Mr. Espresso was founded in 1978 by Carlo Di Ruocco, an Italian who immigrated to the United States by way of France
In the Bay Area, innovation is constant — sometimes to a fault — and it’s no different in the coffee scene. But at Mr. Espresso, a family-owned, Oakland-based coffee roasting company and wholesaler in its 43rd year, they’ve shown you can have success by continually improving on something while keeping tradition as a guiding force. The company was founded in 1978 by Carlo Di Ruocco, an Italian who immigrated to the United States by way of France with his wife and kids, and who greatly missed the short, sweet, caffeinated beverage for which Italy is famous. Mr. Espresso started as an espresso machine sales and maintenance business, and quickly morphed into an oak wood-roasted coffee wholesaler, growing into a popular brand with a portfolio of hundreds of clients in the decades since. Like so many other countless businesses, however, Mr. Espresso was hit hard by the pandemic. The company lost a significant chunk of business as its clients closed their businesses or dramatically decreased their purchasing around the state and beyond. Even so, the company’s director of sales and marketing and one of the founder’s children, Luigi Di Ruocco, said Mr. Espresso should be able to weather the storm, and come out the other end a bit improved, planning to eventually open their first ever retail component with a cafe in Oakland, which was put on hold by the pandemic. This conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Q: What has been the impact of the pandemic on your business? A: About 95 percent of our business is wholesale. We supply restaurants, cafes, hotels, offices, and a lot of those businesses have been closed or partially closed or in some sort of flux since March 2020. The upshot of all that is our overall revenue is at about 50 percent during the pandemic, so that’s what it really boils down to. Q: That’s a huge hit. What has that meant for the business? Have there been any layoffs? A: Yeah, it is. We’ve reduced our staff from about 30 to about 19. And we are still shipping and supporting our active clients. We’re a family-owned business so out of the 19 employees, six of us are members of the family, so we’re carrying a lot of the burden of the executive management of the company ourselves. In the meantime we’ve just been really trying to update our e-commerce and focus on social media, but it doesn’t offset the decline. But we’re able to maintain right now. We’re a family business since 1978, we don’t have any debt, we don’t have any investors. We’re not making profits, that’s for sure, but we’re not exposed quite as dearly as we could be. And the (Paycheck Protection Program) loan has helped us kind of manage ourselves through this process. So we’re just looking forward to the recovery, whenever that may be.
