After ten years of involvement in the media business, running an industry trade magazine, a café and coffee trade events, it has been very exciting to see the industry and its players grow around us.
As the industry grows and new competition enters the arena, we continue to evaluate our business philosophy and market position, looking for fresh ideas and innovations. This is something we have always done. Being one of the first media businesses in the café/coffee industry space, we have pioneered many new conceptual campaigns and ideas, and it has been an interesting and rewarding process. We are always mindful that our job is to bring new ideas to our readers and customers, to help them succeed in this competitive environment.
To ensure we continue to be the pioneers of the industry, Café Culture is going through some major upgrades to take us forward into the next decade.
Café Culture was created as a tool for café owners. My wife Kristine and I were once struggling café owners who needed help, but there were no resources to turn to. Luckily, we were one of the few who did manage to survive. It was then a few years after we sold the business, that I realised the café/coffee industry had no real industry specific help channels. Thus, we saw the opportunity to create Café Biz, to help prevent cafés from failing at a rate of six in ten operators.
A few years later, Café Culture magazine was born, and again that was built around educating café owners.
Now, ten years later, many recognise our contribution and know that the magazine and events we produce are specifically designed around the needs of café operators and their staff, helping them to run successful businesses. Education has been our motivation and is the key element to why we are still in business today.
The future is very bright for our whole team at Café Culture, as we surge forward with energy and focus. We have just secured Cafeculture.com and built a great new website. The website incorporates some great new technology that will encompass all of the latest social media platforms, and I think it looks pretty sexy as well.
Another of our strengths moving forward is that we are ramping up the consulting arm of our business here in Australia and also in South East Asia, where we have worked on many projects in the past. Over ten years of running a successful media business in a specific industry, we have collected a lot of real data and we have become well armed to predict industry trends. Over the years we have helped many suppliers succeed in the industry and have an excellent reputation for our networking abilities.
I can still remember some of our early projects, introducing Australian businesses such as Cafetto into our market; they are now a leading coffee cleaning product business. We originally assisted Phillip Di Bella with his national marketing push when he was working behind the grill at his restaurant in Brisbane. Di Bella Coffee is now one of Australia’s iconic coffee brands. Café Culture also assisted National Foods to become the biggest dairy supplier to the Australian café market. And other consulting jobs we have been involved in include: DaVinci Gourmet, Nudie, Fiji Water, San Pelligrino, Toby’s Estate, Cerebos, Breville, ECA, Byron Bay Cookies, Priestley’s Cakes, Equal and Sugar Australia.
We absolutely love the café/coffee industry and cannot think of anything we would rather be doing. We are looking forward to the next phase in industry growth and to a prosperous future for all.
