André and his wife, Vanessa, created the brand Bona Coffee Roasters in 2017, and roast specialty coffees from around the world, including Brazil, in Boulder, Colorado, USA. And the biggest challenge, according to them, is competition!
In time as chaotic as the current time, many Brazilians dream of starting a business abroad, and that was the case with André Di Bonaventura. Being a coffee lover since an early age, for his Italian grandmother loved to have her coffee prepared at Bialetti together with her grandson. Chance made him create a strong bond of friendship with Rita and Felipe Croce, from Fazenda Ambiental Fortaleza (Fortaleza environmental farm – FAF is the acronym in Portuguese), when they were still children. The families lived next door in Ubatuba, on the northern coast of São Paulo, and spent many summers together.
Raised in the neighborhood of Granja Vianna, in Cotia, in the Center area of the state of São Paulo, André already considered himself a “coffee snob” even though he had never tasted specialty coffees, which happened when he first visited the FAF farm (read the article here), in Mococa, in the countryside of São Paulo. “Whenever I could, I would visit their farm, then I frequented the Isto é Café coffee shop, I got very close to the owners”, he told us.
A friend which was a granger moved to Boulder, Colorado, and André and his family went to visit him and fell in love with the region. André returned to Boulder on another occasion to study English and take a video course and returned to Brazil to finish college. “Being here, I thought a lot about opening a coffee shop but, as at the time there was a rock band, the “Fabulosa Banda do Joker” (available on Spotify), with a declared influence from Los Hermanos and David Matthews Band, the most he could do was become responsible for making the coffee for the kids from the band”.
A year after his marriage, tired of the traffic of Raposo Tavares and São Paulo, he decided to move to Boulder for good, with the advantage that he already knew the city, and also knew that he would find an excellent quality of life and a lot of life outdoors. free. “I knew that Boulder already had some specialty coffee shops and my wife, and I thought it would be the ideal place for us to set up a roasting plant,” he says.
Subtitle: “Boulder is a city of almost 110 thousand inhabitants, in the state of Colorado, with a population of high purchasing power. Recently, due to the Pandemic, many employees of Big Techs like Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook have moved to the city and surrounding areas because of the high rental costs in California,” as he explains.
The investment
They created Bona Coffee Roasters (@bonacoffeeroasters) with an investment of $250,000, which included the purchase of a Loring Roaster smart costing $80,000 Roast, www.loring.com, made in California. Its main differential is that it is a sustainable machine, since the roaster’s flame is not in direct contact with the grain, which is heated only with the hot air produced by a kind of cyclone, located at the back of the machine. The smoke leaves the environment clean, without generating environmental residue.
In order to meet the demands of the American market, which is highly professional, it started to live more closely with the people of SCA (Specialty coffee Association), took many courses and training, visited all fairs and exhibitions about the subject, to strengthen the relationship, including with producers from other countries besides Brazil.
Roasting meets customer demand for the brand’s subscription service, restaurants and coffee shops and is equipped with a test room and a laboratory, which is also used for the Saturday morning cuppings. “We partnered with Airbnb, which made it possible to receive coffee lovers from all over the country. In addition, we also use the space for courses, where we teach latte art, among other things. The truth is that we try to help local establishments, since around here many people who are not trained baristas end up playing this role. So, we realized this difficulty and offered our knowledge”, he told us.
In the same building, the front part is used to serve to-go customers. A month before the pandemic broke out, they established a partnership with the brewery Sanitas Brewing Co. www.sanitasbrewing.com , to run a small coffee shop inside the venue. They had to close after 30 days, but since last year they are in full swing and looking for other places to replicate the model. “It worked very well, and this is a way for small entrepreneurs in Boulder to help themselves, since rents here are very expensive”, he explains.
Of the 10 bags that roast per month, five are of Brazilian specialty coffees, the rest are from different origins such as Sumatra, Kenya, Guatemala, Colombia, etc. “One of the great advantages of working from the USA is that here we have access to all the best coffees in the world and we can experiment and create sensational blends ”, as André tell us enthusiastically.
Plans for the Future
The plans are to grow with the opening of new coffee shops within other establishments and, of course, to keep the restaurants and coffee shops that are already part of the family, working with the brand’s coffee shops. “These customers have been with us for four years, since our inception. What I notice is that some establishments are starting to roast their own coffees, I think it’s a trend that we need to watch out for. Anyway, we can help in the training of these professionals”, he explains.
At this moment, six professionals work in the family, three of which are baristas and a professional specialized in roasting, in addition to André. Vanessa takes care of the less glamorous but no less important part, which is the bureaucratic part, online sales, and social media.
Product line
Its product line comprises three to four blends and four to five unique origins. The brand’s best seller is Sant’ Omero espresso Blend, named after his grandfather’s hometown of Italy. It is a blend whose base is made with Brazilian and African specialty coffee. Another success is the Curupira Breakfast Blend, and the Jobim House Blend.
In the unique origins line, the highlights are Yargachê, from Ethiopia, Sumatra, Bob-O-Link and Bob-O- Dark, both from Brazilian coffees shops.
The packaging
Created by the Brazilian agency Aldeia Ideias www.aldeiaideias.work, the new packaging for Bona Coffee Roasters are a Brazilian show by itself. Gabriel Hardt, the creator, explains that the brief was to go from kraft paper packaging absolutely the same as many others to something that presented a path of its own. “My bet was to find a way to praise Brazilian culture. For this, I started looking for elements of the culture until I reached several coffee producing regions in Brazil. And one of them was Serra do Cigano, in Pernambuco, which is also the land of cordel culture. Without appropriating, of course, I was inspired by cordel and its wood carving process to develop several designs, inspired by the daily lives of people on coffee farms, whether in the return to work, grain selection etc.” as he told us.
The result is that Gabriel delved deep into the framework of Brazilian popular culture and had the audacity to mix Tarsila do Amaral, revisited, by the way, with cordel. In another drawing, the coffee beans become the Southern Cross Constellation. In a third exercise, the artist makes the hummingbird the main element, always using the color yellow, which is not accompanied by green, but. even so, fully exalts Brazilianness, bringing a whole new concept to the packaging, which would certainly deserve an award.
The packaging labels were also developed in colors based on the SCA flavor wheel, to specificate the types of coffees offered.
