MERUS NEEDS PEOPLE

Merus Refreshment Services is currently looking to fill a few vacant positions.  We have a position available in our Columbia, SC office for Office Coffee Service Sales.  And the same position for Office Coffee Service Sales in our Charlotte, NC office.  This position is considered outside sales, business to business.

We are seeking a sales professional that has sales experience and coffee knowledge or interest. This position involves prospecting and presenting office break room coffee service solutions to executive level personnel.



We are also trying to fill a new position for Admin Support.  This person will work in the coffee service side and also support the water filtration side in our Greenville, SC Headquarters.  We are seeking a full time administrative assistant to perform various duties in our Greenville office (in the Mauldin area).  We are looking for a motivated, responsible and reliable individual to assist in the day to day operations of running our business. 

A successful candidate:

·        Must have a positive attitude

·        Ability to multi-task and prioritize workload

·        Customer service oriented

·        Must be a team player

·        Support management and sales team

·        Requires good communication skills, both verbal and written

·        Excellent organizational skills, accuracy, and attention to detail

·        Professional appearance

·        Front Office experience

·        QuickBooks experience (a plus)

·        Microsoft Office Skills

A brief overview of the position:

·        Accounts Receivable

·        Accounts Payable

·        Inventory Control

·        Customer data base management

·        Support of sales team

·        General office duties 

·        We will train the right person!

• NO Night or Weekend Work
• Competitive Compensation
• Local Management/Owner Support
• Rapid Payment by Direct Deposit 

If you see anything you are interested in, please fax your resume to 864-289-0609.  You can look for more specifics about our company on our website:

www.merusrefreshment.com

 

What is Fairtrade?

Fairtrade is an international certification system for agricultural products, which aims to protect the environment and the rights of small farmers and farmworkers.

The Fairtrade label on a product gives you good assurance that it was produced in a sustainable way, and helped alleviate poverty.

Fairtrade products available in South Africa include:

• Wine (South Africa is the largest producer of Fairtrade wine in the world): De Bos, Deetlefs, Fairhills, Five’s Reserve, House of Mandela, Palesa, Place in the Sun, Rhythms of Nature, Thandi Wines, Tukulu.
• Tea: Topqualitea, Clipper Teas, QI Teas.
• Coffee: Bean There, Ciro, Espresseco Biodegradable Capsules, Fabino, Puro, Woolworths Espresso and Instant coffee ranges, coffee sold at Woolworths W Cafés.
• Chocolate: Cadbury Dairy Milk, Green & Black’s.
• Food: EGA Juice, Redwood Fairtrade Flapjacks (a vegan snack), Fairtrade Original Spice Grinders, Zaytoun Green Olives
• Cotton: Puma Wilderness Collection.

Buying these products is a way to make your consumer buck work for sustainability directly through Fairtrade projects.

It also demonstrates to producers and manufacturers in general that fair, environmentally sound practices make good business sense because they keep us, the customers, happy.

2.2 Cups a Day is Perfectly Normal
Everyone Skips the Decaf

The great majority of coffee drinks admit to enjoying it daily - 83% say that a cup is a mainstay in their everyday routine.  But it turns out that a daily cup of coffee is more 2.2 cups, the average amount consumed among participants.  A smaller group - 12% - says that they're able to restrict their intake to a few times a week.  And caffeine is a must.  Most drinkers prefer their coffee drinks to be fully caffeinated, with only 5% reaching for the decaf and another 5% opting for half-caffeine.

Coffee gets upgrade at fast-food places

By Justin Bachman

San Francisco Chronicle

Guess what? Americans really like coffee. In a show of how true this is, Burger King has upgraded its standard, rather uninspired brew with a new line from Seattle's Best Coffee, part of the Starbucks empire.  This follows a similar effort by McDonald's in 2007 to serve a better cup of coffee. Two years later, the company went all-in with its McCafe line of premium coffee drinks, for which the company credited a 25 percent jump in its 2009 coffee sales. In 2011, Wendy's followed the coffee-upgrade trend with its Redhead Roasters brand.

