Steve Turner, founder of Polite Coffee Roasters in Bryan, TX speaks on how coffee roasters can have more ownership in the supply chain and uses his background in agricultural finance to ponder how producers can have more ownership in the supply chain.
Sovda Steve Polite Interview
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:00:00] Hey there! Welcome to the Sovda podcast. This is Nicholas Flatoff, technical brand ambassador, here in our Portland showroom, and I have Steve from Polite Coffee on the line with me.
Steve and I hung out a little bit back in, I believe it was October or November last year when I did the install, Samuel and myself made it down there for the install in Bryan, Texas, just outside College Station, about an hour and a half away from Austin I think maybe two hours from Houston. A really cool build out. Steve, thanks so much for joining us today. How are you doing?
Steve Turner: [00:00:33] Good, man. I appreciate you having us. Pumped to be here.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:00:36] Super happy to have ya. You're doing some cool stuff down there. Why don't you, for our listeners here, start out [with] a little bit of an introduction to yourself and an intro to your coffee shop and some of your, your points of difference and where you focus.
Steve Turner: [00:00:48] I got to A&M, Texas A&M, which is in Bryan/College Station area in 2014 after just leaving the army, and I had decided before I even left the army that I wanted to do something in coffee. And so I started a coffee shop across from campus, in a bar that a buddy of mine that was a Marine owned and he was o- he ran the bar from like 3:00PM to basically 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, 3:00 PM to 3:00AM, just about. And so there's a wide coffee shop window there that, and I just took advantage of it. And I just ran a coffee shop there across from campus for about a year. While I was at A&M taking classes. It was hard. It was challenging. And I ended up just taking a job in something I'd majored in after getting out of A&M and bought a roaster so that I could stay in the coffee game.
And I pulled the trigger on a Dietrich, an IR-12, never having roasted before. Just went for it, full send. I knew I wanted to do it and I wasn't gonna be deterred whether or not I produced bad coffee. I was going to figure it out. And I didn't even, I didn't even sample roast on anything, or roast in the oven, the oven or popcorn roaster, I just went for it and built a barn on my place in small-town Texas to do that. And then the pandemic hit. I partnered with a guy in town who had coffee shop experience as well. And so we joined forces and we're in this building, that's this old historic building. Old for Bryan, Texas terms that has some significance to our local history.
You've seen it. It's just this cool house that at one point had three stories and two of them burned down. The top two burned in our little downtown area, that's being revived. And we brought my roaster from my barn in Normangee, Texas, about 30 minutes outside of town to Bryan. And we built that to this little bitty space that I think it's probably a little bit less than 400 square feet.
So I've got a Diedrich IR-12 in there, the Pearl Mini, and then Sovda packer, or precision fill, and the compressor. Running, all that stuff. What it's done is it's just given us the ability to really highlight, you know, some of the cool little nuances of the coffee industry in an environment where, you know, Bryan has about a hundred thousand people, College Station has about a hundred thousand people, and the whole area has about 250 [thousand] and there's- it's a big college town, so it's like this environment that there's not a lot of education, as far as coffee goes, we get to be there and just show people the coolness and the cutting edge stuff that is happening in coffee. And so, yeah, that's a little bit about what Polite is up to. We call ourselves Polite just because- I get this question a lot- for one, the Texas motto, the Texas state motto, is friendship. And that seems like a like an oxymoron or a paradox, or like a, like, it doesn't seem fitting, but if you've ever been to Texas, you know, it's kinda true.
It's like, if you go, if you're just stopping at a gas station, somebody holds the door before you so one, it was just a subtle nod to Texans and then two, it was kind of like a, a mission statement for how we were going to be, facing the world. We're going to do really good coffee. And we mean that, that's why we bought a Sovda, but we're going to do it in a way that helps the coffee culture, the coffee community, not put barriers up for people who would otherwise not ever experience it. So that's why we call it Polite. We're trying to meet people where they are with coffee.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:04:26] That's awesome. And yeah, I can definitely say the space that they're in, I mean, it's one of those spots that just has these perfect little nooks and crannies, plenty of space to spread out. You can find something that, that that's exactly where you want to be. It was a great place for me to, when I was, had downtimes on the install or was waiting for something, I could really get some work done. Super productive space, really loved it.
