It is time to go down to California for that per­fect cup of cof­fee and have a nice chat with another suc­cess­ful roaster-retailer. Give it up to Stephen Vonkolkow, the happy owner of Café Virtuoso, a cen­trally located San Diego café and roasterie.

V.     Stephen, how would you com­pare the cof­fee scene in San Diego to the big boys’ (Seattle, New York and others)?

V.     There has been a real trend over here in the last 10 years in every direc­tion. It used to be a con­ser­v­a­tive, sleepy, lit­tle mil­i­tary town, but now it’s much more progressive.

As far as the cof­fee goes, that is my per­sonal opin­ion, but the wave is just start­ing to build, and we are still catch­ing up to the other big cities. That actu­ally was one of the things that really spurred me to get into this busi­ness – an “A” game needed to be brought into town.

There are an increas­ing num­ber of peo­ple in San Diego who value good qual­ity cof­fee and are will­ing to go our way for it. These are real cof­fee fanat­ics who find us and say, “Wow! Some good cof­fee in here.” It is a great time to be around in my opinion.

V.      How has the busi­ness being going?

V.     We are grow­ing very steadily. We started this busi­ness about a year before the reces­sion hit, but we had grown dur­ing the worst eco­nomic times, and last year we have more than tripled in size in terms of the vol­ume going out of the door, num­ber of cus­tomers, and vol­ume sales.

V.      As the owner, how would you describe the café and the customers?

V.      I have recently received a com­ment from a barista that came from Portland. He said that we looked almost like a lab. Our café is really built around a roas­t­erie. It’s geared towards being able to let peo­ple sam­ple cof­fees quickly.

We have sin­gle serve in addi­tion to brew, and we do the espresso thing really well. But all of that is built so that peo­ple can sam­ple the cof­fee that we have because remem­ber, we are mostly whole­sale.
The café is start­ing to become known as a hip trendy place. This par­tic­u­lar neigh­bor­hood is a lit­tle indus­trial, a bit edgy, but there are also some art schools, so there are many “cre­atives,” who uti­lize our space and do a lit­tle bit of blog­ging about us as well.

V.      I have noticed an inter­est­ing trend that the major­ity of roasters-retailers are fol­low­ing. They choose to move their roas­t­er­ies to a sep­a­rate loca­tion after a while, for rea­sons such as noise and dis­trac­tion from the retail aspect. Are you plan­ning on going in a sim­i­lar direction?

V.     No, I don’t think so. We enjoy our all-in-one open set­ting, and we feel like this is an essen­tial part of our ambiance. It can be noisy in here when we are in full pro­duc­tion, but our cus­tomers seem to enjoy it. It’s wide open, and we are tak­ing our cus­tomers on a mini tour on a reg­u­lar basis, show­ing them how our cof­fee is roasted. Most of them are really intrigued by it.

V.      What kind of roaster do you use?

V.      We use a 12 kilo Diedrich. That is strongly my pref­er­ence. I use it a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent – some­thing I won’t be able to expand on for the sake of keep­ing the company’s secrets safe – but I found it to be the most con­sis­tent roaster in our mar­ket that is capa­ble of mak­ing the best cof­fee out there.

It is also extremely energy effi­cient. And the after­burner that we bought for it uses one-third less gas and puts out one-third less of CO2 emis­sions com­pared to the ther­mal after­burner that you would nor­mally use. Ours costs twice as much, but it pays out in gas sav­ings. Plus, I know that I’m putting out a lot less CO2.

V.      How do you source your coffee?

V.     Well, we have about twenty dif­fer­ent vari­eties, and it’s too dif­fi­cult to have a direct source and a large selec­tion at the same time, so I do use importers. Our cof­fees are 100% organic, and we are Fair Trade certified.

V.      I have noticed that you use Facebook and Twitter accounts for your busi­ness. Are there any other mar­ket­ing tools that you use for promotion?

V.      Absolutely, we also have a lot of cus­tomers com­ing from Yelp. I would say that there is not a day when three to four cus­tomers come by and say that they found us on Yelp.

However, there is another impor­tant thing that we do to pro­mote our­selves. We have started our busi­ness through the farm­ers’ mar­kets to develop our prod­ucts and to get our brand out, and we have actu­ally held on to one of them. The biggest farm­ers’ mar­ket here in San Diego is in Little Italy on Saturday. It’s a huge event, over five blocks, and we have stayed in that because we get a lot from it. We receive enor­mous amount of feed­back from the cus­tomers, and also reserve many whole­sale accounts because chefs work through this mar­ket to find ven­dors. In any given mar­ket we brew up eight to ten dif­fer­ent cof­fees, keep them turned over, and do sam­pling, sell cups, talk to cus­tomers. We also sell quite a bit of retail bags there as well. It is an amaz­ing mar­ket that every­one should visit when in San Diego. Look for a big line, and you will find us.

V.      What do you think makes you successful?

V.      The num­ber one fac­tor is our top to bot­tom empha­sis on qual­ity: all the way from the beans that we buy to the roaster that we use. We pay atten­tion to the details in each stage of our busi­ness. For exam­ple, when we set up our whole­sale accounts and bring in the equip­ment for them, we make sure that their pro­grams are com­pletely dialed in, so that their staff is trained and makes the same cup of cof­fee to the one that they sam­pled in our roasterie.

I also think that every­one on our staff is on the same page; we always try to keep our qual­ity curve up, and it shows and draws for us. I don’t know any cus­tomer that we have lost. Once they find us they become part of the family.

V.      Is there some­thing that you would like to share with the cof­fee world?

V.      We are in a period of great uncer­tainty – cof­fee prices have been ris­ing in the last year – but all of us who are in this indus­try have to stay true to the vision of a con­tin­u­ing effort to increase our qual­ity. We all need to keep push­ing the qual­ity curve up, and this is where the future of the cof­fee is.