“This campaign resonates deeply with me because it highlights the rich history and connection we share as a community over a simple cup of coffee,” said third-generation Community Coffee owner Donna Saurage. “It reminds me that every sip is not just about the beverage, but about the relationships and values that bind us together.”

The campaign commercial opens with an image of the F.L. and H.N. Saurage General Merchandise Store, which was run by Community Coffee founder Henry Norman “Cap” Saurage and his brother. Cap blended coffee for store customers according to his own secret recipe — a recipe that became Community Coffee in 1919. After five generations,​ Cap’s family is still roasting smooth, rich coffee that builds community​ one cup at a time.​

“Sharing a cup of coffee with an old neighbour or a new friend is as relevant and rewarding today as it was in the past,” said fourth-generation owner Matt Saurage. “So often, it’s through conversations over coffee that people share ideas, relationships are built and communities are inspired.” 

Kicking off the partnership, the campaign was produced by TMA, a marketing and creative agency based in Dallas and aims to connect Community Coffee with a new generation of coffee drinkers while paying respect to those that came before.

The campaign spotlights two of Community’s best-selling coffees: Breakfast Blend and the year-round Mardi Gras King Cake, a flavoured coffee that celebrates the brand’s Louisiana heritage.

Community Coffee’s commitment to giving back is referenced in the commercial’s 1980s classroom scene. Since 1988, the Community Cash for Schools program has raised over USD $8.5 million for students and teachers by enabling schools to redeem product proofs of purchase for funds. The company also recognises community leaders through the Dave Campbell’s Texas Football Community Leader Award, which celebrates educators and administrators positively impacting student-athletes, and the H. Norman Saurage III Service Award, established in partnership with Dream Teachers to honor exceptional Louisiana teachers.

In addition to education, Community Coffee gives back to military service members and disaster relief while being a proud founding member of World Coffee Research.

To view the “Generations’ campaign, click here. To learn more about Community Coffee, visit www.communitycoffee.com.

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“With a passion for education, our Cash for Schools programme is a time-honoured tradition we’ve celebrated for over three decades,” said Matt Saurage, fourth-generation Community Coffee owner and chairman of the board of directors. “With more than 400 schools participating this year, we helped bring joy to thousands of students, teachers and families across our home region.”

Since 1988, the Community Cash for Schools programme has helped public and private schools earn over $8.5 million by offering proofs of purchase on Community® products. With the help of parents, grandparents, neighbours and friends, participating schools collect and redeem proofs of purchase for cash, which can be used at their discretion. Schools can put the money toward resources including new textbooks, computers, playground equipment or events that benefit students.

This year’s total cash earned was up 15% over last year — indicating a strong uptick in Community Coffee’s impact on the region. The top-earning school, Sts. Leo-Seton Catholic School in Lafayette, Louisiana, brought in over $5,000 to improve education for its students.

The Community Cash for Schools programme is open to all state-licensed schools from pre-K through 12th grade. To learn how to participate and for more information about the programme, visit CommunityCoffee.com/CashForSchools. Schools interested in participating can enroll online.

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This two-day event, which takes place at the Ernest M Morial Convention Center, combines industry trade show classes with a consumer coffee festival atmosphere The trade and industry day (targeting regional coffee shop owners, baristas, coffee buyers for grocery stores and F&B directors) takes place on 15 September. On the 16^th, the show opens its doors to consumers to experience the exhibit hall, lectures and skills classes, including special classes for home brewing. More than a dozen of the south’s leading roasters will have their coffee available for free sampling.

NOLA Coffee Festival co-founder Kevin Richards points out that New Orleans is a natural location for a serious coffee industry event: “The Port of New Orleans is [one of the largest points] of entry for green coffee in the United States. Accordingly, we have more than a thousand industrial coffee jobs here. [Folgers, PJs Coffee and Reily Foods] all roast here. Those are industrial coffee giants and all that imported green coffee passes through the Port of New Orleans. Our city of a natural leader in coffee.”

