Craig Avera, Founder & CEO of Cali Coffee
Cali Coffee
Guest: Craig Avera, Founder & CEO, Cali Coffee
Host: Chris Hatch
Summary
Chris Hatch sits down with Craig Avera, founder and CEO of Cali Coffee, the drive-thru coffee brand with 20 locations across Florida. Craig shares how an Oregon kid "forged in California" ended up bringing West Coast drive-thru culture and customer service to Florida, how the team built its own private-label energy drink from customer feedback, and why Cali is staying focused on Florida while 7 Brew and Dutch Bros push into the market. The conversation digs into what separates a top-quartile site from a bottom-quartile one, why access can matter more than raw traffic counts, and how rising real estate costs are pushing the brand to rethink its prototype.
Key Takeaways
"Your marketing budget should really just be your site selection." An A site draws customers in without a heavy marketing spend.
Demo reports and Placer.ai data aren't enough. Walk the site: access points, traffic speed and visibility can change a site's grade completely.
When several coffee brands sit within half a mile of each other, ease of ingress/egress often decides where a first-time customer stops.
You can't out-operate a terrible location, but strong operations and brand loyalty can make even a store with imperfect access a top performer.
Cali runs a hybrid corporate/franchise model and is choosing disciplined Florida growth over large out-of-state deals that would stretch its infrastructure.
To offset rising occupancy costs, Cali uses a mix of ground leases, build-to-suits and end caps (drive-thru required), trims its prototype and FF&E package, and gets better terms from build-to-suit developers as it scales.
Transcript
[01:45] Chris Hatch: Welcome back to the Dirt Dog Pod. Today we've got a wonderful guest. It's not very often we get founders here on the Dirt Dog Pod. It's always an amazing opportunity when we do. So today we're joined by Craig Avera, both the founder and the CEO for Cali Coffee. Welcome to the pod, Craig.
[01:59] Craig Avera: Thank you, Chris. Nice to be here. Appreciate it.
[02:05] Chris Hatch: Yeah. I think the very first question: typically when we are interviewing a podcast guest, I like to put out into the Twitterverse and out into the LinkedIn world. What kind of questions do you have? And I think honestly the most common question that came back is it's Cali Coffee, but at the same time, for some reason all the locations are in Florida. So I think that's probably the best place to start. Tell us about Cali Coffee.
[02:28] Craig Avera: Yeah, I think serendipity is the best one word to describe it all. But I grew up in Oregon. I always say I was kind of forged in California. And that's really kind of where I became most of the person I am today. I think we're always growing. But with that said, Cali Coffee was conceptually born in California and we just saw an opportunity in Florida to kind of make it actually happen with a little more room for expansion than we thought California might bring. So packed up our stuff one day and moved out here to the great state of Florida, three thousand miles away.
[03:09] Chris Hatch: Yeah. Amazing. And the thought behind naming it Cali Coffee while you're opening in Florida, was it just you're trying to bring some California sunshine to Florida or what was the thought?
[03:17] Craig Avera: Yeah, I think it's such a great name. I actually thought of it at OSU and I have a friend who can fact check me on that. It's like, Cali Coffee. It just rolls off the tongue. And again, I was built in California, really. That's really kind of where most of my ideas and good and bad kind of sprang up. So I loved the name, and it was actually a trademark that had expired. I had to hunt somebody down in like Boise, Idaho to go reclaim that name. Got the trademark for it before we opened. Had to buy the website off somebody else that owned that.
It was a hodgepodge of missions to kind of get all the IP under my name. And then once we did, well, as we were kind of trying to get the first one open, it all kind of fell together. So again, serendipity.
[04:11] Chris Hatch: Yeah. You could have chosen a lot of different paths in life. Why coffee?
[04:14] Craig Avera: Man, I mean I love I've been a people person my whole life. I just love connecting with people. I think all of us can relate to that in some degree. And I think it's something that's always in demand and in short supply. Just that human connection. I think even now more so as we kind of enter this crazy age of AI and disconnect, I think that human interaction, the need for that is going to be even more warranted. And I also grew up in Oregon, right? So I grew up in kind of the heart of the drive-thru coffee epicenter of the world. To me as a kid growing up in a dairy town of thirteen thousand people in Oregon, I just assumed again, the world was small to me and I thought drive-thru coffee was as common as McDonald's.
