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Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari poses for a photograph at the roasting facility Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Fresh Brew Group Master Roaster Kevin Myers shows a freshly roasted coffee beans Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari is photographed during an interview with Houston Chronicle Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari is photographed during an interview with Houston Chronicle Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari poses for a photograph at the roasting facility Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari is photographed during an interview with Houston Chronicle Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
The spring of 2020 was bound to be a busy one for Al Ansari, CEO of FreshBrew Group, a Houston specialty coffee roaster and vendor.
The company was already in transition, following the death in 2019 of its founder and executive chairman, Ansari’s father, Dari. But with a new respiratory illness spreading rapidly from China to Europe to the United States, the business was falling off the cliff as airlines slashed flights and government-ordered shutdowns closed the restaurants and office buildings — businesses that make up Fresh Brew’s client base.
Ansari still remembers his chief financial officer coming into his office one day, in March, to tell him that sales had plummeted 80 percent almost overnight. “He was shaking,” Ansari recalled with a rueful laugh.
Like many companies, the pandemic threw the FreshBrew Group into survival mode, leading to pay cuts, sleepless nights and unusual moves, such as selling a stockpile of Colombian beans to commodity brokers after lockdowns interrupted that country’s exports.
But Ansari also recognized an opportunity, he explained, to change FreshBrew’s direction, moving the company from a wholesaler and vendor to a vertically integrated, end-to-end beverage production company— one that could roast beans, make coffee- and tea-based beverages, bottle or can them, and ship them to customers.
Two years later, FreshBrew’s transition is well underway. In March the company sold its vending division, which sold snacks, coffee and other drinks from machines and stand-alone mini-markets, to Compass Group North America, the owner of Canteen Vending Service, for an undisclosed amount.
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari poses for a photograph at the roasting facility Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Proceeds of the sale are getting reinvested in the company’s expansion. FreshBrew so far has invested some $10 million to expand its roasting, extraction and packaging operations at its northwest Houston headquarters.
FreshBrew has acquired 25,000 additional square feet of space — a 25 percent increase — to accommodate its growing roasting plant and warehouse. It’s upgraded four existing roasters, added two more, and expanded packing lines to 25, an increase of 11. The company also retooled its tea business to produce and pack sugar, in response to growing demand for sweet tea products.
FreshBrew has the capacity to produce 70 million pounds of coffee a year, but executives expect that to increase to 100 million pounds when the expansion is completed next year. Ansari said, he expects sales to exceed $100 million in 2023.
Despite the challenges presented by the pandemic, Ansari said, FreshBrew has emerged as a stronger company, and one of the few companies in the country that can work with clients from sourcing the beans to delivering the drinks, packaged in-house.
“There’s so many middlemen,” he said. “We decided that this was an opportunity to cut them all out. It gives the customer more quality control.”
A Houston native, Ansari attended Stanford University on a tennis scholarship after graduating from Second Baptist School. Although his parents drank coffee at home, he never had a cup until college — when he discovered not only that he liked it, but it could also come in handy while trying to balance full course load with playing competitive tennis at an elite level.
His father had started FreshBrew in 1995 to sell coffee and single-serve coffee machines to office buildings, many of which were then developing “coffee programs,” as they’re called. The company grew by picking up clients such as Sunoco, which operates Stripes convenience stores, and launched a vending division, selling coffee from standalone kiosks, many of them located in office buildings.
Ansari said that he didn’t plan to go into the family business, after graduating with a degree in economics in 2002 and returning to Houston. But a job offer from Enron was rescinded as the company collapsed into bankruptcy, and an idea of moving to New York ran up against hiring freezes at major banks.
A Fresh Brew Group worker is unloading green coffee beans Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
On HoustonChronicle.com: Bringing specialty coffee to broader markets
Meanwhile, Ansari said, his father encouraged him to join FreshBrew, which at that point had one roasting machine and one packing line — and, as he saw it — a need for some direction. At the time, clients were mostly interested in coffee that was “basic, dark, black and cheap”— an efficient caffeine delivery mechanism, in other words.
But he wanted to focus on specialty roasting, sensing that American coffee consumers were becoming both more discerning in their tastes, and concerned about sustainability. Coffee production—growing and processing the green beans—is labor-intensive and resource-intensive, requiring a lot of water, in particular.
Green coffee beans are being unloaded at Fresh Brew Group Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Over the next 20 years, Ansari was proved right. FreshBrew’s clients became more selective about their coffee, more involved in developing custom blends, and more curious about how and where beans were grown.
