Drinking positive Despite setbacks, local café owner Al Dawson’s coffee cup remains half-full By: AV Kitching Posted: 6:00 AM CST Monday, Jan. 2, 2023

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This article was published 01/01/2023 (626 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Al Dawson has a nice face. It’s the kind of face that brings to mind that Roald Dahl quote: “… if you have good thoughts it will shine out of your face like sunbeams, and you will always look lovely.”

That’s Dawson’s face — lovely.

The proprietor of Harrisons Coffee Co. has had a pretty tough time and yet he is able to smile through it all. He opened his first shop, in the Johnston Terminal at The Forks, in the middle of the pandemic — “We already had plans to open, and we couldn’t very well back out,” he says — and since then his café locations have been broken into, some several times, with the latest incident taking place in mid-December.

Even for a self-confessed “radical optimist,” surely this is hard going. So how is he able to keep looking on the bright side of life?

He laughs.

“Well I try, but it hurts sometimes,” he says as he recounts the six burglaries Harrisons had last year. “It hurts the most when there’s theft and damage. Margins are extremely tight, inflation has crushed us, shipping comes in at a huge loss… it sucks, it totally sucks. We have had to borrow tons of money to survive.”

Dawson has multiple coffee places — four cafés, a vending machine (the first one in North America) and a roasting atelier — but as much as he loves coffee, he says it’s not so much about the drink but about community, about being part of something bigger, being able to give back to people in need.

“I feel in a time when everyone is being accused of something or being treated badly, we are saying, ‘We got you, we will take care of you,’” he says.

“It’s definitely not a lucrative business but we’re still plugging away. Business is slow. People are going out to restaurants as opposed to cafés, but we still have a lot of guests that take care of us daily, that come visit us and make us smile and we get to make them smile.”

Dawson is possessed of an indefatigable cheeriness that defies understanding; there are many among us who would throw in the towel after experiencing the setbacks he has, and no one would blame us if we did.

But he keeps forging ahead, even if it does make him cry sometimes.

“This whole business has been chaos for me since we bought it, but I love it,” he says. “There’s been nothing easy, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. Over the last two years there hasn’t been a week that’s gone by that I haven’t cried my eyes out at least once if not two or three times, but you just think, ‘Well, OK, we’re not doing it for me.’”

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Born in Toronto in April 1973, Alan Dawson is the only child of Morag Grant, who moved to Canada from Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1967. Independent from a very young age, he would travel around on public transport.

“My mother would freak out,” he says. “I would take it from nine years old. I was living up in Scarborough and I would take the bus, hop on the subway and go downtown. It’s Toronto and no one cared ’cause everyone did it.”

With Morag working full-time in their one-parent family, it fell on Dawson to prepare dinner and by the age of 11, he was an accomplished cook.

Wok with Yan, a TV cooking show starring Stephen Yan, was a favourite and the young Dawson would try to emulate what he saw for dinner, once accidentally setting the kitchen on fire.

His food memories are hazy. There is mention of eating Life cereal and chocolate milk with his cousin, Sunday lunches of rotisserie chicken at Swiss Chalet after church, and tucking into steak and sausage pie, a dish he remembers cooking with his mother, which he’s chosen to make for this feature.

“It’s more of a steak and sausage casserole with a lid on it,” he says. “You can just throw whatever that was leftover in it because it worked; it always worked. You put some gravy on it and it’s delicious.”

Dinner at home with wife Fiona and their two children can be anything from cold-cut sandwiches to hamburgers to leftovers, but the family makes a point of eating together every night.

And as much as he likes cooking and eating — “Look at me, I’m a big guy; no one in my family is going to starve,” he says — he doesn’t often have the time to craft the kind of meals he enjoys.

The business takes up all his time, not that he’s complaining. He’s used to the hours after having worked all over the country, in various guises, in the food and beverage industry.

His last role, before branching off on his own with Harrisons, was business development manager with Tim Hortons.

He wanted more flexibility, he says, and opened his first shop in June 2020. The second came a couple of months later in August. His cafés are driven by his family’s values and in each there hangs a manifesto.

“All our decisions are run through our manifesto,” he says. “We hire very differently; we don’t look at any of the criteria that anyone else looks for. We have aligned our values to our organization, and we only hire according to our values.”

The first four of those values — there are 10 in total — are: being kind; leaving things better than you found them; being part of the solution; and taking care of yourselves and each other.

He’s put his money where his mouth is. Two of his café locations — the one on Princess Street and the one on Broadway — have been gifted to his team members and the café is involved in various charitable projects, most recently donating $1 from every bag of Christmas Coffee sold to Siloam Mission.

This approach, to lend a helping hand wherever possible (the sixth of the 10 values), carries through to his suppliers. All Harrisons coffee beans come from four different importers and each variety is farm traceable.

Each bag has an origin story, and the website goes into more detail, listing things such as altitude, fermentation, drying time and drying atmosphere, as well as how much Harrisons paid per pound and how much the farmers make from each pound sold.

“I will only buy from importers that are transparent — I want to know how much the farmer got paid, I want to know how much they are making, so that we know that it’s all good,” Dawson says.

Living by those values have held him and his family in good stead. But he admits it can be “shattering” to discover not everyone is like-minded — something his daughter realized for herself on a trip away. He found himself having to tell her that not everyone believes the same thing.

“All we can do is judge ourselves,” he says. “Are we right or are we wrong? I believe in people. I think we have to. The line I always say to people when I hire them is, ‘I have got two kids and I want them to be able to meet someone 30 years from now and the person will go, oh you’re Al Dawson’s children; I want you to know what your dad did for me.’

“That is my goal. My legacy isn’t going to be an MRI machine at the hospital; my legacy is going to be, ‘I helped someone through a difficult time. I was there when they were struggling and I thought, let’s do it together.’”

“My legacy isn’t going to be an MRI machine at the hospital; my legacy is going to be, ‘I helped someone through a difficult time. I was there when they were struggling and I thought, let’s do it together.’”–Al Dawson

That’s certainly a laudable attitude and while Dawson can’t be accused of being naive — too many burglaries will do that to you — the goodness of his entire approach is startling, if only because it’s a rare thing to encounter.

How does he not get beaten down by life? What’s his secret to keeping positive?

It’s close to Christmas when we next speak and Dawson is busy on his delivery rounds, making sure everyone has their coffee gifts ready for the big day. He give frank answers to a reporter’s niggling questions.

“What can you do but?” he says, ebullience erased for a minute. “You just hang on and enjoy the ride.

“I still cry on a regular basis, there’s no doubt about that. But I’m in a lot of a better position than most. I have a roof over my head, I am in the top three per cent.

“It would be nice to have money at some point, but life is quite awesome,” he says with a laugh, choosing to remain stubbornly cheerful.

And with that he says a jaunty goodbye, getting back to his round of deliveries.

av.kitching@winnipegfreepress.com