TLDR: George Howell & his coffee empire(s)
by Lucky Peach (these highlights provided for you by Annotote)
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“ in 1975 … he moved to Boston and started his café company, the Coffee Connection
“ It was during this period of rejection and transience that the Howells came up with the idea of opening a café, not only as a remedy to the horrible state of local coffee, but also as … a gallery for [his] Huichol art.
“ Howell is postulating that great coffee doesn’t come from one year’s harvest from a single farm, but rather from an even more discriminating level: individual gems in plain sight, potentially inside every bag of coffee [that] owes its deliciousness to the farmer, the workers who picked and washed the ripe coffee cherries, the coffee varietal that produced those beans, and even the farm itself [plus] the taste and intuition of the roaster.
“ he hates some of the du jour fashions — cold brew in particular.
“ Howell set up a roasting plant in Burlington, fifteen miles of north of Harvard Square, where he’d roast twice a week, in the middle of the night, and then drive the beans to the store
“ How do I get people to taste this coffee? The French press.
“ [After trying an iced cappuccino in 1988,] Howell picked up an old granita machine and started working out the recipe … being the marketing brilliance he was, he came up with the name ‘Frappuccino’ — from frappe, the New England-specific word for a milkshake, and cappuccino
“ In the summer of ’92, Howell debuted the fully formed Frappuccino™ on his Coffee Connection menus.
“ He recruited a board for Coffee Connection, sought out VC money, and opened twelve new stores within a year, doubling the size of his Boston coffee fiefdom. But Starbucks opened twelve stores that same year in DC, bringing their total location count to over four hundred.
“ In March of ’94, Schultz finally made an offer that Howell could live with — he’d keep the Coffee Connection name on the stores for two years, keep the roasting plant running, and bring Howell on as a coffee consultant. Howell sold the company for $23 million in Starbucks stock and signed a seven-year noncompete agreement for roasting and retail.
“ by 2011, Forbes estimated that the Frappuccino brand, born in Boston, was worth $2 billion.
“ He ended up working [for the UN’s International Coffee Organization, running] a competition called Cup of Excellence … Small farmers submitted their beans, a panel of jurors … cupped them and ranked them, and then the beans went up on an online auction, allowing anyone in the world to bid … Within four years, the price of the top coffees in the Brazilian competition jumped from $2.60 to $10.15 a pound; ten years in, it was $24.05 … the program has led to more than $160 million of extra income for farmers in just Brazil and Honduras
“ a couple of years after his noncompete with Starbucks finally expired, he decided to set up his own roasting and retail operation again … starting with a café-restaurant called Copacafé in Lexington
“ In 2012, Howell bought another café, [which he named] George Howell Coffee.
“ I’ve been talking farmer, farmer, farmer, farmer. Okay, but where’s my final loyalty? Is it farmer, or consumer? Farmer, consumer? And it has to be consumer, otherwise I’m a liar. Consumer first
“ he does hope it will be the first of many more George Howells dotting the cities of the nation
