SINGAPORE: Kim Soden loves that she is a people person, that talking with others and helping them through their day is a rewarding part of her career. But there can also be too much of a good thing.
A pediatric occupational therapist for 15 years, Kim has spent the past six years specialising in working with children from complex trauma backgrounds. As one of the only highly specialised trauma-informed occupational therapists in Geelong, she was coming home at the end of the day emotionally and physically drained, which was affecting her family life.
“I want to come home and have energy to play with my own children and not feel like I want to just curl into a ball because I’ve just been overloaded all day,” the mother-of-three explains.
Help for Kim came from the most unlikely of sources – a repurposed powder blue Piaggio Ape (ar-PAY). Developed by the creators of the Vespa scooter, the three-wheeler is designed as a commercial vehicle able to navigate narrow European streets.
For Kim, the Ape was able to carry her love of people in an entirely new direction – as a barista.
Two mornings a week, the Ape is towed from Kim’s Mount Duneed home to the carpark adjacent to Confetti Blooms off Armstrong Blvd. There, Kim opens Meet Me for business.
And the Ape is not the only thing pared back about Meet Me. In a world where coffee varieties seem to be expanding exponentially, Kim has stuck to the mantra of less is more.
Meet Me customers have a choice of exactly one kind of coffee – the “usual” (flat white), made with Surf Coast Coffee Roasters beans. Variety is limited to size (regular or large) and milk (cow, soy, almond, or oat).
The idea for a coffee van came to Kim after the closure of Cups Canteen, the permanent pop-up coffee spot that operated out of the back of a Kombi. Its departure left not only a hole in the marketplace but also a hole in the Mount Duneed community, somewhere where locals could pop in for a caffeine hit and some conversation – not necessarily in that order. This is the sense of community Kim wanted to focus on with Meet Me.
Her initial vision was a vintage caravan that had been converted. But they were too big to store in the garage of the family’s home. Then she thought about going down the Cups Canteen route and finding a Kombi, but they couldn’t source one that had already been fitted out.
Then they saw the Ape, opened by a woman in Adelaide who ran a cafe and was using the Ape to run some off-site events. However the success of her cafe meant she wasn’t doing as many events as she’d envisioned, so the Ape had to go.
After they towed it back home to Mount Duneed, Kim’s husband Michael refurbished the bench tops and built some internal shelving.
It is still towed on a trailer to and from home every day Meet Me is open, although Kim says driving the Ape on and off the trailer is “horrendous”.
“It has a mind of its own,” she insists. “It drives like a motorbike, but because it’s very old and very Italian it’s like nothing I’ve ever driven before.”
Meet Me opened in late April and Kim didn’t have to wait long to discover if she was on to a winner. Anzac Day was her second day of trading and she says she served “hundreds and hundreds” before running out of milk by 10am.
Now she warms to the routines that each day brings. Meet Me is open from 7am to noon on Friday and Saturday, and first up are the walkers out early with their dogs, or the early commuters coming to grab their coffee on the way into town. After a lull it’s the post-school drop-off crowd and then a bit later in the morning it’s mums coming with their children who are going for a play at the nearby park.
Running Meet Me has taught Kim more about coffee than she thought she would know, like how the temperature can affect the beans and how they need to be ground, which then affects the rate at which the coffee is extracted. And milk frothing? That’s a “whole another thing”.
But she is delighted to be, literally, learning on her feet, acting as a communication conduit and community hub.
“Even though society is shifting and changing in a very fast paced world, it gives people just even five minutes to slow down and have a chat to their barista about something that’s going on in their life or what they’re doing for the day,” Kim says.
“I met a lovely man last week who’s just moved from Melbourne to Geelong and he actually doesn’t like living in Geelong. He’s finding life quite challenging at the moment and he has showed up for three days to get his coffee. And I could already see like there was just this sense of, ‘This is a nice place where I feel welcome and even though I’m not loving my situation at the moment, I found something that I can go and do every day that brings me a bit of happiness’.
“You’ll never perfect the art of making coffee, I don’t think, it’s a bit of a challenge in itself to try and make a really good coffee every time. But I think the best part for me is the people side of things.”