Connecting the Dots

Connecting the Dots...with a coffee trader (Jason Joffe)

• Adam Leishman • Season 1 • Episode 40

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This week, I connect with Jason, a coffee professional who knows everything from sourcing green beans to roasting perfection. We talk about the fascinating coffee journey, Jason's personal transition into running marathons, and even touch on the story behind "poop coffee." Tune in to discover the blend of coffee and life lessons in this engaging chat!

Morning, if it's morning for you, but morning. I've got my coffee. I hope you've had yours. Week 40 of me connecting with people I find interesting and I've done that this week, but this week I get to talk to a coffee professional. That's what he was called in the Roast Magazine article I just read about him, an actual coffee professional. Somebody that just drinks a lot and, I mean, he probably does that too. But, an actual industry coffee professional. How cool is that? Let's go find out about his journey coffee and things I didn't know about. This is Jason. Now we met running, which is, seems to be how I meet a lot of people now, but there's a there's a There's some things that we like that are the same and I'm not just talking the running, so I'm not sure I'm into running. But one of them is coffee. Yeah. Tell me about what you have, you, you play a role in the coffee industry. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So I, I currently I guess I currently import green beans very simply, but beyond that work with everyone from, from coffee farmers on one end of the scale to coffee roasters here in Australia on the other. And kind of make everything in between happen.

Speaker:

Yeah, right.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker:

So, I don't know a lot about coffee. And you talk about green beans. Is that how they're grown? Are they picked as green beans? Yeah. So,

Speaker 3:

so coffee a coffee tree grows cherries.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

And the, the beans that we use to make coffee here in Australia are actually the dried seed. Okay. So, so coffee's a fruit very similar to a cherry but with very little fruit on it. Yep. And then there's a huge amount of process between that cherry and a green bean, which is the product we import, that then people here in Australia, well all over the world, roast. Okay. So it's essentially it's a dried seed.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

And is the process the same a lot of the time? Like you It changes, does it? Everywhere is different. In terms of how, in terms of how they go from a cherry to a seed, Yep. It's hugely different. Very similar all around the world, but there's a number of ways you can get there. And, and they all produce different results in the, in flavor. But the places we work with are very different. So, every country has a different dynamic. Whether it's a supply chain or political or, you know, working within the law or just the size of farmers. Every situation is completely unique.

Speaker:

What would have the most influence on a, I mean, coffee place difference? Is it the, is it the cherry or is it the roasting

Speaker 3:

that has the most impact? I always describe it as a chain, right? So every single link in that chain has equally as important a part. So the variety of coffee, so coffee, coffee's not just coffee. There's, there's so many different varieties of coffee, like with apples. Every different apple, all has a different flavor. That would be the first thing. Then where it's grown. So the soil conditions, the climate, the altitude, the number of days of rain and sun and everything in between. Then the process from there to green bean. And obviously how it's roasted. So, and even how it's made. So, I guess when you're drinking coffee to an uneducated palate, the first thing you're probably tasting is the roasting. You know, it's got a huge impact. A very dark roast can be intense and bitter, and a very light roast like this can be aromatic and tea like. So that's probably what most people notice first and then I guess as you delve into it and, you know, ask questions, it's

Speaker:

kind of reveals itself. You seem to know a lot about the whole process having, because you work in just one sector of it. I guess you've worked in other sectors?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, yeah. So I've been in, I've been in coffee professionally, you know, take out school and university and weekends for about 23 years now. Yeah, wow. So I've kind of worked across every, every aspect of owned cafes. Owned and managed roasteries from like little boutique micro roasteries to very large quite industrial sized things. And kind of everywhere in between, so. Yeah, awesome. I don't know if that's because I've got itchy feet. Or if I just, I just find the whole thing fascinating, you know. And it's a diverse industry. It's a diverse industry. Every, every person you deal with in the industry is different, so. Yeah. Why not explore it? What's one of the roles or jobs you've had in the past that was your favourite? I worked, I worked in a in a role doing on the ground upstream development. So working in I worked quite a bit in Timor, working with farmers. helping them to get what they deliver to us to a higher quality. Yeah. That's probably been my absolute favorite role because you see such a big immediate impact with

Speaker:

what you're doing, you know. How much of the coffee that we drink in Australia comes from Australia versus overseas? Very little. Yeah. Okay. And

Speaker 3:

why is that? Climate's huge. You know, so, so coffee ideally wants to be between 18 and 24 degrees all year round.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Very few places in Australia that can accommodate that. Yep. And also the cost of labor, like when you're paying someone who wants the minimum wage now, 20 something dollars an hour to produce, produce an affordable product's really difficult. Yeah. There are a couple of places we grow coffee. Northern New South Wales got like a weird little microclimate where they don't get too much frost, but doesn't get too hot.

