January 2012   |   Volume 3, Issue #3

Old Fashioned Olfactory Experience

Coffee starts as a flower

Depending on the configuration of your particular store, it might be a large island, or a wooden cart, or even a bunch of plastic bins in the grocery aisles. But you won't have any trouble finding the bulk coffee bean display at Sprouts. It will find you.

How to describe the aroma of coffee? Rich. Earthy. Relaxing. Sublime. Full-bodied. The International Coffee Organization has an odd little website where it also uses terms such as smoky, spicy, nutty, winey, floral, malty, ashy and even animal-like — whatever that means. Clearly it isn't an experience that translates well into words. And as someone once said, coffee smells better than it tastes.

Scientific research actually shows that the smell of coffee, alone, stimulates beneficial brain activity.
A 2008 report in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry — not exactly beach reading, but dripping with credibility — said that laboratory studies indicated that the aroma of coffee triggered 17 different genes in the brains of rats, which helped to ward off the effects of sleep deprivation.

In nearly every Sprouts store, those great-smelling coffee beans come from one company: Volcanic Red, a Scottsdale-based operation with roasting facilities in Los Angeles. Volcanic's ties to our company go way back, beyond the founding of Sprouts, because of a longstanding working relationship with the Boney Family and the Henry's stores.

There are many reasons that the Volcanic Red coffee display is so wonderfully aromatic.

According to Co-Founder Stacy Berro, it begins with the bean (not to be confused with Cole Porter's Begin the Beguine, though that goes well with coffee, too). Volcanic Red started with the idea of using the world's finest Arabica coffee beans, which in their opinion are those cultivated near volcanic regions — where there is rich soil, a tropical climate that doesn't get too hot or too cold, and sufficient elevation so that the beans will grow slowly. The fact that Co-Founding Partner David Sant had spent some time on his brother's small "gentleman's farm" near Kona in Hawaii helped get the whole concept started.

"It's the quality of the initial bean that we start with," said Berro. "We were having a meeting recently with our green bean importer, and he was telling us that he doesn't know of anyone in the country that is doing as high end a coffee as we do in a bulk situation. There is something very unique going on at Sprouts with the coffee in those bins."

Gare Clark searches out the best beans in Guatemala

These days, Volcanic Red still scours the planet looking for high-quality beans from interesting growing regions. For example, there is the Huehuetenango (WAY-WAY-tuh-NAN-go) bean, grown in an exceptionally remote, high mountainous region of Guatemala. Huehuetenango is sublimely flavorful, with a superb bouquet. (It's also really fun to say.)

At its production facility near Los Angeles, Volcanic Red uses older European hand-crafted drum roasting equipment instead of the modern fluid airbed roasters that virtually every other company uses. "We feel that the drum roasting actually gives a deeper penetration of heat into the bean and a more consistent cooking method," says Berro. One of their roasters is from Italy, another from Turkey. And the third "brand new" one that is being assembled right now? It is actually a 40-year-old roaster from Germany. All of that makes the coffee aroma that much more potent — even in the neighborhood near the roasting facility.

The third Co-Founding Partner, Gare Clark, also emphasizes that some of the pungency of Volcanic Red Coffee beans comes from their remarkable freshness.

"[Other] coffee is sometimes roasted and then stuck in a warehouse for months on end until somebody orders it, and then it is pulled and it has kind of lost some of its luster. But when you walk into Sprouts, this is coffee that has been roasted within the last week or two. Some of the stuff you might see on conventional supermarket shelves might be months old."

We wake up and smell it, every day.

One of the other reasons that the Sprouts coffee bean display smells so good is because of the wide variety of flavored coffees, like Hawaiian Hazelnut, French Caramel Cream and Vienna Cinnamon. And here again, there is a distinct Volcanic Red difference.

"We have a totally different approach than most coffee companies," says Clark. "A lot of coffee companies don't like flavored coffee, and what they do is to take poor-quality coffee and douse it with flavor. So you get a very potent flavor in the beginning, but you get this kind of 'bitter finish' to it, because that is the poor-quality coffee that is being masked. What we do is just the opposite. We take a high-quality coffee and we put, say, only two-thirds of the industry standard for the amount of flavor. So the flavor is sort of an accent to a good coffee rather than overpowering a poor-quality coffee." And you get the combined effects of two outstanding aromas.

Volcanic uses the same philosophy with its blended coffees, to ensure that each part of the blend can stand up on its own — whether it is a Kona blend, Colombian Suprema, Guatemalan or Costa Rican. There are no cheap "blending ingredients" or fillers.

"We are blending two coffees to create a unique flavor profile," says Clark. "So maybe you take something that's got the brightness and acidity of a Colombian coffee, and balance it with the boldness and smoothness of an Indonesian coffee."

In many Sprouts stores, the Volcanic Red coffee display is supplemented by chocolate bars, teas, and hot cocoas — all of which merely blend together with the coffees to create an even more enticing aroma — sort of a vapor cloud of mocha java goodness.

Finally, let us not forget the other olfactory sensation triggered by Sprouts coffees — the smell of a bargain.

Clark says: "We call it 'café quality,' meaning, these are the kinds of coffees that you would expect to find in cafés. This is more of a specialty item, but it's brought to you in that Sprouts value format. It's really unusual. These coffees we sell to cafés, and they sell [there] for $12.99, $15.99 a pound, depending on what kind of coffee it is — the same coffees that you guys [Sprouts] are selling every day at $9.99."

That's a fragrance that can ward off a lot more than the effects of sleep deprivation!

the original Volcanic Red team in 2001: David Sant, Stacy Berro, Jammie Sant and Gare Clark