I thought it was everywhere. It took me a decade or so to realize that it really had kind of only started there and had started to kind of bleed out into other markets. And so we saw a cool opportunity to kind of take something that I'd built a skill set in and apply kind of our ideas and everything to it. And I like coffee too, but I really enjoy the people aspect more than I do the drinks themselves, to be honest.
[05:25] Chris Hatch: So tell us about Cali Coffee today. What's the experience if you know our listener has never been to a Cali Coffee? What is it? What's the offering?
[05:32] Craig Avera: I think you nailed it. It's bringing the West Coast vibe out to Florida. One thing when we first moved out here, even when we visited to make sure, hey, do we want to pack up our stuff and move 3,000 miles across the country was what's the vibe out in Florida? And right when we landed the plane, we were like, okay, well, it looks like California for one. The beach is on the wrong side of where the sunrise should be, but other than that, it feels very similar. Then we started going into businesses to kind of like test them on what's the customer service environment like and that's where we saw a major contrast from what we were used to.
You know, in Oregon and in California, it was like you have to have a great product. You also have to have great customer service. Those are like non-negotiable points. And what was interesting in Florida was there were no non-negotiable points. It was like you could have a mediocre product and this the great thing about capitalism in general, but we noticed a severe lack of customer service in general. You'd walk into a place and it was almost like you felt like you were annoying them by having them do their job and we're like man is this a good thing for Cali where like customer service is the focus or is it weird?
Are we going to be such an outlier? And we definitely stood out. When we opened Cali for the first time the first shop in Hollywood, we'd have a 10 second interaction with somebody and be like, you're not from here, right? And they'd almost be like taken aback at first, like you're not from Florida, right? And like we're up in their face, we're in their car, we're sitting beside them and they're like, I dig it, I dig it. And so it took a while to kind of break their kind of armor. And then once they did, it was like they loved it, right? It was something they didn't even realize they needed.
[07:15] Chris Hatch: Yeah. So you have twenty stores open at the moment?
[07:17] Craig Avera: Correct. Twenty and a few more months, yeah.
[07:21] Chris Hatch: Yeah. Wonderful. And those are spread throughout the state of Florida. Have you gone into other states outside of Florida at this point?
[07:28] Craig Avera: We've not. There's been opportunities to break into other markets, but right now we're kind of hyper focused on Florida expansion. I just know there's going to be a set of challenges that come with interstate growth and I think they're great and they're welcomed. But right now Florida's such a big market to us that twenty is just scratching the surface. There's so many markets in Florida that we can still hit and grow into and we want to kind of maintain that smaller footprint for right now until we're really ready for that next step. Who knows when that will be, but.
[08:06] Chris Hatch: What's your number one best selling drink at the moment?
[08:08] Craig Avera: So it's one of our signature lattes. It's called the Beverly. It's going to be iced because we're in Florida where it's always a hundred degrees out and super humid. And I think with the demographic, as you probably know too iced coffee is just like what everybody wants to do. It's very Instagrammable, the drizzle looks better, you can do the ice shake that everybody likes to do, and that is kind of our bread and butter. The Beverly is what keeps the lights on, we like to say.
[08:35] Chris Hatch: Not to go off on a complete tangent, but I really got into the Dexter series for a little while. And where I felt that the cinematography just nailed it is they constantly would show the Dexter and he'd be sweating while he was outside wearing a dress shirt. And I'm like, Well, okay, well, thanks for at least being accurate. Yeah.
[08:52] Craig Avera: Yes. You never get used to that weather either. Fun fact about Dexter, this totally off topic, but one of my best buddies in LA, his son, played Dexter's son Harrison, I think, in the show. Stud kid, now he's like killing it and everything he does. But when I knew him he was like three feet tall and I could still outrun him and now that's all out the window.
[09:19] Chris Hatch: That's funny. Every time you talk to somebody from SoCal, you forget how small Hollywood really still is. Yeah. Circles are tight. So selling lots of iced drinks then in that heat, right? And the Beverly is the answer?
