CEO INTERVIEW

SobeyTom CEO feature and cover photographs by Toby Weller

Since launching in 2004, Origin Coffee has grown into one of the UK’s leading specialty coffee roasters. Founder Tom Sobey talks us through the growth story, how he has developed the brand and his plans for the future.

So how did the whole Origin story begin?

I didn’t do particularly well at school, one

GCSE A to C.

Growing up, my father was a mechanic, but he got fed up with, as my mum describes it, lying on cold floors, fixing cars. So he bought a coffee franchise after seeing an advert in the newspaper. There were franchises across the UK, Coffee Man Plymouth, Coffee Man Bristol, Coffee Man Devon, you get the picture, so he bought Coffee Man Cornwall.

When I left school, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, so I became the delivery driver. But after a couple of years I really wanted to do something different, so I said to my father, I’ve had enough of this, you can go back to being delivery driver, I’ll do sales! But I was awful at it. I sensed there were other coffee companies down here at the time, who have bigger vans, better brands, whatever. So I pushed for that because I guess I wanted my father’s business to be bigger and better. But actually, it was a nice little business for my parents. Probably when I came along, it just added cost into it.

I ended up going traveling to Australia and I learned a lot out there. Not just independence, but how to brew coffee, espresso culture and café culture.

I met a few roasteries and did lots of different stuff. I learned how to make nice latte art, good espresso, and all the things you didn’t really see down here in Cornwall at the time. So, when I came back, I said to my parents, you know, I’ve decided what I want to do, I want to be the first coffee roaster in Cornwall.

And so it took me a few years to sort out, I still worked for my parents at the time when I was planning it all etc. And then, yeah, I started origin in 2004. I always had a lot of enthusiasm on my side and a great belief that I could teach people how to make great coffee. One of my very first customers was Watergate Bay. I went down there and brewed them all coffee and beautiful latte art. I said, if you buy my coffee, I’ll teach your staff how to do that. And it just grew from there.

At that stage I still hadn’t bought a coffee roaster because I didn’t really have enough cash to do so. But in 2008, I managed to buy a coffee roaster from a company in America, which was an absolute disaster. I spent $15k, or whatever it was, for this reconditioned machine which was supposed to work with the type of gas that I had, the type of electrics that I had, etc, etc. And it came over broken, hadn’t been serviced. But I was lucky. I played football for Helston at the time and first team manager was a gas plumber. He was quite keen for me to play, so I said, I’ll play if you come and sort this out for me! And so basically, he got it all working, and Origin grew from there.

Education is a huge part of what we do

And when did the first one of your shops come along?

The first shop I opened was in Porthleven, eight or nine years ago. The reason why I wanted to open a shop was at that stage I was spending quite a lot of time driving around the country, teaching people how to make coffee. While it was quite rewarding, it was also sometimes quite frustrating when people didn’t take it on board. So beyond just supplying coffee, we had almost become a consultancy within cafés. So I thought I’d open my own coffee shop and present the coffee that we’re buying in our way. I

had spoken to Trevor Osborne (Porthleven Harbour & Dock Company owner) a few times, and he was a big supporter of young local businesses. So, he moved the office of Porthleven Holiday Cottages out of their office so that we could open a café at Harbour Head, which was amazing. It was a really good spot overlooking the harbour. It was really, really cool.

And I’ve always been very lucky with timing in my career, being in the right place at the right time. When I started Origin, the specialty coffee market just boomed. The same a little bit with opening the café in Porthleven. It was on the up. Sales have probably increased eight, nine times since we opened and that’s purely down to the volume of people that now come to the village.

I guess it must have been around 2014 we opened the shop in Shoreditch. We were getting busier in London at the time. I was always very conscious that I can’t use my location as an excuse and if I want to sell coffee to London, I have to behave as if I’m locally in London. So if somebody rang me up and said, I’d like to use your coffee, I would get in the car and I drive to London because it’s my choice to be based in Cornwall, nobody else’s. There’s plenty of decent roasters in London to use so I would do that a lot and met some good people and won some really good accounts there.

And then we had the opportunity to work with Soho House, when they were just at the very start of an expansion drive. They wanted to put specialty coffee into all of their venues across the world. We worked really closely with them. Part of the agreement with them was we had to have a space in London that was able to offer education and technical support, which kind of forced our hand which was good because it provided the volume of coffee supply that we needed. But I wanted an income against that and I wanted to open a café in London, so we chose the location in Shoreditch and away we went.

