SEY (The Cafe)

In business, as in life, names are important. They’re how you learn about the existence of something – be it a company or a product – and deliberating the meaning of a name is an essential part of a brand strategy.

At the same time, choosing a name without a meaning is also a strategy, and that’s what SEY Coffee in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, did. From their name to their café design to their coffee philosophy, their simple, stripped-back, minimalist approach has given them a unique brand personality without taking anything away from the coffee. 

Deeply ingrained in Tobin Polk, who co-founded SEY Coffee alongside Lance Schnorenberg, is an acute awareness of the insatiable mad consumerism that craves ever more. Living on a planet that teeters on the brink of fragility, what is it that drives Tobin to fight for a sustainable future?

Ending the dependency on charity tipping

Tipping is a culture ubiquitous in American society. Leaving a 15% to 20% tip at a restaurant or cafe is not just a nice thing to do, it’s the done thing. For the majority in the service industry, the low wages mean that without tips, they wouldn’t be able to make a living. In one way, the tipping culture is an excuse for employers not to pay a fair wage.

To break away from this unjust system, SEY Coffee decided to go without tipping at their cafe. At SEY, they believe everyone deserves to be paid appropriately for their work, and that by paying both the staff and the producer a fair compensation for their service or product, they can maintain a sustainable system. For instance, the starting wage at SEY is 28 dollars an hour, almost twice the minimum wage. Also, a mandatory professional development track ensures that once they reach the level of a Tier 3 staff member, they make 31 dollars an hour plus a share of daily revenue and full health care coverage.

“In the US, the feel-good tipping system has become so rampant. I’m sure you’ve seen stories where a child has cancer and the community comes together to pay for his cancer treatment. We think of this as a feel-good story, but that should really be a story about a broken healthcare system.

In America, tipping is a publicly subsidized wage system which is relying on the public’s goodwill and sympathy. In reality, people should be paid what they deserve, because they’re working hard and doing good work – not having to go around asking for money. We’re running a business, not a charity.

But as we’re the rarity, new customers are usually confused when we tell them there’s no tipping. And if our staff feel that tips are more appealing than working here, they’ll leave and go somewhere else. So my role as an owner and as a manager is to be very much in communication with the staff, and make sure that they are feeling good and they are feeling taken care of. 

I see my job as like laying out a field for the seeds to fall in and grow. I want to give people the opportunity to feel like they’re improving their own cognitive ability and their own skill sets, and being supported and empowered to do good work. That’ll help them continue to grow as a professional in this industry. And I think that’s also key to our survival.” 

Normalizing pricing standards

Mass production and mass consumerism have defined the 20th century. Ever since 1913, when Henry Ford introduced the assembly line system and successfully lowered costs and achieved mass production, the trend has continued to expand to all industries. 100 years on, we live in a world where we are able to buy so much for so little. But this convenience has come with a different kind of cost, and a different kind of price tag.

“It’s very easy to fall into this mad consumer mindset. Think about fashion, where you can buy a t-shirt for a few dollars and then you just throw it away when you’re done. But when we think about it, the amount of time and effort and resources that have gone into producing that thing are actually very large. But because we can buy things for cheap, it makes us feel like all of these materials are expendable, and that they can be wasted.

Life is not promised forever. Society does play the role in determining whether or not we continue to be a society, it’s up to every individual to play their part in that. It’s important for us to at least pause and remember that we are here in a fragile state of existence.

And from whatever point of view, business, agriculture, labor, the wellbeing of society, if things don’t sustain that it all collapses. These are the real battles that I have to fight; things I have to pay attention to if I want us to get to sustainability. There have been a few other cafes who have tried to get rid of tipping, but as far as I’m aware, none of them have lasted. They’ve all returned to tipping. It shows how much effort you need to do something different.

I want to help people shift their mindset to realizing that things are actually difficult to produce and that resources are finite. Coffee is a very complex process, from growing the seed to getting it into our cup. If everyone could realize that coffee is a precious and a luxury item, then maybe we’ll start to realize people should be paid appropriately. And as that awareness spreads, the pricing standard will move from quantity-based to quality-based.

We just want to normalize this standard. In the past, conversation around coffee was more about the magic behind the brand or the barista, and these sorts of things. But the real magic is happening somewhere else. 

Coffee is an agricultural product. The pairing of this seed and the land, and the way that it’s being harvested and processed and being very carefully taken care of along the chain. That’s where the real magic is. We don’t do anything that’s trying to make more out of what it is. It’s a beautiful thing as it is. And for us, we’ve tried to really turn the focus to the producer and the person who is producing the coffee. There’s no frills, there’s no fireworks. We want the coffee to speak for itself. 

We tend to shy away from coffees that have been heavily influenced by the flavor characteristics introduced by yeast and bacteria during the fermentation. We really stay in a much more clean, transparent profile so that you experience more of the coffee itself. With roasting too we’re very minimal, taking a very delicate roasting approach, unlocking flavor not using roasting as a way to alter the profile.

