Toronto-based Parachute Coffee is on a mission to provide better coffee to every home.
The company has introduced Canada’s first direct-to-consumer business to provide fresh-roasted craft coffee through its ecommerce platform for Canadians to enjoy their coffee at home.
“Coffee lovers who make their daily brews at home are unknowingly and consistently consuming stale coffee. Coffee beans are only fresh for approximately 15 days after being roasted; a fact that coffee brands obviously don’t want consumers to know. That’s why you’ll never see a roast date on the coffee bags you find in-store,” said Michael Potters, CEO and co-founder of Parachute Coffee.
“We founded Parachute Coffee because we’re coffee lovers ourselves, and we think consumers are looking to finally bring ‘the hipster coffee’ home, and experience top grade, curation, personalization, and peak-freshness whenever they want.”
The company was founded in 2016.
Parachute Coffee ships direct-to-consumer, and never holds inventory — they roast the exact amount of coffee that’s needed for that week, eliminating the need for warehousing and waste.
Known as airdrops, each package is hand roasted and packed at Parachute Coffee’s roastery and shipped to customers on the same day. Coffee drinkers can choose to subscribe to three different variants: medium roast, dark roast, and limited edition (the limited edition roast changes each month). Subscriptions are highly personalized and can be shipped on a flexible schedule, unique to each customer; every week, every two weeks, or once per month.
“Ten per cent of all of our airdrops actually go to Calgary. It’s actually a huge coffee drinking market and I think it’s probably due to the fact that there seems to be an appetite in Calgary for specialty-grade coffee or the type of coffee you might find in what’s commonly called like a hipster cafe,” said Potters. “There seems to be an appetite for that type of coffee. We see a lot of our subscribers coming from Alberta but mostly Calgary specifically.”
Since 2016, the company has shipped out 10,000 airdrops across Canada with 50 per cent of that in Ontario. Coffee beans come from different parts of the world depending on the season – the premium growing regions of the coffee belt. Customers can choose a 10-ounce bag with whole coffee beans or ground coffee. Prices are about $17 to $19 per bag and a bag can produce about 35 cups of coffee or about 48 cents per cup.
“Our motto is better coffee for everyone, everywhere. And we think we can achieve that with this model. Our focus right now is to build a brand and to serve Canadian consumers first. Our intention is to move that model into the United States, possibly to expand into brick and mortar coffee shops and what we’re going be calling experience centres. And then international.”
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