Vancouver coffee roaster and café operator Ethical Bean has closed its two Ethical Bean Xpress-branded cafés and plans to focus on expanding its packaged roasted coffee business in Ontario and the U.S.
“We work better on the supply side than we do on the retail side,” Ethical Bean owner Lloyd Bernhardt told Business in Vancouver June 24. “They’re such different businesses.”
Bernhard closed the Ethical Bean Xpress in the Granville Street Skytrain station in April and then the one in the Commercial Drive Skytrain station earlier this month.
Most of his annual revenue of approximately $9 million comes from his coffee roasting business, which is based on Kootenay Street in East Vancouver. He intends to keep the café that operates at his roasting facility for the foreseeable future.
Bernhardt supplies roasted coffee to institutions such as Simon Fraser University and various supermarket chains.
His coffee has gained a following partly because it is fair trade and organic. Bags of Ethical Bean coffee also contain codes that can be scanned with smartphones to reveal, on Google Earth, the exact location where the beans were grown – right down to the exact field.
Bernhardt was previously an executive at software company GDT Softworks in 1991, when BIV named him as a Forty under 40 award winner.
That technology savvy helped him recognize the value of spending more than $10,000 to have Cory Alder develop the geographic origin app.
