World of Coffee Milan is behind us. Everyone is back home. And have finally been able to catch up on email. We reached out to the Best New Product winners to understand more about the journey they went on to develop their award-winning products.
71 year old roasting & grinding equipment supplier, Garanti, won the Roasting Equipment & Tools category for their FOCHA 6kg batch roaster. The roaster impressed with its modular and minimal design.
We reached out to the team for more.
Tell us more about Garanti.
It all started in 1951, at a time when the founder Mustafa, who is called “uncle” by anyone who has stepped into coffee industry in Turkey, desired to produce grinders in the Konak Chestnut Market Çerçioğlu Inn, a 7 meter squared workshop, by blending together the valuable energy of Aegean pearl İzmir and its passion for coffee.
In those years, due to lack of technology, Mustafa UMSU could determinedly produce each grinder by hand. However, this incapacity did not limit him. On the contrary, it turned into light in his journey of making his vision real. As the first person to introduce an automatic printing press grinding machine to Turkey in 1958, he achieved a big jump in the industry. This big jump he made not only became a signature of himself but also the firm “Garanti” that he bequeaths to us.
To have information about the factors that make a firm unique, first, the characteristic of the brand must be observed. We are a huge family including its employees and customers, a company that caught the vision of abroad and is proud to announce itself, a partner who always gives an ear to everybody’s demands intimately and transparently, a confiding safe harbor like its name represents. It has been a precious firm with the purpose of always keeping the spirit of the first day it was established while going for constant growth and self-improvement. In brief we are much more than an identity of roasters and mills and grinders manufacturer.
Our manager, who has been ensuring the company’s international recognition since 1993, expresses the company’s path as follows: “We process domestic business resources in production and management by observing world standards as much as possible. By analyzing the increasing and changing demands in the coffee and food industry, we strive to meet them with innovative, high-quality, and sustainable products and services. The work we do is guaranteed, just like our name. We always strive to successfully continue to be especially in the last 15 years coffee, has always succeeded to be an important part of our lives with its scent and the environments that it creates. At the beginning of the day, at our work breaks, on a visitation to a neighbor, in the rituals of our traditions, that is to say, coffee is everywhere. With the motivation of the power created by coffee in our lives, we have been producing our products that lead to unique experiences each day since 1951 in our modern factory located in Izmir Kemalpaşa Organized Industrial Zone and bring them together with coffee lovers.
What inspired you to create the roaster?
Meeting the rising and challenging demands of the coffee and food industries by its innovative, highly qualified and sustainable products and services by using domestic resources and showing regard to world standards in production and management, Garanti places great importance on research and development on the basis of products and services. According to current client feedback and market research, most of the business require to have a production structure that has homogenously roasted coffee, well tracked system in terms of factors that affect roasting profile and where statistical analysis is possible by advanced computer systems. The referred client profile here is, coffee consumers who follow contemporary architectural trends, value the cosmetic structure of the product, and do not prefer the appearance of traditional roasting machine. Company gives advance to business-to-business relations with customer-focused solutions under the roof of its brand identity and ensures efficient communication through its sustainable products by technological product studies.
FOCHA’s modular design offers structural comfort in order to create an ergonomic space. The absence of external extensions of the machine provides space-saving in the equipped area and convenience in determining the usage area. The product establishes an equipment-space relationship with its compact structure, especially in specialty coffee shops. With its color palette, FOCHA, you can feel the Aegean Sea’s refreshment, relief, and dynamism.
By the application of minimum numbers, reducing the pattern of the logo (inspired by milling stone named FOÇA stone in Turkey, which has been in use for decades in Garanti Roaster for its grinders. We interpret this core heritage of ours and transform it into our new machine) to only form and texture, the client can have a vision of plain design language and maximum functionality. The design, which tends to an organic form rather than a hard-solid geometric form, represents the purity (purist) in the industrial product with its ease of use, color, and structure.
Tell us about the process of developing the product?
We can say that the quiet time experienced during the COVID19 started the awareness process of the company. During this period, Garanti had been focused on specialty coffee and its desire to adopt a unique design language allowed us to draw a new roadmap. By choosing the design closest to the minimalist and modular design perception, FOCHA has reached its final form. FOCHA design selected from four design models and design, production, and testing phase of the project, which started at the end of 2020, took a total of 16 months.
In addition to the machine design, a special “logotype” study was carried out for this series for the upper segment machine family to be released by the company. The logo is inspired by the special Foça stone, which has been used in grinding machines since the establishment of the company and is still used in some traditional machines. Corporate identity colors are integrated into the logo as an accent. While the accent part of the logo was designed, it was thought to be used without the logotype and was also used in machine branding.
What does it mean to you that you won SCA Product of the Year at WOC in Milan?
The first step of our new journey. Many businesses enter a crossroads after the third generation. Either the existing system shrinks and disintegrates, or it changes its shell and enters a new route. And we had made our own decision. Managed by the third generation, Garanti Roaster transforms the traditional structure in its products and services by focusing on third wave coffee with its qualified coffee training and knowledge.
Representing the breaking of the shell of a 70-year-old brand, we aim to reach industry stakeholders, whose focus is on quality coffee, with FOCHA. The design, which is shaped into an organic form rather than a hard-solid geometric form, represents the purity (purist) in the industrial product with its ease of use, color and structure. We want to tell FOCHA users about the maximum functionality that can go in production with its compact structure, automatic use feature and a simple design language. We are so proud to win the “Best Product of the Year” award in the field of roasting equipment and tools at the World of Coffee 2022 Milan fair as a Turkish manufacturer first.
What’s next for you?
Research and development studies are indispensable values for us. As a company, we strive to provide goods and services that offer ergonomic design, new automation systems with user-friendliness and an environmentally friendly production structure. We will explain and show you step by step soon that FOCHA is not just a machine, it is a concept project. Two project studies, which we expect to solve the problems of specialty coffee shops, will be presented to you as a continuation of the concept. Projects that focus on software projects and environmental product solutions. On the other hand, being a family company, GARANTİ aims to gather specialty coffee lovers and roasters under the roof of FOCHA to create a new, connected family share knowledge and experiences worldwide.
We would like to share with you another project we are carrying out to share what we know and learn more. In addition, we are proud to announce that FOCHA will be used in roasting trainings with the SCA Campus, which we plan to open in 2023 in Izmir.
