On Tartine's fast food coffee and bad values
One of San Francisco's favorite bakery's companion coffee could be so, so much better. Instead it's a greedy afterthought run roughshod over longtime fans.
Pressing another grapefruit into a juicer in the dark, I watched as sun crept across the sleepy kitchen. The big windows to my right ambered into dawn. A line had already formed in the Mission District dark. It was a Saturday morning at Tartine.
I worked at the Guerrero Street bakery on and off for some two years between 2018 and 2021. I was what my former managers at McDonald’s would’ve called crew; I worked the register, stuck croque monssieurs in toaster ovens, cleaned the pastry case, made grapefruit juice. The commitment to craft, on the baking and service side, was impressive to me. Still, as a weekend warrior with another job, I was the lowest of the low.
That’s why my hope to work the coffee bar wasn’t prioritized. I had coffee experience. For a bakery hoping to have the “Tartine of coffee programs,” though, I was a bad investment. I saw the shift leads who worked the coffee bar were the coolest. Somehow, a number of them were musicians working in San Francisco’s local scene.
Moreover, they were organizing our workplace. It wasn’t long until the Tartine Union formally launched with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 6 in fall 2019. That my bosses Chad Robertson and Elizabeth Pruett emerged against the union was a huge bummer to me; I figured these progressive Californians must be so much more agreeable than the Driscoll’s berry owners I worked against with Familias Unidas por la Justicia back in Washington. I was super wrong: Robertson even made an anti-labor merch drop to commemorate his shitty behavior.
I went on to write about Tartine a ton. I covered the workers (when I wasn’t also working the line) for Eater, a University of San Francisco magazine called Globus, and even a neighborhood paper called the Sunset Beacon when the business expanded to a new neighborhood. The bakery’s cast of characters and going-ons joined the long list of highly specific information in my brain filed under “mostly useless.”
Sometimes it is not useless. A flood of core memories leapt from that dusty cranial filing cabinet when Sprudge wrote up the business’s companion coffee roastery the Coffee Manufactory’s 2024 redesign. My little hamster wheel noggin turned, thought:
Are people really buying this coffee at this point? It’s not good. More importantly, it’s just a fast food-ish cash grab.
I was working at the business when it started selling its Coffee Manufactory branded beans. I remember being instructed to tell customers the bags were intentionally blank and devoid of information — instead relying on a simple one to four numbering system — to make buying coffee easier than ever. The idea was that, since Tartine co-signed the coffee, people could believe in the quality without knowing anything about it. Around the same time, our bosses brought rolls of bright yellow Tartine stickers to the bakery. They were for plastering on the to-go cups. I was once again reminded of my formative McDonald’s days.
The reason the coffee was being pushed so aggressively came to me in walk-in snippets of gossip. The bakery, I was told, had flirted with lots of coffee roasters since its seismic boom in popularity. (Noah Sanders for Sprudge captured the 2010s history run-up to the Coffee Manufactory’s launch in 2016.) The most recent partnership led to one of the business’s first public embarassments. Third wave cafe wunderkind Blue Bottle and Tartine announced in spring 2015 they would merge, bringing banger coffee alongside those banner morning buns.
For the uninitiated, Tartine was — and for many still is — the country’s most popular place to get a loaf of bread. Music legend Tracy Chapman was one of our neighborhood regulars. So when the companies called off the merger that December, eyebrows were raised. Blue Bottle was taking off internationally and Tartine still just had the original location. “Our individual plans would be better served pursuing them independently,” Robertson told SFGATE at the time.
My co-workers told me the lines that formed outside both brands, each infamously long, were oppressive in combination. Plus, egos are egos. “Blue Bottle thought it would be Blue Bottle with Tartine,” one of my managers told me in 2018, “and Tartine thought it would be Tartine with Blue Bottle.” No matter, as Robertson told Sprudge’s Sanders he had plans “long before Blue Bottle” for his own coffee project. Enter the Manufactory.
This isn’t a comprehensive piece on Tartine. This is also not a reported piece; This is more an impassioned riff with lots of first-person account and secondary evidence. (I also wish I had better photos from my time there. I basically didn’t know anyone in San Francisco yet. These are from a visit I paid in early summer, wherein I guzzled a cold brew, as part of my farewell food tour.)
