Doroni had to follow a plan that had been in production for many years: relocating its headquarters and manufacturing operations from South San Francisco to a new building across the bay. The Kovit-19 epidemic, however, has already turned an ambitious and costly endeavor into a dramatic exercise in functional gymnastics.
Doroni will have its spacious, 327,000-square-foot San Leandro building in March with its offices and state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities. It will also serve as a Willy Wonka-esque, tourism-friendly “flavor factory”, a “reception” for coffee making, a “customer play area” to try over 150 flavors, and an accessible talk. Through a secret passage behind the bookshelf.
The company had borrowed about $ 40 million to invest in its flavor factory.
“Can we make it? Can we catch everyone?” Dorani CEO Melanie Tulpeko told CNN Business. “Can we repay these loans we just borrowed? Can we keep the business running for our customers?”
The privately owned company, which started on the north coast of San Francisco’s “Little Italy”, has been accustomed to double-digit annual revenue growth for decades. It is now forecasting a 40% drop in sales in April, pushing it to a bad level.
Coffee shop sales were low at the time. According to a survey of more than 5,000 stores in Payment Processor Square, average revenue fell 55.4% from March 1 to April 30.
By the end of April, Dorani had a decline in sales of its books, but only 20%.
“Then the business came back like crazy,” Tulpeko said.
Tulpeko said that as the home pound returns to homemaking, Dorny syrups and sauces are popping up at meetings like mixed drinks, hornbeam patches and sour starters.
Increasing the store’s sales means that Doroni will have to increase its distribution of its 375-milliliter flip-cap bottles frequently at retail. Coffee shops usually buy double sized bottles.
“We had to change a lot in our supply chain to keep all the packaging supplies,” Tulpeko said.
What happened in the background was the move from southern San Francisco to San Leandro. As Torni swung wildly as needed, its operations were at two locations on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay.
Dorny leased 100,000 square feet of space near his new 330,000-square-foot factory to store goods, bottles, labels, caps and raw materials such as vanilla from Madagascar and hazelnuts from the Pacific Northwest. The company used some of the space as stage areas to accommodate and prepare orders that varied from week to week.
“It’s a roller coaster,” he said. “It’s completely unpredictable now.”
Dorney has now been completely relocated from southern San Francisco – which took six months instead of three – and is on track to record annual sales of $ 200 million by 2020, a double-digit increase from 2019, Tulpeko said.
“Explorer. Devoted travel specialist. Web expert. Organizer. Social media geek. Coffee enthusiast. Extreme troublemaker. Food trailblazer. Total bacon buff.”