Being a busy Columbia University stu­dent, I often find myself lost amidst the small, but busy streets of Greenwich Village to for­get the hor­rors of the yesterday’s midterm and to observe con­sis­tently care­free faces of the New York University students.

Which cof­fee shop puts the smiles on their faces? Apparently, most cof­fee drink­ing takes place here at Think Coffee café on 238 Mercer Street. What struck me the most about the place is that the times that I have been here, day and night, it’s lit­er­ally packed like sar­dines, 90% being stu­dents and young pro­fes­sion­als. I haven’t yet encoun­tered a cof­fee shop that was so full of peo­ple. An inter­view with Think Coffee’s owner, Jason Scherr, shed some light on its secrets to success.

M: Your cof­fee shop is really large with lots of seat­ing capac­ity, and it looks like you have never had a prob­lem fill­ing it up. How are you able to main­tain a con­stant flow of cus­tomers despite rig­or­ous com­pe­ti­tion both from fran­chises and inde­pen­dent cof­fee shops here in Manhattan?

J: Most cof­fee shops in Manhattan, that are not Starbucks, typ­i­cally don’t pro­vide much in the way of seat­ing. And that is because rents are steep, and I totally under­stand that. We have made a deci­sion we wanted to be a community-gathering place, so by larger spac­ing we pro­vide seat­ing, and I think peo­ple just want to sit and have a cup of cof­fee in New York. We think it is impor­tant that peo­ple have a place to drink a cup of cof­fee, it is not that they are forced to walk the streets, and it’s part of the expe­ri­ence of drink­ing it is hav­ing a place to do it, plus we want good food that pairs well with coffee.

M: You have a wide selec­tion of items on the food menu, some sal­ads, sand­wiches, soups, and bagels. How impor­tant is food in the cof­fee shop?

J: We believe good cof­fee tastes bet­ter if you have the right food paired with it. We make bagels to order. Which you would think in New York it would be easy to get a good toasted bagel with cream cheese and cap­puc­cino, but to my knowl­edge we are the only ones who do that. The one thing, we don’t bake, because it would dis­tract us from our busi­ness model, but every morn­ing we pre­pare good, high-quality sand­wiches on premises and we throw them out in the end of the day if they are not sold. We don’t have them made by some­body else and get brought in wrapped up in plas­tic. However, we don’t want the qual­ity of our cof­fee to be over­shad­owed by any other ele­ments of our busi­ness, so our food menu is designed not to inhibit our abil­ity to serve cof­fee. Serving food is also impor­tant though because it helps us to pay the rent by increas­ing over­all sales.

M: How did you join cof­fee busi­ness community?

J: I used to be a lawyer in New York, but about 12 or 13 years ago, I moved to Brooklyn, and opened a cof­fee shop in Williamsburg, at a time when there were no cof­fee shops. When I did open, I was a per­son behind the counter mak­ing the drinks, doing all the things that needed to be done to make the place go. It was a great expe­ri­ence and I got to know many peo­ple. Sort of a com­mu­nity feel­ing that we were will­ing to cre­ate and at the time it was very much an artist com­mu­nity, very small. Based on that expe­ri­ence I was try­ing to repli­cate what we have cre­ated on a small scale on sort of a larger scale. So, now we have four oper­at­ing cof­fee shops in Manhattan in close prox­im­ity to each other, and I am about to sign a lease for a new one on the 8^th Ave between 13^th and 14^th street.

M: I have noticed that most of your cof­fee is Fair Trade, but there was some men­tion of the Farmer’s Dividend pro­gram on your web­site www.thinkcoffeenyc.com, could you please expand on it?

J: We really are try­ing to under­stand where the cof­fee is com­ing from and what the rela­tion­ship is to the farmer. One of the things we do, is we pro­vide what is called a Farmer’s Dividend. The indus­try came under fire for dis­par­ity between the price for a latte, for exam­ple, of $4.50 or $5 dol­lars and the amount that the farmer actu­ally gets. How do they ben­e­fit from that? So we actu­ally pro­vide a dol­lar per pound directly back to the farmer. Matt, one of our staff mem­bers is now on his way to Nicaragua and El Salvador to meet the farm­ers who actu­ally grow our cof­fee that we are sell­ing here and give them a dol­lar per pound. Now, there are lots of logis­ti­cal prob­lems with that includ­ing being able to actu­ally reach the farmer, since fac­tors such as the polit­i­cal cli­mate and the cof­fee farms’ phys­i­cal remote­ness in those coun­tries doesn’t make it easy for us to get to the farmer directly. But we are def­i­nitely work­ing in good faith to make it hap­pen. We also give 10% of our prof­its to a com­mu­nity based char­ity in the neigh­bor­hood where we are doing business.

M: There has been a recent trend in cof­fee shops to start roast­ing their own cof­fee. Where do you get your beans and would you con­sider roast­ing yourself?

J: We get our cof­fee from Porto Rico, they roast in Brooklyn. I don’t think Think Coffee will ever be roast­ing cof­fee. We learn so much from our rela­tion­ships with cof­fee roast­ers. We would be con­cerned that if we iso­lated our­selves by try­ing to bring the whole pro­gram in-house we would reduce, rather than expand our edu­ca­tional expe­ri­ence. As far as one of our main future goals, we are work­ing in the direc­tion of mak­ing peo­ple inter­ested in where their cof­fee comes from. One of the rea­sons we call it Think Coffee is because we want you to think cof­fee. You have to think about what’s in your cup, where it comes from, how it tastes and how the farmer who grew it ben­e­fits.
Think Coffee sets a model for a suc­cess­ful cof­fee shop in a city like New York. Despite high rent, Jason wasn’t afraid to intro­duce the idea of an inde­pen­dent cof­fee shop that has a large capac­ity and is

just a nice place to hang out, study and get a nice freshly made bagel and cap­puc­cino, Jason’s favorite treats. At last, I hope that more cof­fee shops will fol­low Think Coffee’s exam­ple of con­cern for the cof­fee farm­ers’ prof­its and will intro­duce pro­grams sim­i­lar to “Farmer’s Dividend.”