BACKBONE-Coffee by Design

Primo Coffee Makers

Mary Allen Lindemann and Alan Spear have grown Coffee by Design through nonnegotiable quality standards, no matter how high the price of green coffee goes, or how big the company gets.

The heart of Coffee by Design is a pair of drum roasters in the back room of the company’s headquarters on Washington Avenue in downtown Portland. One roasts about 25 pounds of green coffee beans, the other 55. They’re manned, always, by head roaster Dylan Hardman, who carefully monitors every made-to-order batch—watching, listening, smelling, and making minute adjustments throughout the slow-roasting process, which generally takes 15 to 16 minutes, about twice as long as many competitors.

“It’s not the easiest way to roast coffee, but it’s the best,” says Hardman, adding that the hands-on process is art rather than a science, bringing out the intricacies of the bean itself. Many competitors, small and large, are more automated. But the couple who owns Coffee by Design (CBD), Mary Allen Lindemann and Alan Spear, refuse to compromise the ideals on which they started the company in 1994, with a coffeehouse on Congress Street, during a recession, when downtown Portland had a 40% vacancy rate and more than one business leader they respected told them the business just wouldn’t work.

It did. Today, Hardman is one of 45 employees at CBD, originally envisioned as “Mary Allen and I and a part-timer,” as Spear says. The company has grown for 17 consecutive, all-profitable years, to four retail locations, and a wholesale business serving more than 400 accounts—
coffeehouses from Wells to Machias (such as Café Crème in Bath), a Who’s Who of Portland restaurants (Fore Street was one of their first custom-blend wholesale accounts in 1998), and national customers all the way south to Atlanta and west to San Francisco.

CBD sells coffee, foods, and merchandise, much of it sourced locally and in Maine, at its stores and online. They sell a range of products wholesale customers need to run their businesses—equipment, foods, syrups and bases—along with consulting services, including training, equipment service, and the kind of relationship that helps wholesale clients succeed. Wholesale makes up about 60% of revenues, with a goal of 80%.

In 2010, CBD moved their fourth shop, in the L.L. Bean flagship store in Freeport, from a second-floor coffee bar to a bigger, gleaming space on the lower level. They also completed a major renovation of the original coffeehouse and rented a 10,000-square-foot warehouse behind the Washington Street store/roastery—all in another recession.

“We took some big steps last year, some risks, but they felt good,” Lindemann says. “We always tell our staff that we made a really strong commitment to our customers early on, and we need to live up to that. We all have seen businesses do well at the beginning and then they grow too fast and what was special is gone.”

“I think it comes down to being authentic, and not contrived,” Spear says. “We wanted great coffee, the best. And we have the palate to know what the best is and the skills to produce it. We’re not going to compromise that, regardless of the economic times or the fact that green coffee pricing is at an all-time high [$3.50 to $10 a pound for most CBD beans].”

The commitment goes beyond coffee, too. The ideals at the foundation of CBD’s success extend to aiding local causes, to the way they treat their suppliers and workers, and to sustainability.

Spear heads up the company’s sourcing operation, traveling “to origin—coffee farms in Central and South America, Africa and Asia—where he buys the best coffee from farms that implement sustainable practices, and seeks ways Coffee by Design can help those farmers and their communities. (For example, Spear recently sourced coffee in Jardin, Colombia, and CBD donates $1 per pound brewed or sold to a local fund for civic projects in Jardin.)

Efforts like this are detailed on their website, www.coffeebydesign.com, where customers can learn about the regions, suppliers, and coffees. “We’ve doubled or tripled our online sales since launching the new website last summer,” Lindemann says.

CBD’s commitment to community continues in Maine, where its growth has dovetailed with downtown Portland’s renaissance. Lindemann, whose background is in advertising, helped found Portland Buy Local, and CBD is also committed to the local arts scene and other causes. The Rebel Blend Fund, now in its 13th year, uses $1 donated from every pound of Rebel Blend coffee brewed or sold at CBD to award grants to Maine artists and art organizations.

Even closer to home, CBD provides full benefits to its employees, along with the opportunity to grow with the company. Key management positions are filled from within, including roaster Hardman, who joined the company as a retail manager, and later apprenticed under Spear. A large training facility sits upstairs from the roastery to make sure that frontline servers make every cup with the same commitment to detail that Hardman has as he roasts the beans.

“It’s so important,” Lindemann says. “When a customer sees our product, they know it’s going to be great, and they know that we did it—sourcing, manufacturing, customer service, cupping—the right way. That’s the key to our success.”

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