< Previous TEA TIME boughtonscoffeehouse.com 20 W ORDS B Y HARRIET ENDEAN ON BEHALF OF THE EUROPEAN TEA SOCIET Y Tea’s versatility and range of flavours makes it a winning combination for pairing almost any item on your menu THINGS TO CONSIDER STRENGTH In general the strength of the beverage should match the strength of the food flavour. So more flavourful dishes will pair better with stronger teas. Choose darker teas for stronger dishes and lighter teas for lighter dishes. FLAVOUR Aim to match similar flavours and highlight key flavours. The best pairings have some matching and some contrasting elements. TEXTURE AND TEMPERATURE Use teas with a creamy texture to help foods taste fuller and richer, use teas with a drying feeling to reduce overly rich flavours. Try iced or cold brewed tea for cleaner lighter dishes and use hot tea to enhance the sweetness of a dessert. Astringent teas can help to cut through the fattiness of some foods. So, for example, a cup of Assam tea can be a great combination with a full English breakfast. EXPERIMENT Try taking a tea from the same point of origin as the cuisine. Japanese green teas work well with Japanese style light rice and fish dishes and strong and complex Indian teas often work well with rich and spicy Indian food. A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN Creating tea and food pairings is becoming more and more popular in cafes, restaurants and hotels. Pairing teas with food is a good way to enhance your menu, encourage guests to try something new and create the kind of unique experience that keeps customers coming back for more – with the added bonus of increasing their potential spend. You are probably already familiar with the idea of wine pairing. A sommelier will select a specific wine to go with each dish on a menu. The wine will be chosen because the food and wine taste good together – the various flavour notes complement each other. Teas pair with food in a very similar way, plus they have the added benefit of being alcohol free and good for the health-conscious gourmet. A good food pairing is one where the tea and the food have been selected because they taste good together. A very good pairing takes the experience to a level where both tea and the food are enhanced by each another, either by highlighting mutual flavours, combining contrasting flavours or a combination of the two. You may notice some additional ‘third flavours’ on your palate that are created by the pairing itself and don’t come directly from either the food or the beverage. Typically once you find a very good pairing you will be eager to go back for 21 TEA TIME boughtonscoffeehouse.com more. At the other end of the scale a bad pairing may leave a bad taste in your mouth, or no taste at all so are best left off your menu! So what are some of the simplest pairings you can try? Rich foods with full- flavoured black teas such as Ceylon Light and delicate sweets with green teas from Japan and China Creamy sweets with lighter black teas or creamy oolongs Fattier savoury foods with black teas Baked goods with medium strength, aromatic black teas Roasted teas with roasted ingredients Fruit infusions with fruity dishes Earl grey tea pairs very well with a wide variety of desserts due to its warm and citrusy flavour profile. You might not think of tea and biscuits as a tea pairing, but this classic combination is actually a great example of the tea pairing rules at work. A typical cup of black tea is naturally rich and slightly astringent, so great for pairing with sweet, baked foods, especially biscuits and cakes. One of the best pieces of advice for creating your own food pairings is to be creative and experiment. With each combination you try you are building your own internal flavour library, and you will begin to select good pairings more and more easily. If you don’t have the time to experiment yourself then talk to an expert. There are professional tea consultants and tea sommeliers available to help. Tea sommeliers have trained their taste memory to identify and pair hundreds of types of tea and food combinations. They will even be able to help select pairings based on a particular theme or for a particular season or event. One important thing to note is that while there is a lot of commonality when it comes to aromas, the flavours and tastes in a food pairing can be experienced differently by different people. While formulating a pairing menu make use of a variety of different palates of your team, exploring the world of tea and food pairings and enjoying what you create. HOW TO PAIR TEA AND FOOD Pair multiple dishes and multiple teas in one sitting. Trying the good and the bad side by side helps to train your sense of taste. Pick out three or four foods to try and select around six teas. Consider including iced or cold brewed teas as well as hot teas and tisanes. Brew and then taste the teas. Pay attention to the key flavours, how strong they taste and how they feel in your mouth for example whether they feel viscose, watery or drying. Taste the food to savour the flavour. Pay attention to the key flavours, how strong they taste and how they feel in your mouth. Select some potential pairings that might work well based on the key flavours and strength of the flavours. When you are ready to try the pairings together start by taking a sip of tea followed