Orzo♥Coffee: six months on

Last month Orzo♥Coffee was six month old! We cannot believe it. To celebrate these first six months, we would like  to share with you some of the steps of our journey.

---

Orzo♥coffee is six month old, a snapshot of these first months?
These first six months have been an amazing journey. We have met thousands of wonderful people, talked, wrote and offered to all of them a cup of freshly brewed Orzo♥Coffee. The first three months seemed very slow, we worked on our packaging and planned our work, but when our first delivery arrived from Italy in April it all got very exciting and hectic. 

How was Orzo♥coffee welcomed?
We have received a very warm welcome indeed. When offering Orzo♥Coffee at fairs or events, I often had the impression that people in UK were “waiting” for Orzo♥Coffee. At the beginning we thought that it would have been harder because in the UK coffee substitutes have a very niche market, while in Italy barley coffee is extremely popular and available in all supermarkets. Our experience so far is telling us that for Orzo♥Coffee it is different:  the product has been embraced by a very broad range of people, often people who also love coffee but simply see barley coffee as an opportunity to enjoy a coffee-like drink later in the day and even after dinner.

What are the strengths of Orzocoffee?
I think that its strongest points are its uniqueness and its identity. We are neither creating a product nor competing with other drinks. Barley coffee has been drunk for centuries and no other drink in the UK market has the same flavour and characteristics of our Orzo♥Coffee. This is what we are trying to convey, this is not a marketing experiment trying to launch a flashy brand or a fancy drink, we want people to know what Orzo♥Coffee is, where it 
comes from, its cultural background and heritage, we want people to love it and to share this love with others. 

What is the biggest challenge you have encountered so far?
For a small business like ours that wishes to work with local businesses in a sustainable way, distribution is a hard 
nut to crack.  We do not want to simply deal with distributors, we want to know who sells our products and we want 
them and their customers to feel free to get in touch with us at any time.  Therefore, we have started with setting up 
a small network of retailers around the country. At the moment the list is short – 12 independent shops stock our products – but it is growing slowly and surely and new outlet gets added week by week.


The biggest satisfaction so far?
I think the most rewarding thing is to see that people come back for more. This is a very down to earth, genuine drink, people don’t drink it because it is fashionable (yet – although we might be starting a fashion). Differently from many other drinks on the market it does not contain anything that could even possibly lead to “addiction” so my only explanation is that they come back for more because they love it. I just want to share with you two tweets I received recently “@OrzoCoffee I was sceptical as I love a good strong coffee but this was very delicious, and 
caffeine-free amazing!” “@OrzoCoffee Just found your 'alternative' coffee and loving it. Health problems mean avoiding tea/coffee, so finding you a godsend!”. These messages are the greatest satisfaction.

What’s next?
We are slowly touring the UK in different food festivals to allow more people to taste our Orzo♥Coffee and we hope to make our products more accessible and available throughout the UK.  We also have plans to become a social enterprise and would love to reinvest our profit in the community, especially into arts and environmental projects, but before we can do that, we need to strive to become a sustainable business. 

We look forward to meeting more people to offer them a cup of freshly brewed Orzo♥Coffee.