Espresso: How Coffee Culture Started in the UK - Jeremy Torz, UNION Coffee Founder

0:06it's fascinating what you said right at the beginning about the lessons from science to brand building were taking convoluted um or not necessarily convoluted but complex things and distilling it to make it simple and what you've said there is with your brand from the outside looking this oh there's so and we have this issue with islands at the minute so i and we basically boiled it boiled ours down to like michelin quality chef grade cooking chocolate and that that's going to be the leading message because that's what's going to pull people on shelf And then we've got, as you say, a whole loads of different tools of how to tell the supply chain story.

0:46I want to now hop in a time machine. And obviously now coffee is ubiquitous. There's coffee chains everywhere. People get tanked up on it from day till night. It's in the UK. but um in in doing research for this it kind of going back to the early 90s 880s late 80s it said there's a quote in one of the articles it said the uk was the graveyard for good coffee and then it said the first thrust in a sip by sip sally into one of the largest tea drinking countries in the world and i really want to kind of one of my obsessions at the minute and it's a quote by uh yohal navari the guy who wrote sapiens which is business is essentially a fiction and i thought about like why do some i was as i said i was speaking to the guys who did the craft coffee is that why do why does craft coffee um craft coffee craft beer why did craft beer why did that story why did that fiction take off why is the low to no booze fiction taking off like why the why do things take off but i'd love to kind of get some context of of the uk in the um in say like 1986 say you were to walk down the street in london what did that look like in terms of of getting a coffee and what was the perception of a good cup of coffee then in in the consumer's mind well it didn't exist you would walk down the high street and there wasn't a place to get coffee it just didn't exist you know we the uk we never evolved that sort of european cafe mentality where you would go out for a coffee you know in most of southern Europe you have the the cafe particularly you know France Italy of course where you go in you have a little one euro coffee at the counter and take your moment and off you go and you know you've had your little recharge um the UK was about we go to work and then at five o 'clock we go to the pub and we drink hard until like the bell rings um we'd never had that relaxed third space um whether it was a cafe or whether it was a coffee you know a tabac bar or you know bistro sort of place so we had a very different understanding of where you spend your time and i think one of the phrases that came in when the cafes start the the espresso bar cafes started to open the phrase that became came in was third place you know the cafe really quickly became the third place not work not home but somewhere else you go to socialize and it was um it was accessible for a woman at that stage to go into a bar during the day and sit down and meet a friend didn't it just didn't feel comfortable to a lot of women who were going out and around just meeting friends yeah they would go to a cafe you know you had chains like whether it was cafe rouge cafe flow started to pick up on that european trend open throughout the day and did certain amounts of coffee business or you went to a hotel you know lounge and had coffee there but there was nothing on the high street and when steven and i started after you know when we came back from our journey in the u.s 94 you know there was there was nothing you know i used to say if you wanted to take away coffee you either had to go to one of the traditional italian sandwich bars or maybe mcdonald's and you got coffee in a polystyrene cup um and it certainly wasn't a a speciality coffee or gourmet experience in any shape of the word um it's mad it's mad how like you know 94 in like over 30 years is how much it's changed you know you can't get enough coffee like gales is where i live in surrey like there's a gales a black sheep coffee a joe and the jews uh there's about five a costa or starbucks all in this one high street in bloody cobham like it's just like it's it's mad how ubiquitous coffee is so so so the state of affairs in the uk was was kind of i suppose lackluster is to put it politely you then jet on a plane to to the states to sunny california which is always uh romantic for for the rain sodden brits i think what describe the cup of what was one like life-changing cup of coffee you had there i'm like right you have you're sipping that coffee like where was it what did that feel like you're like right we need to bring this to you oh there was definitely the moment um tell me tell me to me about the moment jez um it well it was a company that was then had five shops which is it's a very different business today uh it was Pete's Coffee um so Pete's is now the parent company of a very large business owned by JDE um or JAB sorry um and but in those days uh there were there was a one guy that owned it had been started in the 1970s by a Dutch guy named Alfred Pete.

6:10He'd been a tea and coffee merchant and trader. He'd been in Sri Lanka, Far East, buying and trading tea. And he ended up in Berkeley, California, opened a shop on the corner of Berkeley and Vine streets in Berkeley, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. And his ethos was to buy the very best green coffee he could and he had a roasting style which was really dark but it was a slow sweet roast that had a lot of body yeah it was roasty and much darker than we tend to drink today um but they were basically bean shops not espresso bars um i think that's only installed espresso machines in the sort of beginning of the 90s 91 92 prior to that they'd had drip coffee which the Americans grow up on.

