I recently had the opportunity to spend some time with the folks behind KC Coffee Collective and I’m excited for their potential to be able to share Kansas City’s awesome coffee scene with the rest of the world!
KC Coffee Collective Subscription Plans
KC COFFEE COLLECTIVE
Ethan and Ashley from KC Coffee Collective recently did a pop-up at PT’s Coffee in the Crossroads in Kansas City. I wanted to meet them and talk about the possibilities of working together in the same way I’ve worked with MyCoffeePub’s subscription service for the past few years, and what I thought would be a quick “Hi, nice to meet you” turned into an hour long conversation about coffee, Kansas City and storytelling and it was great. Plus I left my house on a Saturday, which is a pretty big deal for a homebody like me! LOL
KC Coffee Collective is a new subscription service that has just recently been launched and, yeah, I know what you’re going to say, “ANOTHER coffee sub?! How many can there be?!” but this one is different. KC Coffee Collective is focused entirely on Kansas City area coffee roasters, a sleeping giant just waiting to be woken up and revealed to the rest of the country. KC Coffee Collective combines two of my favorite things, too… a hands-free, one-bag-of-coffee-per-month subscription like MyCoffeePub, who I’ve worked with for years and deeply love, and Kansas City roasters.
Kansas City’s coffee reputation is slowly, but surely, getting out there. The coffee cognoscenti seem to know we have something special going on here, but even people familiar with the equation, KC + Coffee = Awesome, are always surprised when they learn about the depth and breadth of the coffee roasting scene here in the Paris of the Plains. Ethan, a photographer and adventure travel podcaster, and Ashley, the busines mind behind KC Coffee Collective, have the potential to bring Kansas City’s unique and varied coffee to people from all over, and that’s very exciting to me.
KC Coffee Collective’s model is simple. Subscribe for $19.50/month (or $100/6 months or $50/3 months… and there’s even a $19.50/month decaf option) and receive a 12oz bag of coffee from the roaster they are working with that month. Ashley told me about a lot of ideas for add-ons and companions they are thinking about, and I don’t want to let out any trade secrets just yet, but she has some good ideas and let’s leave it at that. At the moment, KC Coffee Collective has Hammerhand Coffee, Broadway Roasting Co., Parkville Coffee, PT’s Coffee Roasting Co. and The Roasterie on board, and as their subscription base grows they will be adding more roasters to the roster. I appreciated that Ethan and Ashley both have a healthy respect for wanting to grow organically and not wanting to pump up a huge roaster list when it may be a year before they even get into the rotation. That’s smart, and that’s why I have faith that KC Coffee Collective is going to be a big success.
Another thing I liked about Ethan and Ashley’s approach is their recognition of the importance of storytelling, especially for the people who tend to like small-batch, craft, artisanal, whatever-you-want-to-call-them goods. It’s important for a lot of people to know the stories behind the products they’re buying. In the coffee chain of supply from growing to making a macchiato with the finished product, there are a million interesting stories to tell and KC Coffee Collective wants to share them with their patrons.
I liken Kansas City to Portland, OR in terms of our coffee scene. Portland has us beat in the sheer number of roasters, but I think there in one very critical factor that has made it so, and that’s Portland’s two (if not more) coffee “incubators”/shared roasting facilities at the Buckman Coffee Factory and Aspect Coffee Collective. You wouldn’t believe how many of PDX’s craft roasters and some good sized shops with multiple locations take advantage of these facilities. If KC had one, I think we’d see a HUGE explosion of roasters. The time I got to hang out with Intent Coffee at Aspect, roasters could pay a nominal fee for a green bean storage cubby and rent time on a 20kg Probat with probes to plug into a laptop running coffee roasting software for about $20/hour. That’s enough time to crank out three good sized batches, then use the industrial scale and thermal sealer to do all the bagging and labeling right then and there. Truly amazing and if KC had that, I think Kansas City would be mentioned with cities like Portland as one of the best coffee towns in the country.
As it stands, there are about 30 coffee roasters here in the area and we add more all the time. Jump in as an early supporter of Kansas City roasters and KC Coffee Collective with a subscription and you won’t be disappointed!