Podcast

Transcript

Josh (00:00)

Everyone welcome back to another episode of the five in 20 podcast by remarkable academic foods. I'm your host, Joshua Miller. We have another five or so questions in 20 something minutes. Today we have a steaming hot topic with coffee. That's right. This is something that is for everyone, every organization and so many people drink it. So of course you're here listening to this and we have Atomic Coffee Roasters with us today, which is a family owned specialty coffee company located in Peabody, Massachusetts.

They are known for their high quality, ethically sourced beans and expert roasting. Yes, the coffee is good. I actually had it when I visited Boston. And yes, they are supplying beans, of course, to more than just cafes and restaurants, but also school food service, high schools, colleges and universities, which is why they're here. And more importantly, they do so much more than just the beans. And I'm not going to spoil alert you this early into the episode. So I'm to go straight to introducing our guest, who is Logan Mahoney, VP of Sales with Atomic Coffee Roasters he's going to drop a ton of value. So make sure you stick around for this episode to find out.

All right, Logan, thank you for joining us today. And I'm so happy to have you here and to kick things off. We're going to go into an icebreaker question. I'm actually going to do a couple of series of questions to get to know you a little bit better. Actually know the answer to the first one, then we're going to listen to the other ones, which I don't know. first easy one, what is your favorite sport? And why is that your favorite sport?

Logan Mahoney (01:35)

football, no doubt. I played high school football, played college football, and I coach locally at my alma mater high school right now as well.

Josh (01:47)

Nice, nice. so college, so you do high school, but do you prefer in terms of watching TV? Is it high school? Is it college? Is it NFL? Which do you prefer?

Logan Mahoney (01:55)

College lately, NFL is so unpredictable. You never really know what's going to happen. College with the NIL is starting to seem a little bit more like that, but I still think there's a lot of loyalty and any given Saturday anything can happen. So it's definitely, I'm more glued to my chair on Saturdays than Sundays.

Josh (02:01)

Yeah.

Nice, awesome. And so last question on that is your favorite team.

Logan Mahoney (02:21)

Favorite team? NFL would be Patriots. College, you know, I've never, I played at a Division II level, so I went to Bentley University, I'd say them, but you know, if we're talking TV, Bill O 'Brien is a St. John's Prep graduate and he's hopefully taking BC to new heights, so I will, I'll say Boston College.

Josh (02:24)

Okay,

Awesome, nice. Cool. Well, let's go into our topic here of coffee, but first we want to get to know you a little bit more. So why don't you tell us more about yourself and your time with Atomic Coffee Roasters. Let's let people get to know who you are.

Logan Mahoney (02:55)

Sure, yeah, so, you know, I'm the Vice President of Sales here at Atomic Coffee Roasters. Atomic's my family's second generation business. I believe I am coming up on year seven. Things go pretty quickly. But, you know, I joined at a crucial time. We like to say it's like version two of Atomic. It was two of my uncles that founded it in 96. When they started growing the business, it was primarily retail focused.

And then in 2017, 2018, my father, who is their brother, actually bought one of them out. And that's kind of when we flipped and, you know, to focus more on wholesale. So my brother Spencer, who's our VP of operations, I pulled him into the business about six months after I got started here. I'm employee one, which is cool. So we kind of, you know, we revamped our team.

Josh (03:45)

Nice.

Logan Mahoney (03:49)

to support our wholesale needs and where we wanted the business to go. And our business has been awesome to kind of watch and see our team grow just in numbers and then what we're doing as a business to support cafes, restaurants, hospitality, food service. So yeah, and I kinda, I'm sure we'll get into it at some point, but kind of dip my toe in more of the classic role of sales B2B. But it's just been an awesome company to be a part of and help grow, especially with the familial aspect of it.

