Baratza is a small and successful manufacturer of conical burr coffee grinders. One of its products, the Barista Coffee Grinder, can now be found on the shelves of Starbucks coffee shops. Baratza also operates a small and efficient website for online purchases. The founders of the company are Kyle Anderson and Kyra Kennedy. Anderson began his career in coffee equipment as an inventor for Acorto, a large industrial manufacturer of commercial coffee equipment. After landing several patents for Acorto, Anderson joined with Kennedy, the Director of Sales and Marketing, to strike out and start a business. Together they created the company, Baratza, a word derived from Arabic roots, meaning, “the place where the locals meet to drink coffee.”

Baratza may have scored a coup by landing the Starbucks shelf space, but the size and narrow focus of this company makes for several problematic factors. Available only in the United States and Canada, Baratza machines are basically assembled from Taiwanese plastic casings and German conical burrs and then shipped out to customers, whether retail or wholsesale. While multinational parts construction is a commonplace feature of the modern marketplace, there is a transient and lightweight feel to the Baratza product that does not inspire confidence. Compare Baratza’s ten years of operation with the Krups line of coffee equipment. Krups can boast of more than 150 years in operation. You may note that Krups has only made coffee equipment for the last sixty years of its lifespan, yet it still has a long history of appliance design, and it makes all of its parts in several of its own factories.

Baratza makes four coffee grinders for sale at its small online store. They are the Maestro Solis, Maestro Solis Plus, the Vario, and the Virtuoso. The company also has a plastic holder designed to support the portafilters on it machines, enabling you to walk away from grinders in operation. One page of the website offers refurbished grinders of various types.

The Baratza website has a long list of online stores that offer its machines for sale. Serving as a way station for parts that are assembled and then shipped out to retailers, who ship the machines out in turn to the customers, Brataza feels less like a maker and more of a middleman of grinder merchandise. The company’s online store features a page offering “refurbished machines for sale,” which causes one to wonder how many repairs are necessary for Baratza products. Finally, there are several telephone, email and website contact points for the Baratza Company, but there is nowhere listed a physical location of the operation. In the modern digital marketplace, the game of avoiding in-person contact with customers often ends with this kind of dead end, so it is not especially terrible for the Baratza address to be unavailable. It does speak of an online mindset that does not serve the customer well, however.

The Maestro line of coffee grinders begins at about 115 dollars, while the Virtuoso tops out the Baratza products at around 225 dollars. The Vario is a mezzo class machine, designed to serve both commercial coffee sellers and home kitchens, and the product is not yet listed for prices in the Baratza online store.