{"id":29302,"date":"2014-08-21T11:15:09","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T16:15:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=29302"},"modified":"2014-09-08T08:53:09","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T13:53:09","slug":"brock-grads-have-something-brewing-with-coffee-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2014\/08\/brock-grads-have-something-brewing-with-coffee-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Brock grads have something brewing with coffee business"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"coffeebrew\"

Brock grads Gabriel Marchionda (pictured), Trevor Cowan and Mark Fabiano are the brains behind My Coffee Brew, a growing online business that customizes private label coffee pods.<\/p><\/div>\n

\n

It smelled like a good idea at the time, and now three Brock University grads have something brewing with a single-serve custom coffee packaging company.<\/p>\n

Gabriel Marchionda (BA ’12), Trevor Cowan (BAcc ’12) and Mark Fabiano (BBA ’12), all 25 years old, are the brains behind My Coffee Brew<\/a>, a growing online business that provides a personal touch for companies that want private label coffee pods.<\/p>\n

“We’re filling that gap of (businesses) who maybe have six or seven locations but aren’t big enough to work with (bigger companies),” Marchionda said.<\/p>\n

The idea began percolating a couple years ago, when Marchionda’s brother \u2014 a business student \u2014 listened to a guest speaker who started a private label coffee bag packaging business.<\/p>\n

Marchionda heard the story and did some research. After learning that Keurig’s patent on the popular single-serve cups was expiring, he created a website to gauge interest without being able to provide a product.
\nWhat started as one submission per week grew into five or six, and Marchionda knew he had to turn the idea into reality.<\/p>\n

“I was like, \u2018OK, I have to do something about this,’ he said. “It was frustrating because I couldn’t do anything.”<\/p>\n

Marchionda took the idea to the Brock University Students’ Union’s Blueprint <\/a>competition, and in February 2013 he came away with $10,000 from the Nitsopoulos Family Entrepreneurship Award<\/a> as part of the BUSU <\/a>program. Cowan and Fabiano joined My Coffee Brew afterwards, and the money paid for the packaging machine.<\/p>\n

“Without (Blueprint) we wouldn’t have had that $10,000 investment, and we wouldn’t be here today without that,” Marchionda said.<\/p>\n

My Coffee Brew has since partnered with a Toronto caf\u00e9 to provide coffee for packaging when needed. It now has nine clients, most of which are coffee roasters and small- to medium-sized companies. Only two – including BioLinc<\/a> at the Goodman School of Busines<\/a>s – are from Canada.<\/p>\n

In addition to being a client, BioLinc manager Dan Lynch gave the young entrepreneurs manufacturing advice. My Coffee Brew works out of the same building as Trivium Industries<\/a> – a partner of Brock and BioLinc – in Welland.<\/p>\n

My Coffee Brew has one to three orders per month. The typical order varies from 10,000 to 50,000 cups. It’s not enough for full-time work – yet – but Marchionda is hopeful the single-serve specialists can create sustainability through repeat business.<\/p>\n

“Right now we’re trying to build a client list of people who order once,” Marchionda said. “What we want to try to do is have people who order once, (and) they’re on our list and we have a good relationship with them, (order again and) come back to us. A one-and-done deal is good for the short term, but you want to have a lasting relationship. We’re trying to build up as many clients as we can.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It smelled like a good idea at the time, and now three Brock University grads have something brewing with a single-serve custom coffee packaging company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29303,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[119,3,1],"tags":[592,632,2203,133,331,594,2202,2204],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29302"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29302"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29302\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29571,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29302\/revisions\/29571"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29302"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29302"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29302"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}