Echoing that sentiment, Felton Jones, chief roastmaster, PJ’s Coffee of New Orleans, shared, “The Port of New Orleans provides a sizeable contribution to the amount of coffee imported into the US, and this festival helps to highlight the role that New Orleans plays in the industry. With major brands like Folgers, Community Coffee, and PJ’s Coffee calling New Orleans home, I think New Orleans has been grossly under appreciated by the coffee industry — [and yet, the city has] so much to offer to the industry. I feel this was a big part in the decision of the organisers to create this unique experience for the local coffee heads.”

Jones noted that the NOLA Coffee Festival will allow these local brands to be on display for all to see. “The embracing of micro-roasters and small coffee shop owners to take part in this event not only gives them a place to unify and know that they are in great company locally, but it also gives them an opportunity to [become noticeable to the industry outside of New Orleans as the event grows]. This is [a chance] for everyone else to see that there is more to New Orleans than coffee and chicory,” he said, adding, “we absolutely have some passionate and dedicated roasters and baristas in our community, and this will be their [moment] to shine!”

Coffee education is a focal point of the NOLA Coffee Festival. “We’re seeking to bring together coffee industry professionals and coffee enthusiasts alike under one roof for learning, collaboration and good times. We expect the outcome to be a stronger regional coffee scene,” explained Richards. “Our focus in building the coffee education platform has been to solicit speakers who are southern coffee subject matter experts. In New Orleans alone, our city is estimated to serve 20 million cups of coffee annually. We can double that number for consumption across the Gulf South region.”

In terms of education sessions, NOLA Coffee Festival speakers include:

• Felton Jones, chief roastmaster for PJs coffee, who will lead a roaster best practices roundtable;
• Andrea Allen, Onyx Coffee owner and national barista champion, who will talk about her recent documentary and lead a barista class on ‘How to be Effective in Barista Competition Events’;
• Chris Kornman, green coffee expert and education director for Royal Coffee, who will lead classes on Arabica and the coffee flavour wheel;
• Rhiannon Enlil, NOLA cocktail expert, who will lead an exploration of cocktail innovation using coffee as the key flavour ingredient.
• Poppy Tooker, Louisiana food writer and food historian, who will explain the significance of African American calas cakes and their use by 19^th century enslaved women to purchase their freedom;
• Trey Malone, co-owner of Common Co-Labs and Northshore Specialty Coffee in Mississippi, who will lead discussion on the cold coffee extraction method and RTD cold coffee product trends;
• Noah Namowicz, svp of Café Imports, who will lead a geopolitical discussion of the current global coffee landscape;
• Liz Williams, NOLA food historian and founder of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum, who will lead talks on the coffee heritage of New Orleans and the importance of the Port of New Orleans.
• Suzanne Stone, book author and docent at the Historic New Orleans Collection, who will lead a review of historical and current female coffee leaders in New Orleans;
• Bob Arceneaux, owner of Orleans Coffee and regional coffee leader, who will explore modern coffee blend strategies;
• Lauren Fink, owner of Cherry Coffee and NOLA coffee leader, who will lead roaster roundtable discussions;
• Miguel Gomez, PhD candidate at University of Houston, who will introduce his new research to reveal why Robusta is now in position as a ‘first to market value driver in the U.S. market’;
• Eric Brenner, assistant director at the Center for Coffee Research at Texas A&M, who will lead a review of rust resistance data in Central America and provide action items for farmers there to convert their arabica varieties;
• Anna Guiterrez, director of brand development at Barista 22, who will lead classes on coffee shop menu development and innovating signature coffee drinks;
• Melissa Dixon, a lead educator at La Marzocco, who will lead a session on foundational espresso tasting and brewing development;
• Deniseea Taylor, social media blogger for Chicken and Champagne, who will relate new coffee and cocktail creations to the black heritage roots that inspired them;
• Zella Palmer, director of the Ray Charles African American Program at Dillard University, who will air her award-winning documentary The Black Hand Stirs the Pot and discuss the impact of creole cooking in New Orleans cuisine; and
• Prince De’Araujo Lobo, creative director at Addis Nola Ethiopian Restaurant, who will deliver a daily Ethiopian coffee blessing for the exhibit hall and in the classrooms.

“Coffee education is a key need in our region,” said event co-founder Jim Currie. “Of the 3,500 coffee shops located in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, very, very few have ever attended a national coffee conference or training event. We want to flip that around and make great coffee education easily accessible for the thousands of baristas, coffee shop owners/managers and green coffee roasters that work in the gulf south.” He believes that better networking and better classroom discussion will directly lead to new coffee innovations, noting, “Southern chefs have always been national trendsetters and culinary flavour leaders. It is no different for our work in coffee.”

