So This Is Coffee: Specialty coffee with its beauty on the inside

So This Is Coffee has had a beautiful rebrand, and they’re bringing you specialty coffee with its beauty on the inside. We caught up with Co-Founder Tim Wookey to find out how they’re making a go of it during a decidedly different year, and how it’s actually been a catalyst for progress.

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So, tell us about last year, and how you’ve kept going

Like many businesses we’ve been on an extraordinary roller coaster this year. Whilst the pandemic drove a truck through our core business plan, our team used the opportunity to build a stronger foundation for growth.

“Whilst the pandemic drove a truck through our core business plan, our team used the opportunity to build a stronger foundation for growth.”

<< Tim Wookey, So This Is Coffee >>

Let’s wind back to March last year and lockdown 1.0 when all our amamus B2B clients shut their doors. My wife Binny and I spent a couple of days wondering what to do, and then we realised it was a great time to fulfil our ambition for B Corp certification. To date we hadn’t been able to find the time to complete. Around 8 weeks later we were certified – a combination of luck, hard work and that we set up our business to be fundamentally ‘purpose led’. B Corp is growing as a progressive and respected movement and we’re proud to be helping drive it forward.

How did you pivot when things went sideways?

Friends, family and clients started to ask for us to deliver specialty coffee direct to their homes. So we willingly obliged. But this was a very different business model to our core B2B, so we had to upgrade everything including a new commercial Ditting grinder, commercial scales and converting a whole area of our home to packing and dispatch. Freshly roasted specialty coffee was being collected from our partner roasters daily.

We didn’t have the time to create a consumer brand, but despite growing sales, it turned out this was massively holding us back. Particularly when a radio DJ couldn’t pronounce the name of our business during an important piece of PR.

So it the Autumn of 2020 we assembled a brilliant team who helped us align our B Corp credentials with insights around the needs of the the at-home coffee drinker. We wanted to shine a light on the producers and their quality crops of coffee. It is our belief that people want to ‘upgrade’ from supermarket coffee, but despite the vast choice, it can be hard to find a coffee that balances superb taste with a genuine social and environmental conscience.

We love the packaging, especially the colourful labels. What’s the story behind this?

Our new pack design focuses on the beautiful aesthetic printed to coffee sacks from origin. On a recent visit to a vast coffee storage warehouse in Suffolk I fell in love with the sack designs – they all tell a story of provenance. We now screen print our design to a compostable bag using a local printer. We then apply the coffee information and roast date using manual ink stamps also produced locally, which creates a real connection between us and each pack we send out.

Our packs are earthy brown and black and we wanted to introduce some colour to showcase the bright, vibrant flavours in the coffee. We decided to create tasting cards that explain a little about why someone might want to choose that particular varietal. We looked at the country of origin flags and there were some awesome colours that would create some ‘pop’, but with reason. So all our colours are linked to countries flags.

Then our pack shots bring the flavour notes to life. We want to demonstrate that coffee needn’t taste of ‘standard coffee’. In fact terroir, climate and local production techniques develop delightful character. So in our photography we introduced ingredients to showcase what tasting notes might be discovered in the cup.

What makes your coffee so good?

We’ve massively accelerated our buying programme to ensure financial transparency with producers. I am sample roasting and cupping daily, in an effort to find exceptional coffees that have the appropriate taste, provenance and ethical credentials. We have some super exciting coffees in the pipeline and growth in the Specialty coffee market seems to be really powering forward. We believe our new brand will help reassure our customers that we are producer focused. We’re not snazzy or over-designed. But hopefully our packs will stand proud in kitchens, helping bring the focus back to what is actually really important in coffee.