by a bite of food, then taste the tea again and focus on to how the key flavours and feeling in your mouth changes. Which flavours become most dominant? Which flavours diminish? How does your mouth feel? Does it make you want to go back for more?TEA TIME 22 CREATE PERFECT PAIRINGS WHITE TEA Light dishes including desserts like panacotta White fish Mild cheeses Fresh figs GREEN TEA Steamed green vegetables Savoury salads Sushi Rice Seafood Chicken Light desserts White chocolate LIGHT BLACK TEAS (FIRST FLUSH DARJEELING, NEPALESE TEA) Fresh fruit Green salads Lighter sandwich fillings like egg and cucumber STRONGER BLACK TEA (ENGLISH BREAKFAST TEA, CEYLON, ASSAM, KEEMUN) Roasted red meats Chocolate Pastries and cakes Rich desserts Spices and nuts Hot buttered toast YELLOW TEA Sweet fruits Dried fruit Buttery desserts The European Tea Society is a member-led association focused on creating and inspiring excellence in the speciality tea community through innovation, research, education and communication. Members have access to a growing network of tea professionals as well having the opportunity to create and shape knowledge, research and education within the tea community. DARK TEA Game Aged cheeses with grapes Mushrooms Heavy and rich foods DARK OOLONG TEA Richer roasted foods Complex or spicy dishes Roasted vegetables Smoked and cured meats Dark chocolate Nuts LIGHT OOLONG TEA Fruit salads Milk-based desserts Light fish Scallops boughtonscoffeehouse.com23 PIONEERS NATURAL GROWTH Following recent investment and partnership with Blue Horizon Ventures, LoveRaw founder Rimi Thapar shares her no-compromise philosophy behind the success of her vegan brand Rimi Thapar, ‘head hustler’ of vegan confectionery brand LoveRaw, has reason to be celebrating. In January she announced that after a 10-month process her company had secured a substantial investment from Blue Horizon, a venture capitalist fund specialising in vegan FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods). “It’s pretty overwhelming on one hand but very exciting on the other. Even in the last 12 months it’s amazing how things have evolved,” says Thapar from LoveRaw’s headquarters in Altrincham. “Blue Horizon have the same ethics and we are well-aligned. They know our proposition, what we’re trying to achieve and, most importantly, they believe in us.” Today LoveRaw is a familiar brand. Butter Cups – its range of vegan nut butter chocolates made from minimal ingredients and free from palm oil – are available from retailers nationwide, but when Thapar launched in 2013 with a range of raw fruit and nut bars from her kitchen table, competition was high. Falling short of manufacturers’ minimum requirements, she was forced to make them herself, packing and sealing them all by hand. A turning point for her was some advice from a family friend – he said to go straight to her dream supplier. “So I thought about it for a few nights and that’s what I did,” she says. She made some samples, took them to Whole Foods, got a listing and it snowballed from there. “If I hadn’t had that piece of advice I don’t know how long it would have taken me,” she says. Back then her focus was less on profit margins, more on delivering a quality product – “I started off with a love of what I did” – and LoveRaw became a lifestyle brand built around her young family (her husband, Manav, is now a partner in the business). “It was a good time for our product category and it was growing almost without us even trying,” she says. However, it wasn’t all plain sailing – growth brought new challenges. “You’d be naive to think you’re never not going to have problems,” she says. Take logistics, for instance – stock goes missing, ingredients disappear in transit and numbers at the warehouse don’t add up. Even finding a factory to work with that can handle allergens and specialist ingredients (Thapar and her team still select and buy their own) is tricky. “We persevered in order to make that happen,” she says. As LoveRaw’s reach and stockists grew, Thapar realised profit margins were multi-layered and complex. “You have to think about the percentage of profits that go to you, the distributor and the retailer because you don’t want to drive the price so high that consumers can’t afford it,” she says. “Because we still focus on quality ingredients, we’re still priced slightly higher than heritage brands or like for like, but as we’re selling more volume, we have lowered our margin expectations and the consumer gets to buy at a lower price.” Adapting as a business is crucial in order to grow, 24 PIONEERS boughtonscoffeehouse.com she says. “I’m not going to be precious about the bars I made in 2013. You have to recognise and accept if something is not working and to change to what is working. With the bars I thought, where else is there a gap in the market? You try a few different categories.” She says her appearance on BBC2’s Dragons’ Den in 2018 was “a great opportunity to get in front of four million viewers” and came at a time they needed money to launch with Waitrose. She rejected Deborah Meaden’s offer and walked away with no deal – and no regrets – instead persevering and launching the Buttercup range. She says, “We nestled into our proposition as a vegan confectionery brand and as a company – who are we, what we offer and what we want to offer going forwards.” The