Richards added that visitors to the NOLA Coffee Festival “can expect to taste over 25 coffees from our regional roaster community, take part in over 60 hours of free coffee education, interface with companies from across the coffee industry, hear talks from New Orleans’ finest historians about the roots of coffee in New Orleans, watch exciting barista competitions, experiment with home and commercial coffee equipment, explore artwork from our coffee community, meet coffee farmers from Central and South America, and more. And, of course, you be able to find a fantastic cup of chicory coffee.”

To register for the NOLA Coffee Festival, or for more information, click here.

• Aubrye McDonagh Leigh

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Emeryville, California-based Peet’s Coffee is a major player in the specialty coffee retail sector. Its coffee selection includes both single origin coffees and blends, including the Big Bang, a medium roast blend that features fruitiness from natural processed Ethiopian coffee and brightness from washed processed coffees from Latin America. “The name nods to how some have described Alfred Peet as the “big bang” of craft coffee—the one who started it all,” Doug Welsh, roast master for Peet’s, told Tea & Coffee Trade Journal. “When he set up shop in Berkeley in 1966, he transformed America’s expectations of the depth, body, and flavour in our cups.”

One unexpected outgrowth of the explosion of single origin specialty coffee is the creation of coffee growing celebrities, producers whose name-recognition inspires awe among industry peers for the scarcity and novelty of their coffee more than it inspires enthusiasm among coffee customers. The blend, on the other hand, is all about the customers. Blends are often named for bits of company history or the names of neighbourhoods and local landmarks.

Along with Big Bang, Peet’s other most popular blend is Major Dickason. “Inspired by one of the first ‘Peetniks’ and refined by Alfred Peet, this premier dark roast blend is our all-time best seller,” said Welsh. Blends appeal to a wide customer base and remain popular over time.

Rich Nieto, founding roaster of Sweetleaf Coffee in Brooklyn, New York, also finds blends to be customer-centric. “The roasting competition at the 2019 New York Coffee Festival asked us to create a blend that represents a community, so we created the 7 Line blend to represent the 7 train in Queens. Everyone loved it,” said Nieto. “Even if people weren’t from Queens they felt represented in the blend, which included coffees from Africa, Latin America and Sumatra.” The 7 Line blend was so popular Sweetleaf decided to incorporate it into its menu.

Blends are inclusive and customers identify with their accessibility. Each single origin offering appeals to different customers – acidic Central American coffees for one palate, earthy Sulawesi for another – but blends are crafted to satisfy a wider audience. Mark Howell, vp of green coffee with Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based Community Coffee said, “We consider a wide variety of factors, and the consumer plays a huge role in helping us evolve our portfolio. Once we determine a general blend profile, we then go out and look for those high-quality beans that would get us there. In the case of Private Reserve specifically, we are looking for coffees that would qualify as specialty coffee under the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) grading criteria for both physical and cup.”

Third wave roasters cut their teeth building a niche of customers excited about the outer limits of coffee’s flavour, from Geishas lighter than floral tea to coffees as savoury and spicy as pasta sauce, but as specialty coffee businesses grow in volume and in maturity, they are sourcing coffees for the whole family, building welcoming blends into their menus as complements to striking single origins.

Consistency to Limited Time Offer

Allie Caran is the director of coffee education at roaster-retailer Partners Coffee in Brooklyn, New York. “The first beautiful aspect of blends is the consistency they bring to your menu. You can create unique profiles and continuously offer singular flavour flagships that can be celebrated year-round.”

Consistency is one attribute commonly associated with blends, and this reliability provides balance to the variability among single origin coffees. “Coffee can taste like just about anything, and a single origin menu is how we communicate our own excitement over the possibilities of flavour,” said Caran. “We believe that blends can be the easiest way to get people to care about specialty coffee.”

Blends can be the way in, the cup of coffee that keeps a customer coming back. According to Nieto at Sweetleaf, blends are “something to give your customers that they come in and like and can get again and again.” With regard to supplying wholesale coffee to new cafés, he noted that “cafés want to build a loyal base to start a business. Customers know that the next day [the coffee they like] is there. The next week, it’s there.”