One of the things that's super cool is exactly the super efficient use of space you've got running in that roastery, like you said, like maybe 400 square feet. You got a roaster, a huge seven and a half kilowatt, or maybe it's a five and a half. I don't remember what we put in there, but massive air compressor, and then two lifts and the precision fill and the optical sorter, and it's this very nice streamlined production space. Have you made any workflow tweaks or any, you know, table relocations or whatever that have been really good for your workflow since I've been out there? I know that there was a table against the staircase.
Steve Turner: [00:05:27] Yeah, yeah. That table is still there. And we have a stainless steel table, like right in front of the air compressor. So basically like coming off of that line, off that packing, we seal it. And then it goes on a table, essentially there, just into like boxes that we're shipping out. But the only other thing we really tweaked was we took that first lift and we just kind of scooted it so that we can weigh coffee coming out of the roaster. And that's like the only thing we really tweaked. And plus we, like, I don't know, we just wanted to have the control of it not going to the lift every once in a while, because you ruin a batch or something, or, you know, all the dumb things that can happen over the course of a roasting day. But yeah, so, that's the only thing we really tweaked.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:06:09] And you're primarily weighing the coffee post-roast for water loss. Is that your, your primary purpose?
Steve Turner: [00:06:13] Yeah, so we haven't done that in a minute. We got this software called Roaster Tools to help us with our work, you know, just everything and forced us to calculate that stuff when we hadn't really cared about it. I mean, we cared about it, but it's just something like you don't whatever, you know, it's like, it's just a fact of life it happens. And then, but just doing that, we're like, well, we have to figure out a way to weigh it, and so, yeah. That's kind of why.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:06:41] Yeah, so one of the things we'll do a shameless brand insertion here, we are working on, for a short term launch, a load cell integrated lift.
Steve Turner: [00:06:51] I thought so. Yeah. I thought you already had that. Or maybe I just saw that on the web- yall's website or something like that. That that was in the works.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:06:57] You know, we get excited about something. We get a concept and get it pretty far forward and maybe start advertising it a little too early. So yeah, the precision fill, I think we're going to be finishing R&D within the next four to six months, we do have just a load cell cart that you can attach the hopper to and just get a weight out of. But the precision fill itself is pretty cool because it has auto-start functionality and it will actually do... well, the long-term goal is for it to track the actual amount conveyed, so you know exactly that the total batch size, which is, which is pretty cool. So it's good to hear, I mean, it's sad that it's a problem that you're dealing with, but it's good to hear that that's a realistic use case thing that we're working on and looking for in R&D. So we appreciate that feedback.
Steve Turner: [00:07:43] Yeah. And yeah, I think like, as if I'm just roasting or like, this probably goes for any roaster, like if you're like the only person roasting, you probably don't care, cause you probably know like one, you have crops [?] and you're going to be consistent as you can, but like, as you start bringing more people in, if you had like, if I can, if I can pull up crops [?] and see the curves from what somebody did that day, and then I could go and see like this batch weighed this, this batch weighed this, this batch weighed this, that would just be another consistent thing built in.
And then you can even take it a step further and you can weight coming off of, out of the sorter. And that'd be really cool too, cause it's like, there was my weigh loss, here's my defect loss, and then you just look for outliers and see what happened.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:08:23] I've heard that a lot from people, people switching over to Roaster Tools this year, and it seems like a, you know, this is just a free shout out to Roaster Tools, I haven't seen it, I haven't used it, but primarily it seems like one of the biggest perks is all of that data logging, and then the API integration with whatever your retailer or point of sale system is. So I guess the next question I'd have for you right off the top there is, have you seen kind of a boost in retail direct to consumer sales from what you were doing pre pandemic? I know it's a very different setup and it's a very different environment that you're in now, but yeah. What's your direct to consumer versus cafe versus wholesale looking like?
