Don Pablo Brings The Cafe Into Your Home

Each brand of coffee brings something different in taste or style. Burke Brand Coffee offers it’s own style and special traits that those big box coffees don’t.

Many of us only ever think about coffee as what we find in our local café or what we purchase in the coffee isle of our local store. Darron Burke gives us many good reasons as to why we should look elsewhere, as well as a look into an area business that he has made his own.

When was Burke Brands conceived and what was the inspiration behind your coffee?

I met my wife Eliana in Miami in 1989, and she brought me to Colombia, South America, where she was born. There I met coffee farmers and roasters and discovered great fresh roasted Arabica coffee. We started bringing Colombian coffee brands back to the U.S. and people went wild over it. That’s when we recognized an opportunity, and when the idea for Burke Brands was conceived.

What separates your coffee from the competition?

There are basically two types of coffee manufacturers; huge food conglomerates, and small artisan roasters. The big companies roast by the ton on a production schedule, blending in “filler” beans to increase margins, and often over-roast the coffee to mask the taste of the inferior beans. The result is a bitter, stale, coffee with an unpleasant aftertaste.

Artisan roasters use specialty coffee; Arabica beans that are grown at high altitudes in distinct geographic microclimates. They roast these beans in small batches by sight, smell, and sound, in a process that is half art and half science, to bring out their optimum flavor. True artisan roasters never blend coffees to increase margins, they roast to order for optimum freshness, and they don’t over-roast the beans. This process results in a much higher quality and better tasting coffee, but is also much more expensive.

Our coffee is a true artisan roasted product, but because of our innovative business model and large volume customers, we are able to make it available at half the price of traditional artisan roasted coffees.

We also have an innovative CSR program called “Sharing Certified” that gives our coffee farmers a percentage of our roasted coffee sales if they reach benchmarks in four areas; improving labor conditions, sustainable agriculture, protecting the environment, and growing better coffee. If they grow better coffee, we sell more coffee, and more money comes back to them to help them reach the next set of benchmarks. Its incentives and rewards rather than charity or subsidies, and it gives the farmers a chance to participate in the free enterprise system as we know it in the U.S. Here’s a link to more info: http://www.cafedonpablo.com/sharing_certified.html

Why coffee? What was it that made you choose coffee over all the other business possibilities available?

It’s a unique time in the history of coffee. The industry has recently been turned on its ear. Consumers are discovering that they can get something much better than what’s been available to them over the last fifty years, and now more than ever, based on quality and value, innovative specialty coffee companies have a chance to compete with the big food conglomerates for market share.

How many different coffees do you have available for purchase?

We now have two brands; Café Don Pablo and Pablo’s Pride.

We roast single origin varietals including Colombian, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Panama, Brazil, Kona, Kenya, Tanzanian, Ethiopia and Sumatra. We also blend coffees for our very popular Signature Blend, Artisan Blend, and European Blend, and we have some great water-processed decafs, and some incredible espressos.

I could imagine most people don’t know much about the process coffee goes through, so would you mind sharing what that process is that the coffee bean takes from plant to purchased product?

Coffee is an agricultural product and starts as a seed planted in the ground. That same seed can be processed, roasted, and brewed for a cup of coffee. The seed takes two or more years to mature into a productive plant; it flowers, and then produces what’s called a “cherry.” In the cherry are normally two seeds, or sometimes only one, which is called a peaberry.

There are two basic methods of processing; wet and dry. In the wet method the seeds are extracted from the cherry, fermented and washed, and then dried in the sun or in large ovens. In the dry method, the entire cherry with the seeds still inside are dried. In both methods the coffee is then milled to remove the parchment and/or what is left of the cherry.

The coffee is then roasted and packaged either ground or whole bean.

The journey from seed to cup is actually much more fascinating when you consider the history of coffee, and the people and places involved in its production.

Why did you want to become an entrepreneur?

I’ve always enjoyed being creative, taking risks, and being the captain of my own ship.

If you were to retire tomorrow, what would you say is the one thing that you’ve learned from business that you can use in your every day life?

Everything has to be win-win, and mutually advantageous.

Did you have any previous knowledge that you were able to apply when you get into this business?

I’ve always been interested in business, language, and culture. I guess I’ve been a student of each of those subjects most of my life, and I believe that may be a contributing factor to the success of our company.

Is there anything you regret, or wish you could change, that has happened through out your time running Burke Brands?

My only regret is that we didn’t start our company a lot sooner. I never realized I could enjoy working so hard, and I regret not finding my passion a little earlier in life.

What would you tell someone who asked you for advice on starting in the coffee business?

I would recommend they either find a niche or create a breakthrough value proposition if they planned on going head to head with the big coffee companies. I would also advise them to learn as much about coffee and the coffee business as they possibly could, and to begin to develop mutually beneficial relationships with others in the supply chain. And to have faith and never give up.

« Previous Post

Next Post »