Africa grows some of the best coffee in the world. It rarely gets to decide what happens to it....
It started as Zimbabwean coffee. It still is.
The first name was the obvious one. Zimbabwe grows the coffee this started with, so the site should have said so — except zimcoffee.com was taken, and the shorter versions were complicated for other reasons.
So it became ZimKaffee. Swiss enough to work here, Zimbabwean enough to be honest about where it came from. Then ZiMM.coffee, which is where we've landed.
Three names for the same idea. The spelling changed. The reason didn't.
We opened one. Then we closed it.
For a while we ran a café. It seemed like the natural next step — if you care about coffee, you open a place and serve it.
It wasn't the right impact. A café changes what one street drinks. It doesn't change anything about what a farmer in Chipinge earns, which was the point of starting. And running it consumed the time and energy that could have gone into the part that mattered. So we closed it.
That's not a failure we're embarrassed about. It's how we worked out what this should actually be...and we've never looked back.
Two things, both upstream
We roast. For our own subscribers, and for other brands who want African coffee roasted properly under their own label.
And we source — bringing African specialty coffee into Switzerland and Europe, with the aim of shifting where the value in that chain ends up.
The subscription is the part you see. It's also how we plan: knowing there's a community waiting each month lets us buy in small, intentional batches from origins that wouldn't survive a forecast built around volume.
Some origin stories are complicated when it's your own origin
In the 2024/25 season, Zimbabwe's entire national coffee export earnings came to $902,311.
Not one estate. Not one cooperative. The whole country.
That's coffee from the Eastern Highlands — Chipinge, Vumba, Honde Valley — grown at altitude in red volcanic soil, in conditions specialty buyers pay premiums for elsewhere. It leaves at around $4.61 a kilo. By the time it reaches a European café it's worth ten, twenty, sometimes fifty times that.
Zimbabwe was at the table once. Before 2000 the Eastern Highlands had working estates, processing infrastructure and export relationships. Coffee doesn't survive disruption well — it takes four years from planting to first harvest, so when that infrastructure stopped, the industry didn't pause. It had to restart from nothing, years later, with different farmers and a global market that had moved on.
It's rebuilding now. The national road map targets 5,000 tonnes a year, up from around 350 tonnes exported today. That isn't a growth plan. It's a reconstruction project.
This is home. Which makes it harder to write about, and harder to leave alone.
Light enough to taste where it came from
Small batches, on an electric roaster — chosen for precision and for traceability from green bean to cup.
We roast light to medium. African coffees carry their character in acidity and fruit — Ethiopian florals, Kenyan blackcurrant, Rwandan red berry — and roasting dark burns that off and replaces it with the taste of roasting.
No filler. No commodity blends. Underrepresented origins, in quantities where the farmer and the flavour both still matter.
We roast in Switzerland, sometimes the Netherlands and if we are lucky and can get the numbers to work then at orgin so we are leaving as much value as possible.
Tee
Lynn
