Welcome to the Jazz Shapers Podcast from Mishcon de Reya. What you are about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM however the music has been cut due to rights issues.
Elliot Moss
Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musicians shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Max Dubiel – I hope I said it properly – co-founder of coffee business, Black Sheep Coffee and co-founder of Redemption Roasters, the coffee brand and prison roastery aiming to reduce reoffending through coffee. While working in strategy consulting and having dreamed, with university friends of starting their own company, Max and his peers took the leap, quitting their jobs and launching coffee franchise, Black Sheep Coffee in 2013. Their mission to challenge the establishment and rid the world of boring, average tasting coffee. Good, I say. Two years later Max spun off the wholesale business of Black Sheep into a new company with co-founder Ted Rosner. And when the Ministry of Justice approached them about setting up a roastery in a prison to train residents and reduce reoffending rates, Redemption Roasters was born. Installing a roaster at HM YOI Aylesbury they relocated to a larger production space at HMP The Mount in 2020, turning out several tonnes of expertly roasted coffee each month. They run four in custody barrister and technician academies and have 200 wholesale clients and 11 coffee shops in central London where their programme participants make up around 20% of their café’s workforce. Welcome, sir. It’s a coffee topic so we need to start with your first coffee of the morning, is what?
Max Dubiel
My first coffee of the morning, certainly in the summer is a cold brew and cold brew is essentially just cold steeped coffee, it’s the most simple form of preparation, you just need to make it like 12 hours before you want to consume it, you just grind coffee, put it into cold water and let it steep for 12 hours, filter out the grounds and then you’ve got some lovely cold brew where you can add some milk, ice cubes, little bit of maple syrup if you want to sweeten it up a bit and it’s a lot less harsh, I’m not going to bore you with the chemistry but it’s…
Elliot Moss
No, no, bore me with the chemistry, I want to know. What, what gets taken out?
Max Dubiel
Nothing gets taken out but I think boiling water, the lipids get changed and that process is essentially cut short and if you steep grounds in cold water, it’s just a lot smoother in terms of the extraction.
Elliot Moss
Smoother, yeah.
Max Dubiel
And it’s also quite punchy in terms of caffeine extraction, so you’ll be drinking a smoother yet more caffeinated drink.
Elliot Moss
Wow. I mean I love coffee, I’m a, I have to have a coffee in the morning, I’m a kind of a double espresso hot milk person but I didn’t know in my ignorance, it’s amazing isn’t it all these, these wonderful worlds that we get to dip into here on Jazz Shapers, it’s yet another level of knowledge that I now take away and you listening are also going to take that away. Have you had a love affair with coffee or was this a “I’m a strategy consultant, I can see an opportunity, let’s go do it”?
Max Dubiel
I think it was more the latter. I’ve always liked coffee and thought it was a really interesting product through its heritage, the fact that there’s a million different forms of preparing it across the world, it’s got a very rich history going back hundreds of years and I also have some family connection in coffee, my great grandfather in Germany, was actually a coffee roaster and importer and that all went down with the Second World War, I think he had to sell the business for a pound and but the tins are still somewhere in the attic at home of the old brand that he had created and my mum used to tell me stories of how the house would smell like freshly ground coffee and so I think it stuck with me, not that I had any contacts or knowledge about the coffee industry.
Elliot Moss
But that was in there, you knew those stories before you alighted on the fact you wanted to set up a coffee business.
Max Dubiel
Yes.
Elliot Moss
Okay. And, and I read a bit about you as a young kid and you were always kind of selling stuff and things like that. Where did that come from? Is there an entrepreneurial history in the family as well?
Max Dubiel
It’s a good question actually. Both my parents were academics so as far away from, from entrepreneurs as you can get. Maybe my grandparents, they were, on both sides, were entrepreneurs so maybe that was something which shaped it.
Elliot Moss
But it was just who you were?
Max Dubiel
I guess so.
Elliot Moss
And when you were in the strategy world, because I meet a lot of people and I, I often say they, they kind of do the, they didn’t go to school or they were rubbish at school, they went and set their business up or like you, you do your first degree, you do a second degree, you then go into a strategy business and lots of people come out of the consultancy world and say I’ve seen a 15, 20 other businesses, I know what I’m, I can do this. Was it always a “I’m going to set my own thing up” when you went into the strategy consultancy world or did it genuinely become clear that you were compelled a few years into that journey?
