UNION Coffee Founder: Pioneering the Coffee Culture in the UK (it all started in a Garden Shed)

0:00Hello there and welcome to Hungry. Hungry is the podcast for the next wave of challenger food and drink brands looking to pour gasoline all over their growth. Each week we'll interview successful founders, thought leaders, unpack their lessons and provide you with the toolkit to scale super fast. I am Dan Pope, I am your host and without further ado, let's get started.

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1:00Hey guys, absolutely puzzling that Mackenzie Jones are extending their partnership with Hungary. So gassed. In case you have been living under a rock, who are Mackenzie Jones? They are FMCG recruitment specialists. They work with some amazing brands, Lucky Saint, Real Superfoods, Hunter and Gatherer, and Purdy and Fig. Also with some of the big poppers, the big boys, the big G's, PepsiCo, Unilever, Campari. I've known Billy for Yonks, Paul for the last year. He's a top bloke. They're just super kind and lovely. and they're just dedicated to our wonderful space, our wonderful industry of buccaneering challenge brands and that they're so much more than a recruitment business.

1:39Check out the podcast for them. It's epic. I've even introduced Mackenzie Jones to some amazing brands and they've really helped them scale. If you're looking to hire, just reach out to them, have a chinwear, get in touch, do yourself a favour. Thank you. There's a horror story in food and drink that absolutely no one talks about. It surreptitiously scurries through the underbelly causing throbbing headaches, wasted money, huge amounts of pain, dodgy barcodes. So many brands do the hard work. They create the product, name the brand, open the bank account, and then they cut bloody corners online and they order a dodgy barcode.

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5:16There are some very good skills and life skills that are brought to us. Stephen really was the scientist. He was biochemistry, immunology, did a PhD in immune science and sort of went on to do further research and that's what originally took us over to the US. I was an optician. um so for my part it was my work you know was really explaining to people what was going on what they needed and I was always kind of against the the sort of the white coat approach sort of but try and talk to people in terms they would understand demystify things and make information accessible. And I think, you know, in Stephen's world as well, he was exploring new ground and confronting sort of questions and probing and asking further questions through experimentation and then very detailed, meticulous approach through recording the results and interpreting those.

6:24So I think through our sort of creative and business journey, it's given us the ability to take those stop moments rather than rushing ahead, but to think seriously about what we're doing, what we're saying. And can we validate, can we back up what we do? And I think it's a lesson that I think is even more important today in the world where cause-related marketing and greenwashing is so everywhere with people making claims left, right, and center. We felt it's always important that we never say anything that we can't substantiate and we understand the steps that we're taking and how that affects the people that are buying our coffee and enjoying what we do and how we then take them on a journey so that that approach to developed understanding is really what sits behind really pretty much everything we do and that's internally as a business with the people that we have and work with um as well as the customers that we we have i love that so it's almost this ability to take from pulling the science into the coffee which i never thought i'd ever do but i am uh is it's almost pulling sorry that light's just gone off it's almost pulling the taking complex topics whether it's opticians or i'm not sure what steven was doing in science researching them and and going deep into that probably a bit like what you're doing with supply chain in guatemala columbia etc and then packaging that in a really simplistic way for people to understand and i think there's a lot of value in that for people listening to this because people can convolute their product in in the way of making themselves sound better or more um more kind of more switched on but actually the consumer doesn't care about this and or not that the consumers in care but it can make it really perplexing for for consumers i think the obvious one at the minute is this prebiotic probiotic like it's the consumer a lot of the consumers unless you're kind of a yogi from fulham are probably sat there thinking like what the fuck does that mean like it do you know i mean and i think there's a real lesson in how can you simplify this i was talking to talking to mark about this at course in the other day is they're very good at making it really simple what they do like we're just pressed it's super simple um and what made you want to be an optician like what was the path to that that's quite a yeah um well there's medics in the family um my father was a dentist I wasn't quite as academic my brother's a dental oral surgeon um but that that sort of academia wasn't my sort of full path um my great grandfather My grandfather was an optician and something from the history then called me.

