The Roastery
The story so far...
Origin Coffee started with no roaster, no roastery and no coffee. It was simply a dream. In 1999 Tom Sobey came back from travelling Australia with a vision of bringing the UK coffee culture in line with that of our cousins' down under.
In the beginning - 2004 - we found a large roaster to roast coffee we chose from a selection they had. We created blends from that same selection and we were proud of our products. But the dream didn't end there.
From the very beginning Tom wanted Origin to roast its own specialist coffee and to source, buy and import its own top-notch beans from farms we could whole heartedly say were grown in great conditions from farms we are proud to work with directly.
By 2006 Origin had become a brand which people could trust, a brand they could rely on and a brand that stood out for quality. But we still didn't roast our own coffee.
After establishing ourselves in this highly competitive, exciting and ever-changing industry we decided to take our first baby steps into the world of coffee roasting.
We were still a small company. In fact, we still are. So when we began we had a miniature budget for a roaster. There was no big shiny brand new machine on order and no home for the piece of kit which was about to mark the beginning of Origin Coffee Roasters as we are now.
After much searching we found a beautiful, albeit well-used, Diedrick which we installed in 2008 into a small and basic unit in Helston, just a few miles from our offices in Constantine.
And so we started playing, trying to roast blends we could honestly say exceeded the quality and taste of our existing products. Every day we learned something new. We still do. Our first attempts were by no means perfect, sometimes we failed miserably. Eventually though, we got there.
That year we began supplying a few customers with our then branded 'Roasted in Cornwall' range, tentatively we had entered the world of commercial coffee roasting. We started with around five tons in that first year. Our total output was 50 tons.
Year-on-year our roaster worked harder and harder and so did we. It paid off. In 2010 we bought our shiny brand-new roaster - our pride and joy, the Loring SmartRoast. It was a massive investment which signaled a massive change in direction for Origin. The world's first environmentally friendly coffee roaster, our SmartRoast uses 80% less energy than any other roaster on the market and had next to no emissions. We love it. Not just because it fits in to our ethos perfectly, but because it roasts beautifully.
In 2011 our roaster is roasting 20 times more coffee than what we started off with and we're pretty happy with that. We've moved in to a brand new building in Helston, we're a team of 17 people, and we're not yet full grown. We have direct relationships with farms we buy from and everything we sell we are 100% proud of. We still learn something new everyday. We love that. We hope you do too.
