Interview with Scott Sanger & Dan Amador
Rosso Coffee Roasters is certainly not a new face to the Canadian specialty coffee scene, founded in 2007 Rosso has been roasting awesome coffee for seventeen years now! However, this year they’re making a big decision—and that is to rebrand. We sat down with Scott Sanger, and Dan Amador to dive into it.
Why did Rosso decide to rebrand, and what is the team hoping to achieve through it?
SS. For a long time. Every decision at Rosso was made for the love of coffee, and branding was never really top-of-mind. I don’t mean to say this in a negative lens, but we were just hyper-focused on crafting a great product that would speak for itself. I joined Rosso at a really interesting time; just coming out of the pandemic. Obviously, this was a tough time for our cafes, so we shifted and started selling more whole beans online. We have an extremely strong and loyal fanbase within Alberta, but when we started looking at expansion outside of Alberta, we found that we weren’t resonating in the same way. So, we looked at our packaging first and asked ourselves: What is not being communicated on our packaging that is creating some sort of tension, where a customer isn’t willing to just give us a shot? We started with small tweaks, and as we started going down that path, we started strategizing our brand positioning and figuring out how our visual appearance can reflect what we stand for. It’s a very exciting process to take a step back and remove ourselves from the day-to-day and think about what we want to look like tomorrow and into the future.
When we first started this project, I thought it was just going to be new packaging, and that’s it. Fast forward to today; we’ve got an updated logo, packaging, new colour palettes, new fonts—the whole gamut. At the center of that, I think we really want to penetrate cultural relevance; we want to be a little bit cooler, and to us that means showing up with new colours, and being more emotional and fun rather than these stuffy coffee aficionados that we may have been before.
You’ll see in the first few months of 2025, our visuals will change, and we are going to update some of our cafe experience as well! This is all met with a little bit of anxiety, making sure we’re dotting our i’s and crossing our t’s, but we hope to create something that will really resonate with you and make you feel something, and so we’re super excited to get it out, get feedback, and see what the future holds. Seventeen years in, there’s been a fair amount of people we haven’t been a fit for, whether it’s taste profile, design or appearance, so we’re hoping we can welcome some of those people back to the Rosso world through the rebrand.
What does this rebrand mean for Rosso’s current grocery store presence?
DA. The goal with this rebrand is to shift away from this category. It is great to be in grocery, and in the pandemic we had a lot of demand for that. But, we also had to reflect over the last couple years and realize that as much as we would love to be in all grocery stores and how many of them have demanded us to be there, it’s just not really our demographic. It might be our demographic ten years from now, but today we’re still super specialty, and most people that are going to the grocery store are looking for coffee that best suits their budget. Most people will gravitate to their $12 bag of coffee rather than our $18-20 bag of coffee. Our coffee is not necessarily a necessity, it’s more of a want.
We aren't fully pulling away from grocery; we’re still going to maintain some partnerships in that realm, but we are just not looking to expand further. We’re still going to have a lot of our grocery partners here in the province of Alberta because it is a big part of our business here, and the rotation of coffee here in Alberta is different from the rotation of coffee going into British Columbia or Ontario, for example. These are really great outlets, but it’s not our end goal. Our end goal is to support small businesses and local cafes while also starting to get more of the consumer base of people who drink coffee at home access to better coffee.
Grocery is a nice outlet to have so that when people are going to Wholefoods, for example, because that demographic is often looking for quality, at least it's there for them to conveniently pick up! We've had a lot of people message us saying they were so excited to see it was available there instead of needing to order a minimum amount online. It creates a bit of convenience, but we have to be strategic about how we go that route.
SS. We care a lot about freshness here as well, and so with our local partners we have a better grip on what that means, and that’s a big struggle with expanding in grocery.
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