Sunday Sitdown: Grind’s CEO on conquering America with his cult coffee chain
Londoners may recognise the Grind coffee brand. There are currently eight branches around the capital and a 15,000 sq ft roastery in Bermondsey.
Despite a hit to cafe revenues during the pandemic, the company is taking its business model across the pond as Morning Wire can reveal today Grind has ambitious plans to conquer the States.
In fact, it has opened its first non-London branch in sunny Los Angeles.
Moreover, the fast-growing firm expects sales to exceed £20m for the first time ever this year, following the large-scale rollout of new compostable coffee pods.
Morning Wire caught up with David Abrahamovitch (pictured above), the company’s CEO and co-founder, as he details Grind’s plans to take on the US of A by kicking off in California in a partnership with Soho House.
Your first non-London branch has opened its doors. Congrats.
Thank you. We’re super excited to build on our existing global partnership with Soho House to open our first US location, on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood. This new store is just another way we continue to build and grow.
Despite this exciting news, you face spiralling inflation, a cost-of-living crisis, as well as a recession. Are you bracing yourself for a hit?
It’s certainly a challenging economic climate for businesses. Although it’s a big factor in our planning, we also still want to invest and grow aggressively – both in the coffee roastings side of our business, we make home-compostable coffee pods for Nespresso machines and last year sold around 20 million of them online and our high street business.
So what are some of the direct, immediate challenges you are currently facing?
Supply chain issues and disruption have been really tricky for our coffee roasting business, particularly transporting coffee from our farms into our London roastery, and then sending roasted coffee back out to our customers.
“Shipping to Europe from the UK has been especially challenging.”
David Abrahamovitch, Grind’s CEO and co-founder
We supply Soho House, the private members’ club, all over the world, and shipping to their locations in Europe post-Brexit has been a nightmare. Lastly, the energy crisis is a real problem for high street businesses everywhere. In some cases, electricity bills are now as much as 50 per cent of our rent – considering we are almost exclusively based in prime central London locations, factoring this into our budget has become a major consideration.
Let’s zoom in on London for a second: commuter numbers are down compared to before the pandemic, people work more from home. Is this impacting your sales?
More people working from home has certainly impacted the trading patterns in our stores. Mondays and Fridays are quieter than pre-covid, but Tuesday to Thursday revenue is up, and overall we are ahead of where we were in 2019. We are also lucky that uptake for our home-compostable coffee pods has significantly increased since the remote working revolution.
Retail struggles to find people at the moment, like many other industries. Are you experiencing the same issue?
Like many other businesses, we’re also finding recruiting new staff a challenge. Luckily, many of our 250 employees have been with us since before the pandemic and remained loyal – we managed to maintain almost all of our team even while our sites were closed. Most of our senior teams joined the business in much more junior roles and then progressed with us, which I think is the key to retaining good people.
What was your experience of running a coffee chain in London during the pandemic? Tell us a bit more about that.
As we launched our at-home coffee pod business just a few months before the pandemic hit the UK, that half of the business exploded in the first lockdown, so much that it’s become the largest part of the operation and our primary focus. On the other hand, the high street half was really tough – there were moments when I wondered if we’d ever re-open.
“Having put everything into building the business for the last 10 years, it was incredibly distressing to think it might all disappear.”
David Abrahamovitch
We were really lucky that our customers supported us so well while the high street was closed, and that we were able to work with landlords and the bank to chart a sensible way through. I wouldn’t want to do it again though, that’s for sure!
Anything else you would like to share with our readers?
We’ve got a lot of exciting things to come! As well as opening our new store in LA, we’re also expanding to several locations in the UK – some on our own and others in partnership with some amazing brands. There’s also a few updates in the pipeline for h our online business, which we just launched for customers in the US and EU as well as the UK. Watch this space!