01:40 – How Crepes and Coffee came to be

05:43 – The cafe life during Covid

08:50 – Let’s make some crepes!

10:20 – Get your on-demand frozen crepes

11:29 – How to connect with Crepes and Coffee

Click the “Connect” tab to browse Ordering App/Web/Social links …

Ordering App:  Download for iOS/Android

Website:  www.crepesand.coffee

Instagram:  @crepes.and.coffee

Facebook:  @crepes.and.coffee.guelph

Phone:  519-760-6077

Visit:  904 Paisley Road, Guelph, Ontario

Jason Bavington (00:00):

Hey everyone, Jason with DUX — Your Local City Guide. And have you ever wondered why people fall in love with Europe, to such a high degree? It’s just this magical thing. When people talk about, “Oh, I headed on over to Europe. Oh, we traveled through Europe. We backpacked through Europe.” It’s always this, I don’t know how you say, like a, like a “je ne sais quoi” about this magic and mystique about Europe. These people here have totally figured it out. Let’s go check it out.

Jason Bavington (00:36):

All right, everyone. So today we are here at Crepes and Coffee in Guelph Ontario. And you know, there’s a lot of dessert places out there. A lot of franchises. There are places we all know all about them. They’re kind of all the same after a while. But it’s really nice to find a place that’s really unique. That brings a whole different kind of experience to enjoying a dessert, either on your own or with a friend or with family and just making an evening of it, making an afternoon of it and doing something that’s really, really different. So it’s my pleasure today to introduce Taylor of Crepes and Coffee.

Taylor Beech (01:11):

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Jason Bavington (01:12):

Our pleasure! Thanks for having us in your fantastic location today. And, how long have you guys been here?

Taylor Beech (01:18):

Two years in June,

Jason Bavington (01:20):

Two years in June.

Jason Bavington (01:22):

Okay. So they got their two year anniversary coming up. And, I understand that Crepes and Coffee came into being out of a really, really interesting story that’s all about passion. Is that right?

Taylor Beech (01:35):

Yeah. Yeah. It’s pretty, uh, unbelievable. And it was totally surreal when I was going through it, but it happened organically. I never grew up wanting to want a dessert cafe or anything like that. It just, just happen. I met Marta and, you know, right around that perfect time, you know, four or five, six months where everything was great. It still is, mind you! But you know that, you know what I mean? Like that beginning amazing time. And then she gets promoted to an incredible dream job in Switzerland.

Jason Bavington (02:05):

So wait, wait, wait! Don’t, don’t, don’t ruin the ending yet. What we’ll do. We’re gonna, they have a great video all about their story of how these passions, you know, this synergistic passion came together. And we’re actually gonna roll that video right now. So check this out.

Jason Bavington (02:21):

Yeah. So isn’t that amazing? You took a passion, a love passion, and you brought that across the ocean, across the pond, discovered all these beautiful locations all throughout Europe. And, you know, who doesn’t love Europe? Whoe doesn’t fall in love with Europe? And traveling through Europe with your love is incredible. And then you brought that all back to here and you created this restaurant cafe experience out of passion. Like, it’s beautiful, how you’re able to combine, you know, a passion for work and a passion for life all into one beautiful model. And here we are, we’re sitting in it today.

Taylor Beech (02:57):

It just sort of all came together through all of the travels, all the different places we’ve been. We tried to incorporate a lot of that into here?

Jason Bavington (03:07):

Right. So you have your Switzerland, uh sorry, the way you create the crepes is based on Switzerland?

Taylor Beech (03:13):

Yeah, that was the very prettiest one we found. So, you know, wecopied that from Switzerland. Music. Loved that sort of house lounge type beats. We stole that from Amsterdam. Lovelock railings in Prague. We’ve got the coffee we took from Budapest, the way that they would serve the coffee, not only how great in the cup, but just, you know, having a little shot of Perrier with your coffee and little touches like that. We incorporate a lot of that stuff throughout the experience, you know, try to bring back the date nights. You seemed to live off crepes when we were there and we missed it and just tried to create the best combination here.

Jason Bavington (03:50):

That’s the thing I love about your location is you have this little, little glass of Perrier with your coffee. Or you have the locks that you can put on the “bridge”, you know, at your location, cause that’s also all over Europe. It just brings back these memories for anyone who’s traveled to Europe and seen these kinds of things, and you fall in love with them. You don’t really experience those types of things here in North America, but the fact that you brought it here is amazing. So business was going really, really well. Business, as we talked earlier off camera, has been increasingly nicely in the first quarter of this year and then, and then Covid hit, right? And so obviously that affected restaurants and cafes all over the place in a lot of dramatic ways. But you guys have pivoted really nicely and you’ve come up with some strategies. So tell us a little bit about what you guys have done to help continue to move Crepes and Coffee forward, during Covid.

Taylor Beech (04:43):

So when that hit, just like everybody else, we had no time to prepare. I think we were shut down in a day. But fortunately I had been pretty up to date with, you know, online marketing and that whole thing. So we sort of increased our exposure there, started doing a lot more marketing online. We were using Skip the Dishes, but brought in UberEats and Door Dash as well. And I had been working on an ordering portal through our own app for months prior that just happened to be ready like a week after it hit, so we’ve got that for us as well. And just, you know, had to adjust the hours, you know, trimming the hours a bit to the most busiest times. Trying to get by. I guess the whole idea for this whole Covid was just, let’s, let’s tread water for this period of time. So we’ve ended up doing pretty well with that and actually increased our ordering through, through deliveries and take out by 200% since I guess the first month. And then we also decided to do something I’m really excited about with, which is the frozen crepe. We just launched that literally this Monday.