9:20And, yeah, I ended up doing that. I enjoyed it for a number of years. And I was at the just when sort of contact lenses were getting big, I specialized in that sort of work and enjoyed it. Um, but it was the, it was how you explain things to people and, and, uh, make them feel relaxed and comfortable. Um, be able to receive information. That was what I enjoyed the most is the sort of the people side of it. I suppose there's a lot of crossover traits with leading people. How would you say you and Stephen approach brand building like scientists? Is that something you do? um i don't think we had a huge focus on brand building in the early days it took us quite a while to uh get to a position where i think what union stands for is is well presented um in our early days we were kind of like the people that you would meet on a on a sort of a bad date sort of we just we'd meet you and then just want to tell you absolutely everything and it was sort was sometimes a bit overwhelming.

10:37And we had to learn how to tell our story and how to present what we do, how to present union. People that we've come across sort of who worked with us over the years said that they rarely come across as a friend that's story rich. And that's a great thing, but it's also sometimes really difficult to know how to pick out what's important at any given time. And I think over the years, the thing that's always been the core driver of union has been the proposition, the supply chain proposition that we stand for, working equitably with the primary producers and then representing them through the supply chain to the consumer.

11:27And that has been such an intense part of our brand psyche that I think over the first few years, we were seen as very much sort of just a fair trade brand. And the quality side of what we were doing wasn't really coming out. we didn't really know how to present this unifying aspect of the quality and the the values we we've always said that you know the what stands behind us is that the simple question why should consumers have to make a value choice between uh buying coffee that really tastes amazing and something that actually behaves well and does good in the real world and you see examples of that all over and I go back to 2003 when we launched our first origin partnership with Rwanda we were the first people to launch Rwandan coffee as an unblended single origin speciality coffee we had some support from comic relief and we did a launch event we got the uh what was then the Great Lakes or parliamentary uh group in the Commons so we had a launch at the House of Parliament and the then International Development Secretary the amazing Claire Short uh stood up made a speech and of course she's a long-term supporter of trade justice issues and she stood up and said you know there's we were delighted when you could first buy fair trade Nicaraguan coffee but there's only so long you can drink it you know with a salute and one hand sort of covering your nose so you can't follow a brand you can't stay with something just because of a value set it's got to taste well good as well and that was the unifying factor with union we wanted we we made the promise to producers they we would buy their coffee at good prices, represent them well in the market, provided the quality was there, so that they were able to stand on their own two feet.

13:43If we went away or blew up or disappeared, it was important that once they'd got market access, they could access the market on the terms that the consumer would demand and understand. And to do that, we had to share knowledge back through the supply chain to them. So all of the elements of these sort of issues, as well as quality, were the elements that we had to present. And knowing how to balance those in the early days took us off down some cul-de-sacs, both in terms of brand design, pricing strategy, and, you know, just about every brand building mistake you could make. It'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 in this oh there's so and we have this issue with islands at the minute so i i i do consultancy for islands we have so many things we can talk about that are great like the supply chain like harry owns the bloody farm in saint vincent's like that's a massive there's there's a whole almost smorgs aboard of different value things we can talk about and we actually ironically our rebrand goes live tomorrow at lunch trade show and one of the things we've had is like how do we pick out of all these not even usps because i think that's a bit of a naff word but out of all these amazing things we're doing how do we how do we distill it down and make it simple and as you said you've got you've got all these rich glorious stories which we're going to get on to about how you're you know really helping these farmers and solving big actual issues but then you've got a delicious cup of coffee or coffee at the end of it when you said you went down some cul-de-sacs like what were some of those cul-de-sacs first and then second like is there any advice for founders who've or brand managers who've got a a buffet of options to pick from and how to pick the right the right message to land um well i think in the early days you know we didn't have the social media landscape that we do today so there were certainly online sales and web-based sort of contacts so with direct customers and then you had the sort of the grocery retail customers so i think a lot of brand owners you get into the space where you think well just because we're putting it all online everybody will understand what we're all about but there's a whole host of people that only encounter you and your image and your story through the pack uh that sits on shelf whether it's an independent retailer or in a grocery chain so how you present the brand there is vitally important and I think it as I said it it's the whole sum of look identity pricing which all has to add up in the consumer's mind so you know in the early days we made the mistake of really pretty much designing the packaging ourselves uh engaged a designer and then kind of told them what to do and that's you know just don't go there uh the reason you hire a design agency is to bring in other views and visions and other ways of answering the question just because the designer suggests something doesn't mean it's always the right thing and i think one thing we learned sort of later on is you can go so far with an agency, but if it doesn't feel right, you've got to then say, stop, take it somewhere else and put a fresh pair of eyes on it because you get so close to the whole vision of the brand through that creating process.

