Hopedale's Home For Beancounters | How every convenience store got its own brand of coffee
After talking to Rob Stephen, the owner of Coffee Solutions in the Airport Industrial Park in Hopedale, I may never look at a cup of coffee the same way again.
Okay, yes I will. Unless I'm having an espresso to finish a nice dinner out, I tend to drink the cheap stuff. And I can tolerate some pretty low quality brew as long as it doesn't taste or smell like gym socks.
That's where Coffee Solutions comes in.
The company does quality assurance and control work, consulting and training for the coffee industry.
They make sure the coffee we buy, whether it's from the local convenience store or a fine restaurant, is as good as it's going to get.
Taste Perfection
How Coffee Solutions gets a store or coffee shop's coffee to that point is a mix of science and ritual. The science involves a color spectrometer. The ritual involves âcupping,â a strange and noisy way of aerating coffee over one's palette in order to get an accurate sense of a coffee's flavor and aroma.
With only four employees, two in Hopedale and two in Los Angeles, Coffee Solutions manages to work for a wide variety of companies and pulls in between $1 million and $2 million a year. A lot of that has to do with Stephen's experience.
Twenty years ago, he was just a kid working behind the counter at Coffee Connection, which was bought by Starbucks. Before starting Coffee Solutions in 2003, the Milford resident was head of coffee development for Canton-based Dunkin Donuts.
So, you could say Stephen has seen - and smelled and tasted - it all. And it doesn't seem like the company confines itself to the high end or the low end. Stephen said Coffee Solutions gets a lot of work from convenience stores and the like, which âbuy a lot of coffee, but are not necessarily in the coffee business.â
Nevertheless, those companies âwant to know what they're paying for,â he said, and often big, industrial coffee roasting companies use coffee jargon that's over their heads. Coffee Solutions acts as an intermediary, and helps those companies develop their own coffee blends.
That's why every convenience store seems to have its own brand of coffee. The stores know exactly what they're paying for, customers are pleased with the product, âand the roaster's not hearing âit's not good'â from the convenience store owners, Stephen said.
On the other end of the spectrum are the high-end coffee shops and restaurants that are in the coffee business. They may roast their own beans, or they may not. Either way, they know their expensive coffee is good. Their employees may have a lot to learn.
Barista's Best
Those employees can be trained on the finer points of brewing and serving coffee by Coffee Solutions and its U.S. champion barista. Yes, you just read that. Ellie Hudson-Matuszak, the company's vice president of training operations, was a U.S. Barista Championship regional champion in 2004-05 and was a 2-time USBC finalist in 2005 and 2006.
Stephen said Coffee Solutions landed near the airstrip at the Hopedale Airport Industrial Park in part because he lives in Milford and in part because the town has the reputation as having âa nice, relaxed government and is a value in real estate.â
âI liked the isolation,â he said. Any business with âcoffeeâ in its name tends to get a lot of foot traffic whether or not it actually serves coffee, and that was something Stephen wanted to avoid.
Also, the roaster the company uses does produce a good amount of smoke, so an industrial park seemed like a natural fit. From there, the company can do training and can help coffee companies do everything from design and build a new roaster to help fix a broken coffee grinder.
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