PUT UP OR SHUT UP

“Transparency” is the lie we tell ourselves that justifies what we have and what we are willing to pay for the raw product. 

• Me, this blog, July 2021

Yeah I quoted myself, what of it? 

Of course when you put something like that down in writing the trick is to follow through with action, to Put Up or Shut Up. So here we are.

For years now we’ve been open with our P&L data for the cafe, it’s been shared a few times publicly and privately before finding a home here on our website. The Roastery was always going to follow suit, so that we could live up lofty ideals we’d espoused, it just took a little longer than we expected. But you can now view the P&L for the FCP roastery, here. We’ll update it as management accounts become available, and it will sit alongside a yearly review from our roastery team.

Even with such a small amount of data for the roastery we can glean interesting information. For instance there is a visible shift in retail coffee buying, moving from predominantly online in Q4 20/21 to a more balanced split between cafe and online in Q1 21/22. This is undoubtedly due to the reopening of retail post lockdown at the very end of Q4, note also that coffee retail sales actually increased overall during Q1 and are markedly higher than they were pre-covid. 

I think this is the biggest takeaway, that it’s very possible that the pandemic achieved what we as an industry tried and mostly failed at doing for decades, persuading our core audience to buy specialty coffee for home brewing.

Mat North