TOM SOBEY, ORIGIN COFFEE
‘You need to brew coffee within 15 minutes of grinding it – otherwise you lose 65% of the aroma,’ says Tom Sobey, founder of Origin coffee in Cornwall. ‘And what’s the point in that? The smell is half the pleasure.’
Growing up in a family who ran a coffee franchise, he was, self-confessed, ‘rubbish’ at school – leaving with 1 GSCE. Taking a job driving his Dad’s coffee delivery van, he got interested – there weren’t many other options. But it was travelling in Australia in the late 90s, which really gave him the coffee bug. There, the culture was established and advanced. He returned having trained as a barista and announced he wanted to set up Cornwall’s first roastery. ‘I had a huge advantage at the time – I could make a really great cup of coffee. So when I turned up at sales meetings, whether to Rick Stein or Watergate Bay, all I had to do was make them a coffee to nail the sale.’ Origin Coffee was born.
Now they have two cafes in Cornwall, three in London and enough wholesale and direct customers to merit an education and training office in Bristol. But along with their multiple UK and World Cup-Tasting and Baristas prizes, it’s the recent ‘B’Corp award that means the most. ‘When we started trading directly with farmers, we visited them, got to know them, audited them for how they treated their working families, managed their waste water and began to create our own ethical standards for trading.’ Much aligned with the B Corp movement, they achieved their accreditation last year.
Ethics and flavour ticks all our boxes – we’ll be brewing Origin from day one.
