transcript.
Los Angeles
July 2019
On The Future of Bread and Coffee
Alexandra Fattal leads a conversation on the future of coffee and bread with Chad Robertson, Chris Jordan, Daria Illy and Davide Longoni.
Panel
Alexandra Fattal
Former Italy Correspondent, The Economist
Chad Robertson
Co-Founder, Tartine Bakery
Christopher Jordan
Former Verve Coffee CEO and Tartine Bakery COO.
Daria Illy
illycaffè Director of Coffee Culture
Davide Longoni
Founder of Davide Longoni Pane Terra.
Alexandra Fattal
Former Italy Correspondent, The Economist
Good morning everyone. We have here with us today Chad Robertson, founder of Tartine, Christopher Jordan, COO at Tartine and head of Coffee Manufactory, and then from Italy, Daria Illy from illycaffè and Davide Longoni, the leading artisanal baker in Milan. We have the two Italian equivalents of Chad and Chris here for this conversation. So I’d like to start with Chad. Chad, tell a us a bit about what brought you to start Tartine and your own story.
Chad Robertson
Co-Founder, Tartine Bakery
I was studying to be a chef in Europe, and once on a weekend trip I visited a baker, this was back in 1991. You know, in the United States we didn’t really have an artisanal bread tradition. So it obviously came from Europe when Americans started to drink wine with dinner, and then bread followed and cheese followed as well. So I grew up in Texas, and I tasted long fermented naturally leavened bread for the first time when I was actually 21. Then, you know, everything changed.
We started 17 years ago, in 2002, with a small corner bakery in the Mission in San Francisco, and we’re still there. Since the beginning, we just made it sort of our work to continue to get better and better, and maybe 10 years in I was working and still making the bread by myself. I did that for a long time, when I finally decided to train a bread team, and then I started to look out at other chefs around the world. Now I find the most fulfilling thing for me is building teams and bring new chefs in.
Alexandra Fattal
And you were saying that you constantly wanted to share what you’ve learnt and push the limits and is that what brought you to go into coffee?
Chad Robertson
I just wanted to work with Chris. I asked him, whose coffee should I buy? And he said, let’s make our own!
You know, he’s lived in Africa for seven years, and worked building infrastructures there. And so for me, that was the hardest part, the sourcing and building relationships with farmers. That’s the origin of it, and that’s where he’s coming from, and he has a massive experience.
Alexandra Fattal
So, Chris, you used to work at Verve Coffee and before that at Starbucks. So tell us, how was it for you to come to Tartine and start a coffee production from scratch?
Christopher Jordan
Former Verve Coffee CEO and Tartine Bakery COO.
First of all, I mean, being a founder of a company is unique. I was CEO at Verve, and there’s nothing like being a CEO, there’s just no point of view that’s different. Unless you’re a founder, which has been a lot of fun. So I actually spent most of my time, actually 16 years, at Starbucks. For 10 years out of 16 I was in the coffee manufacturing department, so it was everything with regards to roasting and quality control. And then for 6 years I was on the trading side, and then I was in Europe and Switzerland, working in procurement. Interestingly enough, in 2004, when I started that job in Switzerland, it was not too long after Hurricane Mitch hit in Central America, and we realized 60 to 70% of our volume of coffee was from Central America. So Howard Schultz asked me to focus an entire year on diversifying our supply chain. And, you know, we continue to see those issues happening now. And so I went to East Africa, as part of that effort to diversify, and we ran into a group called TechnoServe, in Southern Tanzania. So I tasted the coffee there and it was amazing. And I said this is really where we can diversify in East Africa, so moving a little bit away from South America and to East Africa. But there were infrastructure issues, issues with smaller supply chains. And so together with TechnoServe while I was still at Starbucks, we actually pitched to the Gates Foundation, and they ended up giving us $58 million. So my wife and I moved to Rwanda, and after that to Ethiopia and we ran those programs to help producers put infrastructure in place, like wet mills.
You know, you wouldn’t think it but in Ethiopia a lot of coffee that was sold as commercial coffee derives literally from spontaneous trees and from the fruit fallen on the ground, and it’s sold for really, really poor prices. Putting together the primary processing infrastructure, helping with agronomy and market access, it almost tripled prices for those producers.