Speaker:

Okay

Speaker 3:

So there's a few small growers there and then up in North Queensland. So like Atherton, Tablelands, Mareeba. Yeah, there's some bigger plantations, It is a certain quality and the price doesn't necessarily match it. Yeah, you can sell any quality I can sell absolute trash That tastes awful, but at the right price, that's appealing to someone. So yeah, I guess it just, there's a lot of coffee up there. And, and maybe as things change, climate changes you know, cost of transport has gone up through the roof the last two, three years. Yeah, I guess

Speaker:

the only way to get it from North Queensland is by truck.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but that's a lot cheaper than, you know, by ship from Brazil, right? True. That might change the way. The price value proposition, who knows? Yeah.

Speaker:

So who do you sell to? Are you selling direct to coffee? Like do you sell all of it to roasters or, yeah, all

Speaker 3:

my coffees to coffee roasters. Okay. I mean, the company I work for, we've got a very small amount of direct to consumer retail. A lot of people like roasting as a hobby.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

But like in the grand scheme of what we do, that's tiny. Yep. You know, we, we might sell a hundred kilos. in a month to a home roaster like through all the home roasting network and you know my my wholesale sales are tens of thousands of tons.

Speaker:

And so what, that's a lot like you're bringing them in on ships is that?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, like container loads. Like a

Speaker:

delivery to you guys is in the tons? 20 tons.

Speaker 3:

Right. So 20 tons is one, one container of coffee, 20 tons. Okay. We, we don't really bring in much smaller than that. Okay. You know, occasionally you might have. If it's a very expensive coffee and you don't have a home for all of it, you might, because you're paying the same freight for the whole container, whether it's full or not.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

We might bring in, you know, 16, 18,

Speaker:

but very, very rarely. And do you guys then have to dice it up? I guess you're not dicing it up. Portion it up?

Speaker 3:

We use, we use like third party logistics for all that stuff. So we don't do, I don't do any heavy lifting with coffee anymore. I've yeah, if you worked out the number of, coffee comes in a 60 kilo sack. So if I work out the number of sacks I've physically carried over the years, it's,

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

I should be a lot

Speaker:

more muscly than this. And so they come in this big thing, they get portioned up and off they go. How does it arrive to a, like, it arrives in a sack to the

Speaker 3:

roaster? Yeah, so our roasters would get a pallet, 16 sacks, a ton of coffee. Sometimes, depending on their size, might just be, you know, some, some of our customers would buy, they would look for a container of coffee, they would contract it. So let's say we need 20 ton of coffee over six months. Some of the smaller ones would be like, can we just get a mixed palette, which is a ton and we need five or six different coffees on it. Yeah, kind of, I've got very diverse portfolio of customers.

Speaker:

Yeah. Wow. Awesome. Which

Speaker 3:

is good.

Speaker:

Now we met running. How long have you been running for? Five years. Okay. What got you into running?

Speaker 3:

So I've always prior to running, I've always been quite overweight. And COVID hit. I was working from home pre COVID, COVID hit, you know, then I'm stuck at home. Two teenage kids that I was trying to teach because that was our responsibility.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

And it was just a way to get out of the house, to be honest. So I'd, you know, take the dog for a walk at lunchtime and then I was like, well, maybe I can run to that lamppost. Maybe I can run to that tree over there.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker:

And now you know what it's like, right? And I'm pretty sure, according to your Facebook, you and I are doing the same event this year, which is Sydney. Yes. So, from running to the lamppost, you're going to do a marathon in Sydney? Yeah, it'll be my sixth. Sixth, right. Sydney will be my sixth marathon. Yeah. That's do you enjoy marathons? I'm not sure.

Speaker 3:

Like I said, I enjoy the training. I definitely enjoy, I definitely enjoy running them. The thought of running a marathon in six months time is a little daunting every time. Yeah. What's your favorite distance? Definitely the marathon. Right. Okay. Wow. Like the challenge. I like the challenge. I like the headspace. I like, it's, I like how it's a lot more mental for me personally to run a marathon than to run a five or 10K.

