Perking up in Shakopee

If there's one thing Bill Kirkpatrick has figured out over his decades in the food trade, it's that his globe-trotting days in the gourmet coffee business make for quite a bit sexier cocktail-party chatter than his years at Campbell Soup.

For some reason, people are more attentive when he talks about traveling through Italy to find the slickest machines for his roastery, or through Costa Rica on wine-like "slurp 'n' spit" tours in a quest for the finest high-altitude Arabica beans, than they used to be when he dealt in canned chicken stock.

But the CEO of Cameron's Coffee doesn't exactly work amid glamour. His company is just getting to full speed with a cavernous new building located in a bleak industrial park just north of Hwy. 169 in Shakopee.

And what he himself finds most important -- and what's drawing national attention in the industry, with an enthusiastic article in September's Tea & Coffee Trade Journal -- is the remarkably "green" facility he has assembled in Shakopee.

One telling detail: With heat from his coffee roasters recaptured and reused, he paid just $1,500 last month for natural gas for a 65,000-square-foot building with 24-foot ceilings. To put that in perspective, he paid $360 for his own house, using the same substance.

If it seems to motorists along 169 that the building has actually been there quite a while for it to still seem "new," there's a reason for that. With much of the equipment inside specially commissioned and engineered under the guidance of a plant manager hired away from Starbucks, it took forever to get it fully up to speed.

"The guy who built me the roasters got way, way behind and finally wasn't even responding to my calls or e-mails," the 54-year-old Seattle native said. "Finally I took a plane to Buffalo, New York, knocked on his door and said, 'Hi, I'm Bill Kirkpatrick. Where are my machines?' He was stunned. He didn't try to make any excuses."

There are not too many industrial parks in the Twin Cities where you find scores of 150-pound burlap bags marked "El Salvador," strictly segregated from a roomful of 450-pound plastic drums of flavoring marked with labels such as "TOASTED SOUTHERN PECAN."

Upstairs from that room, coffee to be flavored rotates within an Iowa-made stainless steel drum called a "ribbon blender," whose contents are stirred by eight flat paddles the size and shape of footballs that have to be power-washed each time the flavoring changes.

"It's kinda fun doin' it," Kirkpatrick said. "I love gizmos."

Coffee travels through the plant first in burlap bags, 20 to the pallet, then inside 2,000-pound "rolling hoppers" on wheels: gigantic specially made bins that look like 1960s-era NASA space capsules turned upside-down, including the windows to peer inside.

Chris Castillon, his VP of operations, formerly of Starbucks' biggest roasting plant in Pennsylvania, is another coffee-engineering wonk.

"Some dark coffee is roasted to the point where it almost catches fire as oils are forced out to the surface!" he half-shouts over the din of the machines.

Cameron's is sold in 30 states, in an area bounded by Michigan, Tennessee, Texas and Montana. But its strongest market is the Upper Midwest, where it says it is the No. 1 specialty coffee sold in retail stores and No. 2 overall, behind Folgers.

Starbucks and other gourmet coffee outlets have trained consumers to appreciate high-quality coffee to the point where mass-market brands such as Folgers or the locally based McGarvey have shrunk in importance on supermarket shelves, Kirkpatrick said. His company now wrestles with Folgers' premium arm, Millstone, for the high-end market in retail stores.

The difference is not just snootiness, he said. It's actually a different product.

"We buy a different species than [Folgers]: No Robusta, only Arabica. It's 100 percent specialty-grade Arabica, the top 1 percent that exists. If you don't start with good meat, you don't get a good steak, no matter how you cook it. The Arabica is a high-altitude bean, meaning it's harder, and you can roast it without roasting the flavor out of it."

Strangely enough, however, the Cameron's plant may not be the best spot in the south metro area to get a really first-class cup of coffee. Offering his guests a cup, he half-apologizes for its not being totally fresh.

"This stuff can sit here, brewed, for quite a while before it gets served. You know, the building fires up at 4:30 in the morning. We run a 12-hour staggered shift. Some day we hope to run it 24/7."

David Peterson • 952-882-9023