Cafe Consultation - How our Team Can Help You.

Meet one of Fratello Sales Consultants Joel May. He has been part of the Fratello team for years and is here to support clients with everything they need to run a successful cafe. If you are seeking to open a cafe or are you wanting support in your current business, we are here to help you with our Cafe Consultation. You can read below to find out more about their role and how they may serve you!

Joel May, Fratello.

What are your roles within Fratello and what do you do?

Our roles within Fratello is ultimately a wholesale sales consultant. We stay current with the newest industry trends, provide exceptional training, phenomenal coffee, and help our customers set up with the right equipment and layout. My goal is to become my customers most valuable asset, their key contact for any coffee related questions, issues or needs.

What services does Fratello offer its clients?

As a wholesaler working with independent and franchise cafe operators, we help our partners (customers) succeed through providing exceptional, high quality coffee, as well as the skills, tools, and knowledge required to showcase the best that our coffee has to offer. In addition, we consult with cafe operators to ensure they have the right equipment and flow for their particular location. Capitalizing on flow makes a world of difference to the bottom line. This ultimately creates a win win sales relationship.

We offer:

- Initial cafe consultation

- Equipment sourcing, specs, and quotes

- All maintenance training

- Installation and pre installation site inspections

- Help with equipment placement for optimized flow

- Help with coffee cost analysis

- Full training for all staff from Owner to Barista, from basic espresso training to advanced barista

- Ongoing training and support as required

- Coffee knowledge seminars

What advice would you give for those who want to open a cafe?

There are a lot of answers to this question, but a few of the most important points of advice I would offer are:

Location, location location! First and foremost, a great location sets you up for success, look for places offering massive amounts of foot traffic. Consider looking for foot traffic and making an offer on the right location even if its not for lease or sale. Stand alone locations with no foot traffic are always a challenge. Be wary of spaces that are too large, cavernous cafes give the impression that the cafe is not busy even if its doing well. A crowd always attracts a crowd and 1200 to 1500 square feet seems to be the winning footprint.

Be prepared to float yourself for a year, it often takes all of that to create a strong loyal regular customer base.

Do your research, understand the micro market you are looking to set up shop in.

Decor and renovation budgets are important but don’t forget to budget for your brewing and espresso gear. So often we see the gear as an afterthought, the espresso machine is the heartbeat of the cafe, get the right machine, espresso grinders, and brewing gear.

When selecting your coffee, choose quality over price every time, strong margins coupled with the high yield in coffee translates into $0.03 cents per cup for every $1.00 per lb. Not much of a savings for using a lower quality product…

Higher passionate staff, who love coffee. If your not a people orientated person, higher a great manager who is.

What is the point of difference with those who work with Fratello?

When choosing to work with Fratello it is important to know that our customers are our partners, their success is our focus. We don’t charge a fee for helping them succeed.

While our coffee is exceptional, poor brewing and extracting techniques can ruin even the finest of coffee, we offer the tools to ensure that every cup is amazing!

We are of the belief that by helping our customers becomes better café operators, offering a high level of quality beverages with a great experience, we will all benefit. We produce excellent coffee.

We also have the experience to carry blends and dark roasts along side boutique style micro lots. In many instances, a customers key demographic in their area is looking for a really good dark or medium roast that is stable and unchanging all the time, one that can work well with cream and sugar. We know this and can help.

Calgary is Awesome! Great Coffee Makes for a Great City

It’s like a chicken or the egg thing; what came first – the great coffee house or the great city? At Fratello we’re obviously biased, but we believe that you have to have great coffee houses to make a great city. And just look around, New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Vancouver and Seattle – they all have remarkable cafes. Take it a step further. How many movie sets or TV shows profile coffee shops? Tons of them, and there is a reason for that. Because great coffee houses bring out the very best in us. They allow us to appreciate the good things in life; things that often get missed in the hurly burly of our daily existence.

In a great coffee house we socialize, we think, and we somehow become instantly gracious and appreciative. Perhaps it’s the magic aroma of magnificently roasted coffee, or the professional skills of your barista, but somehow a good coffee shop ‘brings you inside’ and gives you as much value from the experience of the place as from the taste of the product.

At Fratello we understand coffee because it has – literally – been our passion for over a quarter century! Hundreds of thousands of people have tasted our coffee without ever knowing it! With the opening of the Fratello Analog Café in the Calgary Farmer’s market in early 2011 we took the plunge into retail, and we’re delighted we did. We continue to learn new experiences each month which empowers us with new knowledge to better train/coach our wholesale clients. Our brand has become more recognized in this city as the leading quality coffee roaster and has enabled us to have a "voice" in the street (away from business to business).

With the upcoming fall 2012 opening of our flagship store on 17^th Ave and 7^th Street we’ll be in the heart of the action, helping to sustain the pulse of that vibrant part of town. Again, great café help build great cities.

What makes a great cup of coffee? Simply put, pride! Pride in how we source our product, by knowing our producers and knowing our regions, and not being afraid to always make the call that quality is more important than quantity. Attention to perfection then continues back here in Calgary, where we use our many years of roasting/training experience. Lastly, the magic plays out in our cafes, Analog Coffee, where our amazing staff – who all understand and live the Fratello philosophy - bring you the perfect cup of coffee every time you order it.

Coffee should be all about the people. The people who produce it, the people who roast/find it, the people who serve it and most importantly at Analog Coffee, the people who come in to enjoy it. And, great people make a great city!