So that’s more of my background. And then Chad called…
I actually came back from Africa and I realized there had been a third wave in coffee, I had no idea I missed the whole third wave. And I think there is a really interesting conversation to have here, and I’d like to talk to Daria more about this. I see small roasters that are proliferating, like husband and wife starting a roastery, and I think it’s awesome. But also what happens there is that their infrastructure is really small, you end up buying spot coffees, so paying more for coffee, you’re actually sometimes having less transparency, you’re really inefficient, you’re handbagging bags, so your cost of conversion and production is really high. So the ability to really get money back to producers is sometimes compromised. And so I think medium-sized companies really need to take more action, again, like illy did. And so we’re trying to grow because I think growing, so the ability to scale craft, allows you to buy container loads of coffee directly from producers.
Anyways, Chad called, we started the roastery, my wife and I started roasting on our own. The first two coffee purchases were from a producer that I bought from for many, many, many years while I was at Starbucks. And this was because I wanted to work with friends, so we could work with producers as producers. Unfortunately, coffee has an incredible colonial past and it’s never really truly been partnerships, like people actually talk about, and I wanted to talk with people in the country of origin, I wanted to be able to have a partner in coffee producing. So I went directly to the people I knew, and then I went to a coop which was one of those built by TechnoServe and the Gates Foundation. So those were our first two coffees at Tartine, we are now three years into it and it’s been a fun journey!
Alexandra Fattal
You were talking about collaboration and the problem with the smaller producers. Are you looking to collaborate with other companies, such as with your equivalents, like other people like you to buy coffee together? Do you see collaboration possibilities there?
Christopher Jordan
Yeah, that’s a great question. Absolutely. And I think that one of the things that Chad’s done really well is the fact that everything he does is open source, because of the books that he published. When I was at Starbucks, we were a big growing company and weren’t allowed to talk to anybody. It was so refreshing for me to leave and to be able to be informed and learn from people. And one of the things that attracted me was that I was actually going to start my own roasting company with my wife, and I was going to take 20 years of my experience and I was going to apply it into a new company. And when I talked to Chad, he talked about this place [Tartine Bianco in LA, Editor’s note]. And he talked about this being a place for innovation, collaboration with younger chefs, a place to talk about changing the food systems, like a food think tank. And all of a sudden listening to him I thought, I don’t want to just apply everything I’ve learned, I want to continue to learn. And so we hosted things here also in the coffee world, we are partners with SCA, the Specialty Coffee Association, and worked together anywhere we could collaborate.
Another thing to mention is that we have our platform, our sustainability platform, and we’re working with producers on it. The reality for us was that there are too many certifications already and we’re putting these efforts on producers, and it’s more cumbersome in a system that’s already difficult for producers. So I think the more that the industry can collaborate and create one system to make sure that coffee demands the right price and that is sustainable, the better.
Alexandra Fattal
Daria, tell us a bit about your experience with making coffee and the relationship with your suppliers.
Daria Illy
illycaffè Director of Coffee Culture
Well, my friend here said everything! The third wave is hitting part of the problem of how we approach the markets. To give a little background, illycaffè was created in 1933 by my great great grandfather. So we’re now at the fourth generation. The third is still working in the business, it is four brothers, actually three brothers and a sister, and they’re all involved in the company. I’m the first of the new generation involved in the company, and I’ve been working there for already 10 years. So I think that where we were special, where we made a difference on the approach years ago, was the fact that we wanted to help growers produce a better quality in order for them to get paid more in order for us to always have that good quality.
So we talked about medium-sized companies and the job we need to do together, those that think of it in the same way, to maintain quality. And the way that we want them to be building is through appropriate training, best practices, and agronomy. Also because we have so many issues, including climate change, which are all coming out now. So the risk we have is that there might be no more quality coffee around. So what happens to those who worked their whole lives to make a difference and to help growing the system? We have an issue there. So the approach is very important, an approach of continuing education and working with the farmers.
Chris, you talked about certification. So I was in Rwanda, and I saw a stocking place with a Certified Coffee sign, so I went there and looked at the certified coffee and I then asked the growers, “who pays for this?” And the answer was, “Well, we pay the auditors”. I don’t think I need to comment further.
So what you were saying about the approach, I have repeated this, but it’s very important, because the certifications that are in place are really not what we mean by a sustainable approach, because being really sustainable is making sure that everyone has a place in the industry, and that it’s a healthy and wealthy place to be.
