Coffee king thrives on the daily grind

Vittoria boss Les Schirato is not the sort to shy away from being in command to ensure the company stays ahead of the pack.

Vittoria’s Les Schirato. Picture: Chris Pavlich.

Les Schirato, a self-confessed control freak, is so obsessed with selling coffee he has installed what he calls a “war room” in the western Sydney headquarters of his Vittoria Food & Beverage group.

Schirato is Australia’s coffee king, overseeing a business he and his family own with an annual revenue of more than $250 million, mostly from selling Vittoria coffee in supermarkets such as Woolworths and Coles and to upscale restaurants and hotel chains in what is a bitterly contested industry in a coffee-mad country.

One of the last family-owned Australian firms in his industry, it competes with big internationals such as Nestle and its Nespresso brand and others such as Coca-Cola, right down to the boutique roasters churning out their coffee to the burgeoning inner-city hipster market.

Hence, Schirato explains, the need for him to know exactly what is going on out there in the market, where his sales representatives — dressed in suits and ties and driving gold Audis, at his insistence, with classy customer service standards at the forefront of his mind — are doing the rounds and providing information back to base with technology built in-house to track coffee sales and industry movements.

“We call it a war room and everyone says, ‘Oh, that is the wrong terminology. Call it something to do with the customer or something’,” Schirato tells The Weekend Australian with a hint of defiance. “So it’s a bit politically incorrect, but I base it on if you ever see a soldier out in the field they are wired up with the generals back in the war room.

“People say, ‘You’re a control freak, Les.’ I used to be ashamed of that term, and I was embarrassed about it. But if control freak means you’ve got your finger on key elements, your client and what is happening, well that is fine.”

That drive has propelled Vittoria to the top of the Australian coffee market. It makes about a billion cups of coffee a year, has a 36 per cent market share of pure coffee and 42 per cent market share of coffee beans sold in supermarkets, and supplies 5000 restaurants and cafes.

Schirato is the son of an employee who worked 40 years in the business and married the daughter of one of the founders of what was known as Cantarella Bros, taking the chief executive role in 1992 after a decade as national sales manager working under co-founder Orazio Cantarella.

Vittoria coffee is drunk in Qantas first class and business lounges around the world and 5-star hotel chains such as Hilton, Sheraton and Four Seasons, and the company has installed and supplies 80 in-house Woolworths cafes. Vittoria introduced vacuum packed espresso coffee to the supermarket giant in 1981 and recently clinched a deal to supply the rare Maragogype coffee bean from Nicaragua to Woolworths shelves for the first time.

The business also is a wholesaler for products like the Norwegian Jarlsberg cheese and Italian drinking chocolate, though uniquely for an Australian business owns the Santa Vittoria mineral water brand that it directly exports from Italy to 22 countries.

But it has been a painstaking ride to the top for Schirato. He says he is still scarred by the experience of almost losing the business during a credit squeeze in the early 1980s, years of buying out family members to take full ownership of the group, and the days of 17 per cent interest rates and 22 per cent overdraft rates at a time when Vittoria was debt-laden.

“I’ll never forget it until the day I die. I had a crash course in running a business when I couldn’t write out a cheque unless I got a payment in, and I learnt all about cash flow to stock debtors.

“Running a business is all about the boring stuff every day. Everyone looks at it as an exciting thing and ‘I’d like to have a nice suit and car like him’, but they don’t realise running businesses is about all the boring stuff.”

That boring stuff means getting out of his war room which is constantly being fed with information about the coffee market and visiting customers, be it Brad Banducci at Woolworths or a local independent cafe.

Schirato will drive by after checking his app, developed in- house, which provides him information about which coffee brand is stocked where. If they don’t use Vittoria, he might duck in to convince them otherwise. If they are a customer, Schirato says he might stop by to straighten out the Vittoria products on display or even get behind the espresso machine and check it has been cleaned properly — as he explains he did on a recent visit to the sales director of a luxury hotel chain, which had an espresso machine near the meeting room.

“They told me they were running late, so I went over and got the machine and I flicked the grip handle because I could see it was dirty, and I got the detergent and I cleaned the machine. [Then] I was saying try the espresso now you don’t have the bitterness — if they don’t clean the machine you get the oil — and they couldn’t get over what I did.

“If I go into the supermarket I still fix up the shelves. It is not because I’m worrying about getting another $25 for a sale. The day I don’t fix up the supermarket shelf or I don’t clean the machine, that’s the day you should hand over.

“In the end, it reflects on you or who you are. That’s why I still make my sales people wear a suit.

“People say, ‘You’re behind the times, Les. All the hipsters are wearing jeans and T-shirts and they look like pirates and they have those [man] buns, tattoos’.

“I say, ‘That’s fine, but my salesman one minute they may be with [billionaire hotelier] Justin Hemmes and the next they’re in the Park Hyatt. Well, people know the Vittoria person is here when they’re in a suit and they arrive in a gold Audi.’ I make no apologies for that.”

Twice a year, Schirato also takes every new employee away from the business for two days to talk about the history of Vittoria, which traces its roots back to 1947 when it started importing products such mineral water, parmesan cheese and pasta for Italian migrants, and started roasting and selling its own Vittoria Coffee in 1958.

“We talk about the culture. Where did we come from, what do we stand for and those are things that people might say is soft bullshit. Everyone thinks business is a dirty word and all about profits, but they miss the benefits that come like giving back to the community and helping out. But you also see the people around you grow, you grow and everyone else does too.

“If you do it because you read about it, it’s bullshit — and people see through the bullshit. You either care about people, and that comes through with everything you do, or you don’t. People judge you as if you are a success or failure, depending on your success in business, and I think that is a dangerous thing — because I’m the same guy. Whether I made it or not I’m the same person. You have to measure the same person. It sounds a bit trite, but it is true.”

Schirato is proud of his success but is also conscious of being in an industry where small boutique operators are often held up as producing the best tasting coffee.

He insists having started as a boutique roaster, Vittoria now has higher quality control standards at its factory than he could ever dreamt of and that being a big seller in supermarkets is also something that should not be sniffed at by coffee snobs.

“It’s like Penfolds who are big. No one would say their Grange isn’t good because they are big. People will say Vittoria is successful. Well, yeah. There’s an art to making coffee, but there’s also a science. It is the ability to replicate that coffee is what is unique for us.

“Deep down every boutique coffee company would probably dream of being as successful as us. I don’t want to be scared to let people know we are successful and there’s a reason for it.”

Otherwise, Schirato has begun grooming son Rolando to possibly succeed him after a stint expanding Vittoria into the US and running a previous ad campaign featuring actor Al Pacino promoting its coffee.

Schirato has identified overseas markets as the company’s next big opportunity.

Only about 5 per cent of its sales are abroad but it now exports its wholly-owned Santa Vittoria mineral water brand directly from Italy to 22 countries and Schirato has high hopes for selling more coffee and water into Asia and in the US in the future.

“The other day I flew to LA and had Vittoria coffee on the plane and the lounge in LA has Vittoria coffee, went to the hotel and a restaurant in Venice Beach and drunk our coffee there and it makes you feel proud to see your coffee and mineral water overseas. It’s great to be proud to be Australian, but to make it overseas you have to stand up on quality. I think we can do that.”