17:41It becomes hard to step back and make an honest critique. You've got almost too much invested in it. And I think there's probably a lot of people like myself who've been through this process and you then get to the final pack and it's delivered or you get the dummy pack made at a studio and you look at it and go hmm and there's that hint of disappointment between what was you know you were first presenter with is the sketches and the drawings and the concepts through to final execution and some of those can be budgetary limitations so some of those can be real world issues that are limitations of the physicality of what packaging has to do and how it has to protect and whatever.

18:27But you really have to take time through that process and make sure that what you're putting on the pack isn't just what you want to be there, but what people you think will pick up on and how that will then open up a window to engage them further. And as I said today with social media, people, I think more often than not, will pick you up, take you home, try you. If they like it, they're more likely to go online and dig in and understand. So, yeah, the first the first packages that we created were I remember we had a meeting with Sainsbury's when we first launched Union. and the buyer we knew uh through a contact really liked the coffee did the tasting but made the slightly deflating comment that the packaging oh the queue colors are sort of barbecue sauce it's like ah okay and then you look at the art the packaging fit the the coffee fixture and think yeah there's nothing else like that and you think sometimes that's a good thing but the buyers do know their customers as well and you know sometimes if the color queues are wrong or if the packaging cues are wrong people won't stop their eye won't stop on it as they scan so you do need to think carefully about what what feels right in your heart and what needs to be there in front of people hi there guys super super quick one um i write a weekly newsletter called hungry friday feast it goes live at 8am every friday i'm pouring my soul into this bad boy it's probably my favorite creative endeavor i've ever done i basically pick apart all the biggest lessons all the biggest learnings from all the wonderful guests and throw it into a feast or a newsletter we've got over a thousand two hundred subscribers come and join the party i'm going to put a link in the show notes it's right at the top subscribe and if you are already a subscriber please just forward it on to a friend do the amount of favor it would mean the world to me anyway back to the old episode boys and girls do you lead with taste and then the story second or like what is your your hierarchy of messaging in terms like your one two three because yeah like it's almost asking for a mate i mean it's a bit late because the island's rebrand's fucking going live tomorrow but but it's just it's just interesting what you what you led with because you have got this rich delta well i honestly think it's changed over the years you know there's no doubt in our early days nobody was talking about the origin story and the the kind of trade justice issues, aside from the fair trade organization and the number of products they had in market was still relatively limited.

21:13But in those days, yeah, we really majored on the value set and tried to incorporate sort of elements within the brand design that would signal those things. And I think we played that message loud. And I think to the detriment of the fact that the quality aspect didn't really come through, we led so heavily with that. People were tuned into that. And if they wanted quality coffee, because they didn't nervous as a brand, and perhaps they'd experienced sort of like social justice products or cause related products before, which had been a nice idea, but not necessarily always at the top of the quality scale.

21:59They didn't trust us to deliver the quality that they wanted. So we weren't there yet with that sort of getting that value choice opportunity across to people. So we changed the original design. So we launched in 2001 with the initial pack design. We evolved that over a few years by actually just stickering over the front with different labeling that had images of farmers, which dialed up that origin story stuff. But then by about 2006, other brands were starting to copy that style. And we thought we needed something that's much more our own. So we went back to the designers um and created a new a refreshed look that brought the name front and center and created some little kind of iconography around the brand little different icons for the different coffees that we had in the range um put these sort of mood words to them and simplified the pack made it a bolder color but simpler smarter um and i think the quality came through there but again then we lost some of the balance of the the the story behind it um so we you know that we'd swung the pendulum from being all about the cause to all about the quality and it wasn't really until another six or six years later uh at a point when steven and i realized that we were kind of ready to go to the next stage we'd grown up to about sort of nine, nine and a half million turnover by then.

