The Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) Symposium is a new event that precedes the annual SCAA Exposition. The symposium is designed to encourage participants to look at the big picture of where specialty coffee is headed. This year, the focus was on single-cup coffee service. Specialty coffee has skyrocketed in popularity over the last few years, and the growth of cafés, coffee shops and grocery stores providing specialty drinks and coffee beans has increased drastically. Yet its ubiquity has created challenges in differentiating among the myriad offerings.

Savvy retailers are discovering that offering unusual coffees from around the world and serving them one cup at a time is a way to set themselves apart from the competition. These stores have menus offering a diverse selection of brewed coffee originating from such places as Papua New Guinea, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Colombia and others. And all are prepared upon request. The various methods of preparation are also diverse, ranging from a simple pour-over system to new brewers designed expressly to make a single cup at a time. This single-serve program, as several retailers testified during the symposium, is not only creating renewed interest in their coffees but also enabling a new pricing model.

Previously, cups of coffee were all sold for the same price. However, because these coffees are so unusual and have such a cost variance, they are being sold for different prices. While this is not unusual for other beverages, such as wine, it’s not a common practice in cafés. Yet it’s gaining enthusiastic followers, with one retailer noting that one of his stores averages almost 1,000 transactions daily, with all drinks prepared on order and priced differently.

It’s been a long time since we’ve seen change to the pricing structure and offerings in coffee shops, but based on the reaction of the attendees at the symposium, I foresee significant changes taking place soon. Several retailers I spoke with indicated plans to adapt to this new paradigm. I’m looking forward to sampling some of my favorite origin coffees on demand when I visit their stores.

I’m always struck by the scope of international business when I am at large, international trade shows, where we find customers for most of our export sales. The Anuga fair is the largest food show in the world, held biannually in Koln, Germany. Every type of food imaginable is on display in the 11 halls. Meats, cheeses, wines, coffee, tea, chocolate, beverages, nuts, fruits … anything that can be eaten is showcased for sale.

These expositions are generally arranged with exhibitors from a specific country sharing booth space in a pavilion with other companies from the same region. Walking into the hall is a culinary tour of the globe. We always exhibit in the U.S. pavilion, but other pavilions include England, France, Greece, Egypt, South Korea, Spain, Italy, Morocco, Thailand, Brazil, etc. Most countries have a presence in some way to encourage export and trade. Often, one finds certain products associated with a particular country in each pavilion, so there is a preponderance of those items among all of the exhibiting companies. In the Italy pavilion, one walks past dozens of samples of red wine, pasta and coffee. In Greece, there is an abundance of olive oil, although it is always surprising to see the number of countries for which olive oil is such a significant export. The majority of the exhibitors from Sri Lanka feature tea. So far, I’ve seen kimchee offered only in the South Korean pavilion.

This year, the attendance seems down, with fewer people on the show floor and less energy than in years past. The catchphrase among exhibitors in the U.S. pavilion about sales is: “Flat is the new up.” However, although there seem to be fewer attendees, the conversations that we’ve been having are promising. In the last few days, we spoke with people from Lebanon, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Malaysia and Portugal, among others, all of whom expressed interest in private-label products. The show continues for several more days. I hope that these conversations result in new business. If so, then flat won’t be the new up.

We have three guiding principles at Mont Blanc Gourmet: Innovation, Quality and Fun. By far the hardest to pursue is innovation, and I am continually grappling with how to better innovate and make sure that our innovations pay off. Over the years, I have had some terrific ideas and some spectacular failures. So I was looking forward to the panel discussion on “Innovation” at the Inc. 500 conference. It was moderated by a writer, David H. Freedman, and consisted of Tan Le, Nolan Bushnell and Rodney Brooks, all of whom are scientists and extremely successful entrepreneurs.

Some of their comments resonated, including:

• Things are always impossible until proven possible.

• Innovation is risky.

• Companies must have a willingness to fail and to take risks. And they must have systems in place to allow them to fail and keep moving forward. We have learned that each time we launch a new product, we must do so on a small test scale before it goes into full production. I still remember the revolutionary product we created several years ago and went into full-scale production with before it had been adequately tested. We ultimately had to pull it from the market, a decision that cost us a lot of money, but that didn’t stop us from trying to come up with other new products.