[09:22] Craig Avera: Yeah, yeah, it is. Lots of iced drinks. The Beverly's our number one selling latte, and then we're doing a ton of energy drinks too. We've created our own energy drink line. That's massive. I mean, everybody gets it, but it's funny you'll see a lot of couples come in and the girl's there, she wants her medium iced beverly with cold foam and caramel drizzle. And the guy's like, Yeah, no, I'm good I'm not a big coffee guy, or I'll drink it black or whatever. I'll be like, dude, you got to try our energy drink, and as soon as you kind of mention that, they perk up and now they're coming more often than their girlfriend and saying, hey, don't tell my girlfriend that I've been coming three times a day. So that's another fun part of it.
[10:13] Chris Hatch: So tell us about that process. How do you get to your own like private label energy drink? What's that process like?
[10:18] Craig Avera: Yeah, so we were doing Red Bull in the beginning. So when we opened, we did have an energy drink option there. And again, we didn't know we were just trying to get the doors open, right? And start serving anything. And so Red Bull was kind of our number one pick. We felt like the brands aligned. It was a cool, fun, like very active type brand. And we're like, yeah, we dig it. It's great. Let's do Red Bull. And great relationship with them, by the way. They took very good care of us for the years that we were with them. I think we reached a point and it was literally 10 PM.
I'm laying in bed, probably studying customers and what they order and what their kids' names are and their car colors and all that. And I'm like, are we allowed to cuss on this show? I don't know. But I was like, holy sh*t. There we go. Like, what if we just how hard would it be? Kind of what you just asked me. I asked myself, how hard would it be to create our own thing? So then I texted our contact and I'm like, hey, man, we have this crazy idea, but let's create our own thing. Like, we don't need to use Red Bull. Like they're great, but what if we do our own? Let's do it better. We'll, you know.
[11:01] Chris Hatch: You be you.
[11:17] Craig Avera: Customize it however we want. And so that became a rabbit hole that I kind of explored for a few weeks and we found somebody who could formulate it for us. He's like a mad scientist named Marvin. And Marvin the mad scientist came and we told him kind of general parameters of what we wanted. And I remember we went into like this kind of secret room one day and he pulls out his backpack, unzips it, and puts six different cans in front of us and they just say one, two, three, all the way to six, and I'm like, are we actually going to drink this stuff?
He's like, "Yeah, man, you're going to drink all of them." So we sat there testing them all and narrowed it down to like A and B and dialed in from there. And I think within probably six or seven weeks we had created our own brand, label, trademarked it, and sent it off. And I remember the initial feedback from customers was not perfect by any means. We only had one store back then, so You know, I was there all the time. My wife, Rose, and I. We were like in the shop 16 hours a day back then. So with the energy drink, we were like you got to let us know, like feed it to us straight.
Is it good? Is it bad? Did it totally suck? And you know, the main feedback was X, Y, and Z. And so we just went back to the drawing board, reformulated it, and we're taking that feedback very seriously and came out with a second version, which stuck a lot better, and that's what we're still serving today.
[12:43] Chris Hatch: That's amazing. So you actually changed the formula from the customer feedback.
[12:45] Craig Avera: We did. Yeah, we did. 'Cause I'm not an energy drink guy myself. So I was like a bad person to kind of judge it. 'Cause I'll like anything. You put you know acid in front of me and I'll just be like, Yeah, I kind of I taste the notes. I'll find a way to like it. So we needed real feedback and so we got it, we listened, we applied it and it's better for it.
[13:08] Chris Hatch: Yeah, amazing. Okay, so the twenty stores open. Florida's obviously a wonderful state. You got plenty of room for growth there. And one thing that's unique about your company is you are driven by franchisee growth.
[13:20] Craig Avera: Yep, we're a hybrid model kind of. So right now of the twenty stores that are open, we're nine corporate, which is just Rose and myself still. We've never raised any equity partners or brought anybody on. And then we have nine franchise stores that are owned by a few different franchise groups that own one to four stores apiece right now and are continuing to look to expand.
[13:46] Chris Hatch: So what is it like being in South Florida as a twenty store operator, which you've got some wonderful stores? I see the volumes, I see the drive-thru stacks, and it doesn't seem like you're hurting for customers. But then you're competing head to head at the moment in this arms race, right? The beverage wars, between 7 Brew and Dutch Bros. What's going on? What's in your head about it?
