Tom Baker is an ideas guy. He's had a hand in product development for drinks and restaurants across the globe. But when he met Philip Moore and they collaborated on making a new drink, now known as Mr Black coffee liqueur, created at Erina on the Central Coast, he became dedicated to making just one great product.
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Now, eight years later, Mr Black is a world success. Fifty per cent of sales come from the US, 40 per cent from here in Australia.
Baker and company have never rested on their laurels, constantly tweaking the product, packaging and distribution, and offering special one-off products.
And it's not just luck, Mr Black has been ahead of the curve.
Baker reminds that when Mr Black was launched, there were about 30 distillers in Australia (Mr Black's ingredients include vodka which they make as well as coffee they roast). Now, there are more than 200 distillers as locally-made gin, rum and whisky have exploded.
Just this month, Mr Black launched a ready to drink Espresso Martini in a can, trying to stay ahead of the curve.
"We began developing it a few years ago because it's really hard to develop good coffee spirits. It's genuinely hard to do," Baker says. "Now, there is this large, pent-up demand for premium cocktails in cans. Just conveniently, we've been building one for the last couple of years."
A soft launch in Australia was plan, before considering a global launch. But things changed.
"Honestly, we weren't planning on it," Baker says of exporting the martini espresso. "We'll give it a test in Australia this year, sell a couple of thousand cases, see how it goes.
"But the reception has been - both the flavour and the experience of it - extraordinary. So this will go overseas pretty much as fast as we can do it. As soon as we can make enough stock to the US, it's going to go to the US, so we imagine it will be there for American summer next year, so June July next year it will be hitting shelves in North America."
Baker is very confident it is the right product.
"We are one of the better selling spirits even in craft retail," he says. "But, there area lot of occasions where shaking up an espresso martini at home, or having a Mr Black on the rocks, doesn't really work. Like barbecues, picnics, Friday right after work. There are a lot of occasions where Mr Black just is not the most convenient thing.
"Ultimately, that is what the premise of RTD (ready to drink) is based around, convenience. Whether it's a rum and coke, or finely crafted Mr Black espresso martini, it's just like, crack it and drink it. So that's really why there is this whole nother opportunity for our drink that we previously could not service with our bottles."
Baker knows his customers, too. He's spent a lot of time in hospitality. ("I've spent a lot of time in bars talking to people how they drink and why they drink," he says with a laugh.)He knows what the vibe of an espresso martini is.
As he says,
"We call it internally espresso martini o'clock. It can come at two points: it's either your first drink of the night, where you are like, 'you know what, we're having a night of it, we're having an espresso martini to kick off,' or conversely, when you just want the night to keep going a bit, you know, as we say, no one has an espresso martini and goes home. It's a night starter.
"It's also transformative as well. If you meet up at the pub, and you say, I'll have a glass of wine, it's 'ok, cool, we're having one or two drinks'. You meet up and say, let's have an espresso martini, it means, you're having a session with your mate. It's not like you're drinking a lot, it just says something about the type of evening you want to have. It just raises the energy levels a bit, it raises the mood, you know.
"I think everyone knows that clear moment in their head when they drinking espresso martinis.
"We just needed to make a good one."
So putting the martini ingredients in a can (with nitrogen), with instructions to make it cold and shake it before opening, to get that genuine foam, is genius.
Like coffee in general, coffee-related spirits has become very competitive. Baker reels off what others have done in the space - Jaegermeister cold brew in US market, Tia Maria cold brew coffee liqueur, Jameson Whiskey cold brew coffee.
But for him and Mr Coffee, it's about looking ahead, not behind or beside you.
"We used to spend a lot more time looking around [at competitors]," Baker says. "And as we've grown, as we've got more singular on our goals and our mission as a business, we spend less and less time looking at our competitors.
"I don't have a single slide in any presentation that's got a competitive analysis or category analysis or strategic analysis of our competitors in the US. I just get the sales results and they are declining and we are growing, and say, 'sweet, let's go on that'.
"It doesn't matter to the punter on the street who did what when. All that matters is what you're doing now. My numbers have pluses in front of them and theirs have minuses, so we'll just keep doing it."
The Mr Black business has boomed during the pandemic.
"We had a belter of the last two years," Baker says. "It's been a wild ride."
Mr Black is not looking for new markets right now, but it has a full calendar of collaborations planned for next year.
A special edition Italo Disco Coffee Liqueur in collaboration with ST Ali Coffee Roasters from Melbourne has just been launched. A joint project with Bundaberg Rum will hit the market in time for Christmas.
As Baker says of the next year: "It's going to be wild, whatever it is."