Over the weekend, we had an interesting issue arise. We ran out of chocolate. Our chocolate is something we took a lot of time to develop when we opened our store. It’s actually a gnache made by breaking down bars of Scharffenberger chocolate and mixing it with heated heavy cream and agave nectar. The initial recipe was created by Nick Griffith, and it’s been amazing ever since. Our mochas and hot chocolates are phenomenal, so much so, that even I, on my anti-milk campaign, have to sit down every so often and drink a hot chocolate.
The issue we ran into was that we ran out of the Scharffenberger bars. This happened on Black Friday… the beginning of a weekend we knew would be filled with hot chocolate and chai. Normally, the bars show up direct from the factory, so we knew it could be a couple of days. To fix the problem, we decided to run out and grab some chocolate from a local grocer.
In the end, we were left with a very different gnache. It was less ply-able and harder to blend with our espresso… slowing down a busy line. The really frustrating thing was that it wasn’t our gnache. We had hundreds of customers pouring in from all over the country, coming in for what may be there one and only experience at our store, we had to give them something different.
I started to wonder what is worse… To not have a mocha or a hot chocolate on the menu or to have it there, but not to be serving our version. To me, it’s a balancing act. We aren’t just a neighborhood coffee shop that is trying to get by. We’ve made it very clear that we want to offer the finest and the best of everything we do. Yet, we also want to be approachable and have a non-elitist mentality. Did we do the right thing? I’m interested in hearing others perspectives…
Personally, I think we could have handled it better. We handle every other issue by not telling our customers what they can’t have, but by telling them what they can have… Want an espresso to go? I’d recommend a small americano with less water… Iced espresso? How about iced coffee… it has more caffeine! I think we could have gotten by without chocolate. Our chai is also pretty damn good…
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