company’s recent investment with Blue Horizon means they can expand the LoveRaw team to 12 (four new hires are planned this year), focus on their marketing strategy and strengthen brand identity. “Manav and I are very hands-on so we see the gaps. I’m good at creative and NPD (New Product Development). The things I’m not good at I will outsource,” she says. “Without the investment we’d keep ticking over but wouldn’t grow as we’d like.” The partnership is also backing three product launches this year – a range of vegan milk chocolate bars that are formulated differently to any existing brand on the market. “Milk chocolate is one thing vegans miss more than cheese and it’s our opinion – and I know it’s subjective – that there weren’t that many options for vegan milk chocolate that tasted good,” she says. “We’re not coconut-based and we don’t use lots of rice powder to get that milky consistency. We use almond paste and we had to get the right one with the right consistency and smoothness.” The result: three bars – milk chocolate, salted caramel and peanut butter-filled – that launched in Whole Foods in March, with further product lines scheduled to launch this month and September. Refreshingly, Thapar sounds relaxed about the work-life balance she and her husband have created. “You can’t set any hard and fast rules,” she says. “Work is such a common theme with us both and it definitely comes home with us. I don’t beat myself up too much about discussing it.” And she readily admits that building a business from the ground up comes with its sacrifices – “I don’t have a social life.” While taking a back seat is not on Thapar’s radar, the investment has definitely eased the pressure. “Now I feel I can breathe and delegate a little bit,” she says. “You need to know who you are, who you want to be and work towards that. Talk about it less and do it more!” THE INVESTORS: BLUE HORIZON VENTURES “As an investor who focuses on bringing sustainable plant-based and cultivated products to the food chain, Blue Horizon Ventures is continuously looking for start-ups that have a unique and differentiated positioning paired with an excellence-driven and passionate founder team. We saw these values in LoveRaw’s team and products and are very excited to join and support them on their journey to make healthy, sustainable and tasty snacks widely available.” Regina Hecker, Partner bluehorizonventures.com Begin with a love for what you do, be clear about what you are trying to achieve and always believe in your proposition. Think big, aim high and go for your dream scenario. When looking for the perfect partnership, seek out companies who share your ethics and beliefs. When the journey feels tough or slow, listen to the positive voice, persevere and keep going. Be realistic with timescales and deadlines. Yes, you can do it all but you can’t do it all at the same time, so prioritise what you can realistically do in that timeframe. Know your strengths and how to use them. Then outsource what you need to. Be open to change if things don’t work out and keep evolving your proposition. TIPS FOR PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT SUCCESSCOFFEE INSPIRATIONS WWW.SCOTSMAN-ICE.CO.UK26 change? With the lockdown now eased, many businesses are keen to get up and running as quickly as possible. With a significant hole in their balance sheet to be filled it might also be the time to consider whether it’s time to diversify, to fully release your potential. It could be time for a change. Branching into a new area can pay dividends for your cafe, bringing in new customers, showing existing customers your range, boosting your brand and image, and – crucially – increasing profits. But it’s not always straightforward to execute. Deciding what change to make and how you make it will be key in determining its success and how customers respond. To explore how best to go about introducing a business change, we asked John Richardson, a coffee shop business consultant with years of experience in helping cafes to boost their profits. Richardson points out that before making any form of change, it’s crucial for the rest of your operation to be running efficiently. “Step one is always to ensure you’re doing everything possible to make your core business as profitable as it can be,” he explains. “Don’t start adding new things on top until everything underneath is sound and stable.” Once that solid foundation is firmly established in your current business and running well, deciding on what change to bring in will be the next step. Luckily, it’s not hard to find inspiration. Basic online research or even simply visiting a handful of nearby cafes will likely demonstrate some of the many options available and how well (or not, in some cases) they’re being employed. When you’ve settled on an idea and it’s time to introduce it, test the water first. “Trialling something is always the right way to go,” says Richardson. “If the overheads are already in place in your business, you’ve got an opportunity to trial things at very little cost. Let’s say you want to open consistently on Friday nights: trial several different models of food and beverage to find out what works with your audience and within your set-up.” Some venues may be reluctant to introduce significant changes for fear of unsettling regular customers, but if implemented