Holy Cow Coffee-To-Go Nears Fundraising Deadline

The former owner of a café in Albany has turned to an unconventional method to raise seed money for his new project, a food truck featuring gourmet coffee and food. It’s a race against the clock with less than two weeks to go.

Using the Kickstarter.com website, Paul Cruce – known at as “Louis La Vache” – hopes to attract $5,000 in pledges by Oct. 15 to pay for refurbishing an old van for food preparation. However, if the final tally falls short, he will lose all of the money pledged so far.

“Kickstarter’s an all-or-nothing program,” said Cruce. “If you don’t reach the fundraising goal by the deadline, then nobody pays. Of course, if you go over, then you enjoy that benefit.”

A video at the Kickstarter site lays out Cruce’s plan for converting the used postal van into “an on-the-go coffee shop.” According to the website, after the completed conversion, the truck will meet health department standards and contain National Sanitation Foundation equipment. The conversion will cost $15,000.

“I’m talking to a couple of different people about taking an equity position,” Cruce said about raising the other $10,000. He would like to have the total $15,000 amassed by the end of October, and the truck ready by the end of November.

Pledges toward the first $5,000 can be as small as $1, but to encourage larger amounts, Cruce has set up a tier of rewards, much like the incentives offered by public radio stations during fund drives. Cruce’s rewards include coffee mugs and coffee from his .

For example, pledging $20 will earn you a card for 10 espresso drinks, if you live in the Bay Area, or a 12-ounce package of coffee for backers who live farther afield. A pledge of $50 or more will win you two 8-ounce bags of coffee and a free mug, according to the Kickstarter site.

As of Oct. 3, the project had attracted $2,228 in pledges, two from as far away as Holland and Serbia. Other supporters closer to home hail from Minnesota, Michigan, New York and Oakland. (Disclaimer: Albany Patch editor Emilie Raguso has also pledged support.)

Word has spread through Facebook, Twitter and Cruce’s blog, “San Francisco Bay Daily Photo.”

“Many people don’t know that Fair Trade USA is headquartered in Oakland,” Cruce said. “One of our regular customers (from when we had the shop) works there. She put up something [about the Kickstart page] on their Facebook page. Then the New York City Fair Trade Coalition put it on theirs.”

Cruce has found Kickstarter “VERY easy to use. It is ‘non-techy’ friendly,” he wrote in an email to Albany Patch.

Cruce is a familiar face around Albany. In November 2008 he opened Café-Saint-Honoré, on the .

Besides serving coffee and espresso drinks, Cruce developed a line of beans and ground coffee with the “Café-Saint-Honoré” label, many of them Fair Trade-certified. Since the café closed in November 2009, Cruce changed the company label to “Louis La Vache’s Holy Cow Coffee Company” and began frequenting farmers markets around the Bay Area, where he mans his coffee stall four days a week. (Find him through October at the .)

Taking a food truck, which would contain an espresso machine and coffee-machines, to the farmers markets would have several advantages over a stall.

“These market days turn into 20-hour days, with the drive, the prep time, the market time, the clean-up time,” Cruce said. “That’s another motivation for getting the truck, because I can brew as needed, instead of getting up at 2 in the morning and speculating on how much to brew.”

It also means that Cruce will be able to offer espresso drinks as well as brewed coffee, and that he can follow demand.

“The beauty of it, as opposed to brick-and-mortar, is that if you’re not doing well in your location, you can turn the key and move,” Cruce said. “You develop a following; people look for you on Twitter and Facebook. You can tweet your location and give up-to-the-minute information.”

Cruce plans to experiment with his route.

“I’ll continue to use it at the farmers markets that I’m participating in, but I’ll also take it to casual commute spots, such as the one on Pierce Street across from Pacific East Mall,” Cruce said.

Cruce, a Francophile, explained how the name of his alter-ego and of his brand came about. Cruce’s mother’s family hails historically from Normandie.

“When I lived in France, my friends in France accused me of trying singlehandedly to support the Normandie dairy industry, because I ate so much yogurt, cheese and butter,” Cruce said. While in English we say a big eater is “pigging out,” in French the expression for “I ate a lot” is “J’ai mangé comme une vache,” or  “I ate like a cow.”

“Out of these threads came Louis La Vache, my alter-ego,” said Cruce.

Find Holy Cow Coffee Company on Facebook here. Find the company on Twitter here. Check out Holy Cow's plan on Kickstarter here.

Everybody makes mistakes ... even us! If there's something in this article you think should be corrected, or if something else is amiss, call editor Emilie Raguso at 510-459-8325 or email her at emilier@patch.com.