Heating up the Turkish coffee craze in Corona, California

Mustafa Arat knows how to sell. He did it for 27 years for Xerox Corp., Pitney-Bowes Inc. and other Fortune 500 companies.

Now he’s doing it for himself, peddling something that almost every grownup craves. Only, as Arat sees it, he’s providing a more healthful alternative. He’s not selling a product so much as a method that he sees as possibly becoming a hot trend.
From his home in Corona, CA, about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles, Arat runs www.turkishcoffeeworld.com, a retailer for everything needed to make and serve Turkish coffee. He offers a big selection of pots, grinders, gift items and fresh coffee.

“I actually kind of stumbled onto Turkish coffee as a possible product idea by coincidence while I was searching for ways to quit smoking,” said Arat, 55, whose health issues forced him to make lifestyle and career changes.

“As anyone who has tried to quit smoking knows, after meals can be one of the worst times to deal with the urge to smoke,” he said. “I decided to prepare Turkish coffee after my meals to deal with my urges, and it sure has worked for me.” Turkish coffee, he said, “takes several minutes to prepare ... which keeps a person busy.”

A demanding job, hectic days and a four-hour commute to work had consumed much of his life and had contributed to his suffering a heart attack in 2005, leading him to quit smoking, he said. Before he took up Turkish coffee, he hadn’t even owned a “cezve” (pronounced “jazz-veh”), the brew’s special pot.

Arat -- who holds anthropology and international business degrees from Western Michigan University and Indiana University -- considered selling other products, especially items in the technology sector, before he struck on Turkish coffee.

“Sales and marketing is something in me,” said the Turkish native, who remembers selling gum in front of an İstanbul circus when he was 12.

For two years Arat researched Turkish coffee and its associated products and sources worldwide. He got samples from manufacturers and sold goods on Amazon.com and eBay for a year before launching the Web site in January.

His venture is percolating now. Arat is loath to invite competitors by disclosing too much but said he expected to reach $250,000 in sales by the end of next year. He speaks of a market potential in the “tens of millions,” envisioning a cezve in every US kitchen.

The market for Turkish coffee is growing, he said, because of customers like Alicia Watins, 42, a Long Island, N.Y., technology consultant. She and her husband, Michael, have never been to Turkey, but they love the Turkish coffee served in New York restaurants.

As a gift to Michael, she bought a set from Arat’s site. “Before I bought it, I researched through the Internet and talked with several [vendors],” she said. “I had no idea what to buy.” But, she said, Arat “guided us all the way.”

Arat said his last three orders came from Australia, Lithuania and a US Marine base. He’s getting orders from Chile, South Korea and China.

“I get a lot of orders from the US military, probably because they are discovering Turkish coffee in the [Persian] Gulf and Iraq,” he said. “They usually buy my most expensive items.”

As his business has grown, Arat has experimented with various packaging techniques so as to lower shipping costs. He has mastered how to get paid online and how to handle currency fluctuations. He has been tinkering with Internet advertising.

He’s also still learning strategies on how to maximize exposure on Google and Yahoo searches. Once prospects get to him, he wants to know how long they stay, where they come from and what kind of technology they use. So he’s studying Web analytics.

His site gets its largest share of visitors from the US, whose residents drink more coffee than those of any other country. As he believes Turkish coffee will be a hot new consumer choice, he chose Nextrend Marketing as his company’s legal name.

“Many people think that Turkish coffee is a special blend that is grown only in Turkey, so it has to be exported and bought separately,” he said.

But the name actually describes a brewing method that the Ottomans perfected by roasting coffee beans and grinding them to powder. They spread the drink across Europe and the world.

“You can make Turkish coffee from any type of coffee you buy as long as it has been ground to a fine powder,” Arat explained. “Every major grocery store in the US has a grinder with a Turkish coffee setting.”

The process demands a cezve, which is a special pot with a narrowing neck necessary to make the vital foam. His cezves are hand-hammered, etched with elaborate designs, then polished and hand-painted by artisans in Turkey and Bosnia. His “fıncans” -- the tiny traditional cups -- are hand-painted in Turkey. He buys coffee from Bosnia, Croatia, Greece and Turkey.

In other brewing methods, water or steam is forced through the coffee. The Turkish method mixes the grounds into the brew. Arat says this makes Turkish coffee the most natural, flavorful and, he contends, the healthiest.

“Recent studies done on cafestol [a molecule with anti-carcinogenic properties] showed that it is present in the highest quantity in unfiltered coffee drinks, such as French press coffee or Turkish coffee,” he said.

Turkish coffee also carries another bounty: it’s social.

“You have to sit down first before you even take a sip,” Arat said. “Otherwise, due to the small cups it’s served in, it will spill on you. This is probably another reason why it is traditionally shared with others.”

He recited a Turkish proverb on the role of drinking with another: “The memory of sharing even a single cup of coffee will last for 40 years.”

Growing enthusiasm is generating more business for Arat from wholesalers, such as Sweet Maria’s -- based in Oakland, CA, -- one of the largest green coffee bean distributors and a major player in the home roasting industry. Coffee shops, too, are becoming his regular customers. Some shops buy from him and serve Turkish coffee at customers’ tables using a small burner.

“People are tired of the espresso and the milkshake-like coffee drinks. They are not unique anymore,” he said. “Even the gas stations sell those.”

As for Turkish coffee, “I think that once people taste it,” he said, “they will come back for more.”