Josh (04:17)

Sweet, yeah, that's true family company that is for sure. So it's always great to support those types of companies. I actually worked for a food service contractor that is a large family owned one. So it's very unique when you have those companies that are still around. So in terms of Atomic Coffee Roasters, there's obviously a ton of regional coffee suppliers out there. But what sets Atomic Coffee Roasters apart from the many other competitors in the space?

Logan Mahoney (04:46)

Yeah, you know, think a couple of years ago, this would have been a harder question for me to answer. I think for, you know, what we bring to the table is we just want to help elevate experiences and coffee experiences wherever you're at in your journey. So we like to think that we have, you know, 12 to 15, 16 different coffees on our menu at any point. We would like to think that one of those might be attractive to you. you know, we have everything from a light roast, single origin you know natural process more fruitier on the grand scheme of things to all the way to a darker rosa coffee and everything in between so You know, we like to think that we're kind of a one -stop shop And that's for you know direct to consumer as well to as well as B2B and on the B2B side. I think it's our team Anytime I get into You know a potential new opportunity. I always say the biggest differentiator is our team anybody can roast coffee. you really want to get into it, you can learn it, study it, be a part of it, roast in really small batches. But I think where we've been able to get into different avenues of business is our team and our level of customer service and support.

Josh (05:52)

Nice. And speaking of your services and support, you guys do more than just a roast so you help with the equipment side of things as well, and the word I love, which is training. So why don't you tell us a little bit more about those parts of your business?

Logan Mahoney (06:08)

For sure, depending on, again, cafe, restaurant, food service, whatever it may be, there's obviously different needs with different types of equipment, whether it's more fully automatic with the espresso machine, which we do have nicer versions of those machines nowadays, but equipment is kind of the skin in the game.

We do a lot of mix and matching of like, hey, we can lease you this if you buy this, or a lot of people want to just buy their own equipment to have it. So it's a mixed bag, but just having the levers to pull that and say, hey, we've got this in stock, like we can get you up and going has been huge for us. My team on the sales side of things consists of myself. Our director of wholesale is Ellen Blanchett. She has a wealth of knowledge and...

Josh (06:39)

Yeah.

Logan Mahoney (06:48)

I always say she's kind of a unicorn in terms of having the specialties of she knows business and is kick -ass at sales and also can train you on latte art and that's really hard to find and it's really hard to do. I won't be training anybody on latte art personally. And then we also have Chelsea Miller who is segueing from wholesale support manager to adding a tech portion of her role in the next six months. So, everywhere from...bringing a lead in to closing it, to supporting them with equipment and then training you on, throw weights, whether it's just drip coffee, everything with espresso, how to tan properly, throw weights, every, you know, everything from soup to nuts. And that's one of the biggest things and where we've seen a huge need in these different segments.

Josh (07:28)

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. It's almost like a one -stop shop there because you can do coffee and you can just kind of throw a bunch of different, let's call it segmented solutions at it. And then you end up with segmented results. Whereas when you can go to a subject matter expert and they can help you execute everything from soup to nuts, it makes a huge difference and lifts a weight off the shoulders of the operators and the decision makers as well.

Logan Mahoney (08:00)

Yep. Yeah.

Josh (08:01)

In terms of, so you guys are regional. Obviously there's lots of other regional coffee roasters out there. What areas do you guys service right now?

Logan Mahoney (08:11)

We're like Maine to New Jersey. Yep. Yep.

Josh (08:14)

Okay. Gotcha. And so, and what I love about the conversation that we first had when we first spoke is that you guys are, yes, you can ship all over the place, but you guys really want to make sure that you're taking care of the customers and giving that full suite of solutions. So you guys are trying to like grow and, just look at the top line revenue of what you can bring in. You want the quality of what you guys are bringing to your customers as well.

Logan Mahoney (08:34)

Yep. Yeah. The relationship side of the business is what I enjoy the most. So just seeing, you know, the growth from when I started to being primarily just a North Shore based business in, you know, north of Boston to where we're at now has been huge. you know, I always say, like, if we can't get there in a car, in a day probably can't support them to the level that we feel comfortable about and that cafes and restaurants and colleges, universities can have that confidence in us and that's really what we're striving for.

