Often times when we are out traveling, meeting people, and working to get Green Man Coffee Co. onto new shelves, we hear something that makes perfect sense:
“We already have several coffees.”
And that’s perfectly fine with us.
In fact, we love being alongside other coffees.
We’ve even found that being in coffee shops that roast their own coffee can be good for us. Why? Because we’re different.
From the ground up, we intentionally built Green Man Coffee Co. to be something different—not simply another coffee brand competing for the same space on the shelf.
Our roaster alone is unlike anything else because it came from our own design and our own idea. We didn’t simply purchase a conventional roasting system and put our name on it. We developed a process around the kind of coffee we wanted to create.
And then there is the fire.
Our coffee isn’t merely roasted near fire or heated by fire.
We let the fire touch the beans.
We allow the smoke to engulf the coffee, becoming part of the roasting process and helping create a roasting profile that is unlike conventional methods. It is an old-world, hands-on approach that produces something we believe is genuinely unique.
And then, of course, we honey cure our beans.
The goal of honey curing is to help preserve freshness for longer, but we also discovered that the process contributes to the overall character of the coffee. It becomes another part of crafting an experience that isn’t quite like anything else.
All of this adds up to something important from a business standpoint:
We don’t believe we have to compete with everyone.
In fact, we believe Green Man Coffee can be a complimentary addition to most coffee selections.
If a shop already has a house roast, a light roast, a dark roast, an espresso, or several established brands, we don’t necessarily see those coffees as competitors. They each have their own character, their own customers, and their own place.
Our place just happens to be different.
Our coffee would not—and should not—distract from the other coffees on the shelf. And we don’t believe other coffees should distract from ours.
There is room for options.
There is room for tradition.
There is room for experimentation.
And there is certainly room for something that doesn’t fit neatly into the usual categories.
That is where Green Man Coffee Co. wants to live.
We are creating a category that, as far as we know, we are the first to tread within. Open-fire roasted coffee, where the fire itself becomes part of the process, followed by our honey-curing method. It’s not simply another variation of the same thing.
It’s our thing.
And from a marketing standpoint, that’s why different works for us.
Had we tried to make Green Man Coffee exactly like everyone else, we might have found ourselves fighting for the same customers, the same shelf space, and the same reasons for people to choose us.
Instead, setting ourselves apart has opened doors we may have never been able to walk through otherwise.
Now, are we for everyone?
Absolutely not.
And honestly, that’s part of the beauty of having options.
Not everyone wants the same coffee. Not everyone wants the same roast. Not everyone wants the same flavor profile or the same experience.
That’s okay.
Because for the people who are looking for what we do, we want Green Man Coffee Co. to be as available as possible.
We want to be the coffee someone discovers because they’ve already tried everything else.
We want to be the coffee that makes someone stop and ask, “What is different about this?”
And most importantly, we want to keep doing what we’ve always intended to do:
Make coffee that stands on its own.
Different isn’t a problem.
For Green Man Coffee Co., different is the whole point.