We had some great people working in that café, we opened up more and more wholesale accounts and then all of a sudden the infrastructure became bigger with four technicians, a service manager and wholesale managers. As we ran out of space we opened Southwark three years ago, just by the tube station. We have a café in the front, great food and then in the back we have offices, education, technical support. And we’ve got to the point where we obviously now sell a lot more coffee in London than we do in Cornwall. So what actually happened during the pandemic is all of those sales with Soho House went straight into our website. So, we currently have a balance, I would say of about 25% web, 25% retail and 50% wholesale.

You have six cafés now. Has the growth of the shops helped drive the growth of the whole business?

How many people do you employ now across everything?

I think it’s about 84 at the moment, which is pretty much 50-50 with Porthleven and out of county. So we’ve got the cafés, we have an office in Bristol, where we have technician and a wholesale manager. We have a wholesale manager in Leeds and Edinburgh. Then we also have wholesale managers, trainers and engineers in London.

Is most of your coffee sold through wholesale?

We have good mix. Just before the pandemic, we lost Soho House, which was a big customer of ours, about 12% of our income. But we always managed it with the infrastructure, the cafés, and stuff like that. I always knew that for every year that we supplied Soho House, was one year that we should be grateful for doing that. We knew at any point they could move to a different roastery. In the end, they bought into a coffee roaster, which is why they changed away from us.

Very much. They help to showcase the brand and also give you control. Coffee is an odd product in the sense that people often judge the coffee based on where they have it. If you go to a restaurant, you have a terrible meal, you don’t look up the supplier. You would say “gosh, that chef’s not particularly good”. Whereas with coffee, you go to a café and if it’s not particularly well made, people will say that coffee As a brand, is awful. But it’s not that we have to the coffee is awful, it was how it was made. continually It was really interesting. In the early days, you’d evolve have some really good adopters of the training and they brewed great coffee. Then all of a sudden that barista would leave and you’re almost back to square one and then perhaps they bring in somebody who wasn’t as good, the coffee wasn’t as great then that affects your reputation etc. Education is a huge part of what we do. With our own cafés, obviously we employ amazing baristas and we present coffee incredibly well. So yes, I guess the shops act as a brand experience marketing tool. They’re not particularly profitable, but then they’re not run to drive revenue, they are run as cafés to provide a brand experience.

So, there isn’t a plan to significantly expand the cafés beyond six?

No. I did think if I had millions of pounds sat in the bank, I would open small specialty coffee shops, maybe in some seasonal towns across Cornwall and Devon. But we work with and supply some amazing partners who’ve supported us over a long period of time and I don’t know how comfortable I would feel in doing that. And also, I don’t have millions of pounds sat in the bank!

There are so many challenges with hospitality; the challenges in staffing and all of those things. You have a very hard job to run good cafés. It’s well documented, it’s really difficult to get chefs at the moment. We reopened in Penryn last March. It’s an amazing café, the food is incredible. Since March, we’ve had one chef who’s absolutely amazing. But we still haven’t managed to recruit a second chef and so we’re still only open five days a week for food, which is a real shame. Same with the roastery in Porthleven. He just couldn’t get any more chefs. And so it’s really, really hard. And especially with the pandemic and the pinging. George last year got pinged and lost ten days of August which cost him an absolute fortune. It’s tough running cafés, it really is.

Going forward, where’s the growth in the business going to come from?

Selling more into the wholesale trade?

Online and wholesale. We’ve invested a lot of money in a new website and our web businesses has grown by 70% in the last year. Growth will also come from events and we have a new events manager that’s just joined us. We were asked recently by a well-known boat manufacturer to go out to Germany for the Dusseldorf Boat Show. They realise the value in serving amazing quality coffee on their stand. So they were talking about paying us to set up bars over there, baristas over there. And actually, there’s a whole world of that that goes on. So we see good growth there. We have some pretty exciting growth plans. I guess the worry is if there’s another lockdown, and then stay stagnant for another 12 months. We have an amazing team of wholesale managers, we supply some of the best independent cafés, restaurants, hotels, specialty coffee shops in London, and there’s so many good people that we plan to work with in the next 12 months. But the fear is, you get a lockdown and all of a sudden it hits your figures for the whole 12 months, exactly the same as the prior year, people get frustrated and away you go. So it’s very difficult to manage that.

What are the challenges with building a company like Origin?