Jason Bavington (05:54):

Nice. So you have quite a few things on the go. So people can go to your website, they can order a crepe with all the fixings just as if they were having the crepe in your cafe. But then they can get it delivered right to their door, right?

Taylor Beech (06:07):

You can get it, exactly. You can do that too. And that’s, you know, for the local sort of Guelph market. But now we can offer a box of multi-pack, frozen crepes anywhere from London to Oshawa, Barrie to Niagara Falls, with a two day delivery. So, you know, we certainly ship those out, too.

Jason Bavington (06:26):

So yeah, if you really, really want to impress your significant other. I think, guys, I’m mostly talking to you. You know, Crepes and coffee, you can get these beautiful handmade crepes delivered right to your door. With all the different toppings, all the different sauces, all the different ice creams, like, whatever you want and it arrives! It’s ready to eat. Good to go eat. We get a date night at home or just totally just treat yourself. Like, where else are you going to get a Switzerland-inspired crape, during Covid, delivered to your house. I don’t, I don’t know. anywhere else that that can happen.

Taylor Beech (06:58):

Yeah. You know, and, as I go through this, I’m starting to look for comparables. So I’m going to the grocery store and I’m looking for something that I can look to see what sort of heating instructions are out there for things that are like this. And there’s just nothing. The closest thing to that was a toaster strudel. There’s not too much of that in the grocery store, that’s in the same breath as this. So it’s different.

Jason Bavington (07:22):

Pretty neat. So, Taylor, you made me hungry. I think let’s, let’s think make a crepe. Let’s show everyone how, how the magic is done! Shall we do that.

Taylor Beech (07:30):

We’ll spin one up.

Jason Bavington (07:32):

Sweet! Alright. We’re going to go ahead to the crepe station. All right, so Taylor’s going to whip us up one of his world famous crepes, right Taylor? Sweet. So random little girl, what kind of crepe would you like Taylor to make you?

Random Little Girl (07:48):

Can I please have a crepe with salted caramel ice cream, Twix bits, and salted caramel sauce, please?

Jason Bavington (07:55):

Did you get that?

Taylor Beech (07:56):

Yup, no problem.

Jason Bavington (07:56):

That’s a pretty straight forward thing? All right, Taylor is going to make the magic happen and we’re going to watch exactly how this is done.

Jason Bavington (08:01):

So Taylor worked his magic and this was the result. Check it out. Now that my friends is better than dinner. Ohhh, it’s going to be so good. I think someone’s going to be very, very excited by that. So there you go, random little girl.

Random Little Girl (08:20):

Thank you!

Jason Bavington (08:24):

Thank you, Taylor.

Taylor Beech (08:25):

It’s a great gift.

Jason Bavington (08:26):

It’s a fantastic dinner.

Taylor Beech (08:27):

We have dinner like that all the time.

Jason Bavington (08:29):

You know, they’re only kids once, right? So we have this, so we have this fresh crepe that you saw how it’s made. Do want to tell us just a little bit about the frozen crepe option you have?

Taylor Beech (08:38):

So we launched this just after Covid. What we did was we took from over two years of being in business and thousands of orders, the system could tell us our three most popular. So we took those and we’re making those. This is one of the three and we’re selling them in multi-packs. So you get two of each of the top three most popular flavors. This one’s a brownie Oreo Nutella one. We’ve got a strawberry banana. And we’ve got an Apple and almond. And you order it as a six pack multi-six pack. It shows up like this. Cooking instructions and special offers in there as well. It goes out within the next day. Usually people get it within 36 hours, anywhere from London to Oshawa Niagara to Barrie so Southwestern Ontario.

Jason Bavington (09:22):

Excellent. So you have your fresh crepes. You have your frozen crepes. And all of them are European inspired, passion-infused. And I would think you’re making a lot of people really, really happy.

Taylor Beech (09:34):

I hope so! When they eat it, they are happy.

Jason Bavington (09:37):

Yes. Very nice. Alright, so Jason with DUX — Your Local City Guide. Onsite today in Guelph, Ontario at Crepes and Coffee with Taylor who has made us very, very hungry, but thankfully…I’m going to steal her crepe, just don’t tell her… And it’ll all be good. So what we’ll do is first, thanks a lot Taylor. That was a lot of fun. It was great to see, you know, all the magic in action. And what we’ll do is if you’re watching this video anywhere else, but on our website, head on over to dux.city, we’ll put links to the Crepes and Coffee website. You can order straight through there. You can do exactly everything you saw happen here can be delivered right to your home.

Jason Bavington (10:17):

As we discussed. And enjoy the crepes at your house, either on your own, treat yourself or with a loved one or family members. It’s fantastic. So until we you see out on their gorgeous patio, which by the time we finish this filming and make this video live, your patio is going to be up and running, right?

Taylor Beech (10:35):

A couple days.

Jason Bavington (10:35):

A couple days. Sweet. And then if the weather’s perfect. It’s summer. I think, you know, good things are good things lie ahead.

Taylor Beech (10:41):

Yes. We all went through enough. So yeah, good times ahead.

Jason Bavington (10:45):

So we’ll see on the patio to enjoy some crepes. We’ll talk to you soon. Cheers.