Holy Cow Coffee Kickstarts a 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 a week to go.

Using the Kickstarter.com website, Paul Cruce 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.”

Cruce is known at the Sunday farmers market in Walnut Creek and other farmers markets as “Louis La Vache ” — Louis the Cow. The Walnut Creek market is from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. Sunday on North Locust Street and Cole Avenue, a couple blocks from the BART station.

A video at the Kickstarter site lays out Cruce’s plan for converting the used postal van into “an on-the-go coffee shop.” 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. To encourage larger amounts, Cruce has set up a tier of rewards, much like incentives offered by public radio stations during fund drives. Cruce’s rewards include coffee mugs and coffee from his Holy Cow Coffee Company.

As of Oct. 3, the project had attracted $2,228 in pledges, two from as far away as Holland and Serbia. (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.”

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

In November 2008 Cruce opened Café-Saint-Honoré, on the northwest corner of Solano Avenue and San Pablo, Albany.

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, including Albany.

Advantages

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.

“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,” Cruce said.

Cruce, a Francophile, explained how the name of his alter-ego and 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.

Check out Holy Cow's plan on Kickstarter here.