang out for hours unplanned.
• 21:33
  So we capture some more fun stuff on the bag with different
• 21:36
  colours, a little bit of a rust colour on the side.
• 21:39
  We are very music oriented between the three of us.
• 21:43
  So there's some things with there's a coffee roaster
• 21:46
  designed with a with a record there.
• 21:49
  One of our new logos here is the three headed dog, which
• 21:53
  represents the three owners. It's also modeled off the insert
• 21:58
  of a 45 album. All right, so the adapter on a
• 22:01
  45 album to play that album on a regular turntable.
• 22:06
  So you see that tied into music, kind of the rock'n'roll theme
• 22:10
  with the lightning bolt on the side.
• 22:12
  But yeah, just add some color, tell some more about us, capture
• 22:16
  the three of us, a little story on the back.
• 22:21
  There's a lot of threes on there.
• 22:22
  Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it was time
• 22:26
  for a refresh, time for someone professional to put a touch on
• 22:31
  it. This.
• 22:32
  Even this current bag, which is probably the third version of
• 22:35
  our packaging was just done free on with online tools, right.
• 22:43
  So it was it was time to have someone put a touch on on our
• 22:46
  brand. Yeah.
• 22:48
  And it all started with letterpress.
• 22:49
  So that is our new logo. It's custom design that we found
• 22:55
  at a company local in town that has letterpress.
• 22:59
  Everything's vintage, yes, racks and racks and racks with vintage
• 23:02
  letterpress that he found throughout the years and he
• 23:04
  would travel and get collections from newspaper printers that are
• 23:08
  unfortunately out of business. So this all started with this
• 23:11
  custom letterpress design and then build around that and build
• 23:14
  around our concepts, our ideas and the ideology that is the
• 23:19
  three guys and rusted out now. So, yeah, this really represents
• 23:22
  the three of us, I think. And it's just a natural and
• 23:24
  extra next step that we're going to take.
• 23:27
  And I don't know our plan is to grow with this.
• 23:32
  Well, that I think takes me to my my next question, which is
• 23:37
  where can we find it? If, if somebody's watching this
• 23:39
  show, rustydogcoffee.com for sure they can look in their
• 23:44
  markets. If they don't have them, they
• 23:45
  can request them. I would assume you're not you.
• 23:48
  You said east to West Coast. Are you serving more?
• 23:51
  Is it heavier weighted in some places than others?
• 23:53
  Of course, here it's heavy, but the Midwest, we're definitely
• 23:57
  extending our reach. We have cafes trickling out to
• 24:02
  the coast. We don't really have presents in
• 24:05
  grocery stores or much market. Some of the cafes might have 12
• 24:09
  ounce bags on their shelves. And some of the cafe business
• 24:11
  comes and goes. Like there's some coffee shop in
• 24:14
  California that he actually emailed us and said.
• 24:17
  Paris Hilton drinks coffee. Here, you know, and they were
• 24:19
  buying a product for a while and then you don't see them and then
• 24:21
  they come back. So yeah, it's it's harder to
• 24:27
  find on the as you get out of Wisconsin, but we're certainly
• 24:31
  available from the website and there's a wholesale for anyone
• 24:37
  interested in wholesale anywhere in the US there's a wholesale
• 24:41
  application built. Into the website wholesale
• 24:43
  portal and we ship wholesale orders throughout the country as
• 24:46
  well. Great.
• 24:47
  We'll make sure we link to that and show that.
• 24:49
  What did I miss today that you want people to know about Rusty
• 24:52
  Dog? You know what I've, what I've
• 24:54
  pulled from it really is that it's a true collaboration
• 24:57
  between the three of you, giving yourselves the opportunity to do
• 25:01
  this thing that you want to do for yourself.
• 25:03
  But you know what else is there really is?
• 25:06
  I think we fresh roast all of our coffee.
• 25:08
  So we roast. I think you mentioned a little
• 25:10
  bit ago, we are roasting almost five days a week.
• 25:14
  If we don't roast, it's because we planned that way really.
• 25:18
  We roast tour so even our customers that buy 5060 lbs of
• 25:23
  espresso roast a week, we don't roast that the previous week and
• 25:26
  wait for them to place that order.
• 25:27
  We roast when they're ordering. So all of our coffee is fresh
• 25:30
  roasted. And I think I think that's said
• 25:33
  a lot. I'm sure you hear that a lot,
• 25:34
  but I do think that's it's important we don't pre roast our
• 25:38
  coffee and have it sitting around waiting for worst and.
• 25:40
  For other roasters watching this that say that's impossible, of
• 25:44
  course you can't do that perfectly.