Steve Turner: [00:09:00] Yeah, so I had a really good boost there in like the first couple of weeks of lockdown. Primarily because I started free delivery. And so like locally, I was getting of a lot of orders. I could not- those people would have gone to the shop and got coffee, you know? And so after kinda transitioning out of that, and we start back opening back up, we switched to a new website. And yeah, we haven't had the levels we had before, like during the lockdown. I think that was just a crazy scenario, that's not realistic, but we are starting to see like it casually pick up. And it's really cool when you get like, yeah, I think anybody who's ever started online business can attest this, it's really cool when you see like a random order from North Carolina, a random order from Illinois, a random order from California and you're like, "I don't know these people, they're not friends."
And like, that's, that's all, that's like, I don't know how to describe it. It's like a $20 order, but it's like, the internet! It's like, how does this it's like just a really cool feeling. So yeah. Yeah. We have seen it a good little uptick and I think that will increase as we start rolling out some like subscription models and stuff. So yeah, it has. Yeah. I would say a lot of, that's just been like our reputation. Like, we're just like, we're nobody, you know, nobody knows about us, but we're slowly building a little customer base that cares and is passionate and that's helping.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:10:25] Yeah. I do have to say, you've got good coffee and you got good branding. I was thinking about this earlier, right behind on Steve's screen that I can see here is they've got their logo and it's this really cool, nice tip of the, you know, red cowboy hat, but you know, it's manifesting the Texas and manifesting the specialty coffee both in a really unique way that's like super awesome. I usually, I kind of do this at the end, but what's your website to go on if people want to order coffee or take a look at the branding?
Steve Turner: [00:10:49] PoliteCoffee.com
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:10:51] And they're on Instagram and I'm sure Facebook and all that stuff, so...
Steve Turner: [00:10:54] Yes sir. And we, we hope to do some cool YouTube stuff and maybe this would be like the impetus for us to do that, do some fun stuff.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:11:06] One of the things that I found super interesting and engaging and kind of wish that we could have chatted a little bit more about was some of the mentality that you take from your previous job, which was agricultural finance on a, you know, a really broad scale, but still... arguably more local maybe than in the coffee industry where, you know, you're doing a cross-content and stuff like that. What are some of your thoughts now having had the optical sorter doing what you've been doing for a fair amount of time? Has there been any interesting things that you have seen that might be unique to someone with your experience, that the broader audience, especially coffee that hasn't worked with, you know, department of agriculture backed funding programs, right?
Steve Turner: [00:11:45] Yeah. I got actually, so a sister company, or I don't know how you guys would call it, but the coffee we got from you guys curate from Myanmar, which was a coffee that had been grown by poppy farmers, or, the coffee was grown on farms that had recently been poppy farms, we jumped at the chance to do that because that's just like a really cool, tangible way to help the global community, not coffee, but like the global, like everybody! Like the entire world by taking heroin off the market from the second largest producer of opium and, and in one of the poorest countries in the world.
And that's the kind of stuff we want to do with as many origins and co-ops and farms as possible. And I think one of the beautiful things about that, the ag credit system that I was in as a lender was that it was stolen from the Germans and Europeans, you know, in the late 1800s, early 1900s by America, we took it and you know, Woodrow Wilson signed that act into the law in I think 1916 or 1917, the Farm Credit Act... or no, I don't remember what it's called, but anyways, so the thrust of that law was farmers pool their money, their resources together and lend to other farmers as a community-based thing.
It started out like that, you know, actual communities running this co-op a lot like a bank. And then over a hundred years, it's more [?] now they just really just look like a big bank because they kind of essentially are. And then there's some subsidies from the government, but as somebody who works in that system and you see, you know, a mom and pop out of Houston who were an accountant and a prison guard or whatever, worked for 20 years and then buy their little piece of heaven in central Texas, it's really cool. Like, and, you know, we help bonafide farmers, but to see that, like, there's this conduit for like long-term ownership, which builds long-term wealth. That's what is missing a lot of times on the farm side and from just like a, an outsider's perspective is like true ownership.
