We recently connected with Mike Mann and have shared our conversation below.

Mike , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

The Roasted Record started as a passion project, blending two things I love together and starting a blog. That blog led to wholesale coffee roasting growth and ultimately a coffee shop and Vinyl record store. I have always been of the belief that if you are passionate about something and want to share that with the world, the world will generally welcome it. In our case, there was no place in our town to get a “pour over” cup of coffee, so we started one ourselves. In the beginning and through the first year or so, we were told repeatedly that we would not make it in such a small town charging as much as we would have to charge to offer a product of the caliber needed for a “third wave” coffee experience. However, we are now nearing a Million dollars in coffee sales annually.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I started The Roasted Record as a blog. I was roasting coffee on my front porch at home and had the window open so I could listen to a copy of U2’s “Joshua Tree” on vinyl. The sounds and smells were something that I wanted to share with other people, so the blog started. In the process of learning how to roast, I was making more than I could consume, so it began to give it to friends and family. After a while it became apparent that people wanted my coffee, so I started a legal business. Through some connections at the golf course at which I am employed as a PGA General Manager, I was able to obtain my first wholesale account, a local franchised restaurant that had 3 locations. These larger orders made it necessary for me to move from my house to an inspected facility so I took on a loan to get started. At first we were looking only for a space to put a coffee roaster, but when a spot opened up that had space for a roaster, a cafe, and a vinyl record store, we started The Roasted Record. Our goal was to be a “Third Wave” coffee roaster, one that focuses more on roasting the coffee and preparing it properly than just volume coffee sales. This was something that our area didn’t ask for, but I was confident that if I offered it and did it well, they would come around. After two years of operation in the cafe and after winning medals at national and international coffee roasting competitions, we were able to grow to our current space in Downtown Stuart, Florida. We now sell more in one 4 days than we did per month at our old location.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

I got interested coffee roasting while browsing through a home-brew supply catalogue an saw green coffee forte first time. I am a fan of making/growing my own food and beverages, so I thought I would get a small coffee roaster and some green coffee and give it a try. One afternoon while I was roasting on my front porch and with a vinyl record playing, I got the idea to start a blog called “The Roasted Record” and went online to create one. To properly learn how to roast coffee, one must try many different approaches and as a result, I had more coffee than I could drink. so I began to give it to friends for free. By chance, I gave some to a friend of mine who was friends with a guy who owned a new fresh and local acid bowl business that was looking for coffee with which to make their won cold brew. At the time the orders were fro 40 pounds of coffee per month and that also required me to start an LLC and get an inspected roasted facility as you cannot sell wholesale coffee under the cottage food law.
With an eye towards growing wholesale coffee sales, I continued to find restaurants and any place that I could sell a few pound to try to scale up production so I could benefit from economy of scale.
An opportunity came when one of my client restaurants was going to move from their location to a larger one and I decided to lease their old location to open a coffee shop and roasting facility. it had an extra space beside it that they want to lease as a whole package and I decided to put used records in the extra room.
Our first location was a real struggle but I was confident that if I put out good coffee with good service, it would take care of itself.

We definitely had tough times and even came within a few minutes of chatting down as a result of Covid, but we stuck with it and eventually opened our second location and have grown our wholesale business through a national subscription service where we send out over 2000 bags of coffee nationwide each month.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

To get to where we are on the national level took a commitment to coffee roasting competitions. I enjoy competing in most things as I am also a PGA golf Professional, so the United States Coffee Roasting Championships were a natural step in our progression. Maintaining a consistent product and perpetually striving to improve is the core of what I do in the company and continue to compete on the national and international competition roasting space.

When getting new clients, it is important to us that they are aware of our commitment to sourcing great coffee and roasting it with attention to detail and through a reliance on intuition as well as science. We constantly monitor roast levels with Agtron readings and use a refractometer to dial in extraction levels in our cafe.

Rather than look at what other shops were doing, we decided to be ourselves, be the best we could and let our reputation build itself.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.roastedrecord.com
• Instagram: @roastedrecord
• Facebook: @theroastedrecord

Image Credits
@vincent.anthony.conti