23. Create food stories
about your star
products and sell,
sell, sell
We’re willing to bet that you have plenty of stories about some of
your products. The star products that we discussed in number
sevenperhaps will all have some sort of story to them. Isn’t there
an old family recipe somewhere in your lunchtime mix, or maybe
a cake recipe from your grandmother? Make a story about these
items, tell the customers how they ended up on your menu, and
shout about how proud you are of them. Even if the recipe was
relatively simply put together by yourself, you can create a story
to make it seem more interesting.
Don’t forget that most regular customers are actually fascinated
by the whole process of running a coffee business. Many of them
sit there in their tedious little day jobs dreaming about the day
they get made redundant or win the lottery and can finally own
their own little slice of heaven – a coffee business.
We all know that this is a long way from reality, but play this fantasy
up in your stories. The notion of you sitting with your chef dreaming
up delicious new sweet things for your customers to eat, or finding
an old recipe in a dust covered book in your grandmother’s attic, is
enormously compelling to many people. Maybe you had to bribe
the owner of a café in Italy to give you a recipe for his buns. Or
maybe you had to buy a couple of cakes and take them to a local
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