[14:08] Craig Avera: Yeah. I think Cali was first to market. Not that we're growing the fastest, but we were the first to plant a flag. So I always will take pride in that. It's a badge of honor that we can wear. But yeah, I mean, great brands, right? I respect the hell out of what they're doing. I think 7 Brew taking off as quickly as they did in such a short amount of time is nothing short of remarkable. Dutch Bros is such a fantastic brand too. It's kind of a major muse of mine. 'cause I grew up in that whole world. Like I thought Dutch Bros was the coolest.
I respect the hell out of it. And so, it's funny. Everybody can only do so much. I always say you can control what you can control, and you can't control what you can't. Like no amount of willpower is going to stop 7 Brew and or Dutch and or XYZ coffee player from coming in. And so to me, it's just hey, let's hire the best people, let's have the best quality drinks, let's have the greatest operators, and just grow in a smart way. I'd rather have less stores open that are doing better, that are healthier economically and with the staff and the people that are involved with it, than trying to kind of stretch too thin.
And that's why every time somebody says, hey, let's go to Tennessee and do a 20-store deal, it's very tempting to have that carrot in front of you and like, yeah, we could double our footprint in the next 36 months potentially if these guys can execute. But it stretches our current infrastructure a little bit too thin. And so it's something where we've had to weigh the options. Is it worth it right now? Do we kick the can down the road? 'cause I know those brands are coming and you don't want to go from having a five-to-one ratio to a one-to-five ratio, but at the same time I don't want to open bad stores too.
[15:51] Chris Hatch: We just watched Dutch Bros complete the acquisition of Clutch Coffee. In fact, we had Darren Spicer on the pod ten episodes ago or something like that. I got to assume these brands are knocking on your door.
[16:03] Craig Avera: Yeah, there have been conversations. I love Darren, he's the best. I talk to Darren all the time and now that he's at liberty to talk about that a little bit more, it's been cool to kind of hear what the future could look like. But you know, Cali is in growth mode right now and we're looking to grow and so it's flattering if we have anybody that does knock on our door, it's like, hey, it just kind of reaffirms that we're on the right track and doing something good. But we're really looking to expand the Cali footprint right now and I want to see that logo all over the state.
[16:49] Chris Hatch: So as you're looking to do that expansion, if I've got what I feel like is the perfect Cali Coffee site and it's somewhere in the state of Florida and I feel like this a real you know, this going to be a we're going to knock it out of the park here. What does that look like? What are the site characteristics you're after?
[17:03] Craig Avera: Yeah, site criteria, obviously to us it's critical. We like to say that your marketing budget should really just be your site selection. Like if you get an A site, then a lot of that allocation for a marketing budget down the line doesn't need to be so deep because you've just kind of created your own fate. Like by getting a better site, you're going to draw customers in without having to kind of force the card. So our mantra has really gone from You know, we just kind of avoid anything that's not an incredible site. And so there's a lot of things as you know that go into site criteria and selection.
You really have to touch, feel and see and be on the site. You can trust as many Placer.ai sheets and demo reports as you want and look at the numbers and income demos and traffic counts. But at the end of the day you can go there and it might be sixty thousand cars a day on the road, but the access points are terrible and they're flying by at sixty miles an hour and visibility is blocked because they just put up a high rise next door with 30 feet of frontage and you didn't see that on the demo report so yeah we just did a site tour in the Carolinas actually funny going back to that just exploring it was worth a flight up there to kind of see what other markets could look like and again it's like you look at something and you kind of give it a grade like a initial assessment and then you go there and that grade can sometimes stay the same, or it can change immensely, once you actually set foot on it.
[18:36] Chris Hatch: Yeah. When you think about what separates... let's just take your existing store base there, and you say, Okay, here's my top quartile, here's my bottom quartile. What do you think are some of the indicators? I mean, this the Dirt Dog Pod, right? We like to get into the nitty-gritty of site selection and what makes one site better than the next. And really we put these episodes out. The hope is that a young professional can learn something from what's happening, right? So what do you think are some of the main characteristics that separate a top quartile site for you versus a bottom?