Speaker:

Yeah. Awesome. We, on one of our long chats, I got to chat to you a little bit and you had a bit of a flooding issue at home. Yeah. A little while ago. Tell us about that. It was good.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I mean, we, we woke up one morning, 3am with the neighbour banging on the door and yeah, had waist deep water in the house. Yeah. Wow. So that was an experience I don't wish on people. No,

Speaker:

I bet. So I had to do a full reno. Yeah. Literally finished a month ago. So it took us 10 months. And I think I remember you telling me during the run that you, you lost your car, you locked everything, like the cars, everything. Yeah. And, and what was the cars at the time? One of them was a nice fun toy car. Yeah. I

Speaker 3:

mean, I've, I've in my younger years, I've always enjoyed cars, motorsports nothing serious, just having a bit of fun.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

And then I don't know, I don't know if you're the same, but like you get to that point where you, you decide to focus on yourself. Running is one of those things I did. And then as you, as you do that, you know my kids they're at that age, they like, need you less and less as they get older. And you go, what do I actually, your role as a parent maybe or as a person transitions out of I have young kids that I've got to do everything for. And I feel you kind of have to reinvent yourself or at least search back to what you enjoyed. It's just, yeah, one of those things that came up and, yeah, I don't need to truck kids around, they're starting to drive themselves. Why not have a bit of fun?

Speaker 4:

Yep, absolutely.

Speaker 3:

And what's the daily driver now? So now I've got a BMW 3 Series. Yep, awesome. It's a bit of fun.

Speaker:

I saw on your Facebook, you, you're not born from around here. In fact, you're born on probably the other side of the planet. Yeah, yeah, about halfway

Speaker 3:

around the world. Yeah, where, where, where are you from? So I was born in South Africa.

Speaker:

Okay.

Speaker 3:

Like many people in this part of the world, I guess. Yeah.

Speaker:

And how long, where did, how did you go from South Africa to end up sitting in Queensland chatting to me?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, we my family moved out in the mid 90s, early to mid 90s. How old were you? Fourteen. Oh, wow. Okay. Yep. I was 14 when we moved. Couldn't afford to come to Australia at the time. Obviously they needed very different things in Australia. My mum was a teacher, weren't valued very highly. We also, we were kind of stuck in this weird situation where the government was trying to get, was trying to prohibit people from leaving. And then there was a, there's an interesting, which I won't, I won't go into too much depth. There's a very interesting situation where both my parents were they were very anti apartheid. So it was obviously during, during apartheid, they were kind of on, I wouldn't say on watch lists, but they were, what they were doing was being watched by the government. So we couldn't take money out of the country. So we did a, a few sneaky things to, to at least be able to leave. But we landed up in New Zealand

Speaker 4:

couldn't

Speaker 3:

afford to come to Australia. And then, yeah, 10, 11 years later, I just got sick of the cold. I grew up in, you know, we grew up in the Eastern Cape in South Africa, not far from Jeffreys Bay, which a lot of people know for surfing, beaches, warm climate, moved to Auckland, rains 365 days a year very different. And yeah, just one thing led to another. And. I came over here in my early 20s. Okay.

Speaker:

Where are your parents now?

Speaker 3:

Still in New Zealand. And, and do they enjoy it? I don't know. Okay. It's where they live. I guess, I guess at their age, one move, you know, one move is huge. Yeah. Like stressful, financially costly, emotional. I don't know if they would, their plan was to use New Zealand as the, like the bridge to come to Australia. And I think it just got too much.

Speaker:

Yep. Have you ever been back to South Africa? once. Okay.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker:

For,

Speaker 3:

for work

Speaker:

or? No, just, just, just for a holiday. Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Just in those early days after we had just moved across, we did a few trips back to sort of try and bring more money out. So my, my dad had a business with, you know, I think 17 offices or something, and they had a bit of money in the bank and fair bit of assets and they couldn't take anything. So we used to do trips, you know, back to South Africa. Fill up a suitcase full of money, put it back out, kind of thing. so we did that a few times in the early days, and then I just like, whatever's left is left. It's too risky to go back. Since then, I haven't been back. I haven't been back as an adult. Yeah. But I would love to. It's just, it's a huge expense for the family and, you know. Yeah.

Speaker:

Halfway

Speaker 3:

around

Speaker:

the world. Yeah, and you get to, but I mean, not back to there, but you get to see some other countries. I've seen Facebook's got, Yeah, traveled quite a bit with work. Yeah. Yeah. And it's nice. And it's mostly work that's allowed you to travel.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it is the one, one of, it's not the one advantage. It's one of the great advantages of what I do is that we spend a bit of time traveling to places. Most coffee comes from pretty cool countries that people don't visit all the time. So. What's your,

Speaker:

Apart from, apart from here,

Speaker 3:

what's your favorite part of the world? To travel? Yeah. I've been to a lot of countries, everywhere's, everywhere's different, right? So, yeah, you know, I think you can find great things to do in most parts of the world. I definitely prefer going to less developed countries. I quite enjoy, like I still, I love going back to Africa whenever I get the chance Just, it's just a great place. I feel maybe the first world's gone a bit interesting. And sometimes you just need a bit of a perspective or reality check. Yeah. Wow. So yeah, I mean, and I've traveled some very, you know, remote places. Like when, when I go overseas, I'm not in a big city, you know, you're typically out in the countryside talking with farmers you know, up in the mountains somewhere. I've, I've spent a lot of time in Timor, literally the middle of nowhere. And it's. three hours away. Yep. And what does the future hold for you? I have no idea. Right. Yeah. I'm I'm definitely a go with the flow kind of guy, you know, I think it's nice to have, I know my view getting super philosophical, nice to have big plans, know what you want to do in life. But I think it'd be good. super focused on how you're going to do it. You potentially miss a lot of fun opportunities or interesting opportunities that arise. So yeah, I'm pretty flexible. I I don't see myself not being in coffee for a long time. But whether it's what I'm doing currently or something else pops up, who knows?

Speaker:

You never know where things lead. So I read an article not long ago and I know this from talking to you as well, but I read an article not long ago about coffee prices.

Speaker 3:

Yeah.

Speaker:

What's going on there? Yeah. So

Speaker 3:

coffee, I mean, coffee is sold, bought and sold on the commodity exchange, you know, like gold or oil or whatever supply and demand. Brazil's the largest grower of coffee in the world, and essentially what happens in Brazil pretty much dictates where prices go. Brazil's now, the harvest we had last year was their fourth harvest in deficit, which means they've got less coffee than they have demand for.

Speaker:

Right.

Speaker 3:

And so essentially that's all it is. There's more people want to buy coffee than there is coffee to buy. Yep.

Speaker:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

And prices are high. Yeah, wow. And, you know, everything else is high. So, our shipping cost in the last two years has gone up 300%. The cost of doing business has gone up. You know, finance and interest rates and the great Australian peso that we're currently dealing with. Yep. Just, yeah, it all puts coffee prices up. And so, I

Speaker:

guess for a consumer at the coffee shop, at some point we're not going to see these little, adjustments to price, we're actually going to see some, you know, big jumps in coffee price soon. Yeah, I mean wages going up, rent going up, now the actual bean price.

Speaker 3:

The coffee cup price is actually a very interesting discussion, right? So, so, coffee beans have probably gone up for roasters 100 percent in the last two years. Yep. But in terms of a cup price, it's not a huge increase, like the, in a cup of coffee, the cost of the physical coffee is very low, maybe 60 to 80 cents. Yep. So when you're talking about price having doubled over the last two years, it's probably gone from 50 cents to 80 cents, let's say, because the raw ingredient cost isn't the only, you know, it's not doubling the end price.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

So we've maybe gone from 60 to 80 cents. One of the real shames with cafes is they, or what we call GST farms, everything a cafe purchases is GST free. Everything they sell includes GST. So first off, let's say you're paying 4 for a coffee, 40 cents of that's GST. You've got nothing, you know, a little bit of electricity or you know, paper cups, minor things to offset it, but you're essentially generating GST free. GST out of nowhere.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

10 percent GST. So your 4 cup of coffee, 0. 40 is GST, 0. 80 is the beans, maybe 0. 20 in packaging. And you know, if you look at what wages are doing, if you open on a Sunday, you're paying a 16 year old 35 an hour.

Speaker:

Yep. And I've always looked, you know, commercial real estate background, I always look at the rental side of it. It's high rents for something that has a very narrow window for bringing in the revenue. Yeah. I mean, outside the hours of sort of six till, you know, six in the morning to lunchtime, no one's drinking a lot of coffee in this country.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. And, and I guess to put some, to put a couple of things in perspective, right? So when I opened my first cafe in 2005. We sold a small dine in coffee for 3. 20.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

You can still find that coffee for 4.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

That's not a huge increase in 20 years, 22 years. Secondly, the number of cafes open is huge. So there's such an oversaturation. You know, if you, when I guess when I was in roasting and wholesale, we would have coffee customers in the city, multiple doing 80 to a hundred kilos a week. Now that's. over five or six hundred cups of coffee a day. So if you're making a tiny margin, but you're selling a lot of cups of coffee, it's fine. Yep. Now you may see one of those, two of those. Realistically, the average cafe is probably a 20 to 25 kilo. So not only is there higher costs, but there's so much more competition. And so the volume is not there for them. The number of cups being sold a day might have doubled, but the number of cafes gone up tenfold.