Josh (09:07)

Yeah, it's sort of like the as frustrating as it feels like sometimes the in and out mindset, they won't come this far out east and they're like, they want to hold it close to the quality and the service and the supply chain. So that's all very, very cool. So in terms of making excellent coffee, great. Right. So is it really worth going in and buying a better quality? Because, you know, let's be real, they can just buy in the being said their main broadliner has on their trucks and their warehouse. It's the same platform. They don't have to get another vendor approved. Is it worth the excellent, great quality of going out and working with a partner like you?

Logan Mahoney (09:44)

Sure, yeah. Similar to what you alluded to earlier with it being a small family business, you're not, if you want to know something about the company, there's no layers to it. My brother and I run the day -to -day operation here. We're very accessible, we're very...out there, outspoken on LinkedIn, social media platforms. So we're very easy to talk to about our business, what we're doing, what we're trying to do. And then I just think the craft side of the industry overall is why we're not outside of the main to New Jersey, Pennsylvania, et cetera, because we can't have that level of support. And I think that...something that's huge that we do that not a lot of roasters that we even compete against do is we roast in small batches fresh to order. So, you if you're ordering, you if you order on a Monday morning, before we pull that data, at about 7 a we're gonna roast that up that day, probably ship it out either that afternoon or the following morning, and you're getting it by Wednesday. So to have that level of turnarounds, we were talking about that as a team yesterday, is people are like shocked about that and then they relay it to somebody else and then they might place an order online and then that gets to people that run businesses that run. So it's super cool to see that, something I didn't think of, but to maintain that too as we've continued to grow has been one of the coolest things and we're not sacrificing any level of the craft side of the business. Why my uncles initially got into the business

Josh (11:14)

yeah, so true. And for anyone that doesn't see the value in it, I would just say, try, right? Try the cup of coffee that you normally get and try a more premium quality side by side and you will definitely notice the difference. I know that I do every time. Awesome. in terms of like you mentioned a little bit towards it, like it's family oriented. You guys are small and you're hyper focused on the quality and you guys do

Logan Mahoney (11:28)

for sure.

Josh (11:40)

your presence with marketing, branding, is that really an important aspect that should be considered as well?

Logan Mahoney (11:47)

Huge. when we spoke earlier, I told, you I relayed, wish I got that side of the brain. I did not. My brother thankfully did. you know, we're a good duo in terms of the marketing, complimenting the sales and vice versa. So, God, I don't even know how many social media followers we had when he took over, but maybe a thousand, probably not even. And I believe this morning when I look, I think we're at like 28 ,000 on Instagram. You know, we get thousands of likes on Instagram's TikToks. And it's just, it's a viewership and it's people that, you know, they see you there and they're like, yeah, I saw you in this video, you know, doing XYZ, which, you know, Spencer's done a terrific job of growing that side of the business. And from a sales standpoint, it's huge. When I started, you know, inbound leads were few and far between. And, you know, I talked to my sales team this morning and it's like, we, you know, we've had a bunch of inquiries to us and it's just fielding those and starting those conversations, which is, there's no better feeling than, you know, something coming full circle that they saw us here or they heard about us from someone else. Those are like the most rewarding types of leads.

Josh (12:47)

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. it's an easy sell, right? When you bring that kind of brand awareness to a program, it's kind of turnkey. It's not like, we're just XYZ School of Coffee. It's no, we've partnered with these guys and people will notice that when they go out into another cafe, those students might notice it when they go to a restaurant. they're serving Atomic Coffee. We know they are. And not to mention your branding is pretty cool in itself.

Logan Mahoney (13:20)

Yeah. got a nice brand refresh coming up soon, which I'm sure a lot of people will be excited about. yeah, think from the, know, especially high schools and college, like, you know, our coffee is at my high school. And fortunately, they have my ugly mug posted on a picture over there too. So all my guys see me every time they drink coffee in the morning. yeah, it's super cool to.

