HI Square Sellers! This week's interview is with Ritual Coffee Roaster's owner/founder Eileen Rinaldi. She talks about her decisive response to the Covid-19 crisis, conversion to a hybrid general store model, and her vision for the new future of coffee shops.
Tell us about your business.
We opened our first shop on Valencia street in 2005. We’re having our 15th year anniversary next month. It’s unbelievable. I just actually dug up the first transaction at Ritual. We now have 6 cafes around the Bay Area as well as our wholesale coffee roasting business.
Tell us about all these adaptations for Covid-19.
Ritual has been a very steady business. That is all out the window right now, so it’s like being back in month one of our business. You can’t just wait and see. You have to jump right in. I can’t sleep because I’m thinking of all the things I need to do quickly. I have an incredible sense of urgency. It’s survival skills.
I was super decisive, normally I use a very consensus-based approach for changes to the company but under these circumstances I needed to move really fast. We have two out of our six cafes open and we have completely modified the way that we do business.
Employee and Customer Safety
Our first priority was figuring out how to safely do business. Without that I wouldn’t have staff and I wouldn’t have the customers I wanted. So retooling everything about how we operate was super critical. If I didn’t make sure my team was taken care of, I knew I couldn’t expect them to take care of my customers properly.
We’ve been providing masks and requiring workers to wear them. We were really lucky because we have coffee friends in China and they shipped us a big case 6 weeks ago because they knew we would need them and they might become hard to get. We also set a timer and sanitize the shop every thirty minutes to be extra cautious.
We stopped letting people into the cafes even before the regulations came out. So only the baristas are inside the shop. We put a table in the doorway and took a page from our friends at Wrecking Ball Coffee and put up a plexiglass barrier with just a small gap to set the drink.
Cashless-ish
From the very beginning we asked customers to pay with a credit card or apple pay instead of cash. We’ll accept it but we really push to minimize as much as possible now. It streamlines how much we’re changing gloves and sanitizing so we’re basically cashless. There’s a lot of back-end efficiency gained too. I see this approach continuing on the other side of the crisis.
Order Ahead
We had been planning on order ahead for like 5 years, we launched it in one week. It’s basically a skip the line option, we don’t make the drink until the customer shows up but there is a special line. We have lots of signs up so everyone is aware of the two different options. In theory, someone from the regular queue could put their order in on their phone and save some time when it’s really busy.
General Store Conversion
The next big change was converting the Valencia Street shop to a general store. We had a dedicated catering employee so I re-purposed them right away to help build and run the store. We reached out to our pastry purveyor and asked for whole loaves of bread and it went from there. I use almost all woman-owned purveyors so we just started carrying a lot of great stuff: milk and oat milk cartons, Nana Joe’s Granola, my good friend makes Cloud of Protection hand sanitizer so I stock that as well. It helps our customers reduce how many separate errands they have to run. It minimizes their touch points.
Square Marketing
We’ve been a Square customer since 2011 but we actually just sent out our first marketing list and it had a huge impact on business. I’d been cultivating a mailing list on my own for 15 years and we’ve sent out campaigns using that but we just sent our first Square blast and got an incredible response. We have 70,000 subscribers so it’s a massive driver. It’s allowed us to add a lot of new recurring coffee subscriptions. We had people sign up that had come to San Francisco on vacation and now they’re becoming ongoing customers. It’s building brand loyalty. We would have never captured those relationships without this marketing approach. As of this week, we’re back to pre-Covid-19 numbers at our two open cafes which feels great.
The Future of Coffee Shops
I’m already mentally redesigning my stores for long term social distancing. We have an 18ft artisan community table, it seats like 24 people and I’m going to chop it up and convert it into a bunch of smaller tables. We also need to figure out how to maintain proper distancing for queues.
We’re going to keep the general store. I can’t think of any reason to not continue with it. I’m considering if table service for a section of the cafe will be necessary like you see in Europe. We will integrate order ahead into all our normal operations going forward. We’re not going back. Some things are forever changed.
Thank you Eileen! Great to chat.