Max Dubiel
So, the businesses we would work with in consulting were much, much larger so there wasn’t anything entrepreneurial about them, you’re talking listed companies. So, I think sort of saying “I can do this” would have been, would have been a little ostentatious but what I did strive for was working with some good mates around a product that we can identify with that we love and that we can touch and feel and, and smell and taste and I think that was what drove us to coffee more than “I can start a coffee emporium and list it on the stock exchange.”
Elliot Moss
Yeah, understood. I’ve got to jump back actually, I read something and I just want to mention it. It says in my research that you wanted to be Batman when you grew up. I ask this because one of my sons thought he was Batman for two years between the ages of 7 and 9, I think it was my number two who’s about to go to university, just started university. Do you feel, I mean, I know, it’s sort of a crazy question but that superhero-ness, was it just a bit of fun when you were younger or is there, is there something about you that said, “I’m going to do big things when I’m older”?
Max Dubiel
I wish. No, I’d, I think I just had a fascination with the comic character, I didn’t really believe in my own super strength or the ability to change the world through pure muscle and a super car.
Elliot Moss
But I mean joking aside on that, there is something of the revolutionary in you in the mission of both I suppose Black Sheep but really Redemption Roasters. When you set them up, how important was the social change piece and why was it important, if it was?
Max Dubiel
I think with Black Sheep, the idea was to change perceptions around taste of coffee and quality of coffee and with Redemption, there was a deeper purpose of changing lives and the idea that even if, if there’s a whole team of people running around like crazy for weeks and weeks but you’ve changed one person’s life for the better, that is all worth it and just doing it in incremental steps, I always say what we’re doing is getting into sort of the profit versus purpose idea and there’s always a, a depth of purpose and the breadth of purpose and in criminal justice reform, if you’re dealing with people who’ve left prison, that’s very, very difficult. We can all do something small, good, every day, we can recycle a coffee cup and things like that, changing someone’s life when they have left prison is not easy, it needs a lot of intervention, it needs a wraparound support, it needs a job, it needs mental health support and that is definitely something which is a big challenge.
Elliot Moss
And when you entered into the Redemption Roasters business were you thinking about that multiplicity of wrap around as you call it because we talk about the NHS and social care, it’s exactly the same in the criminal justice system which is you put someone in prison, the chances of them reoffending without a skill and without a job are significant, they reduce by something like 50% if you actually give them a skill and a job and that’s what you’re doing. Did you learn on the job, Max or did you know going into this that this was complicated?
Max Dubiel
So like most entrepreneurs, we were really naïve to start with. I think when we were first approached by the Ministry of Justice, neither my business partner nor I had any, any contact with prisons before, we’d never been to a prison before.
Elliot Moss
I’ve never been to one and a part of me when I was a kid always had a nightmare that I’d end up in one but the other part of me as an adult really wants to go. Just, just going through that, what was your first experience like? What was that first visit like to a prison and which one was it?
Max Dubiel
It was HM YOI Aylesbury, a Young Offenders Institute.
Elliot Moss
Okay.
Max Dubiel
And it was, it’s, it’s a fascinating experience because the moment those doors close behind you, you feel you are in this contained space where your liberty has been taken away from you and of course as justices will tell you, you’ve got the privilege, you can go out again but you understand that 90% of the people around you don’t have that privilege and it’s something quite sort of basic in terms of day-to-day rights of what we’re allowed to do and what we’re not allowed to do that you are in an institution that prescribes what you are allowed to do and what you’re not allowed to do.
Elliot Moss
Do you see it in people’s eyes? I mean again, in the young offenders and that first time do you recall kind of looking and thinking what would it be like if I’m there not here?
Max Dubiel
I think…
Elliot Moss
Or was there just too much to take in?
Max Dubiel
So, people in prison are all very different and, and the only thing they all have in common is that they were convicted on a, on a criminal offence and so I think sort of saying you can see something in all of their eyes is probably generalising it a bit but what definitely happens once you’ve been in prison for a couple of years, you are traumatised because the things that you experience when you’re there are, are traumatising and, and therefore it’s going to make life much more difficult on the outside when you are released.
