Café

Café Noir is coffee for everyday life

Café Noir is a small counter on Pohjoisesplanadi, built for people on their way to work. Coffee is ready in under a minute, the counter is cashless and runs on Fiest, and the team plans around Helsinki's weather.

Location

Pohjoisesplanadi 35, 00100 Helsinki

Website

cafenoir.io

Known for

Coffee in under a minute, and a running club that ends with coffee

Good coffee at a good price

It started with a joke and a bag of coffee a friend sent over from France. One of the founders tried it and knew right away that this was how coffee was supposed to taste. That led to a first coffee shop, and to the discovery that running one properly is expensive in ways that end up in the price of the cup.

Café Noir was built to fix that. The goal, as Camille puts it, was to be "the Robin Hood of the coffee industry: good coffee, at a good price," without the things that make a normal coffee shop slow or expensive to run.

The beans come from a family in El Salvador that has grown coffee for five generations. One of the family now roasts them in France, with no middleman in between. Only about a fifth of the harvest makes the cut, hand-picked and graded almost like wine.

Blue Café Noir coffee tins on a shelf — The beans come from one family in El Salvador, and one of them roasts them in France.

Coffee in under a minute, then time to talk

Most mornings look the same, and that's the point. Someone comes in on the way to work, orders what they always order, and has a coffee in hand before their card is back in their wallet. The counter is small on purpose, built for people who need their coffee to go.

The team doesn't call themselves baristas. They're operators, because making the coffee was never the main job. Talking to whoever is at the counter is, and it's a big part of why regulars feel like regulars. The colors are chosen too. The blue on the walls and cups is the blue banks and insurers use, because it reads as trustworthy, and the orange and pink keep the room warm instead of clinical.

Past the counter, Café Noir runs a running club. Three pace groups loop through the city and finish together for coffee, sometimes with a DJ after. The group has grown to about 500 people on Strava, and every so often a brand, like a running shoe company, joins a run to show something new to people who already trust the café.

Coffee in hand in under a minute.
Operators whose real job is talking to regulars.
A running club of about 500 people on Strava.

Customers ordering at the Café Noir counter under walls of blue and orange posters — The morning rush at the counter. Most regulars order what they always order.

A cashless counter on Fiest

Every sale at the counter goes through Fiest, and the counter takes no cash. Nobody counts change, so the operator's hands and attention stay with the person in front of them. The numbers from the counter are in the dashboard, where the CFO can check them from anywhere.

Every counter sale runs through the Fiest point of sale.
No cash, so nobody counts change at the counter.
The day's numbers, readable from anywhere.

The Fiest point of sale on the Café Noir counter next to a case of croissants — The Fiest till sits beside the pastry case. Every sale goes through it, and none of them are cash.

They just want good coffee, and they want to feel like they got value for what they pay.

Camille, co-founder of Café Noir

Café Noir paper cup being served from the coffee machine — A Café Noir cup, ready in under a minute.

Weather data, built on request

A couple of months ago the team asked whether weather data could show up in their dashboard. Helsinki's weather changes how much coffee goes out the door on any given morning, and they wanted to plan around that instead of guessing. Fiest built it: the dashboard now shows the weather for the coming days next to the sales and orders expected for each one.

Their CFO now reads the numbers against the weather directly, instead of asking what the morning was like on Esplanadi. That is how the two companies work together. Café Noir asks for something specific to a small, busy counter, and it gets built rather than filed away.