Most coffee people may not have heard of the Luminaire hot water font unless you were around back in the day. It was a project that some graduates of Olin were working on back in 2010. Something really akin to point and dispense precision hot water with a controlled flow rate for per cup. I got involved as hype man and demoed it a bunch of times with the idea of running it my cafés to do pour overs. It was pretty crazy and at some point, we were at the coffee trade show and I was pulling in anybody with cred who would listen to see it. I was shameless in getting anyone I could into a side room for a secret demo. Many of these people would end up being a who's who in the industry in the years to come but my goal was to share my excitement for it's potential. I think the concept was way ahead of its time but those guys still have a site on Luminaire coffee if you are looking to design something in coffee. The font didn't materialize for my shop long term but it didn't stop me from believing in them.
In that exploration process, my focus shifted to really getting into what we could do with the coffee since our patent method provided a range of strengths. I wanted to have the flexibility to dispense hot water and cold coffee in a tight space and they were working on something that met that check list. I really couldn't stand the big hot water towers taking up so much space on my counters and was struggling with how to fit my draft concept on bar without cutting up the counters. In the end, we got something outside our original intent, we got to be the beta testers and give feedback for the first version of what would eventually become the Marco Pour'd font.
Toasttab.com was another one but that relationship has had more length to it. The founders, Steve and Aman, of that point of sale application showed up via an introduction by a family member. We met with Aman and the team repeatedly and were open and direct, giving feedback on what we could want if we were to have a tablet driven point of sale. At the time we had a weekend table service brunch so we wanted tablets that could function as a register but then could be taken to a table and used to tale orders. We asked for a ticket screen that wasn't paper tickets as well so we didn't have a massive pile of paper. The details aren't important, what they did was ask us what we wanted, our dream setup and we gave them that detailed feedback. This was in a time when registers were linked to a server computer in your basement, not the standards that exist today. Toasttab's team showed up with a working version and we adopted it becoming their first customer. Flash forward, they grew and went public on the NY stock exchange. They invited us down for the event when they rang the bell and we got to stay in New York for the night and have that experience.
Recently the team at toast came in to shoot a small commercial for socials in our space. It was a lot of fun hanging out with Steve and Aman. I even got into character a little bit to be in their commercial.
Kind of wild when you think about it that I've been lucky enough to do more than once what few people ever get to do in this industry. Demoing a prototype and advocating for its design being put into production or tweaks to existing gear to modify it for another use is a really interesting process. With Luminaire, I got a group of friends for years after, and from Marco and Toasttab I got gear we use in the shops daily.
