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

Rob, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?

Before launching Folly Coffee, I was a sales rep for Boston Beer Co (Sam Adams, Angry Orchard, Twisted Tea, Truly). While working for them, I got really into craft beer and the Cicerone Certification program. It’s like the beer version of a wine sommelier. For the advanced certification, cooking and flavor in general is a big component of the exam and this is where my fascination with all things flavor began. A coworker of mine used to sell specialty coffee, and saw me drinking some crappy coffee and was like “Absolutely not. Here’s a list of roasters you’re allowed to drink moving forward”. I went to Sump Coffee in St. Louis, got a cup of a naturally process Ethiopian Yirgacheffe and was instantly intrigued. It was naturally sweet, complex, bursting with blueberry notes and a floral aroma. I had a two hour conversation with the barista about everything that goes into great coffee and my new obsession began.

From then on, I spent all my free time learning about coffee. I went to every roaster and specialty cafe I could find. I would take solo trips on the weekends to different cities around the country to see different coffee cultures and try the country’s best coffees. After a couple years, it was a trip to Seattle that the idea of a business first came to mind. I expected everyone in Seattle to be pumped about Starbucks because it’s their hometown brand, but all the younger coffee drinkers were excited about the third-wave style, lighter roasted coffees, the same style of coffee I loved most. Food and beverage trends on the west coast tend to be 10-15 ahead the rest of the country, so I decided to look into the business side of specialty coffee.

I noticed that the number of coffee drinkers was remarkably stable over the previous 10 years, and was growing slightly. However, the amount being spent on coffee was steadily increasing over the same period of time. This showed me that people were buying better coffee and further research revealed high end specialty coffee was indeed driving this growth. The trends looked very similar to the trends in craft beer in the early 2000s, which later exploded in growth. At this point it became clear it’s not if specialty coffee would become a bigger deal, but when.

While visiting 100s of roasters and coffee shops around this time in 2016, I noticed a trend in the look and feel of high end coffee. It was a trend of minimalistic branding, a high-end stylish aesthetic, that could sometimes come off as pretentious. The coffees were described in a way that was confusing to me before I learned enough about coffee. This is when the idea of Folly Coffee really began to form. I thought if I could start a coffee roasting business with the same level of quality, but create a brand and feel that is approachable and fun, it would attract the large population of coffee drinkers that have never thought to try this style of coffee.

The idea became overwhelming and I ended up quitting my job in May of 2017, moving back home to Minnesota, and beginning the work of launching Folly Coffee.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

Starting Folly Coffee combined my experience in food & beverage sales with an absolute obsession with high-end specialty coffee. Folly Coffee is primarily a wholesale coffee roaster, selling coffee to grocery stores, retailers, cafes/restaurants, and through our online store. Our line of coffees focuses on flavor profiles vs. the industry standard of focusing on the processing methods and location the coffee came from. We opened our first brick & mortar cafe in November of 2022, but up to this point it was completely a wholesale business. This allows us to focus our time and efforts on our customers without the time obligations of managing and running a storefront.

The thing I’m most proud of with Folly is introducing so many new people to the world of high-end specialty coffee. The standard for coffee in the US is a very dark roast, which leads to most people picturing bitter or burnt flavors when picturing a cup of black coffee or espresso. Higher quality coffees, roasted intentionally, have a wide range of flavors from sweet and fruit-forward, to rich and chocolately, to bright and citrusy. By communicating and marketing with a different approach, we have been able to attract many customers that would typically drink the more standard, dark roasted coffees that are the most served in the US.

The Folly Coffee brand is really an extension on my personality. I take the work very seriously, but not much else. The word Folly literally means “a sense of foolishness”, which is how we approach everything. This approach has led to a strong online and social media presence, which we have been able to use to grow the business in all channels. We have been able to form an incredible base of customers, both in the wholesale channels and direct to consumer.

Can you tell us the story behind how you met your business partner?

There is one consistent theme that has remained true throughout the 5 years of Folly Coffee, and that is of luck and timing. The story of how I met my now business partner and head roaster, Jeff Mooney, aka Folly Jeff, is a perfect example of this.

Eastside Food Coop in Minneapolis was the first ever customer of Folly. Every week I would go in to make deliveries, and this guy who worked there with glorious long hair and a beard would ask me increasingly difficult questions about coffee. It got to the point I would be researching coffee topics before the deliveries to make sure I could answer all of his questions! After a few months, he asked me how he could get into the coffee industry. After grabbing coffee, I told him I desperately needed help packaging coffee, and at the very least this could be a nice thing to add on his resume to potentially land future roles in the industry. Each week, we would taste the most recent batches of coffee and I quickly realized he had an absolutely incredibly palate. Within the first year of working with me, he placed 14th in the country at the US Coffeechamps Cup Taster’s Championship, a competition to determine the best coffee tasters in the country. Immediately after this, he took over all coffee purchasing and QA.

Since then, he has taken over the full coffee program as Director of Coffee responsible for sourcing, roasting, and QA of all the coffees we serve. He also became a Certified Q-Grader, the industry’s standard for coffee expertise.

Folly Jeff taking over the coffee program allowed me to focus completely on the business and customer-facing aspects of the business. This was a huge key in the growth of the business throughout the years and has remained how we operate the business to this day.

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

As was true with all businesses, COVID forced us to pivot and completely overhaul our business model if we were going to make it through lockdowns. The federal financial assistance like PP loans did not have much of an effect for Folly, because they were based on wages, in which we were paying ourselves next to nothing as we continued to grow the business. This meant major changes needed to happen as 80% of our business disappeared overnight when lockdowns were announced, but the bills were still due.

Pre-COVID, only about 2-3% of the business was through our store. I had no experience in e-commerce, so the plan was always to keep focus on the retail and wholesale business in the early years, and later shift more focus online. We had a website where coffee was available or purchase, but overall the website was more informational to attract new wholesale and retail customers. This changed immediately when lockdowns were announced. I still remember the moment I found out. I was delivering coffee to a customer. We were talking about the COVID news that was coming out, and they told me they had a contact that informed them lockdowns would be happening that same day. I went straight home after that delivery, cleared my calendar, and created a plan.

Within 72 hours and about 8 or 9 total hours of sleep, I created a new website focused on the online store, complete with a brand new subscription service and a dramatically improved shopping experience. With coffee drinkers being locked down at home, the announcement of the new website and subscription service was met with high demand with record sales in the first week and a growing number of new subscribers. The new online store not only kept us alive during lockdowns and limited capacity at cafes & restaurants, but has now become an integral part of the business.

We relaunched an even better version of the website within the next 6 months, with fully customizable subscriptions and increased capabilities for customer communication. Direct to consumer went from 2-3% of the overall business, to now 20-25% of the business.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.follycoffee.com
• Instagram: @follycoffee
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/FollyCoffee/
• Youtube: @follycoffee or https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmlvevciFwGCQw6YtTMxnEw/videos
• Other: Tik Tok: @follycoffee