Copa Vida Busy with Up-to-date Flagship and Case Conversion SoCalDaily Coffee News by Roast Magazine

Brand modern, state-of-the-art flagship coffee shop in Pasadena, CA, owned by a multi-roastery Cup of Life opened last weekend in San Diego. Reflecting the top-of-the-line equipment and excellent service counter established in 2013 at their first cafe, the San Diego store boasts four groups Alpha Domingo Steampunk coffee machine, Spirit coffee machine with three groups Kees van der Westenand two-group Curtis Seraphim countertop installation for brewing pour-over coffee.

The San Diego shop also uses Mahlkonig K30 Twin grinders for single-origin and decaf espresso, though they’re keeping their fingers crossed that they’ll be among the first shops to roll out the modern Mahlkonig Peak grinders. “They haven’t shipped yet,” Copa Vida owner and CEO Steve Chang told Daily Coffee News just before the opening. “We’re a Mahlkonig distributor through our wholesaler, so we wanted to make sure that everything we recommend to our customers is something we employ ourselves.” The Pasadena shop will also be outfitted with Peak grinders once they’re available.

Copa Vida began roasting petite batches of its own single-origin and blends earlier this year, following the acquisition of Diedrich. For now, all in-house offerings for all of its cafes will be roasted in Pasadena and shipped to SoCal locations until demand dictates the opening of an additional roastery in their modern territory. The company will also continue to offer coffees roasted by others.

“The thinking is that we love our passion for coffee, but at the heart of the business is what the customer wants,” Chang said. “Until we get to a size as roasters where we can offer a lot more variety than we do now, I’m going to continue to take a multi-roast approach in our cafes. The approach for me is that we have a diverse customer base. They’re interested in variety, and until I reach that maturity, I want to make sure they have access to that variety.”

Fresh off its grand opening in San Diego, CV is also preparing a modern retail location — a 40-foot shipping container shell — that will officially open next to a modern Carlsbad office campus that will house a modern GoPro camera company on Nov. 2. “The box is done, we’ve finished the buildout, all the licensing and everything else,” Chang said. “We’re just waiting for the tenants to move in.”

While the coffee shop’s location won’t be perceptible from the street, Chang said it will be open to the public. As the only coffee shop on campus, the coffee shop will have an audience of up to 900 employees a day, as well as other coffee lovers from the area who venture there.

Copa Vida Carlsbad Container Conversion

Copa Vida had already been working on the shipping container concept before the opportunity to install one arose. “The biggest cost of a coffee shop is always the construction, and if the space or the location or whatever doesn’t work out, you have no choice but to lose that initial investment. So we thought, hey, if we could put this in a shipping container, we could always put it in the back of a truck and take it with us.”

It turned out that the owner and developer of the San Diego Copa Vida commercial space is also the developer of the Carlsbad office park. Chang said, “I got a call from these guys one day after we started the San Diego project, and they said, ‘We have this idea for a coffee shop in Carlsbad in the middle of a business park, and we were going to run it ourselves, but we realized we don’t know anything about coffee.’”

The developer approached Chang with a partnership, with one stipulation: the store had to be built in a shipping container. “I literally burst out laughing because I had just finished a design for a coffee shop in a shipping container,” Chang said. The developer had already invested in the shipping container, going so far as to hire a well-known graffiti artist from San Diego to paint the outside of the crate. Copa Vida brought its own interior design sensibilities and built it to include a four-group Steampunk, a two-group La Marzocco Linea PB and a cold-brew kegerator.