And, and that was one of the things that farm credit system did that I saw being here at A&M I would see, you know, professors that have doctorates, you know, doctors go tell a group of farmers in a community of 1500 [people], about how to get like, just a little bit more efficient, putting a couple more pounds of weight on their cattle. You know, how to get just a little bit more efficient at growing a certain crop because that farmer in middle of nowhere, Texas is already very knowledgeable about what they're doing.
And so they can go in there and say, Hey, if you use this pesticide at this time, you'll get X amount better. Or if you do this. And then what's crazy is those people can go and actually apply that because they have the resources and that knowledge and know how to do it. And then, and a lot of countries, it seems like the coffee sites like that, keep you sitting a PhD down there that a lot of times it's just going to be, it's going to fall on deaf ears. Or not deaf ears, but ears that can't do anything about it. Because it's like cool, yeah, I know. I need to pick three times instead of once, but are you gonna pay me to do that? So it's like just, you know, how do we get the people who need to have ownership, ownership, education, and not just education, but like the actual ability to like, like realistically do things.
Yeah. So how do I, how do I go about fixing and helping that? I don't know. I don't know. I just need to grow a little bit to where I can, I can step out of the weeds of my day-to-day business and try to be involved. And then thoughtfully helping them and not just marketing stuff or just you know, talking points that I think will sell coffee, like actually helping, regardless of what my payback is. And that's, I think if more people initially looked at it like that, I think that would actually start seeing some cool things happen.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:15:49] What are you passionate about these days and what are you excited about just locally in your own roastery or with equipment, or even random news articles or whatever, you know, what's getting you going besides the entrepreneurial aspect of what's going on right now?
Steve Turner: [00:16:03] Yeah. So I get excited about all the places you can get coffee. I know that it's kind of cliche, but we talked about Myanmar, I'm not really sure how you say it, but they army threw, basically overthrew the government there for the umpteenth time it seems like. A lot of innocent civilians have been hurt. You see what's happening in Columbia recently, Northern Ethiopia, Yemen, all the places we get coffee, you know, a lot of them had just lacked stability or just start like us and just go through conflict from time to time. Or just you know, things that a lot of times we take for granted the fact that we can voice our [opinions], that we don't agree with people, we can do that and go on internet and do that. And we can say we disagree with our political leaders, but a lot of those basic freedoms we have for the most part. Our country does pretty good about it's population to be above the poverty line.
So basically just the places we get to bring coffee in from, there's like a potential to learn more about the world. Learn what other countries and cultures and ethnicities are going through. And it should shape our world view here and how we treat people. And so, yeah, that's what really gets me excited is just not that there's conflict in places like Colombia and Myanmar right now, but the fact that we get to buy coffee and have relationships with people there and hear what's going on from them and hopefully help in whatever way we can, whether it's just listing or continuing to buy the coffee. And I think that as the company grows, your tools at your disposal to help, grow. And we find ways even as small as we are now to help, but that's what gets me excited is the hope of our growth will lead to get you to do more altruistic things that we'd like to do, like on a bigger scale.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:17:57] That's awesome. I feel like, I mean, it's kind of always been tumultuous one place or another, but the, I mean the past year and a half, it seems like there's a lot going on at a lot more producing countries than, than in the past.
My favorite closeout question is what are your predictions for the industry now and over the next five years?
Steve Turner: [00:18:24] I was just reading a book, it's funny there was a quote in the book that said that even historians can't predict the past. Or something like that. So man, I don't know, but I will take a few guesses. I'm probably not the first to say this, but I believe it's going to happen. I think we'll be drinking commercially viable, especially Robusta, grown in America relatively soon. Whether it's Texas or California or Florida or wherever, I think that is going to happen. It just seems with like the breeding that we can do and the climate change and, you know, the increase in quality of Robusta that I think that sort of actual feasible thing to happen.
And then I got this pipe dream that one day we'll be sipping beautiful specialty coffee from Cuba. That's widely marketed. I think that could be- Cuba was a big producer back in the day. And it's just a dang shame that 90 miles off of our coast, we have this neighbor that we are estranged with. And I think that coffee could be a really cool way to open that door.
