Maurice Contreras With Volcanica Coffee

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio. Brought to you by on pay. Atlanta’s New standard in payroll. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:24] Lee Kantor here another episode of Atlanta Business Radio, and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Onpay. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Atlanta Business Radio, we have Maurice Contreras with Volcanica Coffee. Welcome.

Maurice Contreras: [00:00:44] Hey, thank you. Thank you for having me on the show.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Lee Well, I’m so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Volcanica Coffee. How are you serving folks?

Maurice Contreras: [00:00:52] Yeah, so Volcanica Coffee is a specialty coffee roaster. We’re based right outside of the Atlanta area in the city of Suwanee. We’ve been in business for 20 years, and our focus is on specialty coffee. More on the exotic side. Coffees that you usually don’t find in a grocery store. We import from 40 different countries and we offer over 150 different coffees. All of them are freshly roasted, and the primary focus of our business is business direct to consumer. We ship right out of our roastery across the country, across the world, and we’re also available on Amazon and also on walmart.com.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:28] So what was the genesis of the idea? What got you into the coffee business?

Maurice Contreras: [00:01:33] Well, I’m actually from Costa Rica, so coffee has kind of been in our blood in my DNA for a long time. And I had a career in wireless marketing and was very successful at it. I helped create the brand track Phone Wireless, which was recently acquired by Verizon, and so just was a little, you know, had a little curiosity about building my own brand, building my own company. And then on one of our family vacations to Costa Rica, after touring Coffee Farm, I realized that there was an opportunity because the coffee was so great in Costa Rica. And this was 20 years ago. And the coffee in the United States was pretty lousy at that time. And so I built the business brand website, all of that, back in 2004 and started importing coffee, starting with Costa Rica and Jamaica. And then I expanded and this little side hustle that I started ended up becoming a full time business. Now we have 20 employees and a 15 zero zero zero square foot roasting facility outside of Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:38] And it was always geared like kind of to the consumer directly and not through coffee shops or coffee stores or things like that. You were selling direct to the individual consumer of the product.

Maurice Contreras: [00:02:50] That is correct. Yeah. That is the main focus of our business. We are in the process of building out our wholesale business though. So now we we actually are supplying coffee shops, restaurants and even chateau along the the nice resort and winery here in North Georgia.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:05] So when you’re going direct to the consumer, had you had any experience doing kind of that digital marketing and online sales?

Maurice Contreras: [00:03:13] Yeah, I did, because when I was with Track Phone, I helped build out the the first website back, back and this is late 90s. So it pretty much was just kind of like a brochure where and then we ended up hiring a company that built out the e-commerce portion for track phone wireless. So I did have a background in that and it was it was very intrigued by what was happening in the online space.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:37] So what was kind of the initial launch strategy when you have a brand new brand like this and you can kind of it’s a blank sheet of paper, you could have, you know, positioned yourself any way, you know, the sky was the limit when it comes to how to position a brand new entity like this. But in a in and around a product that a lot of people are familiar with, obviously they weren’t familiar with your specific brand, but they are familiar with coffee. So how did you go about positioning it the way you did and then launching it to get those initial buyers?

Maurice Contreras: [00:04:11] Yeah. So, so, so as I mentioned, I had a background in marketing and had a lot of experience in brand marketing and creating brands. And so just went through the whole evolution of who, what is this brand, what is the name, what are our, what’s our personality? And just jotting it down. I even bought books about it, you know, just to help me. Um, and then, um, you know, once, once I did that, once I settled on the name of Volcanica coffee, um, relating to volcanoes, because the best coffees in the world are grown on volcanic soil, like in Costa Rica. They’re from, you know, up at 4 or 5000 foot elevations. So that was the connection with the brand. Um, and then, um, so building the website, I learned how to code HTML by renting books at the library and built that. And then at the same time, I realized, well, there’s this thing called SEO search engine optimization because just because you build it doesn’t mean people are going to come. You have to build the website so that people can find it. So I immersed myself with SEO, learning all about that and just started building the website from the ground up just so that we could get organic traffic. We did do some advertising early on. It was just very expensive. It was it was tough to to have a profitable business with that. So our big focus was was organic business. And then part of part of the business plan originally is because I had a pretty good full time job, was just this was only something that I worked on at nights and and weekends. And it was a intentionally throttled business for several years, you know, until I became full time on it.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:05] So at the beginning, you tried to run ads, but you found that they were too expensive, I guess, to get an ROI that made sense to continue. How did you just, you know, I guess because it wasn’t urgent in terms of, oh, we have to make payroll this week. So I have to really do. You were kind of you could play kind of the long game on this because you had a full time job so you can experiment and be patient.

Maurice Contreras: [00:06:28] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So so so that’s one of the virtues that somebody has to have in a business and especially online businesses. It doesn’t come overnight. I mean, yeah, there are some stories out there, but they’re rare. It really comes from just time, from just building the momentum, from gaining the customer base, from gaining word of mouth. Um, you know, that’s yeah, you really have to have patience.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:55] So when did you kind of have a feeling like, hey, this could be something like, you know, at first you have this dream, you go through all the process, you put it out there to the world and then you kind of are waiting, right?