23:45And we decided to bring in a senior team, marketing director, commercial director, to really help us bring these values together and tell the brand story better. And it was at that point, again, we went back. So we're now into our kind of third brand iteration in 20 years. And I think it's when we did that launch in 2015 that we kind of got it right and we managed to bring together the right cues with packaging material which moved back to a sort of more craft bag material um we put an elegant sort of box bottom around it to create stand up on the shelf and just to let it pop a little bit more um and put some other elements onto the bag which just just popped a little bit and gave it a bit more of a top end feel and got that look right and got the price point, I think, right, because we knew we'd always been wants to be aspirational, not way out, not pricing just for the top shelf and then some, but just pricing is an important part that says to people that, you know, this isn't the everyday, but it's still an affordable.

25:03It's a little bit extra than the mainstream market. and I think previously when things hadn't been going well the temptation was to just bring the price down bring the price down you know thinking that you'll get traction there but it's not necessarily the people that are going to come with you on that longer term journey so I think it was only when we did the final the that sort of relaunch again in 2015-16 that things started to come together. And by that point also, I think, you know, the communications landscape was different. You know, when we launched, yeah, you had web, you had Facebook, but that was for kids and keeping their social groups together.

25:49It wasn't a sort of a business comms sort of platform. Um, of course, now we've got sort of Twitter, Insta, TikTok, Facebook, and all of those different sort of media channels can allow you to tell parts of your story in different, different ways. So, you know, we might post a longer sort of article on Facebook or LinkedIn, um, but then keep sort of short sweet sort of just immediate things on instagram or or twitter so we much more able now to bring out the depth behind union and what we do through those different elements but it's knowing that we've got the core uh presentation of the brand more right the there's a quote i love by leonardo i think it's leonardo da vinci which is sophistication sorry simplicity is sophistication and i think people listening to this and i you know i think so many brands and we had this with islanders want to shove about a gazillion messages on the front of pack 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 and then we've got as you say a whole a whole loads of different tools of how to tell the kind of the supply chain story i want to like now hop in a hop in a time machine and uh obviously now coffee is ubiquitous coffee there's coffee chains everywhere people get tanked up on it from day till night it's it's in the uk but um in in doing research for this it kind of going back to the early 90s eight 80s 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 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 why do things take off?

28:25But I'd love to kind of get some context of the UK in, say, like 1986. Say you were to walk down the street in London. What did that look like in terms of getting a coffee? And what was the perception of a good cup of coffee then 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 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.

29:12And, 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 relatively quickly became the third place not work not home but somewhere else you go to socialize.

30:03And it was accessible for a woman at that stage to go into a bar during the day and sit down and meet a friend. 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. They, you know, 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 Stephen and I started after, you know, when we came back from our journey in the US, 94, you know, there was there was nothing.

30:53you 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 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 reigns southern 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 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.

32:53He'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 and 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 uh the guys that founded starbucks and peats they ended up when starbucks first started peats supplied the coffee to seattle in in to starbucks in seattle um 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 steven and i were in california starbucks started to come and open into the Bay Area.

35:39But you had people that were, and they called them Pete Nix, saying 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 well 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 boozer 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 the speciality 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 it's similar parallel to manchester i think they get the same number of rainy days 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 fraser 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 a willingness to sort of take an ex uh you know a relaxed way of exploring things and taking time with things and that's that's what was key with the coffee and the i mean one of the things that we saw is so So we would go out to the movies in an evening.

38:26We'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 then 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 I just thought this is different there's a different way of enjoying life and you know that was that was one part of it so you saw that sort of social setting of it but the other an important part was so the 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 driver then so sort of gene therapy and all the stuff that was sort of going on around that, that was Stephen's world.

39:46So that was what he was working in. But yeah, in Menlo Park. So we lived in a place called Palo Alto, which is now synonymous. Silicon Valley. Yeah, it's right at the heart of it.

40:02And Menlo Park was just up the street. And 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 would 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 part of sort of social interaction.