Elliot Moss
And in terms of those people though and now moving from the tension between incarceration, criminal justice and then a business, you’re now inside a prison, you’re setting up the roasters, you’ve got people working and learning, how have you navigated that over these last few years?
Max Dubiel
So, when we first started it was all a bit haphazardly. We were just a small group of people, we opened our first coffee shop round about the same time in Bloomsbury, Lamb’s Conduit Street and we didn’t have any qualifications when we opened, we had no social workers on the team, no background in mental health support and so when our very first programme participant was released from prison, we were all quite nervous and someone on the team said “oh can we maybe push it back by a week and” but of course that’s not possible, right, somebody’s coming out and it’s also very important, we’d learned that from smart people like James Timpson who was a mentor to us very early.
Elliot Moss
Yeah, I’ve heard great things about him and his dad was on the programme a few years ago here so, yeah, that’s, they’re an extraordinary family. He’s a, a really special person I think.
Max Dubiel
Yes he is and he was very generous with his time and back then we were just a couple of idiots with an idea and some coffee and…
Elliot Moss
The coffee, the coffee closed the deal, Max, that’s what…
Max Dubiel
I’m sure it did. And he said that you need to be very clear on the mission and you need to be very clear on where you draw the line between business and purpose and that made a lot of sense because it’s quite easy with a social enterprise to mix the two early and so we had, yeah, our very first participant was a success story but at some point he was recalled and we thought god, what have we done wrong but actually we hadn’t done anything wrong, this was, this is part of the process and he was released again a couple of weeks or months later and the first thing we did was re-employ him of course, that’s our purpose and our job and he hasn’t, he hasn’t been back to prison since and so, success stories are essential and at the heart of what we do but sometimes they take shapes and forms that you wouldn’t expect. I’ve had other stories where people left us after a few months for another job and we thought god, what’s wrong with our, with our system, why are they not staying forever and we thought actually, we’ve helped them through the most difficult part probably in their lives and we are just a stepping stone and we’ve done our job, if they don’t reoffend, that’s good and we can, this opens it up to new people and that’s one thing James Timpson said as well, if they are people who don’t want to work with you, be harsh, you’ve got no time to waste, you’ve got a few spaces that you can open up to vulnerable individuals and if they don’t grab this opportunity with both hands, move on, there will be someone else.
Elliot Moss
This complexity is real and you’ve been navigating it and importantly to me there’s real substance in the purpose, it’s easy to talk about a purposeful business, it’s much more difficult to actually deliver it, especially the way that you are at Redemption Roasters. Stay with me for much more from my guest today, it’s Max Dubiel, he’ll be back in a couple of minutes.
You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very programme again if you pop ‘Jazz Shapers’ into your podcast platform of choice. My guest is Max Dubiel and I’m sure you know that because you’ve been listening, co-founder of coffee business Black Sheep Coffee and co-founder of Redemption Roasters, the coffee brand and prison roastery aiming to reduce reoffending through coffee. And Max, you were just saying very eloquently, talking about some of the experiences, how have these experiences and watching these humans you know basically change their lives, how has that made you feel? Because business, in business we usually feel elated when the numbers are up or when other metrics are looking good, you know profit’s up, revenue’s up, the bar graph’s going from bottom left to top right and all those other things that people talk about, your metrics are slightly different and I’m interested in the how it makes Max feel metric.
Max Dubiel
So, when we started Redemption we were really naïve about it, we as I said had never been to prison and so we just thought this could be kind of cool and quite different as a brand and we weren’t your social entrepreneurs who wake up one day and just want to make the world a better place, I think we were just out for an interesting brand identity and only visiting Aylesbury Young Offenders Institute and reading up about the terrible stats in this country of how bad the criminal justice system is, I mean we see it in the news every day, back then you didn’t see that much in the news, the numbers in terms of overpopulation weren’t quite as bad.
Elliot Moss
I mean now we know literally people are being let out and there’s 10 people here and there’s 1500 places, I mean it’s, it’s really, really creaking, it’s beyond isn’t it.
Max Dubiel
Absolutely. And but even then I mean the cost of reoffending alone was £18.5 billion a year and it’s, it is roughly the same and that’s just the cost of reoffending, that’s not the whole prison system as a whole and depending on the stat that you’re looking at, 45% is the rate of reoffending so, if you get released there’s a 50% coin toss of whether you’ll find your way back into prison within two years.
