Caroline Bell, Cafe Grumpy Co.
Caroline Bell opened Cafe Grumpy in 2005 in Brooklyn, NY. Funnily, I lived one neighborhood over and was introduced to Cafe Grumpy by an ex-boyfriend. We spent a lot of time in that first shop and it’s likely Caroline served me delicious drinks herself. In 2014, a Grumpy employee peeked into my own coffeeshop and we quickly started serving Cafe Grumpy as on our roasters. To this day we serve Cafe Grumpy Heartbreaker Blend as our espresso and one of our cold brews. I was very excited to have the opportunity to ask Caroline some questions in the beginning days of the COVID pandemic, while NY was still the big hotspot facing so many challenges.
When you opened your first shop in Greenpoint, which I use to frequent many years ago, what was your dream for Cafe Grumpy? Greenpoint still feels like home. It is right next to our office/roastery, so when we re-opened the "to go" window there, I was first in line for a cappuccino! Our dream was very simple - we wanted to serve great tasting coffee in a welcoming environment. We were certainly naive and didn't realize what it would take to make that happen and to keep that going. It is a constant work in progress and the pandemic has brought new challenges none of us could have imagined as you know first hand.
What is the structure of Cafe Grumpy? You have many shops, do you have General Managers who all communicate together to ensure consistent quality? What does that structure look like to make sure all your product is always so great?
For the first few years, we didn't have store managers and the small team we had collectively took responsibility for the running of their stores (Chris and I also worked at the cafes every day). Once we grew, we found that the teams at each store wanted to have just one point person so that is when we started to have individual store managers. When we opened our location in Grand Central Terminal which was a huge step for us, we also promoted one of our store managers to Retail Director (Kat - who still works with us today).
We have always placed importance on training as well and have one person who is in charge of Coffee Education and Training. It also helps that most of our baristas are coffee professionals and care about coffee. Our roasting team also used to work as baristas in the cafes so there is an understanding and appreciation of what goes into service on the cafe level.
Of course, most things have changed now as our retail stores have taken a huge hit during the pandemic, but we hope to build our team back up again as soon as we can. Right now, some stores just have one person working at a time.
When NYC started getting hit by COVID-19, what was the process you undertook to make the decision to close all your shops? Some other local coffee shops stayed open throughout doing coffee to go, but we decided to close our cafes on March 15th. We could tell our baristas were starting to feel the stress of working in a customer-service position when there were so many unknown variables and closing seemed like the right thing to do for everyone's health and safety.
We starting slowly re-opening one store at a time mid-May with to go service only. We adjusted store layouts, changed our loyalty from punches to virtual, added pre-ordering, an app...etc.
I've gotten a couple calls from your staff to check in with me and that is so appreciated, how are yall managing a new business at this time? Do you have daily meetings? How are all dividing up the workload when there are so many unpredictable parameters at this time?
We are running with a very small crew right now and have been consistently having to adjust roles and responsibilities - so you might have heard from our Retail Director who is also acting as wholesale support while the stores are slow! Our roasting team has also been amazing in handling the unpredictable work flow. We have been using Zoom to check-in with managers and have been in contact with our current small barista team via email, text and calls as well as some short masked in-person meetings. We just all really miss visiting each other at the cafes and drinking coffee together.
What are your favorite things to read or listen to? Are you reading any books right now? Or listening to podcasts? I just started reading "In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes" - his name appears on my mom's family tree (she is Gibraltarian). It seemed like an appropriate book to start and to get some perspective on what it really is like to be under stay at home orders - lets just hope this pandemic doesn't last 30 years!
