“It’s pretty smooth,” he says, surprised by how good a naked cup of coffee can taste when it’s made with artisanal care. The woman from Joyride hands him something he never orders: a cup of black coffee. “I drink Dunkin’, Starbucks, Tim Hortons–not the deli stuff,” he says, echoing the sentiments of many of America’s 100 million coffee drinkers. “I’m a coffee guy,” declares a silver-haired exec in khakis. For others, the experience is more like an awakening, when they taste the refined brew for the first time. A thirtysomething in a chambray shirt expresses delight at the prospect that his company might ditch the pods in the office kitchen in favor of Stumptown, which he brews at home. A few are coffee snobs, and for them it is a moment of vindication. Staffers begin wandering over to taste coffees with names like Brazil Samambaia and Three Africans. “We’re working to eliminate K-Cups altogether,” one of the Joyride staffers says, referring to the Keurig coffee pods that have been colonizing home and office kitchens with Starbucks-like force in recent years. Every pound Joyride delivers is roasted to order. Typically, office managers purchase the caffeine that fuels their workers the same way they buy toner cartridges and toilet paper–in bulk from office-supply companies.
In its three years, Joyride has forged relationships with “the big four”–the high-end coffee industry’s most respected roasters, which include Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, and, of late, Blue Bottle. These coffee missionaries have been sent in by Joyride, a Queens, New York–based distribution company that is trying to retrain the coffee-drinking palates of corporate America. They slither over to the company’s communal gathering area where they unload the tools of their trade: sharp-edged grinders, precise scales, a variety of specialized heating devices, and four bags of highly prized beans.
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