Coffee firm makes refreshing move

By Gavin Walker
BBC Scotland

The economy may need a pick-me-up, but one small Edinburgh start-up company is still full of beans.

Artisan Roast has landed a deal to supply the Beanscene chain

The independent coffee roaster Artisan Roast has landed the deal to supply the recently taken-over Scottish coffee and music chain Beanscene.

For a small business it is a tall order - 300kg of coffee a week, which means some 1.5 million cups of coffee a year.

Part-owner Gustavo Pardo knows it's a risk to expand the business in the current financial climate, but he also recognises that it was too good an opportunity to pass up.

He said: "We are getting a new roaster [machine], we are getting a new place where the roaster is going to be based, and we also need more people working with us on the roasting side as well as preparing coffee and training, because we have to train a lot of people.

"When you have such an interesting customer in front of you, you can't say no. You have to do what you have to do to make sure that you can supply, and that's what we're doing."

We're delivering about 35kg of coffee at a go and doing several deliveries a day Michael Wilson

For Mr Pardo - a Chilean - and his business partner, Kiwi Michael Wilson, the deal means a lot of extra work.

They roast manually, rather than using a computer or timer, batch by five kilo batch, so it's little wonder they're having to expand.

And it's not just the coffee roasting in need of a revision of scale. At the moment the vast majority of beans are delivered by pushbike, bringing a whole new meaning to the phrase "business cycle".

It is 20 to 40 kilos at a time across Glasgow and Edinburgh and Mr Wilson is currently fulfilling the role of coffee mule.

'Our business'

He said: "We're delivering about 35kg of coffee at a go and doing several deliveries a day, and I'm really hoping that at sometime in the future we might be able to get a car.

"Coffee is our business - delivery is somebody else's, hopefully, in the future."

The coffee deal is a bold one for Artisan Roast in the prevailing business climate.

ARTISAN ROAST Owners Gustavo Pardo and Michael Wilson Handles 430kg of coffee per week Responsible for some 1.5 million cups of coffee per year Delivers - by pushbike - 35kg of coffee in one go

It's something of a risk too for Beanscene, but the owner Fiona Hamilton believes such risks are necessary for business success, regardless of the economic climate.

She said: "This decision wasn't taken lightly. It was a huge decision for us to make, and both companies laboured over whether we could actually do it."

"We've discussed how we're going to grow together. They absolutely convinced us that they were ready to do it."

She also said, despite the gloomy economic predictions, that Beanscene's sales were up on the same period last year.

"We're not going to all stop treating ourselves to a coffee, we're not going to stop treating ourselves to a wee glass of wine. Our sales - compared to this time last year - are slightly up," added Ms Hamilton.

It is not an enormous deal in financial terms, and it is unlikely to even register on the broader economy, but it shows business is still being done.

The conventional wisdom still suggests that companies which make the right investments need not necessarily take a financial roasting.