Elliot Moss
And your, your reoffending rates are sort of down at the 4% rate, is that right?
Max Dubiel
Correct, that’s our, our non-reoffending rate for the last year and it just shows if you give people a chance, if you give them meaningful activity, you give them skills and you help them into a job, that will drastically reduce the likelihood of them reoffending and going back in and I think the one thing that in all of this political debate about prisons and the prison estate, people don’t realise is that I think it’s 98% of offenders are going to get released at some point or another and so therefore it’s not about locking them up and throwing the key away, it’s about making sure that once they are released, they don’t find their way back into the system, for everyone’s sake, not just for their own sake, we’re talking about communities that are going to be safer, we’re talking about less victims of crime and we’re talking about people who are just in this vicious cycle of going in and out again, in and out again, and creating havoc and also a huge amount of cost for the tax payer in the process. So, going back…
Elliot Moss
Yeah, so the impact on you emotionally of all of that and knowing that you’re addressing some of that in your own corner of the world, what does that make you feel like?
Max Dubiel
So I think it’s definitely had an impact on us but only a little later, from sort of wow this is kind of cool to oh okay, there’s a real problem here and there’s a need and we can address it because we have access to the set of skills that can keep someone from reoffending, to seeing it in action and seeing it work on an individual anecdotal basis is an incredible feeling, I mean somebody looking into your eyes and saying “You have changed my life and this has allowed me the freedom” is really moving and it’s, and it’s not something that we expected to be honest, it’s not something that we thought we would end up doing.
Elliot Moss
I want to talk about the partnerships with other likeminded businesses for a moment and we had Amy Taylor on the programme a while ago from Tap Social and I know you worked there, what’s the nature of the partnerships that works best for you? How would you sort of say, what’s the, what’s the two or three characteristics of a partnership that’s actually delivering?
Max Dubiel
So I’d like to go a step back and say that when you do a social enterprise business, it’s a lot more effort, we’re paying for a team of social workers that go in and out of prison and provide the wrap around support for our participants but it also works for you, it works for your brand and it works in convincing all the stakeholders, including the business partners that it’s a worthwhile cause and so our purpose works for us with our investors who are, have bought into what we achieve in terms of purpose, our employees, they strongly believe in our purpose, our landlords, not saying London landlords will suddenly give you a killer deal but it maybe puts you at the top of the pile of people who’d like a unit in their estates and then equally with wholesale clients and partners in our value chain with the purpose and that understand what you’re doing so, we’ve got partnerships, wholesale partnerships with large listed companies that buy our coffee and that makes a difference because it’s a significant amount of coffee, talking Meta, KPMG, Legal & General, Earnst and Young, we’ve just signed up.
Elliot Moss
And a law firm called Mishcon de Reya also uses Redemption Roasters.
Max Dubiel
Mishcon, you’re right, you use our coffee as well.
Elliot Moss
Yes, yes, that’s right.
Max Dubiel
They were one of our early wholesale clients.
Elliot Moss
We’re, proudly, and indeed next to the London office is a café, a Redemption Roasters café, literally, I say next to, within 5 metres. So there you are, every day in my consciousness.
Max Dubiel
Great.
Elliot Moss
So, sorry I interrupted you.
Max Dubiel
But I think they believe in our purpose and sometimes they want to go further as well, they want to employ prison leavers in their, in their office canteen and that’s great and that’s where, where we love working on sort of both ends of our business versus purpose spectrum.
Elliot Moss
So there’s a properly virtuous system that you’ve created, a universe and within that the partnerships that work are probably, I imagine, and the answer to your question is around well people love all of those things and they’re going to be involved therefore but from a practical perspective you’ve still got to be tough with the business hat on, you’ve still got to say well what do I want from this partnership? Have you had some misfires on that?
Max Dubiel
When you are a profit for purpose business people sometimes mistake you for a charity and that could be people as close to the business as our own employees and people as far away as, as a distant supplier and we’re not a charity, we need to make money in order to survive and we need to make money to grow and therefore it’s about shaping the mindset that yes, we have a purpose but first and foremost we have a business and we’re never going to sacrifice one for the other but it’s a very difficult balance to tread. On a day-to-day basis we have discussions between different parts of the business, I mean say for example a shop manager or our head of operations who are very professional in watching the labour spend in their budgets and making sure that our cafes run like clockwork and on, and on the other hand we have our impact workers who may be working with one individual who has recently been released and is going through hardship and was late to work and has maybe made a colleague uncomfortable and they will be butting heads and, and just trying to decide where on the profit for purpose scale we are.
