Blue Bottle Coffee pours flames on wholesale

Sometimes, it’s just better to keep things in house.

Blue Bottle Coffee, one of the hottest coffee companies in existence at the moment – if not in the entire world – has decided that they are to shut down their wholesale business.

James Freeman, Blue Bottle Coffee’s founder, made the announcement last week.

Undoubtedly, this move is going to upset a lot of loyal customers and it is one that has raised a few eyebrows in some corners – mainly because Blue Bottle are about to axe an entire stream of revenue in one fell swoop. But others weren’t: One of them, Brett Smith of Counter Culture Coffee, said: “They know the challenges of doing both retail and wholesale, so I think the focus makes sense.”

So why are they cutting out their wholesale business?

Simply, it seems that the powers that be want to have greater control on the brand that is Blue Bottle Coffee. And, of course, money.

“I get nervous when we can’t control the contests, methods, and outcomes that are part of the experience of drinking our coffee,” Freeman wrote in a post on the company blog. Basically, if you don’t run a Blue Bottle Coffee shop, you won’t be selling Blue Bottle Coffee coffee for much longer.

Freeman continued: “Taking responsibility for absolutely every drink made from our coffee is a logical next step for us.”

“[C]rafting increasingly delicious coffee is an iterative process that only works when your buyers, production teams, roasters, baristas, and cafés are interconnected.”

From a financial point of view all the coffee sold by Blue Bottle will be sold for a premium, through their own tills.

Looking back over the past couple of months, whilst somewhat surprising, this move didn’t exactly come out of the blue: Not so long ago hints were dropped that the company was shifting even more focus onto its retail programme. “Retail is expensive,” Freeman is quoted as telling The Financial Times, “but retail is rewarding if you get it right.”

With a recent injection purported to be in the region of $70m, Blue Bottle Coffee will have the funds at their disposal to get it right.

photo: Niall Kennedy (Flickr) – Used & cropped under Creative Commons