A Revival in Every Cup...
Red Barn and Arbuckle Coffee
There I was, a Fast food operator with seven locations working 12-14 hours a day trying to grow the business even more so that I had the revenue and profit to work a little less and spend time with my young family. We owned Red Barn restaurants in central Pennsylvania.
The thing is, at the time I was struggling with different ideas and decided to add a breakfast menu.
The big problem was that this meant EVEN more long hours away from home.. That meant I had to be there to make sure the breakfast menu was launched correctly and get customer feedback myself, which meant I was on the clock to see that the new menu was totally successful and worth all the preparation and extra long hours.
Then, as if by chance, something amazing happened...
I made a shocking discovery about our coffee or lack thereof...our customers told us we had the absolute worst cup of coffee and some of them were not returning!
Instantly it became crystal clear to me how to turn things around for every customer who tried our new breakfast menu; research how to provide the freshest cup of coffee in town. Coffee they would ask for by name. I could see that utilizing my research skills from being a history major in college and growing up on a farm gave me the extreme work ethic and training I needed to accomplish my goal.
My plan was to start reaching out to industry experts about what made a fresh high quality cup of coffee and everything that went into doing that consistently.
So I started buying Specialty Coffee that was roasted a better way and delivered fresh without the poor standards of allowing it to go stale in a warehouse or truck. But we didn’t stop there.
We then researched expired food trademarks and discovered that Arbuckle Coffee which was once the largest roaster in the country was available to register as our own Trademark.
After that, we started our coffee company roasting our own specialty coffees under the Arbuckle name.
Building on that success, we decided to resurrect the legendary Ariosa Brand which had been John Arbuckle's top seller in the late 19th Century. Again, being a history major I loved learning as much as possible about all that John and Charles Arbuckle did to become the most successful coffee roasters in the United States. They were literally the first roasters to package roasted premium coffee in one pound packages for retail sale.
We call it “Arbuckles' Ariosa as well and even included the peppermint stick; a food premium that John Arbuckle had included in every pound of coffee back in 1873”.
I can now say we are America's Original Coffee: our customers start their day with The actual Coffee That Won the West! They're tasting that Revival every morning while They Enjoy the Sunrise!!
And that's why I'm so excited to share this with you so everyone can start their day with Arbuckle Coffee!
-Denney T. Willis