Maurice Contreras: [00:07:09] Yeah. Yeah. So. Um, you know, after four years, we outgrew our garage. We were importing coffee packaging in our garage and shipping it out of out of our house. Um, and then so we moved it to a co-packer. Um, our business kept growing, and then we outgrew our co-packer. So then it was, you know, we kind of realized, you know, it was either. We need to sell this business or we need to go all in and just, you know, take take it to the limit. And just so happened around that time, that’s when my son was, um, was finishing school and became available and, and I employed him full time and he really helped us out a lot, especially on the from a social media side, but also from a coffee sourcing and building out the whole roasting roastery and equipment and all that. He he, he really got it went went all in on it.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:11] But in those first four years while you were still in the garage, were there times where you’re like, this isn’t working? Or was it always like kind of you were always getting orders? It was always kind of positive, you know, like the when the mouse is in the maze, they got to get the cheese sometimes or else they stop playing. So were there ever times where you were like, I don’t know if this is going to make it?

Maurice Contreras: [00:08:34] Um, no, because the sales were always growing. It was like, it’s not like we went days or or weeks without sales. We were always getting sales. It was just on a slow trajectory upward. Um, so, you know, I knew that, you know, with time and with patience that eventually the momentum would, you know, would would grow to the point where it did become a decent sized business. I did have a some frustrating points, mostly from an IT perspective where, you know, there was a point in time where Yahoo! Some was using Yahoo! As a web hosting platform and they caused some problems and basically shut down our business, our website, for about two weeks, which was very painful. But we restored it and got everything back on track.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:30] Yeah, that’s a lot of folks learn those hard lessons when it comes to their partners, especially in technology where things are out of your control somewhat, that you got to have redundancy, you have to have kind of Plan B’s or else it can really bite you.

Maurice Contreras: [00:09:45] Yeah, absolutely.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:47] So once you started getting the momentum, it keeps growing. Was it a difficult conversation in your family to say, okay, we’re going all in on this? Or was it at that point you had so much momentum, it felt like a pretty safe bet. Um.

Maurice Contreras: [00:10:02] Yeah, we it when we were, we were doing over $1 million in sales. So, you know, and I just kind of feel like, hey, you know, for a part time business, that’s not bad as a side hustle doing $1 million in sales and we’re very profitable. And I actually did a pro forma. You know, I, I laid out the financial implications. What is the cost? What is what’s our profit? And and basically on my pro forma, we we got our investment back within nine months which was astronomical. Um, so there was no doubt that it was the right thing to do and, and everybody, you know, in our family just, you know, agreed and nodded their head, this is the right thing to do.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:52] So now in the is the strategy the same like pretty much your your word of mouth and you’re growing kind of organically off of existing customers and superfans or now do you have partnerships? Do you, you know, use influencers as your marketing changed any?

Maurice Contreras: [00:11:09] Yeah. So we’ve tried almost everything I can tell you. So we are, um, you know, and a lot of it is, is, is trial. Even the stuff that’s working, sometimes it stops working. Like, for example, Google advertising. It was, it didn’t work for us for a long time. I hired an agency a couple of years ago. It started working, started doing good. And then after I started peeking into the into the details of what they’re doing, I realized, well, maybe it’s not so good. So I fired them. And then then I went back and started over, and now it’s working again. Um, you know, we did. We’ve done a lot of influencers, a lot of social media. Social media is really difficult in our space. I can tell you that we’ve spent a lot of money testing and trying different things and we’re just refining the things that that do work. And and a lot of it is it kind of goes back to SEO. Seo is really important to us. We have an SEO agency that’s helping us.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:13] Now, is it like, what is the typical first purchase? Because people who drink coffee, you know, they drink coffee, so they have their favorites and are people’s choice when it comes to coffee, they’re they’re more pliable than maybe some other brands that they will try another brand if there’s something compelling that gets them to, you know, give it a shot.

Maurice Contreras: [00:12:39] Yeah. So the majority of our customers, I affectionately call them coffee snobs. We love them. They just love coffee. They are really into the industry and the flavor, nuances of coffee, coffee very much is like the wine industry with all the varietals and all the different flavor notes and taste notes. Same thing with coffee. Um, and those customers are the ones who are who make up the biggest part of our base and they just find us because, you know, they’re searching, they’re curious. They, they became disenchanted with their local supplier. Um, they like the varieties that we offer. They like the fact that all of our coffees are fresh roasted. They like the fact that we’re top rated. We’re, we’re five star rated on Trustpilot and also on Amazon. So we’re pretty proud of that.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:36] Now, when it comes to is it sourcing just something that is you got to do that all the time. You have to always be looking for kind of the next area where good coffee is being grown. Is it something that’s just part of the DNA of your organization to always know that and be kind of on top of that?

