Coffee is an essential part of most people’s mornings, and although America may run on Dunkin’, Philly runs on Saxbys. The popular chain is all over the city with locations in Rittenhouse, Center City, on a few college campuses and even in New Jersey. Saxbys’ newest location in Point Breeze just recently opened its doors —- but this venue is not a typical Saxbys cafe.
Saxbys opens first roastery launching a brand new coffee program
Saxbys now has its first roastery in Philadelphia, and with the impressive new facility comes an all-new coffee program helping to project the popular chain’s mission, “Make Life Better.” According to Saxbys founder and CEO Nick Bayer, the coffee company has always been highly focused on the people and purpose aspect of the business and now it’s time to elevate the product portion beyond the already-tasty blends Saxbys has been known to previously serve.
“We’re known for our mission core values and for our culture and we’ve attracted all of this talent,” says Bayer. “But I knew that we were ready to be as fanatical about our product as we are about our purpose and people.”
To get to the next level, Saxbys hired vice president of coffee David Amos to achieve that exceptional status and bring the new roasting program to life. Amos has been in the coffee business for over a decade in both the sourcing and origin side, and also the wholesale side of the biz. What the coffee connoisseur was looking for was a new challenge, and like a perfectly mixed blend of coffee, Amos and Bayer merged for a delicious result with the new roastery program.
“I was looking for a new challenge and this one was significant,” says Amos. “I wanted to do something a little bit different using the skill set that I had developed over the years and also get involved in something brand new. Saxbys was serving coffee every day that they felt good about, but wanted to elevate and also have a connection to the coffee. I proposed to Nick right off the bat that we would only serve coffee that I’ve gone and sourced at the origin and from someone that we have a relationship with on the ground for every single coffee we serve. That’s actually more of a challenge than you would think, it really holds us to strict guidelines for sourcing. With our size and scope, almost nobody else is doing what we’re doing.”
Amos has traveled to nine different countries to find the perfect contacts on the ground and also the ideal coffee to bring back to Philadelphia. Both Amos and Bayer love that aspect of the new program; their new roastery even has a map on the wall of the world with pictures connected to the areas they have gone, highlighting memories from each trip. On each coffee excursion also came new friendships formed, fortifying yet again Saxbys’ mission to truly be a business for the people.
“Our culture has always been about people,” says Bayer. “I think that it’s pretty easy in the coffee business to purely look at it from the product side, but we took a different angle to that. We understand our consumers, and we wanted to travel the world and find them an even better product that we think they are going to love even more than the one that they were drinking before. We are taking our commitment and the culture we’ve built around human to human experience and building a coffee program around that. It’s really exceptional. 900 workers at Saxbys now are going to get to learn coffee at a whole new level.”
At this time, the Saxbys Roastery is roasting and bagging four new coffee blends: the Pep Talk with notes of butterscotch, chocolate chips and dark cherry; the Liquid Courage Dark Roast with notes of dark chocolate, maple and vanilla; the Go-Getter Espresso with notes of burnt caramel, honey and black tea; and the No Strings Decaf with notes of baker’s chocolate, nougat and soft cranberry.
Although both Bayer and Amos are vehemently excited about the state of Saxbys new program and roastery at this time, they also see the future for the company as being brighter than ever.
“I think right now we’re on a really great track, it’s just about expanding,” says Amos. “We want to continue to do what we’re doing, but even more. We’re excited to potentially put some custom blends together and reward our partners at origin with more and more product that we can buy from them. It’s just all very exciting, and we now have the ability to do that.”
To learn more about Saxbys, their new roastery and program, visit saxbyscoffee.com
