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JOE NEW YORK LAUNCHES WHOLESALE PROGRAM WHEN JONATHAN RUBINSTEIN and his sister, Gabrielle, opened their first Joe coffee shop in Manhattan in 2003, specialty coffee in the city had yet to be defined. Joe was just about the only place around where coffee lov- ers wouldn't be served their drink pre-loaded with cream and sugar, in a cup tucked into a paper bag. Though the econ- omy hadn't crashed yet, it was still a crazy time to be opening a quality-focused café in NYC. Today, Joe has eight cafés in New York and two in Philadelphia—that's a lot of growth, even over a decade. Jonathan's done it with his famous humor, patience, and vision; however, he's not one to slow down a good thing. No one was surprised, then, when Joe started roasting three years ago. True to his nature, Jonathan approached the process methodically, exhaustively, and responsibly. He brought coffees in one by one, incorporating them with his existing line up, until one day, all the coffees were Joe. The company's roasting operation was legit. Now Joe is excited to announce the development of a wholesale program in New York, where the coffee landscape couldn't be more different than it was 10 years ago. " Coffee in New York in so varied," says Katie Duris, a longtime member of the specialty-coffee community who now directs Joe's wholesale department. "Our wholesale clients run the gamut from Marc Murphy's Kingside at the Viceroy Hotel in midtown, to Bien Cuit, an artisan bakery in Carroll Gardens… We're also working with people in the beginning stages of their projects, helping them lay out their workspace and plan for equipment purchases and initial trainings. It's exciting to not only be growing, but helping others grow, too." That's sort of Joe's M.O.: Jonathan takes chances on people and ideas that inspire him—and hey, it's worked so far. "What I'm most excited about is the way we're integrating all the lessons of 10-plus years of retail operations into our wholesale service," Katie says. "For us, training started as a central part of serving great coffee, but as we've grown the training program has become the foundation of who we are." —Sarah Allen F O A M : N E W S Joe's director of roasting, Ed Kaufmann (pictured), travels extensively to pro- ducing countries in search of coffee that will please Joe's wholesale customers, as well as Joe's café regulars. "We look for coffees that are clean, sweet, and bal- anced, and then a lile something extra that sets them apart from the field," says Joe's wholesale director, Katie Duris. "Ed likes to say he's looking for coffees that have 'a taste of place.'" 25 www.baristamagazine.com B o o k 1 - 4 4 . i n d d 2 5 Book 1-44.indd 25 3 / 1 9 / 1 4 9 : 5 8 P M 3/19/14 9:58 PM