Don’t be surprised if the next time you grab coffee at Carol’s Hungry Mind a hand thrusts a plate of pita and hummus into your hands and you hear, “Try this.” The hand and the voice belong to Elizabeth Lundberg, the new business manager at Carol’s, and the sample, whether hummus or a small mound of quinoa or a vegetarian burrito, will either be on the new specialty foods menu or at least up for consideration.
Lundberg, a Wisconsin native with a degree in business from Minnesota State University, signed on as business manager at Carol’s Hungry Mind Café in December 2009 after leaving the corporate world in search of smaller business.
“Showing up [in Middlebury] and then deciding to stay because I fell in love with [the town], I also came into Carol’s and I was very interested in this coffeehouse,” said Lundberg. “I was interested in how it was run because it seemed like a really great place with a lot of energy, but there seemed like there could be more, that it had more opportunity or more potential to it.”
That potential is finally coming to fruition after months of discussion between Lundberg and John Melanson, owner and founder of the café, to determine Lundberg’s role in the business and what direction changes should take. Melanson admits that the biggest changes have been internally with regard to the way things simply are run.
“I’ve let things go downhill — I’ve tried to keep everything going, but without a rigid structure…” Melanson shrugged.
“[Lundberg] came along and she is just very organized, very detail-oriented. She wants to make [Carol’s] work because of what it is, a community-based place, but she also has the experience for getting this place running better business-wise.”
Lundberg’s first step was to run a cost analysis and determine where the business was losing the most money as well as where it could stand make more profit, and the answer seemed to be in other food offerings.
“We just broke this barrier of figuring things out and being a little scared and we’re actually starting to implement things, the biggest thing being the specialty food that we’ve just brought in,” said Lundberg. “We looked at what we want this business to be about. Yes it’s about coffee and we’re a coffeehouse, but a $1.50 cup of coffee doesn’t pay the bills. We’re looking at other parts [of the business] and we’re really trying to make this a lunch destination. We want something that’s relatively quick but also healthy.”
The last week in April Melanson and Lundberg brought in John D’avignon, head chef at Two Brothers for the last six years, to create easy-to-prepare items that are tasty and healthy like quiche and a side of field greens with every entrée, and so far Lundberg says customer response has been through the roof.
“It’s only been a week and it’s been extremely successful,” said Lundberg. “We’ve been selling out a lot more quickly than we thought we would. People have even been buying the food for dinner at night and they take it to go!”
Besides offering a new menu, Melanson and Lundberg have also been exploring nighttime events like open mics and movie screenings, and they now offer the entire café for rent with catering by D’avignon. Carol’s has already hosted a successful going away party afterhours and a six-year-old’s birthday on a Sunday afternoon, and after recently repainting the walls and putting up new signs, Melanson expects more people will want to utilize the space. He hopes that the new menu and revitalized décor will draw more people during regular business hours too, however.
“This is a community-based place, and I really enjoy seeing people and getting people to meet each other, but there’s also a business side to that,” said Melanson. “You want to achieve a critical mass where enough people come here on a frequent enough basis so that the sense is when you’re in town and you’ve got nothing to do for a little while, you know that you can go to Carol’s and you’re going to meet someone. That’s what I think the business is here. The success of it is based on the people of Middlebury coming here and knowing that this is the place to be.”
Carol's Hungry Mind steps up service
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