SPOTLIGHT
MADE IN ST PETE
Cold-brewed coffee in a can enjoys widespread buzz across Florida
131 22nd Street South • St Pete 727.203.4855 • MadeCannery.com BY ALEXANDRIA JONES St. Petersburg is known for its beaches, eccentricity, and sunshine … and now coffee. Made Coffee is the brainchild of founders Michael Rideout and Taylor Prater. They met back in 2014 while working together at St. Petersburg bar Mandarin Hide. In fact, it’s the same bar where they came up with the idea for Made Coffee, a cold-brewed ready-todrink craft coffee in a can. “We were trying to find a concentrated coffee that we could use in cocktails at Mandarin,” explains Rideout. “We just started tinkering around at the house and came up with a couple ways to make the product, which is basically cold-brewing it. We started off utilizing these ingredients at the bar and it took off fast from there.” Instead of looking at the coffee brewing process to perfect the recipe, Rideout looked at the beer brewing process to get a better idea on how to do things. The avid coffee drinkers went through a year of research before they came up with Made Coffee in 2015. With a business, it goes from making a gallon at a time to making 5 gallons, explains Rideout. “The next struggle is making 1,000 gallons at a time. Now it’s
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making many thousands of gallons at a time, so there’s always that time where you learn about the equipment and tweak the process. The production side is always evolving.” All that tinkering helped them out in the long-run when Publix approached them a couple months ago about carrying Made Coffee in the supermarket officially. Before they got the final offer from Publix, there was a brief test-run where they were the ones delivering and stocking the shelves. During this time, Rideout and Prater were delivering and stocking up to 10 Publix grocery stores. “We’d be up at 5 in the morning and hitting every single store twice a week,” explains Rideout. They stocked their own shelves for 6 months when an email from the Publix corporate office appeared in their inbox saying they wanted Made Coffee to go on their shelves permanently. Once the excitement from the email went away, it was time for the small business to really go to work in order to maintain and compete against the larger companies. “We still are your local cold brew company, but now we’re competing against huge corporate businesses with
huge budgets and it is ruthless,” says Rideout. “We’re growing and we’re growing fast.” (Made Coffee is available at over 250 Publix stores across Florida, as well as markets, package stores and fitness shops.) The Made Coffee brewery is located in the heart of downtown, across from 3 Daughters Brewing. “St. Pete is life! It’s where we’re comfortable. Mike grew up here so we didn’t think about anywhere else,” says Prater. When they began Made Coffee just three short years ago, their accomplishments so far were not even a dream. “When we first started Made, I don’t think this would’ve been in our realm of possibility,” says Prater. “There’s so much more to do.”