Maurice Contreras: [00:13:56] Yeah, absolutely. That’s really important. And we do sourcing trips and to origin, like we go to Costa Rica. We almost went to Tanzania this summer. We weren’t able to do that. We’ve gone to Jamaica and we’re making plans to go to Colombia. Um, it’s really important, you know, to to know who your farmers are and to have connections with them and to understand their farming practices and the quality. Um, but part of the reason why we’re also doing that is, is to, to cut out the middleman. You know, there’s a lot of brokers that deal with coffee and we work with them. But you know, some of our biggest suppliers or biggest origin countries, you know, we strive to to get a direct connection and we just order containers of, of, of of green coffee beans directly from them.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:47] Now, what may be a myth, you can educate our listeners about when it comes to coffee that maybe some of the larger players are doing that a boutique company like yours is doing it maybe I don’t want to say better, but in a different way.

Maurice Contreras: [00:15:06] Um, well, one of the myths is that grocery store coffee is good. So. And I say that because the by the time a coffee arrives in a grocery store, it was probably roasted a few months prior, maybe even several months, maybe even up to a year old. And coffee just starts to deteriorate very quickly as soon as it’s roasted. Um, the actual coffee is good to be enjoyed within 60 days as whole being. But if you grind the coffee, you have two weeks and then the, the the quality starts to decay very rapidly. And, you know, for that reason, you know, most of the coffee you see in the grocery store is ground. It’s in a bag. It was roasted many months ago. That stuff isn’t even close to what it originally tasted like. And that’s one of the myths. A lot of people don’t realize that they’re drinking just like really low quality coffee from the grocery store when there’s a much greater experience. Um, if you buy it closer to the source, something that’s fresher from the roasting.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:19] Yeah. It’s funny that you mentioned that my wife, she’s just started making fresh granola and so she does everything from scratch. And then the taste of it is totally different than store bought granola. And now the joke is when we go to the grocery store is like, we’re like, do you want that factory granola? And we’re like, No, we don’t want the factory granola. We want that homemade granola that’s fresh that, you know, it’s it’s a different food almost.

Maurice Contreras: [00:16:48] Yeah, absolutely. And and I grew up in Florida and, you know, I use orange juice as the analogy. You know, everybody knows that fresh squeezed orange juice is great and outstanding, you know, But then if you go back, you know, into the store, then there’s, you know, previously squeezed or just say, you know, in a jug at the grocery store, that’s okay. It’s not bad. But you go back another step and this is what I grew up on was concentrate orange juice. It was frozen. And you would mix it in, you know, in a pitcher with water. And that was horrible. But that’s what I understood as orange juice when I was a kid. And there’s a big difference from frozen orange juice to something that’s fresh squeezed.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:33] So your your best customers are that discerning coffee drinker.

Maurice Contreras: [00:17:38] That’s right. Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:41] Now, a couple announcements I know that you’re excited about is one with the DK Metcalf Charity Partnership. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Maurice Contreras: [00:17:53] Yeah. So DK Metcalf, the tight end for the Seattle Seahawks. Um, this was a couple of years ago on Monday Night Football. He passed the throne to him and he dropped the ball. And Joe Tesser from ESPN, who was who was calling the the Monday Night Football game, called him decaf. Instead of Metcalf by accident, he caught himself and reversed it. But Twittersphere, the Twittersphere went on fire because of that, because it was called decaf. Dk Metcalf is now decaf. And and the the next day we were on the phone with his agent and we put a deal together, and we’ve been selling his coffee ever since then. And a portion of that goes towards to a charity that DK Metcalf has, has, has requested, and also one from Joe Tesla. So that, that so it’s it’s kind of fun, you know, aligning ourselves with the star NFL player and it’s a really good coffee too.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:00] And also you have a new USDA organic certification.

Maurice Contreras: [00:19:05] Yeah. In late last year we became officially USDA organic certified. And I think we have like around eight, 7 or 8 different coffees that are all organic. You know, there’s no pesticides, no fertilizer or inorganic fertilizers have been used on those. So yeah, so, yeah. And they’re good coffees, too.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:29] Well, congratulations on all the success. If somebody wants to learn more, what is the website and what are the kind of the socials to find you guys?

Maurice Contreras: [00:19:38] So we’re at Volcanica Coffee and that’s spelled like volcanic with an A at the end Volcanica Coffee. And then our website is volcanica coffee.com. You will also find us on Amazon. We have a large selection of our coffees at Amazon.

Lee Kantor: [00:19:58] And that’s the best way to to buy it is the only way to buy it is direct right? You can’t find them in stores yet.

Maurice Contreras: [00:20:05] Yeah. So we do supply a couple of coffee shops in the Atlanta area, but not in grocery stores.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:15] Well, congratulations on all the success. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Maurice Contreras: [00:20:20] Thank you. Thank you very much.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:21] Well, thank you for sharing your story. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Atlanta Business Radio.