Business percolating at AJ's coffee cart

By Darlene Dela Cruz

Tucked away in a corner outside the East-West Center, a business brews beneath the shade of a banyan tree. AJ's Coffee owners Keith and Jeanette Kaneko serve up food and cups of java from their cart every weekday at this spot on the corner of Dole Street and East-West Road.
    
The husband and wife duo started their coffee cart business in 1993, in an era before coffee shops pervaded every street corner as they do now.

"We started when there was no Starbucks on the island," Keith says. "I saw coffee as something that was going to be big."

Beyond Keith's vision for success in the coffee industry, the couple's background has little to do with coffee itself. Keith and Jeanette graduated from high school in 1970, she from Roosevelt High and he from St. Louis. Keith went on to earn an English education degree from St. Mary's College in Texas, while Jeanette spent her years working at McDonald's, and eventually earned a management position.

Keith came back to Hawai‘i, took a coffee roasting class, and the couple started a coffee shop in Aiea in 1992. Although they ultimately lost that shop because of increasing rent costs, their coffee cart at the East-West Center still thrives today.
    
For AJ's regular customers, having the coffee stand is convenient.

"I like the coffee, and the location is perfect," says a man named Sandip, who works at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa in Watanabe Hall. "Here, I know what I'm getting. At Starbucks, it always tastes different depending on who's making it."
    
The Kanekos run the coffee cart by themselves. Jeanette says that hiring a worker to man the cart isn't financially feasible at the moment, and Keith says that it's too time consuming to find just the perfect person to hire as a coffee server. "We don't want to hire just anybody," Keith says. "We want people who know about coffee."

Because they run the cart themselves, the Kanekos have developed a unique rapport with their customers. Jeanette and Keith pride themselves on the close-knit relationships they have with their clients, from already knowing their regulars' usual orders to giving customers leeway when they forget their "frequent customer" discount stamp cards.

"We trust our customers," Jeanette says. "If they say they forgot their stamp card, we still give them stamps anyway. And if they can't find their money, we let them pay later."
    
Both Jeanette and Keith say that taking care of their customers is a top priority of AJ's Coffee, and they describe their business as being "traffic-driven." The Kanekos say that keeping regular customers is the key to their business staying alive, and is also one of their biggest challenges.

"If certain dynamics change, people are not going to walk out of their way to get coffee here," he says. "People are creatures of habit. If they walk somewhere else, then they will develop that as a habit, and we'll lose them. Also, some people will really like our coffee, and then they graduate and they're gone."
    
The Kanekos also have to contend with the continued expansion of Starbucks and bigger coffee chains throughout the island. Jeanette sees the growth of mainstream coffee franchises as more of a curse than a blessing to AJ's and other small businesses like it.

"I think you're just going to see more Starbucks in the future," Jeanette says. "I see Starbucks really taking over, and it's really spooky."

Keith, however, offers a more optimistic view of the current coffee industry boom.

"I think it's good," he says. "It exposes people to different types of coffees, especially in Hawai‘i, where before, it was mostly just regular brewed coffee."
    
To keep their business marketable, the Kanekos focus on the quality of the coffee and food they serve. Jeanette says that their coffee is made "Americano" style, with espresso shots and water. Keith takes pride in using fresh-roasted and fresh-ground Arabica coffee beans to create their own unique coffee blend.

The couple also offers baked goods from a local bakeshop, as well as pita bread turkey sandwiches and snacks. "We don't like to offer things that they offer," Keith says. "We don't duplicate."

Jeanette shares that sentiment."We try to do different things that might interest people," she says. "You've got Subway on campus, so we try to do something different with the pita sandwiches."
    
The couple operates the coffee cart from 7 a.m. to a little after noon every weekday, every semester and during intercessional breaks.