Quality above all
Standing behind a glass panel, Chen spoons coffee beans into his NT$700,000 imported German coffee roaster, checking on their color and scent, all the while keeping one eye on the store.
After starting with just a handful of staff, Chen now employs dozens of people, and he spares no expense in making sure they’re all capable coffee brewers. He provides his staff with nigh-unlimited coffee beans, encouraging them to brew, drink, and experience as much coffee as they can, and only after two months of training are new staff allowed to get behind the counter and actually serve customers.
Even well-established, historic businesses can eventually lose customers not because of changes in flavor or ingredients, says Chen, but because the founders lose their passion for the food and drink they once loved. Many new stores, too, lose business as they experience a boom in popularity and lose the human touch in a desperate grab at commercialization.
That doesn’t mean that Melange hasn’t had to make its own compromises. When it was opened, coffee culture in Taiwan was still in its infancy, so simply selling coffee wasn’t a workable idea. Many people would walk in, find out there was no food for sale, and walk back out, and so Melange expanded their menu to include full meals as well as snacks.
While this move helped shore up business, Chen began to have second thoughts upon seeing so many people come in just to eat, and decided to scale back to just snacks, hoping to get Melange back to its core as a coffee shop.
This dedication to coffee has been a constant throughout Chen’s time with Melange, aptly demonstrated in his uncompromising approach to quality.
As Chen’s Zhongshan locations grew in popularity, well-known department stores like Sogo and Shin Kong Mitsukoshi began inviting him to open up branches in their stores. But rather than rapidly expanding the business to a point where handling staffing and management could get too much, Chen has remained determined to keep things small.
With a shy smile, Chen remarks that if they expanded just for the sake of showing off how big they’d gotten and began changing their product, they’d quickly lose customers. Instead, he has taken a more cautious approach to growing the business, only opening a new branch in Xinyi District’s Shin Kong Mitsukoshi just this August after nine months of planning.
Finding a balance
Throughout the growth of his business, Chen has remained uncompromising in his determination not to let product quality suffer in the name of an excessive focus on service.
While many businesses in Taiwan loudly proclaim that they “put the customer first,” Chen begs to differ. For example, Chen says, when a customer gets impatient and starts taking it out on the staff, he feels bad for the staff because it’s not their fault there are no seats free!
It is Chen’s position that service is fundamental to the food and beverage industry, but that we shouldn’t mistake the foundation for the firmament just to pander to customers. “You can’t treat staff like slaves, nor forget to provide a good product.”
“Would you rather have something delicious to eat, or have something that’s barely palatable but presented well? Your customers will soon let you know the answer to that!”
Having made a career in the world of coffee, Chen says that too many people get into the café business because they like drinking coffee and they think it’ll be cool, but when it comes time to get down to business, they quickly find out that things aren’t as romantic as they’d thought.
Chen admits that he, too, was once similarly overwhelmed by the romance. Sixteen years ago, when he started, it cost about NT$800,000 to start the average cafe, but he spent three times that buying the best equipment and making his store as beautiful as he could out of a desire to provide the best he could.
Romantic, but pragmatic
When Chen’s first branch relocated to its current location in 2002, he invested NT$10 million into décor and design alone; in 2010, when he opened a second branch in the same neighborhood, he spent NT$700,000 on a roaster and NT$5 million on imported waffle makers, slushee machines and the like for behind the counter. “Running a business, you’ve got to keep a keen eye on the expenses, but not too keen an eye, or you’ll want to throw in the towel.”
When the price of food began to rise in recent years, buying fruit cut his profit margins in half, but Chen stood firm, since business was good enough to cover the expense while still not raising prices. Even now, some 80% of the menu at Melange is unchanged from its early days, and the strawberry-topped waffles—long a favorite—have only risen in price by NT$20 from their original NT$130.
Looking back on his entrepreneurial journey, Chen recalls what it was like to go into the business simply from a love of coffee, yet he also wants to remind aspiring café owners that it takes more than just dreams to succeed. But with that said, you also shouldn’t forget your dreams, because they are what fuels the fires and will keep you pushing forward.
Chen Jui-jung, now 45, has relied on a natural pragmatism to temper his romanticism, and this philosophy has helped keep Melange and its alley home packed with customers for 16 years and counting.