Speaker:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

I don't know, this could be a market correction that we're seeing. But also look at, you know, look at beer. You know, 20 years ago you could get a pint for 5. Now no one, no one bats an eyelid at a 10 schooner. But, you know, people are blowing up about potentially paying 6 for a coffee.

Speaker:

So we're both doing Sydney. Yes. Is it going to be a PB you aiming to

Speaker 3:

You know, we're, you're probably similar. We're all runners. You never go out expecting it. You always go out hoping it. Are you going to train for a PB? Absolutely.

Speaker:

All right. Always got to train for

Speaker 3:

a PB. What's your

Speaker:

PB for a marathon? 329. Oh, wow. You and I are not running together.

Speaker 3:

What's your PB?

Speaker:

Oh, 345. That's close enough. And and then I only, so I did Gold Coast one year and I did 345 because that's what I had in my mind to do. You and I. I fought that voice in my head to do it. I went back the next year, having said I was never going to do another one, went back the next year to run slower to try and enjoy it more. That did not work. Yep. And and I was done. I was never doing another marathon. And then they made Sydney a major. So I figured, I've got to. You can't turn it down. Got to. So.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, but you're running fast now. Short distance? Yeah, that's, that's all counts. I mean, I, I went out, I went out to run a sub 3. 30 marathon, super ambitiously for my first marathon.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

When I made that call, I had, don't know if I'd run a sub 1. 40 half yet.

Speaker:

Yeah. Okay.

Speaker 3:

But that was my goal. Got to be ambitious. I'm like rather aim, aim high and you know, I don't want to be conservative and work my ass off to, Get an average, you know, not, not that any times average, but you know, within yourselves, what you're capable of and you go, well, a little more than that would be great. So I set out on, at a 3. 30 pace, first marathon hit the wall at about 28 K's came home 3. 38.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

Second one, exact same strategy, hit the wall at 36 K's, came home 3. 32. Yep. Next one just all came together. Yeah. Wow. You know, so that's, I know now I've got to readjust.

Speaker:

Yeah. See what happens. Thank you very much for chatting to me today. No problem. Cheers mate. Cheers. There's a coffee that's in the world. I know exactly what you're going to ask me. That is poop. Some animal's poop is coffee, right? How does, how does that work?

Speaker 3:

So, in this a bit cat, Sorry, that's an animal? Animal, yeah. So it's like a, kind of like a weasel. Right. In Indonesia, funny enough. And in its digestive tract, it has this, Whatever. Enzyme. Yep. That creates a very unique fermentation. So it eats the cherry? It eats the cherry. Yep. Whole? Whole. Okay. Poops it out. Yep. And while it's digested it, the intestinal enzyme has fermented it in a specific way. Right. And somebody thought let's roast that? Not going to speculate on how that started. Let's see what this looks like. Yeah, absolutely. So, and then it kind of was a bit of a novelty thing for a long time. And then, I don't know, something happened. I don't know what. It became popular like 20, 25 years ago. Yeah. Definitely when, when I started in coffee, it was like the, Oh, have you ever tried it? It's, and it was expensive. You know, places were selling it for a hundred dollars a cup. And I've tried it and I've bought it and it's fine. Have you started feeding cherries to other animals to see what they're like? Actually, yes. Right. So, so two things happened. Firstly, what happened is they started battery farms. Oh, wow. So then it sort of instantly lost popularity. And then the second thing that happened is they started going, Oh, what if what other things eat these cherries in the wild? And then, you know, you go through. But it was very much novelty. Yeah. I think if you ever come across it, try it.

Speaker 4:

Yep.

Speaker 3:

In What's it called? Kopi Luwak. So Kopi is just coffee in Indonesian, Luwak is the type of animal. Okay. Yeah, I mean, if you, if you're traveling, like it's, if you're ever in Bali, which most Australians are at some point in their life, you can get it a lot of places. It's an experience, you don't turn down experiences, right? Nope. Nope. I've done, I've eaten and drunk worse, exactly right, exactly right.

Speaker:

I started life as an espresso drinker. I

Speaker 3:

think we've

Speaker:

actually met. Right. Like,

Speaker 3:

12 years ago, I was thinking about it. Ever since you posted a photo of yourself or a video when you were bigger. Yep. I'm like, I swear we've met Caboolture, the cafe there. Not Evolution. Not Evolution. Older. Older. Older. The guy, Justin Bold was the owner. Ha! Double

Speaker:

brass. Yes. Double brass. You, you

Speaker 3:

went

Speaker:

there? Yeah, absolutely. It was called Double Brass.

Speaker 3:

So, so were you, were you I supplied them, so that's back when I was roasting coffee. Right. Thank you. That's

Speaker:

awesome, cheers.

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