Josh (13:27)

Nice

Logan Mahoney (13:43)

Like go to opportunities too and be like, yeah, like I saw that TikTok video with, know, it just be, brought up in that. I'm not typically in them, which I'm very okay with. But just, having that namesake and people seeing us on their feed is huge. And now it's like everybody's competing for viewership and it's a, you know, it's a necessary thing for us to do that and obviously be good at it too, which Spencer and his team do a terrific job.

Josh (13:52)

Yeah.

Yeah, that's totally true. so I'm even intrigued to see what the rebranding looks like. And as you know, the big names, do you really need to bring any of the big name coffee roasters? I'm not going to name them, but everyone knows who I'm talking about. So bringing a unique aspect into your program, think is, this is a great opportunity. So going into the training aspect, you talked a little bit about you guys offer that program.

Logan Mahoney (14:24)

Yep.

Josh (14:39)

Walk us through that a little bit so people can come on on site. Do you guys go on site to their schools? New to training is it a mix of both? What does that look?

Logan Mahoney (14:46)

yeah, it's a mixed bag, similar to the ownership and leasing of equipment.

What type of equipment they would like to have at the, whether it's a cafe, restaurant, food service, college, university.

And we're authorized resellers of Bunn, Fetco, Malconig, La Marzoco, any of the kind of larger named equipment manufacturers. So we have all of that at our facility. We love having people at our facility. It's obviously easier for us. But I think the level of knowledge and impact of meeting our team, seeing where everything happens, smelling the coffee.

And that's just that's meeting multiple members of our team and that's from production to You know our drivers when they're there our sales teams, support team which to me is like It's it's the best So if we we obviously travel we come on site, that's obviously part of our program but it's just not as I'd say rewarding and you can't get as much knowledge as if you visit us and I joke when we talk, it's like we have a 10 ,000 square foot roasting facility in Peabody. I'm sitting in our 15 ,000 square foot cold brew production space five minutes away in Danvers. So, you we 25 ,000 square feet for about 27 employees. We love people to come because we, it's plenty of space and we want people to see what we're doing here.

Josh (16:01)

Yeah, and that's an easy, such an easy grab for storytelling that we just had a podcast on that not too long ago. And for a team or even if it's just one person from a school going on site and just recording a glimpse of it, if it's a video photo and being able to blast it out to your students and your parents that you're learning about your local partner, that's an easy storytelling opportunity for them. So.

Logan Mahoney (16:34)

Yeah, it's huge.

Josh (16:35)

Let's get into a little bit of the technical side of things, right? So for someone that doesn't know coffee, there is the one component besides bringing in the beans that makes a huge difference in the quality, not only of your final product, but even the maintenance of your equipment, and that's water. That is such an essential part of the program. And so what do people need to know that don't know anything about coffee or coffee makers need to know about water?

Logan Mahoney (17:03)

Yeah, water quality is huge. I told you a story about the city of Cambridge is habitually just known as a place that has hard water. In La Marzocco, they won't sign off on something in that specific city unless there's reverse osmosis filtration installed just because they know that the machine could corrode within a year, if not less. So I think that has to do with a lot of different factors, one of which is, you winter and throwing salts when we have New England winters here, which we have not had recently, which is awesome. But I think water quality is huge. while, you know, RO and preventative maintenance is definitely a costly thing, it's necessary. People will reach out and say, hey, you know, I have this like hole in the boilerplate and things like that happen. And it's like, well, have you ever, have you changed your filter recently?

