Monday, April 6, 2009

A Typical Discourse with a "New Kona Coffee Customer"

I was actually in email and realised I send these sort of things out all the time to new or potential customers that don’t know much about Kona Coffee.

I thought this might be something of general interest so with a bit of surgery (getting rid of specific names, etc.) here is what you might have received had you emailed me asking questions about our Kona Comfort Kona Coffee:


Hello ______,

Nice to hear from you again and glad to see you are curious about our Kona Comfort Coffee.

Well if you can remember Kona Comfort (think Southern Comfort), you can find the coffee on our website and we also have a vacation rental website. It has been very slow economy wise and we are not sure how long we can hold out but hope to still have vacation rentals next year. We live on the coffee farm so believe we will be producing Kona Coffee for quite some time into the future.

coffee: http://www.KonaComfortCoffee.com
vacation rental: http://www.KonaComfortRental.com

But you can always just type in the http://www.KonaComfort.com and it will direct you to one or the other destinations.

The shopping cart at the coffee site has various sales from time to time. When you actually sign up (register in the cart) and make an order, we set your account to get discounts off what newcomers would see; the motive is to reward our faithful returning customers. We have our fair share of customers who come back and order again all year around so it seems to be a system that is accepted and so far works very well. What many people may not realize is that with a natural product like Kona Coffee it would be counter productive to order a massive amount as it would not keep in its prime if not consumed. So we do have places that need large quantities and the cart gives them a break for ordering in volume, but for the home consumer, we give them a returning customer discount to help them out as well.

We don’t flavor our coffee, but we do sell it green (unroasted), roasted from very light to very dark and either whole or ground. A “medium roast” is what most people associate with the flavor profile of “Kona Coffee” -- past the first crack and just nicely into the second crack. A lot of people who are really particular buy our green and that way they roast it at home in small batches and that is the absolute freshest you can get. We used to do that as well before we got the farm — make small batches at home that would last a few days, then make another roast. Lots of smoke when you roast coffee! Now with selling coffee we always have some fresh at home from leftover batches. It makes so much smoke that we are covered with the roasted coffee smell but I don’t mind it at all it is pleasant to us, sort of like when you grind your beans in the morning for that first pot of coffee -- nothing quite like that wonderful smell!

Most folks get 8 oz. or 16 oz. bags for their own use. If they are giving as favors or at parties or corporate gifts sometimes they will order the 4 oz. Rarely does anyone want 2 oz. but we will send those as samples or when there is room in a box we are sending out...

Unless you are a big household or celebrating a holiday or get together with a house full of coffee drinkers, probably the wisest way to order would be 8 oz. bags, that way you can open one and use it, keep the others in the freezer. Once you open coffee and the air gets to the inside of the bag it WILL be progressively less flavorful each day. The bags are sealed when the coffee is still warm, it degasses and forces out oxygen thru the one-way valves leaving only carbon dioxide inside which does not age the beans like outside air with oxygen in it. Once the bags are opened, they resume aging and won’t keep as prime. Whole beans will remain much fresher longer than ground beans.

With green bean it can be many different volumes people ask for — but usually in pounds, one, two, three, five, sometimes even 10 pounds at a time. Green bean does not require a sealed pouch bag we can just put them into zip lock bags or if the order is big into food grade plastic storage bags -- and it is really amazing what will fit into the flat rate boxes when it is just a green bean order!

Well, I got to get to some stuff, it was nice to hear from you and nice to answer some of your questions,

Mike