Elliot Moss
Active management from Max Dubiel. Not Batman but doing a pretty heroic job I should say. Final chat coming up with Max and we’ve got some Sons of Kemet as well, that’s all coming up in just a moment, don’t go anywhere.
Max Dubiel is my Business Shaper just for a few more minutes and we’ve been talking about a whole bunch of stuff around butting of the heads between the department for profit and the department for purpose but they’re existing in two, in all the humans that work in the business. Is this scalable, Max? Should the world be doing what you’re doing? Not just coffee but everywhere because it’s complicated and there’s this wrap around point and yet surely, this would be a fantastic antidote to you know justice and reoffending and everything else that goes with that but it is scalable?
Max Dubiel
I think you have to be a bit naïve to think you can scale this to the end of the world but it has worked for us so far. We would have never thought we’d have a, a business turning over in excess of £10 million with soon to be 14, 15 coffee shops with 150+ staff and, and the impact numbers that we’ve got, I mean 23% of our retail workforce are prison leavers at the moment and that’s, that’s a huge achievement, these are all lives changed and also communities and families very positively affected around these individuals. So for us it has been possible. Where is the limit of growth? I don’t know, we, we’re, I guess we’re testing the boundaries of where we can. So far it has worked but it’s always walking on a tightrope between profit and purpose and as you grow you need to work on the storytelling of your purpose because I think people become a bit more cynical, we’ve seen greenwashing and we’ve seen people have a purpose that’s just a marketing gimmick and I think you need to be even better at demonstrating what you do. We publish a social impact report on an annual basis, we regularly report numbers such as the, the split of our workforce coming from programme participants and you need to be even more in your face, even smarter in how you tell the story as you grow because people will question it more and they will question commercial success which I really think should not be at the mercy of purpose, sometimes we have this idea in our head that people who work in charities should all be on tiny salaries and walk around in sandals but actually, no, it’s important that the brightest minds in the country are attracted to positions in, in purposeful organisations and salary is a part of that and commercial success is a part of that. So, I think the old mindset of either you have a charity and it’s just there for doing good or you have an evil profit-making business, I think those boundaries are blurring and for the better, I think.
Elliot Moss
Well look, here’s the boundary blurers like you because without people like you, this stuff doesn’t happen and I know it’s a growing movement as it were but yeah, it’s brilliant that you’re, you’re putting those profit and purpose pieces right up in the air and saying come on, we can do this together. It’s been fabulous talking to you, Max, thank you for your time. Just before I let you disappear to go do more good things, what’s your song choice and why have you chosen it?
Max Dubiel
It’s Billie Holiday and Strange Fruit. On a recent trip, just had a baby my partner and I and we went for a road trip through the Deep South and we stopped in Birmingham Alabama and it was very impressive to see one of the heart cities of the civil rights struggle and we went to the Civil Rights Institute which had, absolutely brilliant if ever any of your listeners find themselves in that part of the world, I recommend it. It tells the story from the beginning to end of, or beginning to now and hasn’t ended the civil rights struggle and it was really, really moving and it was inspiring and it was humbling, the dignity of peaceful protest against the most ghastly repressions that we can imagine and the racism in its purest form and it’s come a long way and I think the dignity and perseverance of women, men and children back then has shaped how we see racial struggle today and it was very inspiring and moving and this song I think captures some part of that.
Elliot Moss
Billie Holiday there with Strange Fruit, the song choice of my Business Shaper today, Max Dubiel. He talked about the way that belief and purpose permeates and organisation and everybody involved in that organisation whether it’s shareholders or whether it’s investors or whether it’s indeed the employees themselves. He talked about success stories taking shapes and forms that you wouldn’t necessarily expect and that’s about people and the way it impacts their lives and how things unfold. He talked importantly about being clear where you draw the line between business and purpose, it can be both but they are distinct things. And finally and related to that, he say we need to make money in order to survive and to grow. Really important as part of this business. That’s it from me and Jazz Shapers, have a lovely weekend.
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