Cameron’s Coffee Location: Shakopee | Employees: 131 | Products: Coffee sold in retail markets.7 Sep 2020 06:17
Cameron’s Coffee
Location: Shakopee | Employees: 131 | Products: Coffee sold in retail markets.
Specializing in packaged products made Shakopee-based Cameron’s Coffee well positioned for the lockdown. With local coffee shops closed, meetings cancelled, and most people working from home, supermarket sales of coffee beans spiked, Cameron’ CEO Bob Waldron says. This spring, the coffee-roasting company had to bring in an extra 3 million pounds of coffee.
And Cameron’s makes sure that it’s buying high-quality coffee—“the top 10 percent of the beans in the world,” Waldron says. Coffee’s market growth “continues to move toward premium,” he adds. Cameron’s “magical position” is “premium coffee at a mid-tier price”—lower than many of its premium brand competitors.
Camerons Coffee pallets of coffeeCameron’s might not have the name recognition of coffee-house brands like Caribou and Dunn Bros, but its profile is high in the retail market. According to Chicago-based retail industry analyst IRI Scanner Data, Cameron’s was the fastest-growing retail brand in the Midwest’s Plains Region and number four in total retail sales. Cameron’s sales hit $72 million in the 12 months ending July 31, 2019. Since then, Waldron says, the company has grown in double digits on average each month compared to the same month the previous year.
One of the main drivers of that growth is Cameron’s distinctive single-serve EcoPods. The story of these compostable coffee pods began about 12 years ago. Bill Kirkpatrick, Waldron’s predecessor as CEO, wanted to enter the booming single-serve K-cup market. But according to Waldron, Kirkpatrick didn’t like the “plastic, watery taste” he felt pods imparted to coffee. Working with an Italian packaging design firm, Kirkpatrick developed a single-serve design whose key component is a soft, thick mesh filter that “traps the water against the beans,” says Waldron, who became CEO in 2015. “So your extraction time is longer, and you get fuller flavor.”
Waldron says he and Anne Maus, Cameron’s vice president of supply chain, “saw the opportunity to take the three materials—the lid, the ring, and the filter—and make them more sustainable, whether recyclable or compostable.” After two and a half years of development, Cameron’s introduced its new EcoPods in 2018, and is freely sharing the technology with other coffee roasters.
Cameron coffee packaging process
Cameron’s keeps costs down by outsourcing production of its packaged lines.
Cameron’s maintains its mid-tier prices in part by keeping production costs down. “We favor streamlining and simplification whenever we can do it,” Waldron says. For instance, all of Cameron’s packaging lines are manufactured by Bologna, Italy-based ICA. This allows the company’s maintenance team “to optimize training and performance, because it’s all the same equipment,” he says. Cameron’s runs lean, with about 25 people in a front office that’s adjacent to the roaster area.
The company also is
Sign In
Follow the stocks