Alexandra Fattal
I remember a few years ago, we had a talk with Riccardo Illy and he was saying the he borrowed an idea from the wool industry, I think from Ermenegildo Zegna: the idea of awarding prizes to growers who could grow the best quality and keep growing high quality coffee in their region. Can you share this with us?
Daria Illy
Sure. So this was almost 30 years ago. Riccardo, one of the four brothers, had this idea back in the 80s, when we were a very tiny company, with less than 100 million Euros in revenues. And the idea was to get people to want to learn more. And the story starts in Brazil. You know, Brazil is first producing country for coffee, but they’re always also the second coffee drinker. So it’s a very difficult market. And it was very hard to find the right quality there. So what he did is to have producers compete in a positive way. So our team went around, worked with the growers, taught them best practices, showed them what was wrong when we got samples that didn’t work, what was wrong with the process, was it the drying or washing, was it the picking or the selection. And this elevated the quality significantly, and in the 29 years that we’ve been doing this the quality improved so much that now we buy a lot of coffee from Brazil. So this combines education and wanting to have a higher challenge through the prize we give and the sustainability action that we do through the education which is what now allows us to buy so much from Brazil. We then made this prize international, it’s been three years now that we have an Ernesto Illy Coffee International Award. This means that all countries where we buy from have access to the same award, which we host in New York, and we have three finalists for nine countries. illycaffè has nine ingredients which we blend, and we only have one blend.
Alexandra Fattal
So, coming back to bread, Chad could you talk to us a little about your approach to suppliers?
Chad Robertson
Definitely, there’s analogy to the bread world. Like I said, I started baking in the early 90s, and I grew up with white bread. I was actually studying to be a chef, before focusing on bread. And I saw that the chefs were having a lot of fun, with way more diversity of ingredients than bakers. Bakers in the US were really mostly focused on flour, and flour was like sugar, something you pull off a shelf, nothing special. For me it was like when I was a kid: growing up, I lived in a place where you didn’t have many types of tomatoes, and when I moved to California, when I was 21, and went to the farmers market in the summertime, I would see 50 varieties of tomatoes. So back to grain, grain is one of the last things in the culinary world to sort of start expanding and to celebrate diversity. I mean, now it’s radically changed.
When I started baking, and I had my own bakery, I focused on fermentation techniques. I was familiar with sourdough bread from Europe, I’m not sure about Italy but traditionally in France sourdough was commonly used at kind of a ripe stage, like 8 to 10 hours fermentation, so it’s a little bit sour, using a little bit lower protein flours, and it develops a much, much younger, and so much lower acid, so it doesn’t break the grain apart.
So maybe five or six years ago, I started to travel up to Washington State to work with the Bread Lab, which is affiliated with Washington State University. And they have a bakery there, and there’s their graduate program with students that work on selecting and growing wheat, for studying nutrition and disease resistance, all these different factors go into it. So three years ago I started collaborating more closely with them, to select the grains we are using now, and every year they provide some grains. It took a few years for them to grow enough grain to supply us, but now we have 3 million pounds of wheat growing there for Tartine for next year.
So we work with the growers on whatever grain is most sustainable for them, and then we taste them. We test like five to seven new varieties every year and then set the quantity. To support the farmers who grow the grain, we pay them for the seeds in advance and then we pay as they mill the grain.
Alexandra Fattal
And when you say what’s more sustainable for them, in what sense are you saying that?
Chad Robertson
I mean, traditionally in the US grain was grown for yield and achievability, for what would give you the most grain for lot of land, and what could be brought into a factory to make bread. So it wasn’t really about flavor. So now we are choosing based on flavor. Also talking about yield, I mean yield’s an interesting thing. In Washington State where a lot of our grain is grown, the yields are crazy, like five times the yield of the Midwest where most of the grain in the US is grown, which like in the middle of the country. Washington has a much richer soil, so you get a better yield.
So now that we’re, we’re scaling and growing our team, as we as we do in coffee, we start looking at where’s the best place to grow. This goes not just for grain, but for everything we serve in our restaurants. For example, for the meat we serve in the restaurant, we weren’t buying from California, but from where the cattle can eat the grass. So while we’re definitely looking at everything in regional, cause regional is great, local is great, we also need to balance things and look at sustainable practices.