Ansari declines to reveal who his customers are, but estimates that 95 percent of them are other businesses—airlines, conveniences, restaurants, retailers. A tour of the warehouse, with its hundreds of boxes stacked for shipping to various national and international locations, leaves the impression that you’ve probably sampled FreshBrew without realizing it, maybe while traveling by air, stopping for a cup of coffee at a convenience store or drinking sweet tea at a fast-food restaurant.
Some names have trickled out, too, over the years. Some of the boxes neatly stacked in the FreshBrew warehouse contained a custom blend called “Papal White,” developed for American Airlines in 2015, when the airline was preparing to fly Pope Francis to the United States. The Latin American-style blend proved to be a hit and is now the airlines’ regular cabin blend.
Most of the nearly 80 men and women who work at FreshBrew today are coffee and tea enthusiasts. Ansari, for his part, uses a Swiss-engineered Jura machine, the simplest models of which start at nearly $1,000. But he also thinks you can make a decent cup with simpler devices, such as the manual, gravity-powered AeroPress that retails for roughly $35.
Going forward, FreshBrew executives see cold brew coffee as a key area of growth, as do most industry experts. The global cold brew coffee market, which stood at around $321 million in 2017, is projected to exceed $1 billion this year, according to the business data firm Statista
This growth is being driven by consumers in North America, after Starbucks — long a market-maker in coffee — added cold-brew coffee drinks to its the menu in 2015. It’s now readily available in cans and bottles at grocery stores and gas stations, with younger consumers, Generation Z in particular, embracing this option.
To be clear, this is not iced coffee. Iced coffee starts with brewed coffee, poured over ice, often after languishing in a carafe for a good while and acquiring a burnt, bitter taste. Cold brew, as the name suggests, isn’t heated as part of the brewing process.
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari poses for a photograph at the roasting facility Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
It has less acidity, and a smoother taste, than hot coffee. The beans are still roasted before they’re ground, but they aren’t subjected to a second round of heat from boiling water — which brings out acid.
“Over the last two to three years we’ve seen an exponential growth in cold coffee versus hot,” Ansari said. “Hot will still definitely be the breadwinner, but we see the growth in cold coffee as tremendous.”
He also expects tremendous growth in bottled and canned coffee- and tea-based beverages more generally, as consumers retain the grab-and-go habits they developed during the pandemic, and as botanically-infused iced teas, for example, tempt consumers away from soft drinks and other carbonated beverages. A new analysis from ResearchandMarkets.com forecasts that the “Ready to Drink Tea and Coffee Market” will grow from $100 billion in 2021 to more than $150 billion in 2027.”
“The cans, really—the bottles are one thing, but cans have exploded,” Ansari said, explaining that younger consumers, with their eye on the environment, often prefer aluminum to plastic.
A tour of FreshBrew’s warehouse shows a pivot in progress. The company is, for example, converting the 40,000 square feet of warehouse space that had been used for its vending business to expand operations that make coffee from ground beans, a process known as extraction.
“Everything’s in flux,” Ansari said passing around hairnets to visitors.
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Of course, that’s been the case since his trembling CFO came into his office two years ago to deliver the bad news about the pandemic’s impact on the business.
“I was super worried,” Ansari said. “But I didn’t want to show my team that I was panicked.”
Fresh Brew Group Al Ansari is photographed during an interview with Houston Chronicle Wednesday, June 8, 2022, in Houston.
Luck played a part in the company’s survival, Ansari says. Fresh Brew wasn’t carrying much debt going into the pandemic. And he had placed a large order for Colombian beans several years earlier, after noticing them for sale at a good price. He was able to sell those beans back to brokers after global lockdowns disrupted supply chains, creating a sorely needed revenue stream.
His tennis experience — apologies for the pun — served him well, during the nerve-wracking experience.
“It’s a very mental game,” said Ansari, who can still recall the feeling of being alone on the court, under the spotlight, and down after the first set. “If you can’t keep your cool, if you can’t focus when things are tough, you’re going to lose.”
In such a situation, he continued, you have to rally. So that’s what he did.
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Erica Grieder is a business reporter for the Houston Chronicle.
She joined the Houston Chronicle, as a metro columnist, in 2017. Prior to that she spent ten years based in Austin, reporting on politics and economics, as the southwest correspondent for The Economist, from 2007-2012, then as a senior editor at Texas Monthly, from 2012-2016. In 2013, she published her first book, "Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn from the Strange Genius of Texas." An Air Force brat, Erica thinks of San Antonio as home. She is a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas's Emerging Leaders Council, and holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin's LBJ School of Public Affairs and Columbia University, where she majored in philosophy.
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