IT’S too busy,” complains Mark Dundon the co-owner of Seven Seeds, a Melbourne-based specialty coffee roaster and cafe, which opened earlier this year. Customers are queuing and sitting around waiting for specialty espressos, and lattes and other newfangled brews.
He’s not the only specialty coffee operator facing a boom in trade and a shortage of good baristas.
People are replacing eating out in restaurants with coffee, and starting to look at the origins and treatments of coffee beans. That’s what Dundon and other specialty roasters and cafes offer: a quality, fairer than Fair Trade beverage, with food for less than $20.
Welcome to the world of the third-generation of niche Australian roasters, for which the bean is not a commodity business based on volume sales but something precious, sourced directly from Third World farmers in small batches and treated with respect.
Dundon, who also founded the cult roaster and cafe St Ali in 2005, predicts an explosion of growth in the specialty coffee scene over the next year.
Salvatore Malatesta, who bought St Ali from Dundon in 2008, puts the attraction of coffee down to the fact that many people need their regular morning hit of caffeine.
“Coffee is recession-proof,” Malatesta says. “First of all because it’s a drug, coffee is one of those affordable luxuries that people are always going to spend money on.
“Especially in London, there has been a move from pubs to cafes,” he says. “If I was crystal-ball-gazing, in five or 10 years specialty coffee will be mainstream and people will be talking specialty coffee with the same knowledge that they have about wine.”
Malatesta has put his money where his mouth is.
He has set a course for expansion of outlets in Melbourne, Sydney, London, Tokyo and New York.
Plans include a second-string brand opening soon in David Jones, with 25m of street frontage on Melbourne’s Little Bourke Street.
With his financial muscle he is also aiming to educate the Australian coffee palate away from bitter roasts to the delicate flavours of small batch roast beans using a new generation of equipment, including all manner of coffee-making devices.
Since taking over St Ali 18 months ago, Malatesta says, it has grown by more than 120 per cent. “We’ve doubled the business in a recession.”
At Mecca Espresso, which roasts in Chippendale and has two cafes in the Sydney CBD, the story is similar. Owner Paul Geshos says Mecca’s biggest growth spurt in four and a half years in business, was in the past 12 months.
Meanwhile, sales of small-batch coffee roasters are going through the roof, with specialty roasters cropping up across the country, Melbourne being the epicentre.
Peter Frangoulis of Dukes Coffee Roasters on Melbourne’s Chapel Street is a recent addition to the scene with a busy attached cafe.
He established as a roaster because he was not satisfied with even the specialty blends available and recognised the role good coffee played during the drudgery of a working day.
“Many people who drink coffee work in an office crave something that is made well, and interesting.” The likes of Dundon, Malatesta, Frangoulis and Geshos see growth in consumer awareness for Fair Trade, but they are not focused on Fair Trade beans, for which only a small premium over commodity prices is paid to farmers.
“Fair Trade for us is attached to the commodity market,” Geshos says. “We don’t buy commodity beans. We look to sourcing coffee direct from the farm.
“With that we are able to source quality that is exceptional and reward the farmer with a very good price for their efforts. In most cases it is more than double (sometimes 10 times) the Fair Trade price,” Geshos says.
Like many of his generation of roasters he travels to meet the farmers, and works with them to improve the product. St Ali’s Malatesta is taking it one step further, with plans to finance fermenting bins for coffee farmers, which cost about $10,000.
Malatesta’s idea is to work with the growers to improve the characteristics of the final beans used in the roast, as a winemaker works with a viticulturist. “The only way to know it is to grow it,” he says.