• Business models can be a place to innovate. Wal-Mart tracks everything it does, which is the basis for its success. GE Jet Engines no longer sells engines. Instead, it sells time.

• Partner with contract manufacturers. Our business model is based on this concept, as we have successful partnerships with nine co-packers across the United States.

• You can’t engage with customers until you reach a certain point in the process, and you can’t ask customers what innovative product they want because they simply don’t know.  I am always frustrated by the lack of innovation in the specialty-coffee industry. Can someone please come up with a new beverage for the holidays besides a mint mocha?!

• Create a culture of innovation within the company, and get everyone involved.

• Keep teams small to innovate and create an internal competition for new products. When we work on new products, we have people from other parts of the company taste and evaluate them to get feedback from different perspectives.

• Without a champion, ideas are worthless. And ideas aren’t necessarily valuable, so keeping them secret isn’t worth it. Ideas need to be discussed and analyzed for value.

• Keep innovating, and listen to your gut. You will always get things wrong, but often you can find success in failure. Some of our best products are the results of ignoring feedback and tweaking products that originally didn’t work but succeeded after they were changed.

It was refreshing hearing these experts put into words some of what I was already doing and to hear about more things I should do. Innovation is an integral part of our company and culture, and listening to this panel was the impetus I needed to continue developing new products and ideas.

I just bought my first two cows, and I am pretty excited. Two cows are a great start to a herd. For the last several months, I have been encouraging donations to my page at Heifer International. Heifer is a nonprofit organization that works on the aphorism that if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life. To do so, Heifer supplies animals to people around the world to help encourage their self-sufficiency. An astonishing array of livestock can be donated, including bees, chickens, geese, goats, pigs, water buffalo and, of course, heifers. Check out my original blog post on Heifer when I set up the challenge.

At this year’s Coffee Fest in Las Vegas, I was just short of my $1,000 goal. I mentioned my challenge to one of my friends who works for Coffee Fest, and I told her the amount that I needed to put me over the top. She reached into her wallet and gave me the money. I was so excited that we had managed to pull this off. This was the beginning, and I’m proud that we succeeded in raising enough for the two cows. I will set up another goal soon and will post it here and hope that people participate. Next time, I hope we can donate even more.

Sensory analysis plays a key role in what I do. Daily we taste, sample and compare different products that Mont Blanc Gourmet currently makes or is developing. At the recent SCAA Symposium, the keynote presenter was a scientist who helped explain how the body and brain taste and process flavors. It was fascinating hearing about the science behind what we experience every day in our lab.

For example, did you know that the nose has 340 receptors that identify different scents? Or that there are about 1,000 chemicals in the world that create all of the aromas that we can identify? Yet we can identify only a few at the same time? In fact, the maximum number of aromas most people can identify at one time is three.

During the seminar, we did a simple exercise describing the aromas in a glass of Sauvignon Blanc wine, which has very distinct aromas. Passionfruit was the strongest and most easily identified aroma, followed by cat urine (yes, cat urine!), then some people detected further notes of pepper and lemon. In this exercise, though, the limit of three identifiable aromas held up for most people.   

Identifying flavors happens on two levels: detection and recognition. First, we detect an aroma, and then we seek to recognize and identify it. Detecting a flavor involves identifying characteristics such as temperature and astringency, while recognition involves descriptors based on how we taste things such as sweet, salty, bitter and sour.

One of the challenges in sensory analysis is trying to describe the flavor. Different flavor guides exist, such as the Specialty Coffee Association’s flavor wheel for coffee or the chocolate flavor wheel developed by Mont Blanc Gourmet. Using these tools helps translate an aroma into words. For example, begin with an aroma of fruit. Using the wheel helps define its characteristics more precisely. Is the fruit ripe or dried? Does it smell like raisin, or cherry, or fig? Using specific words to describe different flavors creates a common language of identity, enabling different people to describe and understand aroma and flavor experiences more easily. 

Returning to my lab, I shared my notes with the staff. There is a lot to learn, but I hope we can collectively improve our own language of tasting and descriptors to better enable us to describe and share aromas with one another as we develop new products.