Burger King is clearly playing catch-up in the espresso battles, but recent history shows there are plenty of coffee guzzlers to go around.

All of this new, purportedly improved coffee at the fast-food chains was spurred, in part, by Americans' highly public love affair with Starbucks, Peet's, Caribou, Tim Hortons, Tully's, Coffee Beanery, Stumptown and thousands of other shops big and small across the land. (Blue Bottle, anyone?)

If every corner once had a mailbox or pay phone, it now has a coffee retailer peddling caffeine.

Home brewers

And we love it. Each day, 65 percent of Americans drink at least one cup of coffee, a figure well ahead of soft drinks, the National Coffee Association reported last year. Consumption of gourmet coffee grew from 37 percent of all cups in 2011 to nearly half (46 percent) in 2012.

Much of this coffee is being drunk at home: 293.7 million cups per day, up from 280.5 million in 2009, according to Experian Marketing Service, a global marketing firm. (We're also more revved up - the amount of decaf has dropped in the past four years, Experian says.)

More to the point for Burger King: Eighteen percent of the chain's customers drink espresso or cappuccino, compared with 16 percent of all U.S. adults, Experian researchers have found.

Thus, Burger King has introduced 10 coffee drinks, including lattes, iced brew and a regular that starts at $1. The new blend is lighter than the old, designed to pair equally well with sweet and salty menu items, said Eric Hirschhorn, Burger King's vice president of global innovation.

"Over the past several years the American coffee drinker has become more and more sophisticated, and the demand for delicious coffee is growing," he said.

All of which raises the question: As we evolve into drinking better coffee that's sold everywhere, is there any limit on coffee demand?

Coffee habit

Peruse the voluminous risk factors in Starbucks' 2012 annual report and nowhere will one find anything along the lines of, "Americans could decide one morning to just kick the coffee habit or to drink a whole lot less." Nope. Instead the Seattle behemoth warns investors about the price of arabica beans, the vagaries of consumer discretionary spending, and how the Affordable Care Act could boost its labor costs.

Those of us who jones for java? We aren't going anywhere - unless it's trading one primo brand for another, such as Caribou for the new Burger King.

Starbucks does flag that possibility: "In the U.S., the ongoing focus by large competitors in the quick-service restaurant sector on selling high-quality specialty coffee beverages could adversely affect our sales and results of operations."

For all our coffee service friends that may not know what a real coffee tree/bush looks like, we have one growing in the lobby of our Greenville, SC office.  We hope to soon have one in our Columbia, SC and our Charlotte, NC office too.  They are very slow growing plants.  This one is about 7 years old and started from a seedling brought from South Africa by a friend with a coffee plantation there.  We don't get enough yield off of it to get a complete cup off coffee, but it is amazing to think that all coffee comes from this red fruit (picture included).

Here is something interesting I found in our archive of material.

Beginning of Coffee Service Journey

Welcome to our new Merus Coffee Service Chronicles Blog.   This is the beginning of our blog where we will provide information, tidbits, ideas, innovations in the coffee industry, and a place for you to ask questions.  This is how it all began.

The coffee service business is a unique way to make a living!  When I started Merus Coffee Express in Greenville, SC 15 years ago, I thought our success would be based on providing our customers with great products and top flight service.  But I was only partly right; great products and service are a vital part of what we do here at Merus.  This focus allowed us to grow rapidly and to expand to the Columbia, SC and the Charlotte, NC markets with great success.  

At this point in our companies evolution, I can say with confidence I truly understand what the real key to success has been for our company and that is “we care about our customers”.  When I say we “care” about our customers, I don’t just mean we like their money; I mean we deeply appreciate the opportunity to serve them. I have come to realize that our customers don’t care about how much we know, until they know how much we care.

My advice to anyone starting a business today would be to realize the fact that your customers need to be understood and truly appreciated.  In today’s market good service companies are a “dime a dozen” I don’t want to run a good company; I want to run a GREAT company! How do you build a GREAT company? By showing your customer every day that you care about their needs and you truly appreciate the business they give you.

Yes the Coffee Service business is a unique way to make a living! A caring cup of great coffee is the key to our success.

Steve Bailey