properly, any additional offering from your cafe, whatever it might be, doesn’t have to interfere with your existing audience, “It shouldn’t affect that core offer,” Richardson explains. “It’s very important to protect that base daytime customer, and if you manage things properly, it won’t disrupt their experience.” Communicating this change is also key in making it work. Both existing and potential customers need to know that, first of all, your business is doing something new, but also why they should be interested in it. People are bombarded with ‘new’ offerings every day, so they need a reason to engage with yours. This doesn’t have to be any kind of ground-breaking epiphany as to why they should visit your business, it just needs to speak to people and appeal to your demographic. Inside and outside signage is a simple way of delivering the message to passers-by and existing customers (and helps reinforce to them that you’re known for one thing), and social media is also an invaluable tool in relaying your new venture, but Richardson warns that it’s essential to stick to certain themes and keep things relevant online, “People like to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what you’re working on next, so give them an insight into those areas through your social media. Rotate TIME FOR A With so many businesses finally allowed to reopen after lockdown, it might be time to consider some new ways to boost revenue. From revamping a menu to hosting supper clubs, it could be a step change to a whole new model, says Tristan Parker boughtonscoffeehouse.com27 BUSINESS DIVERSITY around a series of strategic posts every week, so that when you’re doing something interesting, people know about it. A lot of cafes just post pictures of flat whites and latte art, but you need to follow a very specific process to keep people engaged.” When it comes to measuring how much of an impact your new change has had, analysing the figures to assess profits is the clearest initial indicator (though you should also factor in how much time has been spent making it come to life), but it’s also important not to lose sight of the wider benefits that your new direction may have set in place. “Ultimately, you’re looking to see how much profit you’ve actually made after you’ve taken out your costs, but there are also intangible benefits,” he explains. “Changes you make will often attract people who haven’t been to your business before. If you run a training event on ‘how to brew better coffee at home’, for example, people will bring friends who may not have known about you, and some of them will come back. It’s about gaining those new customers.” Alongside John Richardson’s expert guidance, we’ve identified four areas that cafes and coffee shops can consider exploring. We then spoke to four individuals with significant experience in each field to advise on how businesses can introduce these measures successfully. JOHN RICHARDSON’S THREE TIPS FOR MAKING A BUSINESS CHANGE ONE MAKE SURE YOU’RE GETTING THE MOST OUT OF YOUR EXISTING BUSINESS Don’t see making a change as a silver bullet – ensure you’re getting the most out of your turnover before introducing something new. TWO CONSIDER THE LONG-TERM RAMIFICATIONS If your change works, will you want to keep on doing it? You have to be comfortable in continuing to manage it if it goes well. THREE STICK TO ONE THING AT A TIME Introducing multiple changes at the same time is a bad idea. You need to work away at that one thing and keep tweaking it until the figures are really adding up. boughtonscoffeehouse.com28 BUSINESS DIVERSITY boughtonscoffeehouse.com We started to host evening events quite early on after launching, just to fill the time that we weren’t open during traditional cafe hours and to bring in extra revenue. At our Ancoats venue we have allocated dates for other operators to come in and host an event, whether they’re street food vendors or people with an idea that they want to try out. In that sense we’re a bit of an incubator space for people who want to road test something in a bricks and mortar environment. It brings in people who haven’t come to the cafe before and there’s a bit of cross-pollination in terms of brand awareness with those outside operators. We get some wet sales from it as well, and it’s provided a change in people’s mentality when they realise we’re also open in the evenings, hosting something different to what we do in the daytime. In our Levenshulme cafe we provide our own service for evening dining, opening Thursday to Saturday nights. It can be difficult to change that identity in people’s minds about what service you provide, and it’s not as simple as just launching a night-time menu if you’re normally only open for brunch. You need to be able to change people’s perception of you on your own merits. At Ancoats we’ve had all sorts of food events, from local groups hosting their first supper clubs to big global brands like Vice, and everything in-between. We’ve also had bread-making, jewellery-making, Portuguese classes and podcast recordings. As well as boosting our daytime business, the events help us reach people that don’t know about us already. If you can tap into 5,000 more people that don’t normally follow you, just through working with one other person or brand, that’s pretty big. So, we’re really heading towards where