Wicked Coffee

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Wicked Coffee were awarded a Gold award for their Wicked Diablo Coffee, at the 2023 awards, and we wanted to know what makes this dynamic company tick.
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Please tell us when your company was founded and some of its history?

Coffee Solutions was founded in 2004 when we initially started in the coffee industry with a single client that was looking for an outsourced hot beverage and vending operator. Once we started with that client, we expanded our offering over the years to add fresh milk equipment solutions and then also started importing our own coffee vending machines from Italy. We then partnered with a roastery to help develop and roast our own recipes of coffee beans to sell to the clients that were purchasing their coffee machines from us. Once this had grown to a decent size, we had the opportunity to purchase a complete roastery in Montague Gardens in 2017 and also slowly stated entering the hospitality sector as well. Once we started on this journey, we started labelling our coffee “Wicked” with a catchphrase of Wicked.Good.Coffee.

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Please tell us about some of the unique features of your company.

Coffee means different things to people and there is an incredible range which is available to the market in South Africa, which also means that everybody doesn’t necessarily enjoy the same taste profile. We roast coffee that we enjoy drinking, and a central tenet of that philosophy is we want to try and have our customers look forward to the next cup of coffee. Therefore, we generally would like to develop roasts and blends which can be enjoyed through different brewing methods but are always rich and satisfying with a touch of sweetness and without bitterness. We also try to develop our coffees in a way that the man on the street can enjoy them without needing extremely expensive equipment and without being a trained barista.

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What do you think are some of the unique products you have?

We LOVE our Diablo blend! We enjoy all the coffees which we roast, and we are proud of all of them, but it's always a great day when we put the Diablo back in the Grinder. Furthermore, we are also proud of our hot chocolate powder that we blend and mix ourselves. Our Luxury chocolate is aimed at coffee shops with a pretty high cocoa content to provide an upmarket bitter-sweet flavour profile and then our Deluxe Chocolate powders can be used through vending machines as well, just by mixing in hot water.

Please tell us what is unique about your production/manufacturing process, and your philosophy around this.

Our fluid bed roaster, which is imported from America, provides an excellent ability to repeat the same profile when roasting batches of coffee and provides a very clean taste profile. It means that the coffee we roast is consistent from a roasting and production point of view, from there we depend on our green bean suppliers to provide us with coffees that have consistent characteristics and are of the best quality possible.

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What do you think is your distinct advantage or reason for your success?

We love what we do and the products that we produce, and a great day is whenever someone tastes your coffee and smiles or is enthusiastic about what you have given them. We genuinely try to satisfy the customer’s needs and wants, but should we be unable to provide something then we would rather point them in the correct direction rather than trying to force something on them which doesn't fit, just to make a sale. Furthermore, we try and develop our products in such a way that we first look at the sensation that we want to achieve on tasting the product, then we work our way backwards until we achieve that.

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In what countries can your products be found?

South Africa.

Please tell us if you have any innovations in the pipeline for the future.

We would like to keep developing some ideas that we have for some other flavour profiles that appeal to our tastes, as well as to extend our range of powdered products.

Contact details:

Contact person: Jason Kuhn

Email Address: jason@coffeesolutions.co.za

Contact Number: (+27)21 745 2888

Website: https://www.coffeesolutions.co.za

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CoffeeSolutionsCapeTown