Coffee focus still brewing strong in West Coast cities
By Allen Liddle
Reprinted with the permission of Nation's Restaurant News
In terms of coffee outlets per 10,000 residents, nine of the top 10 U.S. cities or metropolitan areas are found on the West Coast, recent NPD Group research determined. And regarding the Top 10 cities by total number of joe-dispensing establishments, the West Coast again dominates, with six representatives, according to the trend investigator.
It's nice to have such things quantified from time to time, but those findings hardly are news to anyone who lives in or travels through that region. For decades, entrepreneurial beanheads, consumer demand and spirit of adventure have combined here to create a percolator of sorts that draws up and concentrates coffee innovation.
NPD's restaurant census ReCount division determined that, overall, the number of domestic coffee outlets increased by 7 percent in the most recently tracked 12-month period. It reported that the Top 10 cities/metropolitan areas by coffee outlets per 10,000 residents and the number of outlets per 10,000 people were: Anchorage, Alaska, 2.8; Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash., 2.5; San Francisco, 2.2; Bellingham, Wash., 2.1; Portland, Ore.-Vancouver, Wash., 2.0; Bremerton, Wash., 1.9; Boulder-Longmont, Colo., 1.8; Olympia, Wash., 1.8; San Louis Obispo-Atascadero-Paso Robles, Calif., 1.6; and Santa Rosa, Calif., 1.5.
The Los Angeles-Long Beach area is tops among U.S. cities/metro areas in actual number of retail coffee outlets, with 801, according to NPD. The Port Washington, N.Y., company reveals the other nine as Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, 628; Chicago, 568; New York, 525; Portland-Vancouver, 419; Minneapolis-St.Paul, 384; Washington, D.C., including parts of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, 379; San Francisco, 373; San Diego, 344; and Orange County, Calif., 326.
West Coast dominance in the coffee bar/shop development race is evident, but how did we get here? Obviously, much of the credit has to go to Starbucks Corp. The Seattle company's Starbucks Coffee chain has more than 9,000 retail locations worldwide, a good portion of which are in its home market, the West Coast.
But the Starbucks phenomenon did not spring from a vacuum, nor is it solely responsible for contemporary coffee fanaticism along the Western Seaboard. The sparks that lit the current caffeinated-beverage inferno originated from many places, including espresso-selling hole-in-the-wall joints in San Francisco's North Beach Italian district.
In the 1970s, but possibly as late as the early '80s, at least one luxury hotel in San Francisco was realizing impressive incremental sales in one of its fine-dining restaurants with a tableside coffee cart. The cart was operated by a woman who brewed-to-order beverages made with beans imported from exotic coffee-growing regions and who tried to share with guests the romance of coffee as well as its variety of flavor profiles.
Proof that the "Left Coast" was becoming a hotbed of latte lovers early on also was evident in the 1982 formation of the Specialty Coffee Association of America in Long Beach.
Starbucks the past few years has staked its claim as the major force in the drive-thru espresso wars, ending its last fiscal year with about 700 such auto-oriented stores. However, the groundwork for that concept was laid in the late '80s and early '90s by West Coast independent operators and small groups, including Coffee People, now a Diedrich Coffee division, which opened its Motor Moka in Portland, Ore., in 1990.
Another Oregon operator and franchisor, Dutch Bros. Coffee of Grants Pass, is among the larger also-rans in the drive-thru espresso niche, with more than 60 such outlets in the West as of mid-March.
Nonetheless, people still are waking up to the refinement of coffee marketing and consumer education in these parts.
Pastry chef Kimmel Kington of San Francisco's Fog City Diner recently joined with specialty coffee supplier and retail coffee bar operator Boyd Coffee Co. of Portland to educate food and restaurant writers about pairing coffees and pastries. Boyd's Gary Jacob supplied pairing insights based on the characteristics of certain blends, and Kington turned out such eye-opening fare as raspberries stuffed with chocolate-Chambord-truffle paste. The berries were served with a coffee made from a combination of beans from Indonesia, Brazil and Colombia.