I’ve been very careful in how I’ve grown Origin. And I’ve always felt, as I touched on earlier, I sort of stumbled into this by accident. People have always asked what my exit strategy is. But what else would I do? I’ve got the qualifications and the job. I’m going to be in this forever, because I don’t know what I would do otherwise! Well, I always fancied being an estate agent maybe! I am the sole owner of Origin. I’ve always been very, very cautious in how I’ve grown it. It’s taken 15 years to build a really good,

sustainable, ethical brand that aspires to be Europe’s leading specialty coffee roaster. As a brand, we have to continually evolve. what we were 15 years ago is not who we are today. And we have to evolve because there’s always somebody younger, cooler, more aggressive in terms of growth than you, that will come along and want what you’ve got. So, I always try to employ people who are smarter than I am, which is pretty easy! People who can add value, who take autonomy within their role and can take pride in the work that they do. Smart people who are ambitious, who’ve got the right When I started personality, who want to take ownership of

Origin, the their role. One of the most rewarding and also the one specialty coffee of the most challenging parts of growing a brand is people and I think at Origin we’ve market just had some amazing success stories with boomed people. For instance, one fellow came to work for me as a barista in Porthleven. When he did a degree in business, we gave him a job as head of wholesale. He had a really good career with us and twice won the World Coffee in Good Spirits competition and is now a global coffee consultant. I take massive pride in things like that.

Would it have been easier if you were based up in the home counties? Have you ever considered moving Origin up country?

No, because I was born in Cornwall and I love living in Cornwall. But if we were based in London, yes I think Origin would probably be a lot bigger. But do I regret not living in London? Not in the slightest. Yes, sometimes the distance between Cornwall and London is a long way away. But I have a wife and three children and I like spending time at home. I want to be here for my family, I don’t want to be in London, all week, every week and coming home at weekends.

Do you trade on Cornwall and Cornishness?

That’s an interesting question, but no, not really. You see all these brands which pop up now and everything’s about Cornwall and the lifestyle. Historically, it’s people who are not particularly from the region who do that more. I’m very proud to be Cornish, proud to have grown up in Cornwall. I’m very pro Cornwall. So where we would use Cornwall as a brand experience would be maybe if someone from Soho House or of that ilk came down. We’d bring them down to Porthleven, would spend a couple of days with them, go to the Mussel Shack, to Kota Kai. Give them that brand experience. But that just reinforces the identity of Origin as a business. But I’m not a big fan of just stamping Cornwall lifestyle on everything. I think a brand should be about the product and the people as opposed to a location.

You recently became a certified B Corp business. Was that driven through personal passion?

I had always wanted to be B Corp. I had spoken to a guy at Caravela, which is a coffee exporting company that we worked with in Colombia probably about four or five years ago. He was telling me about B Corp, but I’d never heard it before. And then I did some research into it. As I said to the guys at work, I want us to be B Corp. It verifies everything that we do. It’s very easy for us to stand up and say we’re sustainable, we’re doing this, we’re doing that, because that’s a message that we can put out. But I always felt there was a lack of verification. Yes, you can buy direct from the farmer and pay a premium because he grows great coffee, etc. But what happens if that guy treats his coffee farmers terribly, doesn’t look after them, doesn’t do this, doesn’t do that, pollutes rivers etc? We always did face to face visits with them, did some audits, but actually part of the B Corp process was to involve third party independent auditors. So it’s not just our guy saying we’re great because we pay a national minimum wage in El Salvador. That’s awesome, but actually it’s not awesome if everybody else who works in coffee in that area is getting double that amount. So, the whole thing with B Corp was just actually verifying everything that we wanted to do. And I think with specialty coffee, certainly in the UK, it was a bit like the space race, and then everybody was trying to do it. We were one of the very first and we are really proud of that. We’re certainly the only specialty coffee roaster down here in the south west who is B Corp.

In recent times the growth in specialty coffee has also moved to enjoying it at home with the likes of coffee pod machines.

We had been talking about doing coffee pods for years but I was very against them, not for the environmental reasons but I was against them because I’d never had a capsule which I thought tasted pretty good. It was suggested and I said you’ve got to be joking. We’re coffee guys! I’d expect that sort of suggestion from the finance guy! But there’s a lot of growth. Someone who does capsules once described it to me as costing 30p for five grams of coffee or whatever. He said for him to achieve £2 million worth of sales in capsules, he’d have to buy something like 10,000 kilos of coffee. Whereas if he was a traditional wholesale roaster, to achieve £2 million worth of sales, he’d have to buy something like 100 tons of coffee. So, I said to them at the time, if you can come back to me

We’ve had and give me some capsules which I enjoy, then yes, I would be keen to do it. some amazing And we discovered a company who would success stories make the capsules as aluminium. People have talked aluminium being really bad, with people which they’re not if you dispose them in the right way. When you have finished with the capsule, if you separate the coffee into your compost and then the aluminium into household recycling, you actually completely recycle that product. And the coffee was brewing really well. It was delicious. But we are continually evolving and at the moment we are looking at doing a home compostable capsule.