Name: BLUE BOTTLE
Uploaded: 2014-09-16
Duration: 2 min 35 s
Description: BLUE BOTTLE

[ MUSIC ] My name is James Freeman and I'm the founder and CEO of Blue Bottle Coffee. This idea of coffee being a prepped food was very exciting to me. I would drive down to south San Francisco, buy green coffee, unroasted coffee in little one pound sacks. And I would put it on the. We're afraid of baking, she filled the kitchen with smoke. Kind of a crude way of roasting coffee, but it was very exciting to me. I started just selling beans, like me on a forlorn little table selling a bag of beans. And then I got an espresso cart and I was able to buy that sort of on the installment plan. Around 2008, I got involved with this non profit called Inner City Advisors. And they hooked me up with this great advisor, his name was Jim Harrison. He was a former CEO of [ UNKNOWN ]. And he said well let me introduce you to this investor who was an early investor in [ UNKNOWN ]. And so I met that gentleman Johnny. And he invested in 2008. By 2012 I had seen the demand around New York. And, the lines and everything. And I thought if we could figure out how to do this on a wider scale. That would be very interesting. To work at this detailed of a level. To be this careful with our profiles and our preparation. And to do it on a wider scale that's something in my opinion. That hasn't really happened. [ MUSIC ] I don't spend a lot of time thinking about how rebottle is different. I spend a lot of time thinking about how I want things to look, and how I want things to feel. My opinions about coffee spaces have changed a lot over the last 12 years. I like nice. Sort of clean spaces. I like beautiful buildings. I, but we don't have a palette. We don't have a easily recognizable identity from store to store. Starbucks has 23, 000 cafes. Starbucks has created this market. I wouldn't be talking to you if Starbucks didn't create this market, create, you know, thousands, millions of coffee drinkers. And tell them it was okay to pay four bucks for something. I can't imagine getting to 23, 000 cafes. So the goal, I wanna be able to scale better than anybody else has ever scaled in terms of quality. I want the coffee to get better and better every single year. And that has to be measured and reported on. I don't really care how many. Is it 1000? Is it 500? Is it 230? I dont' know what that number is, but that's what I want to do, I want to get better with what we do and do that on a wider platform. [ MUSIC ]