Coffee Shop Trailer- The Beginning

Its official, we bought a trailer. The beginning of a new dream, a new adventure and all the coffee we could ever want. Our own coffee shop trailer packed full of bold, beautiful coffee and sweet, jumbo cinnamon rolls.

For a while we have wanted to start selling coffee on a more serious level. At the bakery we sell two options for coffee; a cup of hot coffee and a Sweet Cream Cold Brew. These two options are tried and true classics, but we have been yearning for more.

The Popularity of Coffee shop trailers

The idea of a coffee trailer was foreign to me about 5 years ago. My mind could only picture a coffee cart, similar to the one Rory frequented at Yale in Gilmore Girls. But once I happened upon several in a trip out west to Oregon, I was in love.

Out west we past many on our route through Portland to Cannon Beach, and further up into Washington. Instead of the same old Starbucks located in every town, each town had several local coffee venders sprinkling their streets. On route you could simply pull over to the parking lot of a grocery store, laundry mat or park and buy a cup of coffee prepared with beans from a local roaster. The perfect way to start the day.

Why a Coffee shop trailer?

Why not a classic brick and mortar coffee shop? Although that would be wonderful, a trailer is both practical for the business owner as well as the customer.

Our bakery the Flour Barn is currently operating out of a barn turned commercial kitchen on our farm. This was the perfect set up because we avoided having rent to pay, which in turn allowed us to grow at our own pace. This set up allowed me not to feel overwhelmed if we made less one month, because there was no sum that we had to make, only goals. This also allowed us to be able to experiment, see what products worked best, what products made the best profit or sold the best out of the case. The relaxed nature of us not having to be successful immediately allowed us to be creative and grow at our own pace.

I wanted to continue to expand our business but in the same gradually, low risk way. Our barn was not big enough to add an indoor seating option, so coffee shop didn’t seem like the best idea. Then came the idea of the coffee shop trailer.

Trailers, although requiring upfront costs, are free of rent. They are a flexible entity that will hopefully allow use to grow at a steady pace.

Location

So where will you park this thing?

Anywhere! That is the beauty of a mobile trailer.

To start we are planning to use this trailer to expand our bakery hours. Currently we are only open on Saturday mornings. Since we are doing a lot of work in the bakery during the other days of the week, we do not have room to also have it set up for customers. That is why we believe have the trailer parked at our drive way will allow our customers to pickup breakfast before work, student to drive by on the way to school or for those needing their cinnamon rolls fix. We would start by being open Friday mornings and going from there.

For this reason we would like the trailer to work as both a drive thru and walk up ordering system. We will be considering this as we design the outside of the trailer.

The first few steps

To clarify this is not a instructional article, this is my first time starting a trailer. I am more inviting you along for the ride. You may see me make some mistakes or maybe we will fall in love with this trailer together.

The first step I took was to find a trailer. We searched and searched on Facebook Marketplace until we found the perfect one. Although we played around with various idea, we decided on a utility trailer base.

Some of the more popular coffee shop trailer options include:

Renovated Horse trailers: I have seen this done many times and they look incredible. The one downside to a lot of these is that the renovation process is vigorous. Most old horse trailers have been well used. Not only does the trailer itself need a large amount of cleaning up, it then needs fitted with all the proper innards.

Renovated Campers: Another design that has been done and looks very nice. The fear we had with older campers if that campers take constant upkeep.

Utility Trailer: We ended up deciding on this option because of its durability and cleanliness. The trailer itself is in great shape and felt like the perfect blank canvas.

Our trailer

So here it is, in all its….glory?

Some inspiration

I’m sure after seeing our trailer your a little confused/ worried. Here are some already renovated functioning coffee shop trailers that I love. Just to show you I am not too crazy…

Current progress

What we have accomplished:

We bought the trailer
We have obtained the proper licensing, as well as the appliances needed to sell various baked goods and coffee in our trailer.
I am now realizing how short this list is….

The next step

We are currently in the designing staging of the trailer. We need to decide where the windows should be located, where all the required appliances will fit, and the overall design.

Ellen and I are lucky to both be married to engineers, so between our crazy creative minds and their meticulous practical minds we hope to come up with a beautifully functional coffee shop trailer.

We have been doing our research for quite sometime and we believe we have finally found the perfect roaster! But that story is for another day…