We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Erick Kanter a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Erick, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

The coffee industry is a huge and very competitive market so you have to do something that will set you apart from the thousands of other coffee brands out there. Apart from the lower quality coffee companies there are plenty of high quality and good practice companies we’d be competing against so we knew we had to create something different. My wife and I both love a good story be it in a book or movie as well as a love for theme parks and that feeling of being immersed. So we decided to focus our coffee brand on being a themed coffee company by bringing together stunning artwork and a story to help drive the premium coffee that compliments each bag. While there are other companies following our lead now, back in 2014 we were the first to embrace it.

Erick, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

When we decided to start our coffee company in early 2014 this was just going to be a passion project for us to also help give back to animal rescues that our family was also involved in. We really knew very little about the coffee and roasting industry besides that we knew what we liked in a good cup of coffee. We researched and spoke with a few roasters and tried some good and some not so good coffee along the way. We were finally lucky enough to speak with a local roaster who was willing to work with us and show us the process from choosing the right green coffee to the science and art behind the roasting process and best ways to flavor a coffee.

Now that we had someone in the industry to help us create our coffees we needed to find some artists crazy enough to work with us for nothing more than their name on the bag as the artist. We were lucky enough to find an art student (who later went on to work for Disney) that understood our vision of creating artwork reminiscent of the vintage Disney attraction posters or 1950’s movie posters.
My wife and I came up with half a dozen pop culture inspired themes and I got to writing a backstory for each whole the artwork was drawn up.

What we created was a couple of our standard medium and dark roasts and a few out of the norm flavored coffees like banana pie and vanilla praline. Little did we know we’d become known as a flavored coffee company for our wild takes on flavored coffees. We’ve also been honored to work with so many amazingly talented people from Disney artists and retired Imagineers to fine artists and other art students just getting into the industry to help create the art and stories of our coffees. We also support our artists by still listing each person on the back of our bags so you can learn more about them.

We’re still a husband and wife team after all these years that continues to create new ways to make your coffee drinking experience more immersive and get you involved in the story. We’ve expanded on our themed coffee origins to create what we call the Coffeeverse™ that will open up a new way for our fans to explore and become part of the story. We also just launched our new website and will have upcoming events in the metaverse to be able to interact with our fans in new ways.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

We had to figure out the social media side of the business on our own. Since this was just a side hustle we couldn’t afford to hire a marketing person to run it. We were lucky to have our main audience we were trying to reach be the pop culture and theme park fans so there was already a good built in audience on the social platforms. We used trending hashtags in those groups and reached out to people who had a good following to help get the word out about our story driven coffees. This was at the beginning of the rise of influencers so it was easier to just get your coffee in the hands of some people to talk about it.

The fans of theme parks and pop culture products are very receptive to new things to try and we were able to grow a small but pretty loyal fan base from it. Most of the posts and ads were pretty basic compared to todays standard but we were also honest in our posts and not pretending to be something we weren’t. I think our passion for creating this unique take on coffee really came through as genuine which people will respond to in a positive way while disregarding a company just trying to make a quick buck.

So for those just starting out, find something you love to do and let your passion show through in your social posts. Don’t be afraid to put yourself out there as well to show the real person behind what you’re selling.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

When we started out our company name was Smiling Dog Coffee Company as we started this side business to donate a portion of every sale to different animal charities we worked with. Besides our own methods of getting the word out there about our coffees we also relied on the rescues we donated to to help get the word out. After about a year we realized that we had to make a change if we wanted to keep going. We were growing a larger customer base around the theme park and entertainment fans so we made the decision to rebrand into Expedition Roasters Coffee Company and expand our line of coffees.
We still give back to animal rescues as well as children’s and veteran’s charities, but we just don’t push it or publicize it as much. It’s just something personal that we enjoy doing as a way to give back.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ExpeditionRoasters.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/expeditionroasters
• Facebook: facebook.com/expeditionroasters
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/expeditionroasters/
• Twitter: twitter.com/expeditionroast