They're like, I had no idea. So just coaching people up on smaller things ahead of time before the install are huge. We've done a lot of, you know, we'll come into an opportunity with, they own the equipment and it's never been serviced. And for us, it's like, okay, let's go ahead and take care of that first. And typically that's a, it's a, we do a write up and say, Hey, this is what really needs to happen for, you know, for everything to work properly and also for the coffee to taste good. And, you know, it's very interesting that, you know, coffee can taste different no matter where you are, even if it's the same coffee, just based on the water. And that's huge. So for me too, I continue to learn about it. I don't even try to pretend like I know everything about water quality. I wish I would have taken the course at Bentley when I was there. I probably would be better off, but

Josh (18:27)

Yeah.

Trust me, I don't either.

Logan Mahoney (18:41)

Yeah, it's crazy how much it's evolved even since I started here a couple of years ago.

Josh (18:45)

Yeah, and there's a balance. You don't want to take all of the minerals out, but you'd need to take some out because of the corrosive ones. so the moral of the story, everyone, is make sure you have water filters and make sure you're changing them. It's an upfront, yes, investment, but it's an easy install. not like you need to bring in a ton of utilities to filter water. You're just connecting it to your water line, and it's easy.

Logan Mahoney (18:52)

Yep.

No, no. Yeah, especially for like a just a basic setup like a brewer. That's easy. It's you know, it's it's way less of a, an upfront cost. When you get into the larger bulkier systems that are like, you know, reverse osmosis for you can do just an espresso machine, you can do an espresso machine plus a brewer and those are the ones that are obviously, you know, it's a larger unit that has to, break down the water. So those are more costly, but just having a good practice of filter changes in my team has just started doing those as well and helping with people, get those set up. So it's a necessity.

Josh (19:42)

Nice.

Yeah, and the reverse osmosis, that's generally not needed. It's more of an extreme circumstances, right, where that's a necessary part. Depends on your local water.

Logan Mahoney (19:54)

Yeah. Yeah, we, we test water too. So we have water quality tests. So typically like if a cafe is opening up, that's one of the things that, is routine for Ellen and Chelsea to run tests to say, Hey, there's a lot of chloride. There's not a lot of chlorides. Like this is what I'd recommend filtration wise. I will say most of the places around Boston at this point, you probably need some sort of RO.

Josh (19:59)

Yep.

Logan Mahoney (20:18)

especially if you're going for a higher price machine, Like a La Marzocco espresso machine can go anywhere from, standard, you're talking 16 to 30K. And if that thing, breaks down in a year, you're probably not gonna be very happy about it. So just to protect your machine, protect your investment, that's something that, yes, it's expensive,

Josh (20:20)

Yeah.

Logan Mahoney (20:37)

we joke that it's true that the epicenter of a cafe is an espresso machine and that's where you're making your most margin. So you got to protect it.

Josh (20:44)

Yep. So true. not to mention changing the filters out takes like 30 seconds. It takes like no time. Yeah. So you kind of talked about a couple of the different machines that are out there. Well, first I want to go back to the ROI, which is, you know, bring in a coffee program. Let's say someone doesn't have it or let's say that they want to revamp it. You you talk about...

Logan Mahoney (20:52)

It's not very hard for sure.

Josh (21:09)

the numbers of investing in the equipment. I've never personally heard of a place that has a high coffee demand and they didn't get their return on investment rather quickly. Like it's pretty easy to get that because your margins are pretty good, especially when you bring in higher quality. You could charge a little bit more.

Logan Mahoney (21:25)

Yes, for sure. Yeah, it's one of those things too. it's full circle with the branding, right? Like we've done, we've been able to, in one person's loss, another person's game and that's sales. But we've been able to kind of get into a lot of opportunities because of the full picture. And that's with equipment. And then it's like the branding and people being excited about it being, I've heard of Atomic. I've had Atomic. So.

Josh (21:37)

Hmm.

Logan Mahoney (21:49)

That's kind of just the little bit that helps. And then it's word of mouth of them being like, yeah, I love atomic. And then whether it's, a, food service place that I went to recently, they had a coffee roaster for 20 years, and then they switched to us because, they just didn't feel the love recently and they didn't have the level of support. And it was just on my end, consistent reaching out. So that's huge to them. And then it's a relationship like they want to be in.

