BRATTLEBORO — Mocha Joe's, the cozy, art-lined half-basement tucked into the slope of Main Street like a hobbit hole, is a key place for local coffee aficionados.
The cafe's high-minded drink selection and homespun aesthetic makes it one of Brattleboro's most emblematic businesses - an establishment that both reflects and informs the culture of the town.
Yet you can now find Mocha Joe's coffee in Tokyo and Seoul. In each city, a café has opened, brightly promoting its use of the company's beans.
Besides a brief foray into Keene, the café in Brattleboro is Mocha Joe's only location. But its distinct hometown character belies the sophisticated operations of the company, which began importing and roasting its own beans in 1994, three years after the café opened.
The roaster supplies wholesale beans to hundreds of businesses throughout New England - traveling outside of Brattleboro, you might still be drinking Mocha Joe's without realizing it. Even so, the Vermont globetrotter might be surprised by Mocha Joe's newfound presence in Asia.
How does a singular Brattleboro brand find itself halfway around the world?
“Mocha Joe's has already been international for a while,” said Ben Zeman, the company's director of operations, whose role involves coordinating projects, consulting, and equipment repairs - both here and in Asia, albeit at a distance.
The Asia connection, by way of Putney
Since 2009, Mocha Joe's has done business outside of the United States, buying green coffee beans in Sumatra and Cameroon directly from small farmers, a concept called direct trade.
The connection to Cameroon, where Mocha Joe's has three full-time and several more part-time employees, is of particular importance. That relationship began when a roaster there, Hamidou Yaya, sent Mocha Joe's a sample of the beans he'd grown.
Pierre Capy, the company's founder, partnered with Yaya and personally helped establish the growing, milling, and sorting operation in Cameroon, which he visits regularly.
But while the company has functioned as an importer for years, its launch in Asia, and the specific development of Mocha Joe's as a recognizable brand there, is a different path to international growth. And this, too, began from an outside source.
Mocha Joe's director of operations in Asia, Juno Lee, was born in Korea and moved to Japan at age 12. Four years later, he came to Vermont to attend the Putney School and while there, he began coming to Mocha Joe's.
“I remember the first time walking into Mocha Joe's and trying maple latte,” he said over email. “Something about the simplicity and the taste of the drink made me want to share it with people in the outside world.”
Compelled by the idea, he tried calling Capy, only to learn that he was away on business in Cameroon.
“I knew so strongly then, that I wanted to work with him and learn from him as much as I can,” Lee said.
Work began on developing bottled products. Lee would spend hours testing drinks, with an eye to eventually selling the products nationally, as well as in Asia, where bottled beverages and specialty coffees are both booming markets.
But these products were a secondary goal. “I don't think we started this international project with the bottled beverage product in mind,” Zeman noted.
“We had considered that a bottled coffee product could work really well over there, but there is a danger in projecting too far,” he said.
A foothold in Asian markets
When the development of these products hit various logistical snags - such as producing the bottles themselves - Mocha Joe's placed more focus on bringing the coffee beans to Asia.
The cafés are more the byproduct of this goal than they are the culmination.
“I did not just want to build cafes and other locations in these two countries,” Lee explained. “I was more interested in exporting coffee beans.”
Specialty coffee beans, for instance, cost twice as much in Tokyo as they do here - should Mocha Joe's use its importing network and build up its brand in Japan, the company could drastically reduce that cost for buyers.
To help establish this foothold in the Asian markets, Mocha Joe's has partnered with Forest in the Boat, a Japan-based business that owns and operates both the Japanese and Korean cafés under their lifestyle brand, Keats.
Beyond supplying the beans, Mocha Joe's collaborates with Keats on other aspects of the business, such as design and marketing.
Zevan, describing their relationship as like a “family business,” is enthusiastic about the partnership.
“Like us, they are socially responsible, ethical, love sharing, care about their products and care about the people buying them,” he said.
So while you won't find a place called “Mocha Joe's” in Tokyo, you might still find yourself at home in the curiously named “Keats Lifestyle Beauty Lab.”
The café, with the appearance of an old-fashioned Japanese house, sits incongruously along a stretch of low-rises. Inside, a large window alights on a clean, spare lounge with white walls and plain wooden furniture. A painting of a man drinking coffee hangs on one wall, and on another, an empty burlap coffee sack.
But connecting back home is the familiar logo - a noir-ish man in his crumpled fedora, smiling over a steaming cup - that adorns the menu board, merchandise, and equipment.
More than iconography, Mocha Joe's brings its emphasis on organic and direct-trade goods to the café. Keats combines its own company's focus on health with Mocha Joe's values - so in addition to coffee, the café sells smoothies.
Building the brand in South Korea
Meanwhile, in a hilly neighborhood in Seoul, festooned with trees and neighboring a large park, is a modest-looking blue brick building called the Keats Hotel.
The café there - the Keats Heath - operates alongside the hotel, a restaurant, and a tailor. Keats Heath shares a dining area with the restaurant.
The aesthetic is part rustic chic - a mounted deer head, antlers, a chandelier suspended from the ceiling with belts. The café immediately adjoins a long, elegant dinner table overlooking a small courtyard.
The café itself is in its own corner, again branded clearly with the Mocha Joe's logo. But, unusually, its purpose is not to sell drinks to the public at large. The hotel attracts rich clientele - particularly executives - and the café functions as a showroom to highlight Mocha Joe's coffee. The intent is to interest high-profile clients in the brand, to help continue the expansion.
The difference in approach to each country is critical.
“Cultures in Seoul and Tokyo are completely different from that of Vermont's,” Lee explains. “From the way people think, do business, and dress […].”
“The first thing we had to do was to establish a brand identity and values that would make us unique in the two different cultures,” he said. “Even Korea's culture is different from that of Japan's, so we were really dealing with three different cultural models.”
Mocha Joe's is ambitious, but its planning is careful. The future might still see Mocha Joe's drinks packaged for retail, both here and in Asia, but for now the focus is on establishing its name and reputation to lay the groundwork for growth.
“As our brand recognition grows through these two locations,” Zeman said, the company will work toward “providing beans for more businesses and selling retail bags in shops and online,” with the eventual possibility of setting up a roasting shop there.
Still, even as the company adapts to markets in Asia, preserving its Vermont character runs through the enterprise.
“At first the culture in Vermont seemed new and almost a bit 'weird' to me,” Leereflects. “But as time passed, I slowly found myself talking about Vermont and supporting its culture outside of the U.S. I developed affection for Vermont.”