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Cascade coffee: toll roaster and private labeler of specialty coffees: Phil Johnson of Cascade Coffee, and his lengthy career in the field, have had a lasting impact on both the commercial and specialty coffee segments of the coffee industry. As the inventor of the "bulk, self-service coffee bin," his influence is seen in nearly every grocery store in North America.

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Whether you are "for it or against it," the ubiquitous sales medium provides either an opportunity for sales or an opportunity for a marketing "foil" to reflect your own product against. Long out of the self-service bulk coffee bin business, Phil Johnson now works with Cascade Coffee in Everett, Washington. We recently spoke with him and his associates Tim Kirstein and Greg Thayer to learn about Cascade as well as Johnson's history in coffee.

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"My first entry into the coffee business was in 1977 when I went to work for Goodhost Foods," Johnson told us, "it was a privately held company owned by the Slater family in Canada. My background had been consumer products sales to supermarkets and I wanted to get back into supermarkets," said Johnson. "While working for Goodhost, I developed the bulk, self-service coffee bin concept that was executed in the first stores in the Northwest in late 1978, early 1979. It was rather slow at first and there were a lot of details to work out such as who supplies and maintains the equipment; how the product would be priced, etc. Through trial and error over the next year or two, the distribution system became defined, although products themselves constantly rotated. By 1981 we were in approximately 125 stores under the Goodhost name. In 1981 the company decided to sell the U.S. branch that I had developed for them and I ended up purchasing the retail sales division, which became Millstone."

Vive Le Resistance!

In the late 1990's, specialty coffee matured and locally roasted coffee became available in more and more areas and the bulk, self-service bin became the pariah of the small batch specialty roaster. Johnson commented, "The resistance to the bins is...

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