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Adam Questad and Chris Buchanan may have found the perfect recipe for the coffee company they really didn’t intend to launch.
“I think what we found is there’s kind of two types of people,” Questad said.
“There are people who love to shop local, that might not want to spend a ton on coffee but they love that it comes from right in town,” he said.
“Then there are the people who do love coffee, and the fact that it’s meaningful is just an added bonus on top of that,” he continued. “I think those two groups have allowed it to scale pretty quickly without us doing a whole lot.”
“It” is Bond Coffee Roasters, located right in the heart of Marblehead’s historic district. A coffee company that’s “A little bougie. A lot welcoming. Lovingly overthought and tested on friends in Marblehead, MA,” according to the company tagline, which really says it all.
Questad and Buchanan are neighbors, friends and coffee lovers, and with same-age kids, the two families spend a lot of time together. Questad said one day conversations about coffee graduated to buying green coffee beans and roasting them on a stovetop.
“Basically, if you apply heat to green coffee beans, they roast, right? It’s simple,” he said.
“We were like, we could probably figure it out. And so we just went for it.”
And they have, it seems, figured it out. Bond Roasters produces four blends:
— Barnegat Breakfast is their signature morning blend.
— Shakedown is “bold, smooth and mischievous.”
— Nunnepog Fog Espresso Blend is designed for espresso lovers.
— Header Holiday is a partnership with SPUR aimed at helping families and has a hint of holiday flavors to it.
A QR code on each bag tells the story of that particular coffee, its roasting profile and tasting notes and provides an opportunity for customer feedback. Questad said they want to be responsive to what customers want, not just make what they like to drink.
How it all started
“It’s not like we sat down and said, ‘Hey, we’re gonna start this company. Get ready,’” Buchanan said. “It just sort of started happening.”
Essentially, it started with them ordering a bunch of beans, which come with tasting notes describing how the bean will taste under certain roasting conditions, Questad said.
Then they spent a lot of time drinking a lot of coffee while narrowing it down to a particular region they both liked.
But what really launched them from being casual coffee fanatics into running a business, Questad said, was a Kickstarter campaign that allowed them to buy a specific roaster the pair had had their eye on.
Tariff wars and shipping delays meant it would be seven weeks before the roaster arrived, but when it did, it was game on.
Rather than roasting a handful of beans in an air popper, the Bullet allows them to roast up to two pounds of beans at a time, Questad said. It also allows the pair to fine-tune a roast profile via a computer attached to the roaster, because it’s not just good coffee that drives them — it’s everything about it.
“We realized early on, we’re both very, kind of obsessed with almost every aspect of it, like the science behind it and the chemistry behind it, but also the culture and the connection, the supply chain, the branding and all of it,” Buchanan said. “It’s become this thing that obviously we talk about all the time.”
Much to the dismay, at times, of the rest of their families. Buchanan said they had dinner at the Questads recently and his wife gave them five minutes to talk about coffee.
“Plus or minus an hour,” Questad joked.
Where it’s going
They might be only two months into what is currently a time-consuming side gig for Buchanan, who owns a software company, and Questad, who is an engineer, but they are already thinking next steps. Currently the roaster is kept at Questad’s house, and although it only takes minutes to roast a batch of coffee, keeping up with orders can be a challenge, he said. That might also be because if you live within five miles of them, they will deliver it personally to your door in Buchanan’s Japanese mini truck.
“We’ve had just awesome demand,” Buchanan said.
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