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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Coffee project brings a sweet taste of success

BDC Young Entrepreneur Award

By: Nancy Truman

Posted: 06/26/2012 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Zane Kelsall (POSTMEDIA)

THE votes are in and this year's BDC Young Entrepreneur has been chosen.

Zane Kelsall, founder of Two If By Sea Café in Dartmouth, N.S., stood out among the eight finalists for Anchored Coffee, an innovative project to launch the first roastery in Atlantic Canada that will buy all of its coffee direct from farmers at ethical prices.

Kelsall worked in other people's cafés for a decade before he followed his desire to make the exceptional cup of coffee and launched Two If By Sea Cafe. Founding Anchored Coffee is an extension of his drive to deliver on that.

"Our obsession with quality has led us to wanting to control every step of the coffee process. We see it as the only way to expand around the world," Kelsall said, about how the project came about.

However, the return on investment the project will bring is not lost on him.

"Between our two cafés we're going through 40,000 pounds of coffee a year. So just supplying our own cafés, we'll see a complete return in approximately 19 months," Kelsall says. And that doesn't include offshoots like being able to sell to other cafés.

Another benefit of Anchored Coffee is having consistency of brand, a key component of growth in the food industry.

"Being able to control the coffee roasting will give that to us. If we wanted to open a café in another city or in the same city we have everything coming from a centralized location that we have complete control over," Kelsall said.

The $100,000 grand prize will, in large part, go to equipment costs to set up the roastery with the best equipment; in addition it will pay for inventory, trips to coffee producing countries to meet farmers and promotion and branding. "It's essentially our complete budget for the startup," he said.

Besides the grand prize, there are other benefits to being part of the contest. Kelsall says it forced him and his team to do checks and balances to make sure the idea was going to work.

"With an organization as thorough as BDC looking over our plan and saying 'yes, you're a finalist,' it's a reaffirmation that what we want to do is smart, well thought-out and we're ready for it.

"We started out thinking we wanted to do a roastery in the next couple of years; getting told we should really apply for this shows we're totally ready and the project makes sense," Kelsall said.

The Young Entrepreneur Award was created by the Business Development Bank of Canada in 1988 to recognize successful entrepreneurs 18 to 35 years old. The selection process narrowing the field to the eight regional finalists is based on a wide range of criteria, from project plans and objectives, to their feasibility and sustainability.

To view the interview with Kelsall and the live chat held Monday with him and FP Entrepreneur columnist Rick Spence, go to financialpost.com/innovators .

-- Financial Post

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 26, 2012 B6

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