Bonanza Coffee Heroes

Bonanza Coffee Roasters was founded in Berlin in 2006 as a coffee shop roasting coffee in-house and serving only coffee. Bonanza Coffee Roasters is planning to open their fourth branch soon and is also looking into expanding their business overseas. We interviewed the founder Mr. Kiduk Reus who has continued to take initiatives- unprecedented in Germany- focused on selling specialty coffee. “I thought about quitting many times.” “When we started our business, we didn’t have a concrete business plan in mind. We just wanted to build a small coffee shop where our neighbors could come and we didn’t intend to do anything bigger than that. It’s not that we had any great ambitions or aspirations in mind because we were not even sure, first of all, if our business would be viable with such an unusual store style.”  When Kiduk, who was born and grew up in South Korea, opened Bonanza Coffee Roasters in Berlin in 2006, nobody had heard of the third wave coffee. It was challenging and adventurous of him to start a coffee shop in a city where the coffee shop culture had not yet become widely known. “You may think that things were going well when you think about how we do now, but I thought about quitting many times because the business was not going well. I had invested a lot of my own money, so I couldn’t simply quit. The most difficult time was around 2014 when we lost customers to other roasters such as THE BARN and Five Elephant.” “Having said that, more and more people became interested in specialty coffee thanks to them, so the number of customers...