Editor’s note: This article is a review of comments made publicly by Abdullah Ramay, CEO of Pablo & Rusty’s Coffee Roasters, on the Café Success Stage at Food & Hospitality Week. The views expressed are his own. R&CA does not endorse these statements, and nothing in this article constitutes advice or a recommendation from R&CA. All pricing and business decisions must be made independently by each business based on its own costs, customers and circumstances.
If you were at Food & Hospitality Week last month, you may have caught Abdullah Ramay — CEO of Pablo & Rusty’s Coffee Roasters — on the Café Success Stage for one of the most practical sessions of the show.
The topic was what café customers actually care about. Here’s a recap of what Ramay shared with operators. R&CA doesn’t promote this as advice — it’s one operator’s view of the market, worth hearing in his own words.
Ramay was direct about what he sees as the café pricing problem: in his view, most operators underprice, and most do it because they’re watching what everyone else is charging. His message to the audience was to stop.
Price your product based on who your customer is and what you’re trying to deliver — not based on the café two doors down, he told operators. Ramay said that with wage increases and the surcharge ban on the horizon, he’s factoring a price increase of around 1.5 per cent into his own business now, and reviews his own pricing every quarter — no longer than every six months. His broader point: understand your own costs and your own customer, and price off those.
He also pointed to research where customers were asked directly whether they’d pay 50 cents more or accept a drop in quality — 70 per cent chose to pay more. People don’t like price increases, he noted, but they like worse coffee even less.
Ramay’s central argument was that there is no average café customer. There are five different types walking through your door, with five different needs and five different reasons to leave. Trying to serve all of them, he argued, means underserving the ones who matter most.
His suggestion to the audience: pick one, maybe two, customer archetypes and build everything around them — menu, pricing, atmosphere, social media, signature drinks. It takes courage to say no to the rest, he said, but the businesses that do it consistently outperform those that don’t.
Not sure who your customer is? Ramay’s answer: talk to them. Look at your Google reviews. Use AI to help you make sense of what you’re seeing. The data is there — most operators just haven’t asked the right questions yet.
A few observations Ramay shared from his own data. Cold coffee now accounts for 68 per cent of orders among younger customers — the crossover age from hot to cold is approximately 28. If your venue skews younger and you’re not offering a cold beverage, he suggested it’s worth revisiting.
On social media, he observed that younger customers are finding cafés on TikTok, while recommendations and orders flow through Facebook. Knowing where your customer lives online, he argued, is as important as knowing what they order.
And home coffee? In Ramay’s view, it’s not your competition. It’s training customers to care about quality — which makes the café experience more valuable, not less.
R&CA members looking to understand their customer mix or access workforce support can visit the member portal or contact our team directly.