[19:06] Craig Avera: Yeah, I mean at the end of the day it really just does come down to kind of several factors, but traffic counts is one. Ingress, egress, I think with more players coming in that are similar, right? Let's say there's a Cali, a Dutch, and a 7 Brew within a tight radius, half a mile. I think a lot of it's going to come down to what is the accessibility level, especially where the brand loyalty may not yet exist, to somebody who's coming in as a Florida native where they didn't grow up around Dutch. They didn't grow up around 7 Brew and Cali's new. They didn't grow up around that either.
It's like, what's going to influence my decision between this brand, that brand, and the other? And so a lot of it really is how easy is it to get in. And then once I do go there, maybe my first visit to any of these brands is going to be based on geography. Hey, I'm already going west. I can pull into this plaza. I get my gas over there. There's a Cali on the way. Great. I'm going to try that place out. I did notice there's a 7 Brew across the street too. Cool. Looks like they're kind of doing the same thing. And then I go to Cali.
What's my experience like? Because just because you got that first one, what's the actual experience like and how do you feel after that as a consumer? So if you're not wowed on that first time, I mean, where's the incentive to go back? I was coming from work, going back east, and I see that 7 Brew. Shoot, I'm tired. It's 3 a.m. Now let me pop by there and see what that experience is like. You know, now you're going to be making all sorts of little subconscious assessments. Figuring out where your allegiance is going to fall. You know, who do I like better? What was cooler?
What does my cup look like? Am I proud to show up with the logo versus that one? There are so many intangibles. That's the beautiful and crazy part about entrepreneurship is like a million factors that go into it. You can do so much, but you try and do one thing at a time to kind of make people want to come back to your brand.
[21:02] Chris Hatch: You know, it blows me away when we look at coffee stores, we're constantly looking at our competitors, we're constantly looking at coffee stores all over the place and how much of it just goes back down to that convenience. It's that simple, easy, ingress/egress. How do I get in? How do I get out? And if I can get on a well trafficked road and I can get in and get out, people want to stop. I mean, that's the other thing, right? Some of these roads that carry tons of traffic, people just don't want to stop.
[21:26] Craig Avera: For sure. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and it's great. You know, you can build a great brand and you can market yourself, peg yourself as a destination spot where people will go out of their way. And I do think there's a percentage of people who will. They have enough brand loyalty to where they're going to make a U turn, go half a mile down to come to you. Our busiest store actually doesn't have the greatest access point. If you're going west, you have to do a U turn and then to get back out, you've got to go right and do another U turn. And it's our busiest store in the system.
And so I think there's a level of influence where and I think that validates our industry in general, where it's like we are making a difference, people do care. There's a lot of data in that too. So I'm definitely not trying to be reductive in the sense that operations matter immensely. Like we are so operational people driven. That's kind of the foundation and the cornerstone. But at the same time, I don't think you can out operate a terrible location, right? You're going to be spinning your wheels in the mud forever trying to just get to baseline. If you picked a better site, you may have been able to put in ten percent of the effort with twice the return.
So yeah, I think you get the best site you can, then you operate it the best you can, and you hope that's good enough for a home run site.
[22:39] Chris Hatch: You wear a lot of hats. You're a store operator, you're a founder, you're a CEO. I'm sure at times you might be a barista depending on what you choose to do with your day, or a taster, whatever else, right? When you wake up in the morning, what is it that you can do? What do you see as the thing that can promote Cali today better than anything else? What goes into your head in the morning?
[23:00] Craig Avera: I love that question, man. That's such a great question, because my role with Cali has evolved so much over the years. And some of it I've really embraced, really loved. I think all of it I've kind of embraced. Some of it I have not loved, though. I will tell you that. There are hats on my head right now that I don't think I'm best suited to wear, but somebody's got to wear it. And right now I am the best person for that job. I think every day for the last basically 10 years of my life. The first and last thought on my head is generally something related to Cali Coffee.
It's something about how can we make this better? Is the yellow shade on our logo too yellow? I love a lot of the design aspects of it. And truth be told, one of my favorite things still, my form of therapy, I don't have a therapist, but when I'm going through it and I'm like, man, I'm just about to red line and explode, I will go to a store, ironically, because what made my head spin was the 19 Zoom calls I had to take that morning. But what makes me feel grounded is going into a store, grabbing an iPad, and going out and taking customer orders in the heat and sweating my a** off.
