Big changes are afoot at Montreal café and roaster Dispatch Coffee as founder and owner Chrissy Durcak is launching an online subscription service to mail its beans across Canada.
And while Dispatch isn’t the first coffee subscription service out there, Durcak tells Eater that unlike many others, Dispatch will be mailing coffee out at a much lower price — bags will drop from the current retail price of $20 to $25 towards the $15-19 mark. (The coffee will also be available for in-store pick-up.)
“We’re going to be extending wholesale prices to users and kind of slashing our retail margins,” Durcak says.
It’s a big step up for the coffee purveyor, which only got its first brick-and-mortar space on St-Zotique four years ago (Dispatch now has two other cafés — one at McGill University, and another on the Plateau); Durcak jokes that it’s almost like a return to Dispatch’s roots, when she was working out of home.
“It kind of comes full circle back to when I was taking orders for cold brew on my Facebook.”
Dispatch’s approach to coffee subscriptions is a little different to most that are out there in Canada — many subscription services act as a middleman, pulling in coffee from a range of roasters then repackaging it and mailing it; the Dispatch service will only offer the company’s beans, something that likely helps keep prices down by removing an extra step.
And unlike some services, which deliver a fixed quantity of beans, Dispatch will have an online “consumption calculator”, which quizzes customers about their coffee drinking habits and sends an appropriate amount of coffee to them monthly.
Durcak has also put an emphasis on customers being able to trace their coffee, and trying to counter the often opaque coffee supply chain — Dispatch’s website will feature transparency reports, providing details about the small holding farmers and co-ops from which the company sources its beans.
The subscription service is expected to launch on Dispatch’s website in June — but the pivot to online doesn’t mean the company is ditching its real-world stores. Weekly tastings are very much still happening at Dispatch, and the St-Zotique location is set to get a refresh and some fresh colour. Durcak also obliquely mentions a plan to open up in another Canadian city — stay tuned.