Choosing the SEY brand name, the cafe design, everything is all about minimizing the impact we have on the raw product.  The magic is already there. We’re just making sure we highlight it.” 

The beauty of complexity

Tobin fell into the coffee industry after college, where he’d studied scriptwriting and philosophy. He was drawn to the vastness of the industry, how it encompassed the whole world.

“Coffee is a globally traded agricultural product which touches so many physical locations, individuals, and socio-economic groups. The impact is in all directions. It’s so deep and complex, and I like how it gives a very clear picture of what society is. That is really beautiful to me.

Coffee is something that I can experience with all my senses, and be reminded of the fact that I’m alive in a world that is very complex. It creates that culmination of all the things that come together and make us feel alive. A feeling that this world is a lot bigger than just me.

Beauty is of course subjective. For me, it’s something that makes me feel joy or something that makes me feel deep sadness. It can be love. It can be a whole host of feelings. It can be all sorts of things. All of these emotions jumbled together in the world is where I feel beauty.”

Tobin has often been told by friends that he’s very empathic. Being sensitive to the feelings and energies of others means that he is able to see, hear, and feel things that are not always immediately obvious. In relationships, this can sometimes lead to conflict, but Tobin has turned this into a strength in his business. 

“I feel that humans are such valuable entities. The fact that we are relatively limitless in our imaginations, and can basically believe anything we want to believe. We are full of emotion and full of physical capability and thoughtfulness. And when you combine all of that, it can create dreams that you can turn into reality, which is a pretty amazing thing. 

I believe that the possibilities of humans are boundless. I don’t believe in putting somebody in a specific position, making sure that they only do those things like you would a robot or a factory line or something like that, where you just repeat orders and you have those same synapses firing all day long. Micromanaging human beings doesn’t help, in fact it actually does a lot of damage. It’s important to believe that people are capable and provide encouragement and opportunity for them to make the most of themselves. We only have one life, And we should be able to live the life that we feel is the best and really go for it.” 

Believing in the boundless possibilities of humans

Not long after joining the coffee industry, in his early 20s, Tobin had an experience that has had a lasting impact on his life. At the time he was working as a barista at a coffee shop. He hadn’t been working there long, and didn’t have much experience or technical skill, but he had a manager, Elicia Battaglia, who really believed in him and decided to put him in a training position.

“I was confident in what I was doing, and knew that I could figure it out. I was interested in the work and I showed genuine care for what I was doing. I could have been the wrong person. But I think maybe my manager just saw something in me and believed I was the right person. She made a very positive impact on me by just believing in me.”

Now as an employer, Tobin is returning the favor, constantly looking for ways to provide opportunities for his staff to realize their full potential. To make sure that everyone can function as part of the team from day one, there is a comprehensive phased onboarding program. And once the staff are working on the floor, they continue training with a two hour weekly one-to-one session with Tobin. 

“The most important thing that you can do as a coffee professional is taste coffee very well. So I have detailed, one on one conversations and cupping with my 7-member staff. The conversations are very focused. Sometimes it’s about brewing methods. Sometimes it’s about coffee varieties, sometimes it’s about microclimate, etc.

In conversation with my staff, be it about coffee specifically or be it about service or be it about the interpersonal workings of a team, when there’s an issue, the only way that ever becomes healthy is to talk about these issues openly and freely, and talk them through. From a business point of view, people might think, why would we do this? But I honestly believe that’s why we’re here. To invest in our people and to help them improve, Because in the end, it does help SEY. It helps us.

If something bothers me about one of my staff members, I don’t think “Oh, you’re just not the right person for this.” I question my perception. Am I correct? Am I seeing the situation right? Maybe I don’t fully understand, maybe I need to reevaluate myself, and reevaluate the way I see things. And the majority of the time, the person can do the job.

As long as you stay open to any possibility, then the possibilities really are boundless. I’ll continue to reevaluate as new problems come up and try to approach everything with an open mind, and think in a way that doesn’t keep us constrained to certain structures or the normal ways of doing things. We need to make sure we’re learning from history in a way that produces results. I would love for my entire team to be the ones who are driving new ideas and being aware of the problems that we face and reevaluating and coming up with solutions.”

Coffee is a simple drink made from grinding seeds and adding hot water. It cannot tell its own story. It is an agricultural product, planted in the earth, born from seed, and grown to fruit. Listening to the voice of each seed, weaving it into a story, and experiencing happiness, sadness, anger, and joy is how we can feel grateful for the life that we have now.

“Humans are both a beacon of hope, and also pretty terrible as an animal. We humans are a parasitic entity. We take way more than we give back to this earth.

But unlike other parasitic species, we have the ability to recognize this and accept it as a truth. And we can do something about that. And we can change that. We could create a future in which humans can still exist on this planet, which would be great, I think, because I do think that we’re smart enough to do it. The human brain is such an amazing, amazing, amazing thing.”