7:05And it's, it is the way that historically most Americans would drink their coffee, filter coffee. And Pete's had this wonderful deep, dark roasting style and they brewed it strong in the cup. And you would go to the counter and I still remember it. There was a shop in Menlo Park and that's why I ended up working. It was my first job in coffee. So went to the counter got a cup of filter coffee you turn around you head back to the door and you take a sip and you just we just stopped dead in our tracks what wow i mean steven and i had always been coffee drinkers and yeah we bought sort of beans from the local deli and sort of ground them and made kind of fresh coffee at home what we didn't know there was a they weren't the best beans that we were buying from the local shops and they weren't really always that fresh pete's coffee was roasted and delivered into the store the next day so he had super fresh coffee that was great quality and it just blew our heads off and blew our minds we thought this is just phenomenal and Pete's it was at the time when Starbucks had just gotten started in Seattle Chicago New England and because of a convoluted sort of ownership history between the guys that founded Starbucks and Pete's they ended up when Starbucks first started Pete supplied the coffee to Seattle in in to Starbucks in Seattle and when Starbucks started to expand for a number of years they had an old compete agreement which kind of ran out as I was and Stephen and I were in California Starbucks started to come and open into the Bay Area but you had people that were And they called them Pete Nicks.

8:59So Pete's is the best coffee and you can never do anything better than that. And people were so loyal to the brand because the quality, the consistency of the way it was sourced, roasted and served. And we just thought that was hugely inspiring. And around that time, we started to think seriously about something that we do together post science. um we're both foodies so we wanted to do something in food and drink together and coffee came along at that moment when we were really starting to think about what we could do and we started asking questions and yeah the rest is down the rabbit hole quick one guys espresso's got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands i bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins no way your stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trick always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book and a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you again back to this science piece right we said the beginning is like once you've got that idea or that hypothesis of whether it's coffee or or the genesis of a business you start asking questions i love that but but just i'm trying to get a feel for for being outside that that pete's coffee shop and almost draw the draw the juxtaposition of the uk people getting smashed in the booth and then you know or drinking tea versus the us and um so so did the did the coffee start in seattle is that where that movement started in the us or was it new york reality coffee scene is is kind of talked about as having started in seattle yeah there was isn't the weather in Seattle shit as well is it Seattle it's similar parallel to Manchester I think they get the same number of rainy drinks a year oh right okay it's a lovely city um but I don't think the weather is necessarily the the driver behind a lot of coffee drinking there it's it's a sort of an arty sort of lefty kind of city that's got a relaxed vibe um yeah you may remember the Frasier TV series of the of the 90s era yeah you know that was seattle it was sort of cultural the west coast america sort of san francisco portland seattle is very different to the east coast and you know virtually the rest of america uh it's the closest to europe i think of the american that american culture exists But it has a willingness to sort of take a relaxed way of exploring things and taking time with things.

12:13And that's what was key with the coffee. And one of the things that we saw is so we would go out to the movies in an evening. We'd come out of the movie theatre and there's kind of a strip mall there. So we'd come out of the movie theatre and there was a Tower Records that was open till midnight. and there was a coffee shop adjacent to that that was open to midnight and the skater kids and the teenagers you know up to sort of 20 years of age they'd be coming in and out of tower records and out to the coffee store and hanging out and drinking coffee and iced drinks and stuff like that and you know if that had been the uk they'd be trying to get into a bar and get hammered and And I just thought there's a different way of enjoying life.

13:05And, you know, that was one part of it. So you saw that sort of social setting of it. But the other important part was, so the Pete's Menlo Park store, where I ended up getting my first. Menlo Park is, sorry, just where is, that's in the Bay Area. That is, yeah. It's now where you've got Facebook and all the big tech companies headquartered. in those days it was beginnings of silicon valley but it was biotech was the the big uh driver then so sort of gene therapy and all the stuff that was sort of going on around that that was steven's world so that was what he was working in um but yeah in menlo park so we lived in a place called palo alto which is now synonymous silicon valley yeah it's right the heart of it um and And Menlo Park was just up the street.

14:02And so the peace store there was right on a corner. And you get a line at the door every morning at seven o 'clock when the store would open and people come in. You'd have a constant line till about nine. But you have a few people just hanging out at the bar. And we had a pilot who was based out of San Francisco International, the local pastor from a church over the road. and a building contractor and they would meet every morning have a cup of coffee chew the fat and then go off and do their day and they were I just thought this is amazing there's three people here who for the best part of 10 years have just met up every morning over a cup of coffee who they their their lives and paths probably wouldn't intersect otherwise they'd just gotten to know each other going in for coffee every day um and i just thought it was a really nice uh part of sort of social interaction and i i'd never really be the morning person if anything i can do to put off getting up in the morning but when i would do the morning bar shift at peace and you sort of welcoming people in and you realize hey you know you're setting people up for their day you know and just a nice greeting and get their drink that they want and it's a simple transaction but it seemed to have meaning on so many different levels for people um and i just found it a really interesting place to be thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the fun episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave friends as well it means the world to me