And thirdly, I think the most vague would that think there will be, you know, some kind of, so, you know, we had the recession of 2008 and then we had this pandemic recession. And I think that the effects or what the things we did to try to fix, to prevent a worse recession are setting us up for another bad thing. Whether it's going to be, you know, the humongous national debt or runaway inflation, if that ever happens, or if it's just going to be people realizing that their supply chains are too global, what does that do to, you know, countries that are on the end of the supply chain? What does it do to, you know, little bitty farmers if inflation really hits, like if really bad inflation hits and what does it do to little bitty mom and pop coffee shops?
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:20:14] Coffee’s already such a passion driven industry. Like if you really want to be in coffee and start a cafe and be a coffee roaster, like you're not doing it for the money, you know. And so one of my complaints about the industry has been that we went from everyone 10-12 years ago, you'd go into Intelligencia and it's like, okay, yeah, you got these kind of pretentious baristas that are like almost irritated for you coming in. But the coffee was so good every single time. And now I go to, I'm not going to name who here in Portland, there's some people that 2012-2013 I was having the best cups of coffee I've ever had and learning a ton from the baristas and all kinds of stuff like that and now it's, you know, it's a college student part-time job, so who knows maybe higher wages outside of coffee will actually float quality within specialty coffee and people who are passionate about it.
Steve Turner: [00:21:08] And I would love, I know I've seen some coffee shops that have a pretty cool model. They have very few baristas that are full-time and on salary. And that is a really cool thing to do. I'd love to be able to do something like that, but I will say we are very blessed with the baristas we have cause we, I mean, we're going to, like, I've got a guy who's going to go work for Deloitte. I've got a girl who's going to go be going to vet school in London. A girl who graduated with the visualization degree from A&M. Most of it, like a lot of those kids go to like Pixar or work at Disney or something and I got chemical engineering major that graduated with the chemical engineering [degree]. Like just some of the, like, literally everybody in there is like way more educated, way smarter than I am. And they're just, you know, this is what I do. I'm just here for a couple of years while I'm on my way, and it's like, I love that. I love that about coffee, that you get to be involved with somebody's life that you otherwise never would have been involved with. And so, yeah, that's one of the cool things about where we're at.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:22:11] And thanks for that, because that's exactly the thing I was just doing to write off the industry. And so it's awesome to be able to kind of have a dialogue in two separate perspectives, then it's like, yeah, dude, I'm totally missing out on all that stuff that you're getting. Thanks for bringing that to the surface. I personally appreciate that.
Steve Turner: [00:22:26] Yeah. And what's really cool is like, I feel like we're creating this culture where these people are getting, like they were casual coffee drinkers and that through our energy and passion for good coffee, you know, just having an optical sorter, you know, at 20 feet behind the bar and our Dietrich IR-12 there, and the cupping sessions we do with the public... that is contagious. And now like our staff is like, you know, go from like, can't put shot, can't steam milk to like, I need to go like two seconds longer on this shot, you know? And so like they're refining a palette and they're learning how to taste coffee. And I truly believe, you know, if you have smart person and they're interested in something, they'll just watch to see how cool things happen. So that we've been blessed with that for sure.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:23:09] Yeah. A hundred percent and you know, Nathan deserves a shout out he's, he seems like...
Steve Turner: [00:23:14] Shout, Nathan, man, I love Nathan, he's the backbone of Polite Coffee for sure.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:23:18] Yeah. I think he pulled me one or two pretty good Ethiopia [?] while I was down there. And we had a blast together, so yeah, that was, that was super cool. Steve, thank you so much for your time for offering your industry experience, your predictions, and it'll be fun. I'll try and make it back down there in a couple months and say hello.
Steve Turner: [00:23:35] Give me a holler and I can, I mean, Houston is really quick for us and I have some stuff I want to go do there sometime, so it'd be cool. It'd be cool to run into you.
Nicholas Flatoff: [00:23:45] Absolutely.