Alexandra Fattal
And Davide, so you come from a family of bakers, but you tried to set your own path in it. Can you tell us a little about your approach?
Davide Longoni
Founder of Davide Longoni Pane Terra.
My father and grandfather were bakers, so I’m the third generation of bakers. I first pursued a classicist education and studied history, and then I got back to my family business, in 2002, and started baking bread myself. That is when I realized that in the industry the flours that were used were really distant from their origin, from the land, from the soil. So what I have been doing in these past 20 years is to try to bring bread back to agriculture, to reestablish an artisanal way of doing bread with a strong awareness of where the raw materials come from. What struck me it the alignment, the parallel, between Italy and the US, and I am realizing the entire industry is going in the same direction. Because we all had to learn again what artisanal bread was, we had to rethink baking both in the raw materials and in the techniques.
In agriculture, we had the so-called Green Revolution with the adoption of high-yielding varieties of cereals, the use of chemical fertilizers and controlled water-supply, and it was focused on productivity and increasing the yield. At the same time, artisanal bakers were trying to adopt industrial techniques, adopting standards of productions that were far form the artisanal processes. And so this created a reset of skills and know-how, and what I had to do was to basically start from scratch and recreate the knowledge that was lost in the previous generations of bakers, getting a lot of inspiration also from Chad’s work in the U.S. actually. I had really to find my way. Also because there is really not much literature on this. Something has started to emerge just recently, in the past five years or so.
Chad Robertson
I think it’s interesting because we have no tradition in America for bread, while Italy has a very strong tradition. It’s almost like when you when you choose to go against tradition, then you know you have to go around. A similar thing happened in artisanal baking in France, where they’re going back but to do so they are going around.
Davide Longoni
I actually find it easier in the United States compared to Italy where I have a lot of colleagues, like classic, traditional bakers that are seeing that this new industry is rising, but I’m actually not seeing a change from them. So I actually had more than seven people in my lab who left to open their own business. Those are people who were learning from me in my own bakery and now they have started their thing.
Another interesting thing is that these revolutions are happening in cities. So it’s happening in San Francisco and LA, and in Italy it’s happening in Milan, in Bologna, in Rome, and the situation in the Italian countryside remains the same. So the change starts from the cities. Usually historical changes happen in cities.
Alexandra Fattal
Davide you were saying that this is your first time in California and that you are amazed by everything you’re seeing. Tell us a bit about the things that have struck you.
Davide Longoni
Well, I feel dizzy, I have this strong sense of vertigo. Everything here seems to be going really fast, everything is really amplified. There is a sense of possibility beyond the imagination, this ability to look beyond.
Alexandra Fattal
You were telling me before about how you noticed here the focus on coffee from different origins, and how that made you think how in Italy you see this approach more on wines from different origins, and how from your place wine and bread were more close than coffee and bread. Which I thought was interesting.
Davide Longoni
I get a lot of inspiration from the wine world. In Italy in particular the wine industry faced a significant momento of crisis in the ’80s, when wine was produced in an industrial way, with the methanol scandal where some wine makers added methanol to their wines, which caused multiple hospital admissions and some deaths. After that huge crisis, the industry wanted to renew itself and today we have now reached more than 250 varieties of grapes and thousands of small producers, so in this moment in the wine industry the market is rich. I see this trend happening in the coffee world, with a many different beans varieties and origins, just like wine, with small productions that are starting also in California. So I take a lot of inspiration from the wine industry in Italy and I’m getting a lot of inspiration from the coffee industry here in California.
Alexandra Fattal
As we’re discussing about artisanal productions, I’m wondering how do you manage to retain that focus on artisanship while growing and scaling? You know, Chad, for example, how do you find the suppliers that you need as you’ve been growing?
Chad Robertson
To me that’s a pretty straightforward answer. Everyone asks us that question, that’s the number one question: how do you scale and remain artisanal at the same time?
You know, we have people making everything by hand in the tiny bakery in San Francisco, and we can make five times the bread we make in San Francisco here [at Tartine Bianco in LA, Editor’s note] with the same people. We’re always trying to utilize technology to empower our artisanal process, not to replace it. There’s certain things, you know, like putting the bread in the oven and taking it out. Well, you don’t need a human to do that part. There’s selecting the grain, growing the grain, milling it, there’s monitoring all the fermentation, that is what takes judgment calls from an artisan. Putting in and pulling out of a machine doesn’t require a human. So we try to really look at every step of the process and decide where we can implement technology and how to scale without compromising the quality.
