The “Welcome Box” and other great ideas brewing at FreshCup Magazine
Fresh Cup, an online magazine for coffee and tea professionals, is filled to the brim with great ideas.
So we asked Garrett Oden, publisher, to share how two of the most successful ones work: A Welcome Box of samples sent to new coffee shop owners and a Salary Survey of the same group.
First, the back story: Oden also owns Alimentous, a content marketing agency for the coffee and tea industry. He took over the 29-year-old print magazine after its revenues fell off by 50% during Covid, and the original founder put publishing on hiatus. Oden relaunched Fresh Cup as an online magazine in 2022. With two small businesses and a newborn, he answered our questions on a Loom video, at night, when he said he finishes work.
He considers the Welcome Box, a free gift of coffee and tea-related samplers for new and soon-to-be business owners, as his most successful new initiative, accounting for 10% of revenues this year, and an expected 20% plus in 2024.
The gift boxes are sent to coffee and teach shop owners, who have or will open within a year. This is a prime market for FreshCup’s advertisers, Oden said.
”You are in an impressionable stage. You are evaluating partners and products. You are expanding your menu. So these are people who are starting wholesale relationships, so they are valuable for people who are trying to get those wholesale deals,” he said.
“These people are very excited to get their products into the hands of new shop owners.”
Instead of giving advertisers the contact information of shop owners, Oden puts a postcard with the advertiser’s QR code in the box, so that “There’s no catch” to receiving the gift box, but that recipients still contact wholesalers to discuss making a purchase. QR codes also provide a method for tracking results.
Oden says the samples are equally popular with coffee shop owners. He estimates that about 2000 to 5000 new shops opening in the U.S. annually generate about 40sign-ups a month for gift boxes. At this rate, Oden estimates they will send 400 to 500 boxes annually. He has sent more than 100 boxes out so far, marketing through industry groups and the website.
“The welcome box is really the thing that people are thrilled with. Sponsors love it. The respondents love it.” They can also use the postcards for sponsors such as POS systems who do not have product samples.
“It’s very fun. It was inspired by becoming a new parent with our first child. We were receiving boxes of samples.”
People who are building out a coffee shop are in a similar start-up mode in need of a little fun. “It’s a very stressful time. They are investing a lot of money. It is probably their dream; they are staking a lot on. So we should do something fun to welcome them, give them a nice experience, and make them feel like they are supported by a wide range of companies in the industry.”
“It’s not a wild amount of revenue for us, about 10% of our business for 2023,” he said, anticipating that 2024 may be upwards of 20%. “We’ll see.”
The Coffee Shop Owner Salary Survey
If there is one thing coffee shop owners are also interested in, it’s how much money everybody else is making. Published in September 2023, Oden built the survey on modular form-builder, Tally.so’s, and promoted it to 25,000 monthly visitors online and in industry groups of which Oden is a member.
With so many questions, filling out the form was a heavy lift – it took about ten minutes to answer them. Eventually, the minimum of 100 responses was surpassed, and they closed the survey at 155 respondents.
To identify insights from the survey, Oden hired a data analyst to work with the raw data and map out rough charts. An internal designer polished up the visual for publication.
Beyond averages – $48,234 for a coffee shop owner, $53,374 for a coffee roaster owner, and $62,635 for both owners – the analyst correlated data on company age and city size.
The result was more reports, What Do The Highest-Paid Coffee Business Owners Have In Common? and Survey Results: Six Recurring Themes That Shine A Light On Coffee Business Owner Challenges. One insight is that outside funding sources are required for many to “fund the coffee business dream.”
There are more innovations we liked in this online magazine:
The Gear and Tech channel has valuable articles such as “Five repairs this coffee tech says you can do yourself” and “We asked three cafe managers for their must-have work tools. Here’s what they said. “
An editorial policy link at the top of each article, connecting to a policy written in plain English, lets readers know how to identify sponsored content. and how product reviews are conducted. It is a good one to use as an example.
Finally, we liked the separation of newsletters into a news digest and exclusive stories: The Filter, a content and community newsletter, and Coffee News Club, a curated take on the week’s news with up to 20 links out to sources.
Oden said the content agency still produces about 60% of the company revenues and shares resources, including content producers. The online publication is on track to become profitable as a stand-alone company. In the meantime, many learnings from content marketing are transferred to the publication.
”We’re not starting from scratch,” he said.
Many thanks to Oden for sharing these initiatives.
