Many businesses claim they are serving specialty coffee. Specialty coffee is often defined as the top 10 percent of coffee available in the world. Let’s talk numbers.
The J.M. Smucker Company bought the Folgers brand in 2008. It has been a very successful acquisition for the company. Smuckers gross revenue in 2010 was $4.6 billion. Folgers is the number 1 store brand of coffee in the United States. The Folgers brand accounted for approximately 40 percent of Smucker’s sales in 2010 or about $1.8 billion. The Folgers brand family also includes Millstone and a 25-year agreement to provide coffee for Dunkin’ Donuts. Dunkin’ Donuts sales were $276 million of the total, making Dunkin’ donuts the number 2 “specialty” store brand behind Starbucks.
Speaking of Big Green (Starbucks), it has around 11,000 stores in the United States and 17,009 stores worldwide. Starbucks sales were $10.71 billion in 2010. Starbucks bought 269,000,000 pounds of coffee in 2010.
McDonald’s by comparison has 32,000 stores worldwide, 13,700 stores in the United States and $24 billion in sales. McDonald’s sells coffee in addition to burgers – about 500 million cups per year.
Why have we thrown all these numbers at you? The coffee that Dancing Mule serves, roasted by PT’s Coffee, is not available in enough quantity to provide the big boys (J.M. Smuckers, Dunkin Donuts, Starbucks, McDonalds) with coffee for a day. PT’s sold approximately 205,000 pounds in 2009, and PT’s primarily buys coffee from small farms in small lots. One of their recent micro-lots from Hawaii was 210 pounds and sold out in two weeks.
PT’s develops direct trade relationships with coffee farmer’s that benefit the farmer by giving them a better price for their hard work and benefit PT’s by allowing them to source the top 1 percent of coffee available in the world. For more information about PT’s Direct Trade policies you can go here: http://www.ptscoffee.com/education/direct_trade_coffee.php.
For more information and a longer discussion of the definition of specialty coffee check out this article http://www.scaa.org/?page=RicArtp1 by Ric Rhinehart the Executive Director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America titled “What is Specialty Coffee?”
Having the best coffee available is only a starting point to providing truly special coffee. The coffee must be prepared and served correctly. The fact that there is only one Dancing Mule is a huge advantage over large coffee chains in regards to serving quality coffee.
We don’t have to make our coffee taste the same in 17,009 stores! We are a locally owned family business with daily management and involvement by the owner’s of the business. To sum it all up, Dancing Mule is Stubborn About Great Coffee.