Obviously, we’re trying bring more bread, more coffee, more food to more people. Right now, the U.S. is modeled on the farm-to-table artisanal food movement, but here in the U.S. it is really feeding less than 1% of the people. So to eat good food, like what we all Americans imagine it’s like in Italy or France, it’s 1% of the population that can access that. So we’re trying to bring more quality food to more people.
Alexandra Fattal
And how are you doing that? Educating people to focus more on quality?
Chad Robertson
We’re educating by making food all day, and trying to just make it more available, and more affordable.
Christopher Jordan
Also, when you’re small and you are innovating, I think it’s not just about the number of loads that you’re making, but it’s influencing a broader market. I mean, the third wave is small. But look at it, it created the Starbucks Reserve program, because they had to do something. So I think just doing stuff really well, making it really taste good, as well as be nutritious, and then all of a sudden, you know, people will come and they’ll eat your product, and they’ll talk about your product, and then other companies will have to change the way that they source grain or source coffee. So I think that we shouldn’t only talk about scaling, we can talk about the influence.
Alexandra Fattal
But, as you said, it’s still 1%, it’s still an expensive product and the majority of people are still focused on price. How do you think you can get to more people?
Christopher Jordan
I think there’s a couple different things with regards to our product. I think it’s our job to be able to show value, and one way is through quality. But for instance, Chad’s country dough is 2.5 Pounds [1.1 kilograms] of bread for $11, by the ounce it’s not expensive. So we’re looking at things like doing half loaves or doing smaller loaves, that are showing value. So I think it’s up to us to show quality consistently and show value and people will understand it.
I mean, I do joke with Chad, that we’re a terrible couple. You know, in the United States, bread is free on the table and you get free refills of coffee. And now we’re trying to get people to buy $10 loaves of bread and $4 cups of coffee. So it is a big task. But I think we have to. Again, it’s part of scaling. And the interesting thing of scale is that by scaling I can give value to the two people that are the most important in a very complicated supply chain: number one the customer, number two the farmer. Everything else in between should not be commoditized but it should be maximized, so that you can actually provide value to the customer and provide more profits to the farmers.
Chad Robertson
I think the influence, the part of us trying to influence things to raise the bar and to make it better, can’t be overstated.
When I went to France for the first time after growing up in the U.S., and it’s the same in Italy probably, I witnessed that when you go to a wine coop and you buy wine by the volume it is cheaper than water. It’s because the people that live there have determined collectively that it is important to have affordable, pretty good wine for everyone. And we’re just starting to make, trying to make it a collective demand for higher quality food in the U.S., for coffee, bread and so on. For example, in Germany everyone want their bread to be organic, they want it to be sourdough, they want it to be 15 cents. So I went to see these bread factories that are automated, making 500,000 loaves a day with just two bakers, and the bread was pretty good. And that is because the whole country demands that quality for a fair price.
Christopher Jordan
I think in the United States as well, we hope we’d see a trend where people will eat less but better. And so then all of a sudden your value proposition is very different. I’d rather just have something very good and eat less. So you know that’s all part of showing values. You don’t need to have 3 or 5 meals a day, if you eat really well, and more nutritious food.
Alexandra Fattal
Talking about scaling, we touched on how to keep the optimal process, but on the supply side I was wondering how easy it is to find the farmers and the growers who meet the requirements that you need. You know, once you need to grow the amount you need from them, for both coffee and bread, how do you tackle that?
Chad Robertson
It takes years of building relationships and supporting each other. I mean, we shared how we pay for the seed and for the grain in advance, and so we support the growers. And we’re trying to diversify our product range now. For example we have a line of crackers that can last longer. Because we’re trying to make sure that whatever the farmer has, we can use it. It’s our job to sort of take it. Whether it’s for pastry, bread, crackers, pasta.
Christopher Jordan
Our VP of operations was a chef, originally, and came from farming as well. So I think it’s also about how you set your priorities. If you look at our menu, everything you’ll see on the menu is seasonal. If something goes out of season, it comes off the menu. And I think again, it’s a part of educating people. If someone says I want strawberry but they’re out of season, we’d say don’t have that, but we have stone fruit. So I think it is continuing education, and really moving towards a more seasonal approach.