• 25:46
  So we look at our production demand through our through our
• 25:49
  software, we roast to demand plus 10 or 20%, right.
• 25:54
  So that 10 or 20% gets you the start the next day or the day
• 25:58
  after. So it's, yeah, we're not
• 26:01
  roasting to the bean to demand, but we're not roasting to put
• 26:04
  coffee on a shelf for a week or a month to fulfill orders.
• 26:08
  We are, it's, it's order based plus depending on the the bean
• 26:13
  and the demand for that product, 10 or 20%.
• 26:15
  And then we roasted some. Some of those were still roasted
• 26:19
  for days. Absolutely.
• 26:21
  But you need that little buffer to get.
• 26:23
  There's orders coming in right now that we don't know about,
• 26:25
  right? Yeah.
• 26:26
  And I think that's important even with our grocery customers.
• 26:28
  So we do self distribute every week, every Wednesday, Mandy's
• 26:31
  not here because of that and we rotate our product and we load
• 26:35
  fresh product in every week to all of our grocery customers as
• 26:38
  well. So I think that's important to
• 26:40
  know too when you're shopping for us to know.
• 26:42
  There is a date stamp in fact and you can see what it is.
• 26:45
  But all of our coffee even to grocery stores were roasted
• 26:48
  usually Monday, Tuesday. We package and work hard those
• 26:50
  days to get it ready for a Wednesday delivery.
• 26:52
  I appreciate that date stamp. I'm always looking for that.
• 26:55
  That's comes from my beer days too.
• 26:58
  But knowing well, I was just, I'm not going to call them out,
• 27:02
  but I was recently in a grocery store and the same coffee in the
• 27:05
  same line, the one in the front had been roasted that week and
• 27:09
  the one in the back had been roasted in April.
• 27:11
  So you know that nobody's going through and cycling through,
• 27:14
  see. For sure it's important.
• 27:15
  Yeah, the dates in the coffee world are all over the place too
• 27:19
  because there is no federal standard.
• 27:21
  Coffee's considered a non potentially hazardous food.
• 27:24
  So everyone dates their stuff differently.
• 27:26
  Some are roast on dates, some are batch coded with no dates.
• 27:29
  Some are expiration dates dated out 18 months from now.
• 27:32
  Some people have expiration, not expiration dates, Best Buy
• 27:35
  dates, some have Best Buy dates six weeks from now.
• 27:38
  There is no standard. So you really have to learn your
• 27:41
  roaster to make an educated decision, you know, on that
• 27:44
  grocery store shelf because everyone does something a little
• 27:48
  different with their dates. There, Sure.
• 27:50
  I would venture to say that if it's a really bad cup of coffee,
• 27:53
  it could be a dangerous thing when I throw my cup, you know,
• 27:55
  across the campsite or across the room.
• 27:59
  I'm not saying that I have a, you know, an anger management
• 28:01
  problem with my coffee. I'm just saying I appreciate
• 28:05
  both of you being here. I appreciate Manny.
• 28:08
  I'd probably appreciate him more if he was here, but I appreciate
• 28:11
  that he exists. That's awesome and I appreciate
• 28:15
  you. Thank you for tuning into the
• 28:16
  Coffee People podcast. You can find Rusty Dog Coffee at
• 28:20
  rustydogcoffee.com. Those links will be in our show
• 28:23
  notes wherever you're listening to this or watching it.
• 28:27
  Again, thank you to Rostar for supporting our show.
• 28:30
  If you are looking for coffee at your local grocer, your local
• 28:33
  market, and it's not Rusty Dog but you want to try it, ask him
• 28:36
  to reach out. Thank you.
• 28:38
  Thanks to Joe for setting up from Green coffee importers.
• 28:42
  A Green a Cape Horn Green Coffee importers.
• 28:43
  Excuse me. You can check out all their
• 28:45
  stuff online links as well. This show is available on Apple,
• 28:49
  Spotify, YouTube, all of the different places search for
• 28:52
  coffee people. Thank you for listening,
• 28:54
  watching. Don't forget to tip your
• 28:56
  baristas and thank you for drinking good coffee.
• 28:59
  Yeah, anything. Else.
• 29:02
  All right. We'll also.
• 29:03
  Wander around? Yes, please.
• 29:35
  The. Perfect.
• 29:54
  That's perfect, guys. Fun.
• 29:55
  I think. I'm going to thank Dave from
• 30:02
  Green Bean Asia too. It's still rolling.
• 30:05
  Yeah, no. Do that.
• 30:06
  Do that.