Those secondary pieces, not including my own, are bountiful. Tartine went on its own Chicago Bulls-esque run, without Blue Bottle thank you very much, and expanded tremendously. The Manufactory opened in fall 2016, to rave acclaim across the nation from outlets including Bon Appetit, and with it came the business’s own coffee roasting. Chris Jordan, a former Starbucks and Verve Coffee Roasters top dog, joined to roast for the company in Berkeley.
There were parts of that growth that felt exciting for workers. There were parts of that growth that felt like outright betrayals of the values that vaulted Tartine to huge heights of popularity, gracing the “Obsession” issue of Lucky Peach in 2013. Across the board, though, there was concern: What happens when the value of growth starts to enter a conversation that began squarely on craft?
Like with so many beloved parts of American life — from suburbia to surfing — private equity gets involved. The New Yorker wrote an enormous report on Tartine’s transformation from neighborhood bakery to “supergentrifier.” The magazine called attention to real-estate private equity firm CIM Group. Tartine, and the nascent Coffee Manufactory brand, was meant to be an “anchor tenant” in developments the business would go on to build across the nation.
With this particular venture owning an undisclosed amount of Tartine, it shouldn’t be surprising the coffee’s bad. I haven’t done a tasting of their offerings in a while, to be fair. But I do remember the coffee hitting the basic notes of a coffee meant for wide distribution: fudgy, even, dark. The idea that the level of intentionality brought to those original sourdough loaves is being applied to the coffee is almost laughable, though.
It’s almost laughable to think the company even cares about the intentionality behind those sourdough loaves, too; Tartine brought on Quest Consulting to fight their bakers, after all. The Press Democrat found that to be the same legal team used by Amy’s Kitchen in its war against workers.
While working at the bakery we used the Coffee Manufactory’s “Espresso” and “Filter” blends on, you guessed it, espresso and for batch brewing. I can’t speak to the coffee buying, the roasters, or the team in charge. In the recent Sprudge piece, it was Director of Brand Partnerships Robert Metzger who spoke about how “collaboration is an integral part” of the coffees’ new look.
From my time there, and from all my reporting on the business, I would put money down that collaboration is not much a part of the business’s values.
Instead, I think about Alice Waters’s 2021 We Are What We Eat. She writes the book in two sweeping halves: fast food and slow food. She says one of the major values of fast food culture is the more the better. “The bigger the organization,” Waters writes, “the less personal and real it is for me.” (Ironic given her early fandom of Robertson’s bread.) This echoes researcher Anna Tsing and her thoughts on scalability as one of the major sins of modern American capitalism: It’s the need to let profit run rampant, to only consider markets in the context of their unfettered growth. That’s why the Coffee Manufactory’s major offerings are, basically, unremarkable.
Why the company takes this approach is in that same spirit. Selling out, still a Thing that’s worth calling out, is in vogue in the United States. When pitching a story about coffee, an editor in San Francisco gave me an unsolicited (read: super out of the blue) speech on how stupid consumers are for decrying their favorite coffee businesses going gangbusters with big money. See: Sightglass taking Starbucks execs, Blue Bottle making a Faustian deal with Nestlé, and even Philz playing a real estate shell game in the Mission.
It’s about money, and it’s better to have flat, uninspired coffee to see that scalable money. It’s the airport-ification of coffee: If you squint, it’s all the same, and the one percenters upstairs get bailouts whenever need be. Regarding the coffee industry’s absent voice on Gaza, writer Fionn Pooler said “it has become abundantly clear that many in the industry would prefer an empty, corporatised version of community.” I feel that applies to the larger brand and approach Tartine devotees happily swallow.
According to this write-up, those information-less bags I once sold now have information written on those recyclable sides. Coffee Manufactory’s logo, upon release and still now after this redesign, is an homage to Ethiopia. “The CM Lion is inspired by the 1954 modernist Lion of Judah statue by Maurice Calka located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia,” Metzger told the outlet. “We further emphasize this by prominently placing the Lion on each panel of this design.”
It’s low-hanging fruit, but let me pick it: I think Metzger must mean the CIM Lion.