Just like everyone else, the recent economic shifts of the coronavirus have shaken us to our foundations. All small businesses are taking a hit, and for Union Coffee Co. in particular, our life-blood is casual gatherings, music, and togetherness. Within days of the state’s order to discontinue all dine-in sales, we were forced to close our Milford, New Hampshire café. Despite the support from the community of people coming in and placing to-go orders, our costs to remain open and continue to re-stock supplies was more than the cost to temporarily shutter the café. We stopped taking compensation ourselves. We had to lay off our beloved staff that we’ve been growing with for over five years. Tears were shed.

Even so, closing shop doesn’t put a halt to our ongoing expenses and obligations.

We still have bags of green coffee, we have our health, and we have a community that needs Union now more than ever. Besides, sitting around while calamity overtakes our town has never been our style anyway. As such, we’re retooling our business model to support the current needs of our community in crisis. Filling the needs of our neighbors is the same thing we’ve always done, only now that same community looks very different than it did mere days ago.

1) First, we updated all of our single-origin, retail coffees to be available to purchase online.

This meant adding our approachable $10 Every Day Carry (E.D.C) coffee to the e-commerce portion of our website. We added logic for real-time available quantities of each product as availability for some coffees will likely be limited in the near future by our suppliers. We also re-worked shipping options so that we can send these products across the nation for way less than we were being charged to do the same thing before. We also came up with a great local option, but we’ll get to that soon.

2) We added a quarantine-friendly, individual-serving coffee packet to our arsenal.

OK, some of this was pure luck. We’d been working on creating these single-serve, steep-able coffee bags for months and they finally came together as the virus was ramping up. We had been thinking of this new product in terms of camping, travel, and as a general replacement for watery k-cups that ask you to run boiling water through a plastic pod that then gets chucked in a landfill. We had no idea, the whole nation was going to be asked to camp out in their homes for an unknown amount of time. But the timing was a Godsend. These coffee packets (think tea-bags but with coffee) are nitro-packed to retain freshness for months longer than a typical whole-bean coffee and they only require water to make a really good cup of coffee. These bad boys are packaged in compostable material and cost less than a cup of coffee at your favorite orange and pink drive-through joint.

3) Union Coffee Co. is offering free local delivery on purchases of $35 or more to any New Hampshire address within 10 miles of our Milford café.

Hey, we’ve been delivering to our wholesale customers like Revelstoke Coffee, the Local Moose Café, Riverhouse Café, and Whole Foods Markets throughout New England for over a year now in our groovy, little delivery van. And without a café to run, we can’t just be sitting around waiting for somebody else to come save our bacon. Certainly not while our community still wants to drink coffee every day.

There’s no reason we can’t drive the wheels off that Ford Transit and deliver coffee to every doorstep in Nashua, Manchester, Milford, Amherst, Merrimack, Bedford, and so on. We can do it without asking people to expose themselves to the crowds in the grocery store, and this coffee will have only been handled by one or two of us in a sanitary roasting lab instead of who knows how many people during the production/shipping/stocking process.

Beginning this week, every retail order that is placed by 11:59 PM on Monday will be sent out the following Thursday.

UPDATE: we are also offering café pickup hours from 11:00 AM–1:00 PM on Friday and Saturdays.

Union Coffee Co. is having to radically re-invent ourselves in order to thrive throughout this time of drastic change and hardship. The rest of the world will have to do the same, so we might as well get started on it now.

Hold fast, friends. This is a time for unity and love.

The Union Coffee Co. MGMT

Order Union Coffee online

Buy these sweet threads