Today we’d like to introduce you to Ben Somerville.
Hi Ben, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
My wife and I started looking for properties to open a coffee shop in 2017. After several years of hobby roasting, we saw a hole in the market in Fuquay and both of us desired to get into the hospitality business, so we decided to roll with the coffee! A generous friend invested in an amazing building in DT Fuquay (1960s EMS station) that needed a lotta love and a total overhaul. We spent about a year building out the space and opened Fuquay’s first coffee roastery in July 2018. We have a large, open environment for our customers that is an industrial/minimalist/black and white themed design.
Today we serve hundreds of guests every day and roast hundreds of pounds of coffee every week to serve our local community great, fresh coffee.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Without industry experience, the first year was really tough, with us making a lot of mistakes. It took a while to get the basic stuff down and systemized… great coffee served by great employees served via great processes, that’s the basic challenge to make any business succeed, assuming the market is there for it.
COVID was a challenge we quickly adapted to with curbside/effortless online ordering and our customers supported us faithfully, it’s been our best year so far actually. We have tried to use the challenges and struggle to grow and learn, and it’s an amazing three years overall!
As you know, we’re big fans of Cultivate Coffee Roasters. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
Cultivate is a coffee roastery, bakery, and cafe space in downtown Fuquay. We buy high-quality ingredients and make most of our products from scratch (coffee roasted in-house. syrups made in-house, baked goods made in-house.) We specialize in really fresh, high-quality coffee, and we are known for making products that are better and more consistent than the competition.
Philosophy-wise, we don’t cut financial corners and we take the time to make things with really good ingredients. For example, we buy milk from a local creamery instead of the cheap stuff from distro or Walmart or something like that. We make our caramel in-house even though it’s a hassle because it’s just better that way. There are some things that don’t make sense for us to do, but we do a lot of stuff that other cafes outsource to save money and time and it ends up making B-level products.
I’m most proud of our staff, we have a very high bar and they are absolutely top-notch. My two goals as a business owner is to create a container for relationships to thrive (staff and customer) and to have a clear north star for our team to strive towards.
We would invite readers to come down and spend some time with us over a great cup of coffee. We are not snobby about it, just no-fuss delicious coffee from a simple menu.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
Camping! The smell of the fire, of breakfast cooking, sleeping under the stars… magical.
Contact Info:
- Email: ben@cultivate.coffee
- Website: www.cultivate.coffee
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cultivatecoffeeroasters/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cultivatecoffee