we want to be in terms of brand growth at the moment. On a practical level, we have our own alcohol licence, but anyone who comes in to host an event needs their own public liability insurance, as we’re just providing the space and not actually cooking the food. Opening our Levenshulme venue for evening dining was a bit more of a challenge at first. We had to really consider altering the ambience by changing things like the playlist and the lighting. We didn’t want people to feel like they’d come back to the same place if they were here earlier for breakfast. We had to make sure it felt like an evening venue with a different vibe – more of a restaurant or a bar than a coffee shop. Now we’ve got a rhythm going with all the preparation and it’s quite manageable. The evening events have been really quick wins for us and the Ancoats events organised by other operators are really low maintenance. They often sell out, because a lot of them are one-offs and people want to be part of that experience. It’s important to keep incentivising people to come back. trovefoods.co.uk CHANGE: HOST SUPPER CLUBS AND EVENING DINING Marcus Saide, co-owner of Trove cafes and bakery, Manchester Both Trove cafes offer after-hours events, ranging from supper club takeovers to regular evening menus MARCUS SAIDE’S THREE TIPS FOR STARTING EVENING DINING ONE OFFER PEOPLE SOMETHING YOU DON’T ALREADY OFFER Provide a unique opportunity for customers to experience something different from your usual menu. TWO DO YOUR RESEARCH Things like a Temporary Events Notice allow you to host events with alcohol and music several times a year, even if you don’t have an alcohol licence. THREE MAKE YOUR EVENTS TICKETED Selling tickets in advance helps cover your costs and manage attendances and cash flow, which is especially useful if you’re a small business.29 BUSINESS DIVERSITY boughtonscoffeehouse.com We wanted to create a place for people to be productive and have positive experiences in. I want to be around people doing things, I want to walk into a room that has a nice buzz, where people are getting stuff done. A lot of cafes have the attitude of, “We don’t want people sitting in all day,” and I think that’s wrong. We are welcoming, inclusive and supportive to everybody, whether someone’s been there for 20 minutes or three hours. And because we’re being consistent in what we do and our attitude, the people who have found us have stayed with us. There are things in place to make it easy for people to work while they’re here. We’ve got big tables, so if you want to get your laptop out you don’t feel like you’re working on your knees. We make sure the tables are flat – a nice plank table looks good on Instagram, but is really wobbly when you’re tapping away on a keyboard. I also invested in a 5G GigaCube to increase our Wi-Fi capacity, as things were slowing down if everyone in the cafe was using Wi-Fi on multiple devices. That was a bit of an investment, but it makes everybody’s life easier, so was worth it. Once people know you’ve got that kind of space to work in and be comfortable, they’ll come back and they’re going to bring their friends as well. Previously, we’ve hosted weekly events and meetups for freelancers, like ‘Laptop Fridays’ and ‘Freelancer Mondays’, which were set up by customers. Little Man is more like a blank canvas for customers’ ideas. I want to encourage people to try things. We look after our working customers and average spend – that’s important. For example, we have a £15 ‘day pass’, which gives people bottomless batch coffee, something from our lunch menu and a piece of cake in the afternoon. If you can get £15 from most people working on a laptop in your venue, you’re doing really well. We’ve also got two meeting rooms downstairs that we hire out. The rooms are used by everyone from a FTSE 100 company to charities to Cardiff University. We want to make it as easy as possible for people to have a meeting in our cafe and we’re lucky to have those spaces that we can monetise. Our coffee is critically important and we serve the best coffee we can – we use over 25 roasters on rotation – but for me it has to be about ‘coffee and…’. People need have two reasons to come to the shop, which could be ‘coffee and a carton of oat milk’, which we sell, or they might come in for ‘coffee and a meeting’. We’ve got to try and monetise that idea by selling two things, not just coffee. We’re lucky to have good customers who come back again and again, because they know that our attitude is consistent and friendly, and that they feel comfortable here. littlemancoffee.co.uk CHANGE: EMBRACE THE LAPTOP CROWDS Rob Cooper, owner of The Little Man Coffee Company, Cardiff Little Man Coffee is well-known for its welcoming approach to customers who want to work from the cafe and is popular with freelance workers ROB COOPER’S THREE TIPS FOR WELCOMING WORKERS ONE MAKE IT EASY FOR CUSTOMERS TO WORK THROUGH GOOD DESIGN Things need to be functional and your set-up should give people enough space. Those little things make a difference. TWO HAVE AN OFFER THAT INCREASES THE AVERAGE SPEND If somebody’s going to be with you for a while, encourage them to make a saving by spending a little bit more. THREE BE CONSISTENT IN YOUR ATTITUDE Be nice, be friendly, be kind. But don’t try too hard – just be genuine and people will appreciate it.Next >