The Roasting Plant. Just think­ing about the name, one would expect to be over­whelmed by the heavy roast­ing machin­ery in the back, lots of cof­fee bags lay­ing around the place, and peo­ple try­ing to mon­i­tor the tem­per­a­ture in the roaster with seri­ous looks on their faces.
However, The Roasting Plant will turn your con­ven­tional cof­fee world upside down and will likely become one of your favorite cof­fee places on earth. Apart from pre­sent­ing state of the art tech­nol­ogy, it stands strongly by its ideals of free­dom of choice and effi­ciency.
I met with The Roasting Plant founder and owner Mike Caswell, a for­mer Starbucks exec­u­tive who was the head of the effi­ciency team at Starbuck’s; before he went on to estab­lish his own busi­ness venture.

V.     Tell me about the whole idea behind this mar­velous place. What dif­fer­en­ti­ates it from dozens of other cof­fee shops in New York?

C.     We wanted to make choices for our cus­tomers as open as pos­si­ble. Here, what­ever jour­ney cus­tomer wants to take, he can. We don’t impose “drinks of the day” pol­icy on any­one. The idea is to let peo­ple decide what is best for them by giv­ing them more con­trol over a bet­ter prod­uct that gets to them faster.

V.     So I see an impres­sive array of tubes neatly posi­tioned around the walls and the ceil­ing of the café. What is their func­tion, and how is it related to what you have said about the fresh­ness and free­dom of cof­fee choices being the dom­i­nant reli­gion here?

C.     These tubes are all part of our patented Javabot sys­tem, the heart of our busi­ness. Let me tell you how it all works. As you can see some of the tubes are filled with green beans, in fact this all our (about two day) inven­tory, all here. This lim­ited inven­tory guar­an­tees excep­tional fresh­ness of course. As we pre­pare to roast we go to the back room, press a few but­tons in our soft­ware pro­gram and voila, from then on every­thing is auto­matic. The exact amount needed gets sucked in to the roaster that is also com­pletely con­trolled by the com­puter, and the roaster then sends the fin­ished beans to dif­fer­ent hold­ing con­tain­ers for roasted beans. You can see that each one of them has its name, ori­gin and descrip­tion. The sys­tem can mix any cof­fees together to your spec­i­fi­ca­tions to cre­ate just the right blend .

As some of the green beans were sucked up and trans­ported into the roaster, I was amazed at how fast and easy every­thing hap­pened right in front of my eyes. There was no oppor­tu­nity for mis­take: the machine mon­i­tored every­thing from the exact amount of green beans needed, to the air tem­per­a­ture in the roaster up, and until the freshly roasted beans filled up the appro­pri­ate con­tain­ers. The over­all process took only about seven min­utes to com­plete includ­ing the time for the cold roaster to heat up. I couldn’t help but won­der about this tiny lit­tle work­horse roaster stand­ing in the cor­ner com­pletely on its own with tubes going in and out.

V.     What brand of the roaster are you using?

C.     It is a pro­to­type that we designed. Its time is about to be done, it served us well for two years, and we are get­ting a new one this spring, again designed by us from the ground up. In fact, pretty much every­thing that you see here we designed except the Apple hard­ware that the Javabot is using and the Egro Swiss cof­fee mak­ers. Ergo mod­i­fied these mak­ers specif­i­cally for us. Let me show how the drink gets made, it’s just as auto­matic as the roast­ing process.

We have stepped behind the counter, and Mike showed me a screen with a mul­ti­tude of but­tons rep­re­sent­ing dif­fer­ent choices of drinks, cup sizes, syrups and other ingre­di­ents. We pressed a cou­ple of but­tons, and it took less than a minute for the sys­tem to suck out some cof­fee beans from the con­tain­ers directly to the grinder, and from the grinder to the machine that poured out our drink. It tasted deli­cious, and need­less to say see­ing beans fly­ing above your head makes it even more special.

V.     So as far as I under­stand, it is all com­pletely automatic?

C. Yes, we just put green beans in the con­tain­ers every two days or so. Also, the milk steam­ing, we do it our­selves. The indus­try is just not there yet, but every­thing else is the machine. Our main inten­tion is to make a stress free envi­ron­ment for our cus­tomers and employ­ers. You order what­ever you want and the sys­tem makes it really fast and per­fect. You can always be con­fi­dent in the qual­ity and the ser­vice you will receive here.

V.     Does this wide use of machin­ery con­tra­dict envi­ron­men­tally friendly practices?

C.     Do we use more elec­tric­ity than a nor­mal cof­fee shop? Probably we do. But also there is no roast­ing plant some­where else. So we don’t have to have a facil­ity in Brooklyn with a one bag or five bag roaster, with air con­di­tion­ing and heat­ing for run­ning that roaster, or the labor, and staffing that whole thing and man­ag­ing inven­to­ries. None of that exists for us. What you see here is every­thing that it takes to make a cup of cof­fee from the green bean. There is no trans­porta­tion, so we are not box­ing it and shrink-wrapping it, and stor­ing it and then ship­ping it to the stores, it is all hap­pen­ing right here. And all the envi­ron­men­tal impact of these things that I just described doesn’t exist in our logis­ti­cal model. So we are really envi­ron­men­tally friendly.

As I was tak­ing a sub­way uptown to the Columbia University area, where I live, I was grate­ful to have got­ten to know this won­der­ful cof­fee shop that in my opin­ion is both an engineer’s dream and pos­si­bly the future of the gourmet cof­fee indus­try. Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA and The Roasting Plant can stand together on the must see places in New York list.