COFFEE IS ESSENTIAL

May 7, 2020

When San Francisco became the first major metropolitan area in the U.S. to issue a “Stay at Home” order early in March, one of my first reactions was to determine if coffee qualified as an essential business. Obviously states have been writing their own rules, to a certain extent, but I thought California’s playbook may indicate where Summit would be in a few weeks time, once North Carolina adopted its own.

Coffee, as it turns out, is considered an essential business. Let me check myself — coffee IS an essential business.

There’s certainly a bit of irony, writing this as I sit at my home desk, wearing my Summit-branded “WFH 2020” shirt that celebrates the Work from Home era so many of us are fumbling through. It’s not glamorous — my “desk” doubles as my nightstand, my office turns into a bedroom once the sun sets, and I can hear my children biking up and down the sidewalk every 36 seconds or so.

I am leading an essential business while also working from home. So while yes, Summit has accomplished more than our share in the last 8 weeks despite some serious adversity, the work is being carried out each day by people other than me. It’s our essential staff.

You see, we’ve long known that coffee is an essential part of our culture. Not just the caffeine hit for those on the way to work, though there’s no fault in that. But for the familiarity, the routine, the tinge or normalcy in stepping inside or even just curbside at your local café, saying hello to your everyday barista even if it’s your only trip out of the house each morning.

For Summit to have the luxury of staying open and being great, and for me to have the luxury of working from my nightstand and enjoying the awkward WFH perks, it requires this remarkable essential staff to show up.

Showing up during COVID looks very little like showing up two months ago. Our baristas show up having just washed their hands for 20 seconds, and immediately wash them again. They wear masks, they keep the Summit doors wide open. Our essential staff has had to handle the introduction of both mobile ordering and deliveries, two new methods of serving coffee that we hadn’t touched in 21 years in business.

And our staff, from Asheville to Davidson, to the roasting production team in Cornelius, has SHOWED UP. The hospitality is the best I’ve seen in nine years leading Summit. The drink quality hasn’t dropped a bit, the teamwork is fluid, and the optimism for a better Summit is at an all-time high.

In order for coffee to be essential, coffee people need to be essential. So for all the WFH warriors like me who are busy on Zoom calls and trying to balance parenting and meetings, home schooling and more meetings, the 7th snack break between more meetings, there are dozens of essential baristas who don’t have that luxury.

I finish my daily runs every morning by 6:00, and am one of the first four customers at our Basecamp café — shoutout to Luke, Frank, and the gentleman in scrubs who orders a large skim mocha whose name I am embarrassed not to know. I grab my two coffees (one for Tyler, I am not that caffeine desperate), head back home and do it all again, sometimes lamenting the monotony of another day in the bedroom office. For me to grab my coffee at 6:00, that means two essential Summit baristas are in the café well before me to safely brew coffee, safely open doors, safely turn on lights, and bring their A+ energy long before most of us are awake.

Our managers have done a remarkable job keeping the cafés alive, happy, and clean. It’s their entire teams, however, who provide that normalcy, the routine, the hospitality that makes coffee essential.

It’s people like college students Sarah and Maddy whose semester got flipped upside down, now waking up earlier than ever to make Summit happen. It’s people like Ali, our lead roaster who pivoted into a barista with almost no notice because, well, we needed her to. It’s Holly, who during the week stays home with her two kids only to work back-to-back 10 hour shifts on the weekends.

It’s the team in Asheville, that instead of getting down about the empty chairs and empty tables, made barista dancing videos go viral and show the world that, yes, it’s still OK to smile. A team two hours away from company headquarters, rejecting this idea of isolation and instead banding together to say “We, too, are Summit.'“

The news for weeks has covered all the essential medical professionals risking their lives to save others, and also covered plenty of executives adapting to remote work. These stories certainly matter.

But there’s been too little written about the essential service workers, making your essential coffee or your essential takeout food from your restaurant that was deemed “essential” by a governing body. Summit has been an essential part of the Davidson and Asheville communities since the start of “Stay at Home,” just as Summit has been since the day our doors opened. That’s only possible, however, with our essential coffee team.

There’s no fame in this coffee life we’re leading, and certainly not a whole lot of fortune. Still, coffee is essential because Summit is essential, what Summit does is essential to us carrying on and coming together and having hope that some day soon we can gather out back on a Friday evening for a beer. And without the essential team, there is no essential Summit.

Today and everyday, I extend my utmost gratitude to our essential team, who’ve not only survived but in fact thrived during this global crisis. I draw inspiration from you, am in awe of you, and hope that you take as much pride in being part of this era of Summit as I do leading it.