Interview with Aaron of Slide Coffee
Hey I’m Aaron, and I'm the owner of Slide Coffee Roasters.
Can you tell me about where it all began, the moment when the idea of starting a roastery really felt achievable?
It has always been a dream of mine to start a coffee roastery. I was running a coffee shop at the time and felt that there were a few things I wanted to see improve in the coffee roasting world. I’ve always had a huge passion for sourcing ethical coffee, wanting to really dig deep and know that people are getting paid right and sourcing the coffee ethically. Because I had that passion, I decided that I needed to roast for myself, to take my career to that deeper level and develop a closer connection to the coffee farms. I love working with other like-minded cafe owners and being able to rub shoulders with people who put their whole heart into hospitality and do it properly is nice. It all just made sense for my wife and I to pursue our passion and start our own business. And now Slide has been around for 5 years!
Could you give me an overview on Slide’s core values?
Ensuring that Slide is community focused is a big one. Doing everything we do with love. Roasting coffee with love and making coffee with love. Sustainability and doing the least harm to the planet, making sure we're doing everything we can to ensure minimal impacts - and where possible - positive impacts to the planet.
Let's do a word association, when I say the word community what's the first thing that comes to mind?
It’s Garry who comes in for a flat white and wants to have a chat at the bar about the surf. When people need to offload onto the baristas, we embrace it. People need community, people need to come together and have that banter. If you isolate yourself, it's no good for anyone really.
Slide feels like a really great place to work!
A lot of our staff seem to love working here and some have been here since we started the business. As far as I know, they don't plan on leaving, so they must be liking it. We try and create that culture and atmosphere, so that people know that they’re respected and looked after. We're not here to rip people off, we're not here to make people's lives hard. We're here to create an environment where people want to rock up and give 100%. And I think this is a little bit of a lost art within hospitality, and sometimes the focuse is a little bit too much on getting busier or profits or efficiently. But then they miss the point - are their staff happy? Because they're the ones who are talking to customers every day. They're the ones who are running the business for you when you're not there. It’s so important to us that people are happy and excited to come to work!
And how did you came to be in this space?
We first started in November 2018, and we started a roaster with legend, good friend and fellow roaster in the industry, Josh Russell. It was a good opportunity for both of us to share the expenses, essentially and through that, we were able to focus on roasting and wholesale. In the early days, we got a few really good cafes on board to feature our coffee. We got to a point where we needed to get our own space and expand, and that was a scary moment. And then the opportunity for this space came up for lease, so I chased it down. I thought, ‘it's on the corner, it'll be good for selling coffees as well’ which we didn't plan to do originally. But when we secured the location, we decided to create a tasting room where people could come and try our coffee as well.
What do you think makes your coffee special, and what do you think your community likes most about it?
I think we put that extra bit of effort and love into making sure that the beans are sourced ethically and tasting great. On the wholesale side of our business, we try to really help the cafes with their business. If there are any questions or they need some staff training, we're here to help and support them on that journey. Running a cafe is not an easy task, so we like to consider ourselves a buddy in the industry to walk with them on the journey. In terms of flavor, we designed our blend to tick all the boxes for people that are having both milk-based and black coffee, there is a lot of flavor there. We're spending that bit more on green beans to make sure that we’re creating something delicious.
How did you cope with the onset of the pandemic?
Yeah, at the time when it was all going down, we weren't quite open yet and were still fitting out this space. We didn't have any cafe errands to run, and we quickly adapted and realised that our cafe owners needed our support. They were trying to work out all the rules as they were changing every second day. At one point, we were supplying one of our cafés on a day to day basis, calling them every second day to see if they needed more coffee, we weren’t going to make them stick to the usual roasting schedule. They want to stay low in stock, so they don't have any wastage- we'll work with that. It was nice to be able to offer phone support for them as well, they could and we could work it all out together.
When it comes to supporting your cafés, how does your relationship with Brewtech feed back into that?
Our first and foremost focus is the coffee roasting, so when a callout is for anything beyond a simple machine issue, we as roasters can't really fix it, which happens a lot of the time. Brewtech are then able to provide that support and it helps us keep our cafes happy, and back to trading. We wouldn't be able to keep things running without that backup tech support. And there's often questions about new technology and new machines, as everything's changing all the time. It's good to have someone we can call and just ask those tricky questions of, and try and diagnose problems together.
Okay, let's flash forward five years, how do you see the coffee scene around the Sunshine Coast transforming in the future?
We all obviously love and really care about our coffee around here. Sometimes I do find myself scratching my head thinking, why can't we have more of a specialty coffee scene like the cities have. Yes, we're really interested in specialty coffee, single origins, filter and other kind of higher end fancy stuff. But same time, we’re chill, and we can just enjoy coffee and not get too serious about it. That's a nice aspect of the Sunshine coast, we're a little bit more laid back and crazy. The perfect brew is just one aspect of a positive coffee experience. The other aspect is the connection with people and the environment. And actually, when you look at it on a global scale, Australia is obviously very far ahead in the specialty coffee world and Sunshine Coast is right up there too. This is because we’re doing all the latest stuff and dabbling in all the latest techniques and exciting new things are always happening.
What is next for Slide?
We have a roastery and tasting room here, and we have a shop on the south end of the Sunshine Coast in Caloundra, as well as a café called Compound, where ‘surf and drink coffee’ is the slogan there. We don't really want open more shops, we want to grow and work with more and more like minded cafes. For now, it's slow and steady growth, we don't want to go crazy big time or become international roasters or anything like that. We're happy to keep it real and keep it small, and just keep chipping away and growing at a healthy, organic pace where we can keep offering really good service and experience for people.
So great to chat to you today, thanks for your time!
Not a problem.