41:06And I'd never really been a 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 Pete's, 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 and i just found it a really interesting place to be hi guys super super quick one so so excited look for years i've been badgering on about hungary the podcast you're probably bored to death thanks for putting up with me but hungary is also an agency and we look after one amazing brand called islands chocolate we've had a great time over the year we've won listings at load of wholesalers we've got milk and more we've got our first grocery listing coming very soon which is very very sick but what i'm thrilled to announce is hungary's merging with hc consulting um my boy harry clark and his wonderful team he's an absolute g they do brand strategy new business business and account management but why i really love working with harry and why we've got on so well over the last couple of months is harry was actually the founder of the boozy isolate brand pops so he's been in the trenches he's grafted his face off he's had the sleepless nights he's had the turmoil he's had the triumph he knows what it is to be a founder he is a founder and he's got a proven track record in grocery and out of home holy moly dips the gut stuff savile drinks remio gelato so if you're a brand and you're you're stuck you're looking for like new business help you're looking to scale drop us a message we'd love to chat thank you so much back to the old episode i interviewed the fact you know popham's the bakery in islington i don't know i don't know what coffee they use but i interviewed ollie they've unbelievable pastries i mean they do like a bacon maple pastry if you like your food it's just i've never had anything like it they do like a victoria sponge in a croissant i'm thinking fucking hell like that's that's it's very very good but what we were talking about is is is as you said when you're working at pete's those three people from all different cultures are the the caffeine or the coffee i should say is pulling these people into this one thing and that's what we were talking about and and but then he said that the actually the people the baristas and the people who serve you in a coffee shop i really believe that they're the everyday superheroes genuinely like they have the ability to make someone who could be feeling a bit shit just to be like put them in a good mood like that it's a very something you don't think about but these small things across the world that are happening right now as we're speaking jeremy like could be making someone's day but equally if you're in a shit coffee shop it could be it could be pissing someone off um but i i completely agree with you this coffee is is this um is is this amazing thing and then we're gonna we're gonna explore that shortly like like what coffee means culturally because i think that's fascinating but what i'd love to get back to is this um this this business is fiction thing because what's what's mad is you know the weather and stop the wet uh the weather in seattle's isn't great right and that's where the coffee kind of starts the uk coffee scene's awful um what were the significant moments when you got back to the uk and you thought right this is i know you were in your kind of i think it was either yours or steven's mom's shed or something like that that you're in your mom's shed what was the moment you thought right this is going to be a movement this and what this is going to be like a big movement that's going to spread like what are the specific points on that part well we didn't really know i mean as this as i've said before you know there was no coffee landscape here in the uk um so during the time in the states you know we'd seen we'd seen not only peats but there were people that we'd come across making kind of life changers taking the the exit from the big corporate life and starting a little coffee store with a roasting machine and just doing their own thing and that's what attracted Stephen and I you know we could we realized through buying particular coffees and roasting them in certain ways almost like a winemaker we could end up that expressing our own personality and desire into the shape and flavor and taste of the coffee so we knew we wanted to roast so we create we thought initially well we'll do what they do in the u.s and get a shop and put a roaster in and yada yada came over back on a trip yep still nothing going on the high street right let's take this sort of i mean i'll call it an apprentice tv show grade cv uh business plan it was pretty poor really but we went and saw a bank manager who it was the bank that i'd been with as a student by then number of years and i thought well been with them a while they'll give us a listen went and saw the bank manager said we want to open a coffee store and he just looks and goes i don't get it i don't have no idea what you want to do and we tried to explain it and of course there was nothing he couldn't see it and he gave us the best piece of advice really and said look if you really want to do this nobody's going to rent you a unit a business shop premises you've got no track record no history if you're really serious try and get somewhere start a whole small wholesale business and if you're still here in a year come back and see me and let's see let's have another chat so yeah we went back over to america to continue we had a certain amount of time still to spend there we had steven was on a four-year contract so we had about 18 months to run we thought no we do want to do this and fortunate and fortunately where steven had grown up his parents uh right next to their house they had an old wooden workshop that had just about fallen down they'd had it sort were renovated.