Consistency for customers and for wholesale clients is a key benefit of blending. “Sweetleaf introduced two more blends to meet the needs of wholesale customers,” said Nieto. “Just because Sweetleaf’s cafés are focused on single origin coffees doesn’t mean our [wholesale] customers want the same thing. We have a different client base than restaurants. Customers come into a café looking for specialty coffee.”

Blends cover lots of territory within specialty coffee, from being a tool for consistency to deliver reliably crowd-pleasing coffee to restaurant wholesale accounts to being the way into specialty coffee for curious café customers. Blends can also be a limited time offer to highlight a particular flavour profile, parallel to what single origins offer. Welsh noted Peet’s 2019 Vine & Walnut as a seasonal fall limited offering and Ethiopian Super Natural as a seasonal winter limited offering, both sold only at their coffee bars or online store.

“With each sip of a Peet’s Single Origin, consumers enjoy a true expression of that specific region — like the black currant flavour of Kenya or the jasmine-like aroma of Ethiopia. Each cup is truly evocative of where it is grown and produced,” said Welsh. Offering a blend and a single origin as equally special limited offerings shows that neither is inherently superior. “By ensuring a breadth of high-quality offerings across segments, we are able to meet the range of taste preferences of coffee drinkers.”

Building the blend starts with the coffees sourced. Of Peet’s sourcing, Welsh said, “we are very selective about the beans we purchase, sourcing from the top one percent of the market and verifying how they are grown. We bring together coffees that could each stand on its own.”

Community Coffee sees blends as a perfect combination of coffees that appeal to a particular flavour profile and create something unique but balanced, while single origins are sourced to respect the unique terroir of a particular coffee. According to Howell, “We balance our portfolio with Private Reserve specialty-level [blends] coffees from all over the world. Single origin is a way to honour a specific origin, region, community or farm. It’s about telling the story of the farmer and region through its unique flavour.”

Smart Sourcing

Blended coffee is consumed as one, but its components might be sourced on opposite sides of the world. Jonathan Withers is the green coffee buyer at Partners Coffee and knows that coffee purchasing must begin with the end in mind, considering both single origin offerings and blend components. “Not only are we trying to find the best microlots in the world, but we are doing so vertically so that the same people who grow these microlots are also supplying us with the coffees that we use in the blends,” he said.

Partners considers the seasonality of coffee in its sourcing plan. “Building a thoughtful and fully integrated program for both blends and single origins allows us to encompass the entirety of the coffee without challenging the inherent issues that come with coffee as a live, organic and fleeting product,” said Withers. Partners started their blending program as a response to what coffee buying could be. “To be able to buy someone’s entire specialty farm output gives us better access to coffee, stronger relationships, and complete transparency,” Withers explained.

As specialty coffee producers and exporters become more familiar with the tastes of both niche and broader market coffee drinkers, they offer special stand-out microlots while also producing coffee that meets the requirements to become a specialty blend component. Many parts of today’s specialty coffee menus can be sourced from the same farms.

Blends also require teamwork across company departments. “Developing blends is a dance between what the consumer wants and what story/flavour we want them to experience,” explained Community’s Howell. “Ultimately, it’s a team effort between marketing, sales, operations, supply chain, the farmer and the consumer.”

Perfecting the Recipe

Each roasting outfit perfects the art of its blends over time. It helps to start with the right ingredients, but without putting them on a pedestal. “No coffee is too good to blend,” reminded Welsh. “That’s a principle Alfred Peet lived by and one still carried on by the company to this day. Blending is fundamentally about adding one great aroma, flavour or texture to another. Body from a syrupy thick Sumatra, bright bittersweet chocolate from a Guatemala, juiciness from a Kenya AA. In this way, one can experience more in a blend than in a single origin.”

Great coffees mutually reinforce each other in a carefully crafted specialty coffee blend. Of Sweetleaf’s espresso blend for its coffeehouses, Nieto said, “we approach our espresso blend 50/50: sweet, low flavour tones like maple, milk, chocolate, or cocoa then something sweet to layer on top of it. I love jam, but I need some base to put the jam on.”