And I love it, man. I love it. I love making drinks. I love high-fiving the crew. I love making the crew happy. And that's really what fuels me. And so it's so funny because once the growth happens, you have to draw yourself further away from that on the daily. So I intentionally will go to a store regularly to just remind myself why we started because I did not start the company to be on nineteen Zoom calls before noon. I started it because I love the people aspect. And so yeah man, I love to stay rooted that way. Anything that can make Cali one percent better or point one percent better, no matter how long it takes, it's worth it to me. And so yeah, it's a beautiful, messy journey, man, but I love it all.
[24:51] Chris Hatch: You mentioned a few minutes ago AI and my question to you is how are you implementing that into your lives? I guess we should now, according to POTUS, all call this superintelligence. So we got a rebrand there. So how are you using yeah, apparently as of yesterday, we all call this superintelligence now. So that.
[25:01] Craig Avera: Is that okay? Gotcha. I appreciate I'm not hip with the trend on that stuff. So funny, man. It's such a powerful thing. It's terrifying to me, but you know, it's just the world we live in. I think AI on the front end of Cali I don't really see a huge path for us there. I think we stay the course, we continue to kind of keep it old school with the customer interactions. I know a lot of brands are probably going to lean into it more. I think AI can maybe be helpful maybe with optimizing some things on the back end. Just streamlining things, getting answers quicker, more efficiently, accurately, right?
Because as we grow, you need answers quickly. And as AI gets smarter, it's going to be able to provide those. I can go in and type in a prompt and get an answer to a question where I'd need like an expert on that. But I think what we want to kind of avoid is having any of that be felt by the customer or the crew, right? Like I still want the old school approach. I'm an old school guy, I guess. I'm like an analog dude living in this digital world. I love the face to face. You know, we'll never have a squawk box at a store.
We always will be face to face. I'll still be jumping into people's cars and riding on people's Jeeps on the way to the window. I think that authenticity and that that magic is what's going to keep us a desirable place to go. That X factor.
[26:40] Chris Hatch: My favorite is when, especially on the social media side, people talk about how AI is going to take your job. And I'm just like, Well, if AI wants to rent a rental car in a new city for the third day in a row and go drive twenty seven sites and decide if these are good or not, great. Perfect. I'm all for it. Yeah, let me know where to sign up for that subscription because I would pay a lot of money to not need to do that in my life. But that is the problem, right? Here we are.
[27:12] Craig Avera: Exactly. It's so funny with like the generational change too and like the younger generation adopting it more, or it being more intrinsic to them. I don't know, I'm approaching forty and it's just like every cell in my body is trying to push against and resist and keep it old school. But to your point, man, if it can make things easier that don't need to be hard, why not, you know?
[27:39] Chris Hatch: Yeah, exactly. So we have so many pressures on site selection in the world today. Just finding a good site is hard enough. But we have all of these rising cost measures and we've talked about the competition this competition for pads, the rising property taxes. How's it going? Right. I mean, the South Florida real estate pricing is high, right? And I know I'm preaching to the choir there. How are you finding success getting stuff done?
[28:07] Craig Avera: Yeah, it's another phenomenal question. Things are definitely getting more expensive and not cheaper. You know, in coffee we've got a pretty good margin base. So if the rent factor, your occupancy rate goes up a little bit, I think we have a bit of a breathing room there, but it doesn't help anything by any means, especially when it's a land grab out there and you want the best sites, you're going to have to pay for it, right? We're never going to reverse our mantra of okay, well let's go for the cheaper B sites because that's going to kill our AUVs and our top line. So how do we continue to get the best sites and maintain economic health?
I mean, it's tough. You know, we're doing a combination of ground leases, build-to-suits, end caps. Drive-thru is still a requirement. We've done a lot of site and building optimization to try and figure out how we can take the same concept and make it a little bit leaner, right? We're always looking at that. I think in the past, we didn't have to focus, hyper focus on it so much because things were not as expensive and after COVID when things shot up and continued to stay up and only get hotter. Now we've been looking at going back to the drawing board, I guess. You know, do we need twelve hundred square feet on our proto?