47:18And it was vacant, a small barn workshop. And we said, well, look, can we take that space and set up a small business in there? And they said yes. And so when we were ready to come back from the US, we found a roasting machine, brought it, brought that over. I mean, we flogged everything that we had, literally car, flat. We ended up moving in with his parents for what was supposed to be six months it was two years um and started the put the roaster in the in the work in the wooden workshop and and started roasting in there and took us about six months before we'd sort of burnt enough coffee to really be sure we knew what we were doing and then started to go out and try and market and sell to what were then really the only places you could sell to were restaurants you know as i said there were no coffee shops so we just didn't know what we were going into um but we had that idea that this is something we were going to do together we had no idea whether it would just be a business that's tick over enough to earn a crust or it's something that we could um grow and develop there's so many people building brands right now who have that kind of uh that wanderlust for and curiosity for starting a movement and a big healthy dose of naivety which i've done hundreds hundreds well just over 100 these it's a common theme you need naivety if you knew how bloody hard it would be you wouldn't start but what what was your why like what was the why in yours and steven's soul that allows you to go back and you know work ridiculously long hours in a shed people your bank manager's telling you to make the same good like well this may not be a good idea what's what's the why like why were you doing this i think it comes from the point of view people say well you know i'd love to do this but my customer wouldn't understand you are your customer you're no different from anybody else out there one of the best adverts I ever saw one of the best billboard ads.

49:39I think it was done by Tom Tom, the sat nav company years ago. And they had this really brilliant billboard. It said, you're not stuck in traffic. You are traffic. And I think just stop pulling yourself out of that world and think you're the only one looking in on it. You're in there like everybody else. So I, you know, we would just keep coming back to why should we do it because we went to Pete's coffee that day and we stopped in our tracks and noticed the difference and we were also there at a time when yes the Silicon Valley thing was starting to happen and when I was working in the Pete's store we ended up we actually had quite a lot of Brits come in who had had the Bay Area experience and then the day before they'd fly home, they'd come in with a suitcase and buy 25 half pound bags of coffee that we'd pack up for them.

50:35They'd stick in a suitcase and bring home. So I thought, you know, if there's people out there that really want something that's better than that, then we can give it to them. We can do that. And you look at coffee and it's unfortunately for one of those industries that had never educated its customer base. You know, you look at the coffee fixture and even up until the last sort of maybe 10 years, you know, the pricing structure was flat. You had bog standard value, you had the supermarket own label, and then you had some of the branded coffee and they were all in a very narrow, low expectation space.

51:16And what we felt was that, you know, people don't need to be special. It is an affordable luxury. It's just that people have never had the opportunity to say, ah, actually, you know what? I do like this. I can make a conscious choice to buy something I really enjoy rather than just accept the default purchase off the shelf. So everything that we've tried to do over the years is to be to put something that's noticeably better in front of people. It doesn't need to be ground shakingly different. And And maybe we'll talk in a while about what happened when the speciality world exploded. And there were some really kind of odd trends.

52:00You know, I would liken it to the craft beer world. Suddenly sours came in and people said, oh, you've got to be drinking sours. And it's like, maybe, but I don't really enjoy sours. You know, don't tell me that's what I've got to be drinking every day because I'll end up going back to my default purchase. So it's, we knew what we had to do was give people something that they could identify as being better, more enjoyable. That's the reason to repurchase. So what we've always tried to do there is through the knowledge that there's got to be other people like us out there. You know, we're not that radically different.

52:38I love that. And that's kind of why I started this podcast is I used to work for a peanut butter business and I was feet on the street pounding the pavements. thinking oh a big part of it is i wish i could listen to these conversations whilst i was doing that it's kind of as simple as that because a lot of people would be like oh it's too niche there's a lot of food and drink brands in the world like there's going to be some people and now it has started to get momentum but but what would you say were not necessarily for your for your for union but what were some of the significant dominoes if you want to call it that the momentum dominoes that that dropped that made coffee begin to bubble in the zeitgeist in in the uk and people are right i'm no longer gonna get wankered in the pub i'm actually gonna have a cup of coffee and enter this third space do you know what i mean well i think timing had a huge amount to do with it as i said when when steven and i first started there weren't coffee chains to to to to lead the market with everything needs push and needs pull so you know i think as a brand owner you can push as hard as you like but if there isn't an opportunity for the pull to be created, then, you know, you're doing everything uphill.

