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For those who don't want all the fuss, Michael Butz,
president and founder of Peakland Coffee Service in
Beltsville, has built a thriving business selling
coffee to offices. According to the business journal
Automatic Merchandiser, office coffee service nationally
was a $3.39 billion business in 2004, and it is growing.
Peakland customers have their choice of coffee makers,
including a high-tech, one-cup machine similar to the
Saeco or an air-pot brewing system that pours fresh
coffee into thermoses, thus ending the acrid smell of
office coffee boiling to death on an electric burner.
Butz says new customers are often looking to upgrade the
coffee service in the executive suite, overlooking the
high-end coffee aspirations of lower-level employees.
But eventually, folks on other floors follow their noses
to the good stuff. In the interest of office morale,
many clients eventually decide to offer everyone the
higher-quality brew.
Peakland sells three brands of coffee -- Gevalia,
Starbucks and Quartermaine, the last roasted in
Rockville and available at Quartermaine's Bethesda store
and at its Rockville roasting plant. "We run taste tests
for our employees and our customers. Quartermaine always
wins. It's a rich, smooth coffee that's easier on the
stomach than Starbucks," he says.
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Though some prefer other brands and some
accuse Starbucks of overroasting, the Starbucks
name has tremendous cachet. Many employers
throughout the region insist on Starbucks coffee
and pay extra for paper goods embossed with the
Starbucks logo -- to please employees and
impress visitors. One such company is K12 Inc.,
a McLean publisher of print and computer-based
curricula with a staff of 200-plus employees. |
When Fran Roman, director of procurement and
administration at K12, introduced free Starbucks
coffee four months ago, employees flooded her
with grateful e-mails. And no wonder: Many of
these employees were paying out of pocket for
Starbucks coffee. |
Heather Charles, senior finance manager,
says before Roman made the upgrade, coffee at
K12 "literally made me sick." So she and some
co-workers organized a coffee club. Twice a day,
a member would fight Northern Virginia traffic
to make the run to a Starbucks drive-through.
Charles kept a spreadsheet. "I was spending $6 a
day for coffee." Others were spending as much as
$12 a day. When the office began providing
Starbucks, "it was like getting a raise." |
According to K12 management, in-house
Starbucks is paying for itself in increased
productivity. "I was losing up to 40 minutes a
day of Heather's time," says Charles's boss,
finance chief John F. Baule. "I couldn't afford
that." |
The cost effectiveness grows, he adds,
when you multiply the time lost going out to
Starbucks by some proportion of the 200-plus
people who work here, he adds. |
The fact is, Baule says, that many of the
people in his company, himself included, "run on
caffeine" -- which may explain why he thinks
"for workers today, coffee is a much bigger deal
than it was in the past." |
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