Josh (22:09)

Yeah.

Logan Mahoney (22:13)

you know, that's great for us and just creates that partnership that, you we're looking for.

Josh (22:19)

Nice. And so getting into the machines, higher end equipment, you mentioned earlier fully automatic. So for someone that doesn't know what that means, what does that mean, fully automatic?

Logan Mahoney (22:29)

Yeah, that's more on like the espresso machine side of things. In years past, we belong to the specialty coffee association. So we have a lot of guidelines that we follow in terms of throw weights, coffee to water ratios. up until I'd say five to 10 years ago, there really wasn't something that they were like, yeah, we're good with this type of machine for, specialty coffee standards. There are several now.

Josh (22:51)

Mm -hmm.

Logan Mahoney (22:52)

they're expensive, but depending on what you're looking for, the two that are the best are like the WMFs, which are a little bit, I'd say more geared towards a restaurant that wants to say, know, and actually, you know, believe that they have fresh espresso, which people say, but it, you know, is it? I question that when I go to a lot of restaurants, I'm like, is it? Do you have whole beans? But yeah, so that's...it has whole beans. it can go everywhere from a grinds, it tamps it for you, it steams the milk for you. It's like a robot could run the thing. So, I think in today's world, there's a lot of challenges with labor, obviously, especially cafes and food service. So the payment is either you're gonna invest in your employees or if you can't keep consistent employees, then it's like, let's invest in equipment that can help us solve that and just like make things a lot easier for us operationally. So the other one that's a little bit higher end, that's more like cafes and I'm not gonna say what large corporation, but they're very Northeast heavy, might've just dropped the donuts off of their corporate name.

They even have one of these machines. saw a couple, which is wild to me. And that's in Everest. the machine even dials in for you. So you don't have to dial in your espresso, which is insane. So tech's crazy. I am not as well versed in the changes year to year, but it's so cool to see even from the time that I came on that like what the capabilities are andcontinues just to push the boundaries of specialty coffee and just bringing specialty coffee to as many people as humanly possible.

Josh (24:29)

Yeah. And it sounds like the best way that that type of machine would be great for introducing to a program, a coffee program into a school without overwhelming the staff or your budget. Because, know, especially if you have to, if you're doing the manual way, you have to have more people to help execute it, possibly another person. So yeah, without overwhelming your operation, it sounds like the way to go. So pay the little higher investment upfront. Awesome. Well.

Logan Mahoney (24:54)

for sure.

Josh (24:56)

This has been a great conversation on a fun and very universal topic, I think. And so if people want to connect to learn more about you or time at coffee roasters, where can people go?

Logan Mahoney (25:09)

Sure, I'm in sales, I always say check out our social media. That's what I'm always doing, that's what a lot of people I think do. So we're @AtomicCoffeeRoasters on I believe TikTok as well as Instagram. That's one C in Atomic Coffee Roasters. And then LinkedIn, my brother does a ridiculously good job on LinkedIn, he posts every day.

Josh (25:12)

Yeah.

Logan Mahoney (25:27)

I don't know how he has that much content, but he does. So I would, I'd follow him, Spencer Mahoney. And then obviously I'm Logan Mahoney on LinkedIn, Instagram, mostly posting about football and coffee.

Josh (25:39)

Awesome. And for anyone, if you go to Google route, Atomic Coffee Roasters, make sure you look those words up. I did look up just atomic coffee. And then there's some other businesses out there with that name. So make sure you put those three words together. And you'll definitely land on them. And I know that we were talking about school food service. But hint, hint, they also sell some good liqueur on their website with their espresso. So make sure you check that out. That's the adult version of this episode. But thank you again, Logan, for taking the time to meet with us and drop all this value for us in School of Food Service. You guys are all remarkable for what you're doing and helping out that space. So thank you for being ambassadors of Remarkable School of Food Service. And everyone, until next time, I'm your host, signing off.