53:50So we were very fortunate. And yeah, you know, we've been lucky in the sense that timing has worked for us in some ways. And seeing what was going on in the US, you know, food and drink trends, it's only a matter of time before things sort of crossed the Atlantic. So about six months after Stephen and I started roasting, we were getting traction with some great chefs, some of the leading London restaurants. Such as? The River Cafe. Amazing. They were one of our first clients. um we worked with uh the ivy the caprice as it was then before the later takeover um we also did um we were picked up by the then buyer at harvey nichols um so we got into the fifth floor at harvey nichols knightsbridge food hall which was like everybody used to talk about in london it's the harvey nicks food hall in new york it's dean and deluca that you want to get a listing in is just shows that you're you know quality new kids on the block um but also we got into having picked up onto the fifth floor we got taken into the restaurants as well so we ended up doing quite quickly all the coffee at the harvey nicks fifth floor the oxo tower and they were opening a couple war restaurants at the time.

55:27So that was growing big for us. But really, I suppose the key relationship was an American husband and wife who were living and working in London, who were from Seattle. The story goes that they missed the Starbucks experience of the US and asked Starbucks to come over to London and Starbucks said, nah, Brits don't drink coffee, go away. So they decided to open their own version of it. And it was a business called Seattle Coffee Company. And Scott and Ali, who were the founders, Scott and Ali Svensson, they started the first store in Covent Garden on Long Acre. And that was in the days when Stephen and I, We were roasting in the morning, packing and sending out some packs in the afternoon, but didn't really have a fully occupied day.

56:27And we were turned on the TV in the afternoon and there was a food lifestyle program on. And we saw on the screen this sort of picture of an espresso bar and latte, cappuccino and stuff that we were familiar with from the US. There was another American coffee story. And then the camera pulled back to outside and it was Longacre. con garden chip that's london it's happening and we literally 10 minutes later we were on a tube train going into london and we went in and knocked on the door and met the owners and said guys we are coming at this world from the same place as you they were using a local supplier we're like trafalgar blend and things like that and we said no you've got to do you've got to go the whole nine yards quality west coast style roasting da da da so they said well if you think you know what we should be doing bring us some ideas which we did and we created a a house espresso blend for them um a breakfast blend and an after dinner blend and we created the names around seattle districts and storied it for them and they liked it and we started to supply them when they had about three stores and this was mid this was like 99 middle to late 95 and very quickly they started to open another store and another store they did a fundraising to get to about 10 or 12 and they were going along they opened a place in corn hill in the city of london and they were moving along and then they opened one near liverpool street station and from the day it opened they were slammed and this place suddenly started to do volume like you'd never seen a coffee store do and we thought this is going to work and we started to work with them and i was so i was just going to say why do you think it was liverpool street is that because the city workers and high flyers realize that it's dynamite in terms of productivity and words they're having words spread very nice yeah i mean you yeah you know you had people like whether it was goldman sachs or some of the new york and wall street banks that were headquartered around there and these guys you know they lived on coffee in the u.s they came over here you bet word got around when there was something familiar that opened up and yeah just with the sheer footfall that liverpool street station near the exit delivered combination of that and a bit of aware local awareness amplified it and it started to work bohemi our beloved sponsor by helping build the fastest growing challenger food drink brands look if you're a small brand just starting out and you need your first indie stockist your first hundred stockist to wholesale boemi are the platform to categorically speed that up but if you're a big brand wanting to get bigger boemi are also insane they make field sales marble smooth silky slick they're just epic ollie's ollie's been on this podcast twice actually they saw a 29 uplift in sales when using boemi to check major malt listings availability insane 29 uplift by downloading an app insane lucky saying my boy Aaron Duff, who's come on this podcast in a couple of weeks, he uses it to manage a team of 30 people, and they've, like you say, have unlocked 500 draft listings by using Boeing.