Creating and maintaining a specialty coffee blend is an opportunity to play with flavour, to fit the taste jigsaw together to reveal a new work of art in the cup. “A beautiful coffee with nice acidity pairs well with something with a lower bass. It’s very important for our espresso blend to also play well with milk,” noted Nieto.

At Community, blends are all about how the parts create a greater whole. “We look at the individual coffees and their characteristics, and how to combine them appropriately to build flavour into a final unique combination. We look at attributes like acidity, body, flavour and finish,” noted Howell.

Getting back to the idea of blends having personality and reflecting both the story of the company and the story of its customers, that personality can be apparent in the blend recipe as well as the name. “Over the years, Major Dickason’s blend has become the coffee that epitomizes Peet’s: rich, smooth and complex, with a full body and multi-layered character,” said Welsh.

“We’re understandably coy about the specific ingredients of this, our most famous blend, but customers know it well as combining the sparkling notes of high altitude Central American growths with the body and satisfying finish of the Indo-Pacific.” Like most hard work, blends appear effortless, full of balance and flavour that customers recognise and return to. As specialty coffee evolves, blends are poised to be an ever-more meaningful part of the industry’s future.

• Rachel Northrop has been covering coffee for T&CTJ since 2012, while she lived in Latin America’s coffee lands writing When Coffee Speaks. She now lives in Miami, Florida. She may be reached at northrop.rachel@gmail.com.

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For the first time, Community Coffee’s American Classic blend is now available in a new 37 oz. canister option on Walmart.com and will launch nationwide in 3,100 Walmart Supercenter stores this September.

“There is no coffee like a cup of Community coffee. You can taste the difference, and when people try our coffee they make the switch. It’s why so many coffee lovers prefer us as their brand of choice, making us one of the fastest-growing retail coffee brand in America,” said Leah Herrington, senior vice president of marketing.

“To debut our nationwide rollout in Walmart, we’ve taken what we’ve learned about the American coffee drinker taste profile for 100 years and created the perfect premium blend for audiences across the country. This medium roast blend is well-rounded with a smooth finish ideal for any part of your day. It’s sure to be a new household classic. That’s why we named it ‘American Classic’.”

For more information, please visit CommunityCoffee.com.

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Crafted with 100% select Arabica coffee beans, Community’s premium Signature Blend Dark Roast coffee and Breakfast Blend coffee will be available on Kroger shelves in Virginia, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, Michigan and Illinois later this month. Both blends will be available in 12-ounce bags and 12-count single-serve boxes.

“We’re thrilled to continue growing our footprint with Kroger and provide more Kroger shoppers with great tasting, high-quality premium coffee from a brand that’s been crafting delicious-tasting coffee for 100 years,” said Ryan Schemmel, senior vice president of sales and ecommerce at Community Coffee Company.

“From our humble beginnings, Community Coffee has developed into the fastest-growing retail coffee brand in America. We have a very loyal following of consumers who have grown up with Community Coffee. There’s simply no comparison when it comes to the taste profile of our premium blends, which has made us a household name in the communities we serve. We’re excited to bring Community Coffee to even more shoppers across the country to taste the difference.”

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From May through July 2019, Community Coffee Company will donate a portion of proceeds to Folds of Honor for every bag and single-serve box of Community American Classic coffee purchased. Founded in 2007, Folds of Honor is a non-profit organization dedicated to providing educational scholarships to spouses and children of America’s fallen and disabled service-members.

“There is no higher respect to be given than to those who have served this great nation and who have made the personal sacrifice,” said David Belanger, president and CEO of Community Coffee Company. “Our goal is to support these impacted families by providing educational opportunities that not only enrich the lives of those impacted but the communities they serve.”

“Since its inception, Folds of Honor has awarded nearly 20,000 educational scholarships with recipients in all 50 states. This would not be possible without the support from partners like Community Coffee,” said Major Dan Rooney, founder and CEO of Folds of Honor. “The company’s longstanding support of our servicemen and servicewomen through the Folds of Honor program serves as a testament to Community Coffee’s dedication to making a difference one family at a time.”

For every Community American Classic coffee product that is purchased, Community Coffee Company will donate to Folds of Honor (up to a total of $25,000). To learn more and to purchase online, please visit CommunityCoffee.com/foldsofhonor.

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