Can we shrink it down to ten eighty? If we even do that, what's the material or immaterial cost? Because we're only paying for a little bit more FRP drywall and some stucco, our MEP package is going to look the same. So we've noticed it's not a big needle mover because you're going to pay more per square foot. So there's a lot of things we've looked at even your FF&E package. We've kind of worked on optimization for that. But as far as real estate goes, man, I think the bigger we go, we're getting better cap rates with these build-to-suit developers. So at scale you start to get better terms and you get better players coming to look and give you opportunity to grow with them and partner up with them.
And so we're just continuing to try and forge those relationships and kind of it sounds kind of lame, but trust the process because we know the path ahead. Once we get to scale it's going to get leaner and leaner. So again, you can only control what you can. So if things get more expensive, so be it, but we'll battle as hard as we can to keep the things within our control in our control.
[30:33] Chris Hatch: Yeah. Wonderful. For anybody out there that hasn't been to a Cali Coffee, if they find themselves in your drive thru, what are you getting for your drink and what should they get?
[30:41] Craig Avera: Okay, so I'm a very boring coffee drinker. This so ironic. I'm a black cold brew or a black iced Americano kind of guy. At my house, everyone walks in and they're like, man, he's going to have this cathedral, and I've got like this $30 Mr. Coffee. But if I'm going to a store, I'll do a black cold brew, I'll do an Americano. If I was to recommend, I like to read the customer, right? If it's a female, about 20 years old, I'm probably going to go Beverly or Gold Rush. I'm definitely going to recommend cold foam. We do flavored cold foams now too. So I'd probably say, hey, let's do like a vanilla cold foam on top.
We'll do drizzle. We'll give her a nice pink straw. And you know, if she doesn't love it, we'll tell her to come right back and we'll remake it until she does. If it's a guy, I'm probably going energy drink. I'm probably going to go Paradise or Rosewater Hero energy. If they're doing some kind of a keto thing, we've got a zero version for you too, so you can go sugar free. But yeah, it's a lot of just customer reading. It's funny. My wife, who's the other founder, was at the Fort Myers store when five girls walked in. She goes, Hey, I'm going to guess all of your drinks.
And she literally nailed every single one based on like just their mannerisms. It was crazy. Like one was a black coffee drinker, one was a tea drinker, and she nailed them all. I think you just get to know your audience and adjust to what they like.
[32:11] Chris Hatch: All right. So I roll up, I'm in my Cybertruck. What am I drinking?
[32:16] Craig Avera: A guy like you, man, I've got to go cold brew. I'd put my name on cold brew for that. I could be wrong here because you're going to fire test me here, but I definitely go cold brew. I wouldn't want to insult you, but I would suggest that we could add a flavor, but I would probably think you're going to be a kind of guy like me. And maybe see if you want to add some cold foam and I'll slide it on there for you without having to tell your wife or girlfriend it's between us type of thing.
[32:45] Chris Hatch: Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. We built like thirteen Starbucks locations and we built a dozen Dutch and now we're really heavy onto the 7 Brew side as we move to that program. And it is hilarious to me because every time I go through a drive thru, it's the same thing. I either want a nitro cold brew or a black cold brew every single time. Yeah. Now listen, if it's past eleven AM, I will be convinced of getting an energy drink, right? Like you know I could be convinced. Yeah.
[33:00] Craig Avera: Yes, you and me, man. Dude, I want to be fun, but I'm so boring. It's like no matter what time of day, I'll try. I'll do my cold brew and I'll add a splash of something fun. And then I'm halfway through regretting that flavor.
[33:26] Chris Hatch: Hey, you got it dialed though, right? I mean what's the point in messing with it when you know what you want?
[33:31] Craig Avera: If we've got a good coffee, why mess with a good thing? That's what I say. That's why our roaster, [Palm Coffee], are such superstars because they've given us such a good cold brew and bean blend that I don't want to mess with it. But I love being able to customize. I love having the ability to do that and you can create so many different things and limitless options and I think that's such a cool thing about what we do, you know. In food you can't really do that as much. It's like, yeah, no onions, a little extra salt, there you go. You could do a rainbow of flavors and make it crazy.
[34:07] Chris Hatch: Wild. Well, for everybody out there listening, if you haven't been to a Cali Coffee, get out and go check them out. Try a Beverly. Try an iced black cold brew. Might change your life. You never know. But it's worth it. And Craig, thank you for joining us on the pod. We appreciate your time.