Ever been stuck driving between cities with no coffee options except for gas stations and chains? Do you belong to a social group with regular meet-ups? Do you oftenย find yourselfย playing the role of host and coffee-klatch coordinator for groups of your friends? Are you a barista who would welcome the chance to practice your bar skills withย patrons in a low-stress domestic setting?
If your answer to any of the above is yes, then an app developed by Dutch entrepreneurs may have your name on it. Or rather, you may want to build a name-heralding profile in this new marketplace community. Itโs called Coffee Shots, and its aim is to lead discerning coffee drinkers to theย homes and personal workspaces of discerning baristas, be they amateur or professional. There they use their preferred ingredients and apparatus to pull, pour, or plungeโand make a littleย money along the way.
During the Amsterdam Coffee Festival in March, the Coffee Shots stand was getting good attention. The company reported that 150 attendees, from countries as near as France and as far as Canada, volunteered as beta testers for the app, with another 100 signing up online. In May, Coffee Shots wentย official, the app appearing on bothย Google Playย andย in the Apple Store.
So how does it work? A user downloads the free app, available for phones and tablets running iOS and Android, then creates a profile and links it to a credit card or PayPal account. Thoseย who want to serve coffee specify where they are, when they can receive guests, the machinery on hand, and a menu. Users lookingย to get coffee rely on the appโs geolocator to see whose doors are open at any given time. Once Coffee Shotsย usersย settle on an appealing profile and an accessible location, they request a visit and, upon approval, receive address details.
Prices are set by the barista, though Coffee Shots suggests โฌ1.50 for an espresso, โฌ2 for a cappuccino, and 50-cent increments per shot. The company keeps 20 percent of the fee; most is earmarked for further app development, though 10 percent of that commission is for โthe farmerโโan origin-country farming project that Coffee Shots selects. Before leaving the baristaโs home, the customer pays digitally, via the app, and afterward, a review request is sent.
When not working at perfecting the Uberisation of coffee, Coffee Shots foundersย Arnoud Aalbersberg and Corine Schmal work at Tropicare, a travel health-care-product company that donates 1 percent of its turnover to support the eradication of malaria. Aalbersberg, who founded Tropicare more thanย two decades ago and has provided much of Coffee Shotsโ startup capital, notes how both engageย with regions of the world that suffer from malaria and uneven development.
Of the Coffee Shots taglineโโhonest coffee for everyoneโโAalbersberg explains: โWe think the farmer should work on every part of the value chain and not only get pity money for the green beans. And the other side is that we think if you pay โฌ4 here in Amsterdam for a mediocre coffee, thatโs also not very honest.โ
The peer-to-peer transaction espoused by Coffee Shots is seen as co-existing with, not replacing, commercial espresso bars.
โWould we ever be a threat to the coffee business? I donโt think we would, but we are very quality-driven, so we might be a threat to poor-quality coffee,โ says Arnoud Kruiver, Coffee Shotsโ chief roasting officer. He does that job at a small roaster alongside his work at Vintage Espresso Machines, aย repair and restoration company located in the nearby suburb of Amstelveen. The company is run by Roland Buurman, who doubles as Coffee Shotsโ chief operations officer.
โWhere [coffee]โs the core business, we wonโt ever be a threat,โ Kruiver elaborates. โBut there are a lot of businesses in the Netherlands where the coffee is on the side, and there, yeah, I would skip those to go to a home barista any time.โ
For would-be home baristas lacking supplies, Coffee Shots sells bags of Kruiverโs roasts and vends or leases Rocket Giotto and Cellini PID espresso machines andย Mahlkรถnig Vario grinders. Those without a suitable spaceย canย consider the Coffee Shots kiosk. Established under the auspices of MIK Amsterdam, a project that givesย retail space to community-engaging startups, the small venue wentย operational inย mid-June and is accepting baristasโ reservations to, essentially, time-share the bar (to schedule a shift, email info@coffeeshots.nl). Working atย the kiosk bringsย the company’s commission rate up to 50 percent, allaying costs of rent and the in-house provisions.
Coffee Shotsโ partners see aย potential โto become the largest and most social coffee community”โnot just in the Netherlands but globally. As it’s been available for onlyย some weeks, itโs too soon to evaluate. (The company might want to adjust its logo for a US audience, at least; cheeky as its meant to be, crosshairs over a coffee bean won’t resonate the same in the States.)
Yet, the app already brings to light some of the specialty sceneโs assetsโmost often highly committed, adventurous, and welcoming types of peopleโand its potential drawbacks, such as the way quality cafes frequently cluster in more affluentย neighborhoods and are sometimes more conducive to interfacing with gear and gadgets than with humans.
That users enlist as home baristas โis a sign of trust and passion,โ believes Aalbersberg. โThey donโt live from it. They donโt have to make a coffee. They want to make a coffee.โ
While the barista-as-bean-whisperer is a 21st-century notion, the app is simultaneously promoting what seems to be a now-retro social ritual.
โIn the Netherlands, but also in other countries that I know, 20, 30 years ago it was very normal for your kitchen door to be unlocked, and your neighbor would walk around your house, open the door, say, โHello. Hey, letโs have a coffee,โ โ says Aalbersberg.
โTo bring that back by facilitating theย [ritual] in a modern wayโ is howย he describes his hope for the app. โSo itโs not that the door is unlocked,โ he emphasizes. โIt is that someone in the streetโฆor maybe a little bit further away can see: โHey, Arnoud is open for a coffee. I feel like a coffee, and I feel like a conversation.โ โ
Karina Hof is a Sprudge staff writer based in Amsterdam. Read moreย Karina Hof on Sprudge.ย