1:00:06Look, you've got to get involved with this stuff. It's absolutely insane, and it will categorically change your life. It's just the sickest platform. I use it all the time at Ireland. There's this book by Seth Godin called This Is Marketing, and he talks about how movements and or stories spread. And he says, it's like, imagine you've got a drop of dye that's purple, and if you try and drop that in the ocean, nothing will happen but if you try and drop that that purple dye in a swimming pool it's the whole pool goes pink and this basically the story is it's like all these big ideas start super small whether it's one coffee shop in liverpool street but but it's getting that nucleus that white hot burning thing and then these ideas spread so yeah it's just i'm just i find it fascinating how you know we're interviewing this now and it's so ubiquitous you go to liverpool street i was there on the weekend actually and they've got a gazillion coffee shops all around spitterfields it's um it's mad what what i want to talk about now is is that seattle coffee company because they sold to to starbucks what were some of the principles did you learn from starbucks if i read that right did you did did you i may have read that wrong but there was a there was a period when seattle sold to starbucks were you around for that what did you learn there what what happened well i said you know timing and every business entrepreneur needs a bit of sort of foolhardiness naivety as you said and luck along the way um and the the timing we you know we we had to be quite patient early on because as you said the landscape the market wasn't really there but once seattle came along um the food and drink landscape also was evolving in the uk at that time you know people were starting to switch on to you know it was it was okay to enjoy food and drink and talk about flavor and the experience of that you know not be too english about it and sort of bound up yeah you know we had you know it but it took things like on the media things like ready steady cook tv programs and bbc food and drink and jilly gould and waxing on about you know wine and os clark and people like that just to say you know guys it's okay to talk about this and enjoy it so you had that that was going on so there was a cultural change around food and sensibility and then the pool which was places started to open that were easy to go into and enjoy and and coffee was the part that was just really easy to to adapt and incorporate into your daily life so um with seattle we we grew quite quickly from that 10 stores they then went and did a further fundraising round to go up to about 50 stores i think and it was during that period that was like 96 97 and at that time i think as a part of growing they realized that to be serious they needed a much closer tighter relationship with the roaster um and we were growing you know we got harvey nicks and we were also doing then the coffee for the chain called eat uh which was a kind of a similar to pret in the early days very quality driven um so we were we were actually growing we'd outgrown the wooden shed and needed to move into larger premises get a slightly bigger roasting machine so it made sense that we merged in with seattle coffee company we became part of their group um and that gave us a bit of growth capital and then 97 starbucks realized that the uk really had started to take off and they needed to either get here or or do something you know significant and they decided to acquire Seattle Coffee Company as their entry vehicle so we we'd merged with Seattle in 96 97 and then in 98 Starbucks acquired that group so we ended up working for Starbucks from 98 to 2000 so they effectively took over our roastery in London so we in fact became the first people to roast starbucks coffees outside of north america um and it was like the coca-cola recipe you know absolutely sworn to secrecy around the blends and all of that um but it was a fascinating time and we thought it would be really interesting to see you know, I think Starbucks in those days, they'd been the darling of the coffee industry as they'd started to scale and grow and then they achieve a certain size and people go, oh you can't really do all of that you know you can't really do that you know you can't you can't really do that.

1:05:11thinking they could never possibly do what we do. And in some ways that's true, but they can scale because of disciplines and an approach to systemizing things that can be of benefit to any business and any entrepreneur. So we figured it was worthwhile seeing what we could learn and see. And we had no idea where life was going, you know, still, but we were enjoying the journey. um so yeah we stayed on with starbucks after they acquired seattle and tours and mccatonia which was the original roasting company well i i i love what you said there jeremy and it's it's just a succinct but delicious phrase i think everyone should latch on to it's we had no idea where we were going but we were loving the journey and i think especially one of the the drawbacks of all this linkedin bullshit is that people think i need to be doing this in year three i need to be in this supermarket by year four and actually by having all these goals and these destinations you end up hating the journey and actually this whole thing of we had no idea where we're going but just enjoy the journey and i'm trying to do this with this business is like it's like just enjoy the conversation our conversation by now i'm absolutely really enjoying it but i don't think about the bigger picture like sometimes just be in the moment but then the other thing you said and i think this is true and i've been i'll be the first to say i've been on my high horse sort of lambasting corporate um but i think there are a lot of amazing insights what were some of the core systems or lessons do you learn from starbucks that you then and still use at union today i think it's about uh i suppose it's the rigor of process.

1:07:02So when we started Union, we knew that we had to grow it and achieve a certain scale to get for our vision for what we wanted to achieve. And you think, oh, well, you know, we're only little at the moment. There's no point putting in this system or that approach because it's just way more than we need. But everything that we did around the, what we call now union direct trade, which is our purchasing and supply chain philosophy, everything that we do around sort of quality management in-house, we work under the BRC, British Retail Consortium Global Food Standard. So it's a manufacturing and hygiene quality audit.