What happened to the café?

People haven't stopped asking

"What happened to the café?"

"When are you opening a new location?"

"There isn't a place for them anymore in Zurich."

They come up every few weeks, from people who came in regularly and from people who only heard about it afterwards. I've given the short answer dozens of times and it has never once been satisfying, because the short answer sounds like something went wrong.

Nothing went wrong. Something changed. That takes longer to say.

It started with 20kg in a suitcase

I brought a 20kg bag of coffee back from Zimbabwe in a suitcase, before the world shut down for covid.

I'd been surprised to find out Zimbabwe produced coffee at all. I wanted a few people to be able to buy something Zimbabwean and pay for it with Twint. That was the entire plan.

Everything since has been some version of that same question: how do you get Zimbabwean coffee in front of people who will pay what it's worth, and get more of that money back to where it grew?

It seemed like the obvious next step

If you care about coffee, you open a place and serve it. That's the path everyone points you down, and there's a good reason for it — a café is the only part of this industry where you get to watch someone taste what you chose.

What I didn't expect was the surprise. Zimbabwe isn't on anyone's list — it doesn't appear on specialty menus, it doesn't come up when people talk about African coffee. Watching someone taste it for the first time and quietly revise what they thought they knew never got old.

Some of them came back. There were people who flew in from the Middle East and returned across different summers, to drink coffee from a country most roasters skip — which, given the quality of what's available in their own backyard, I still can't entirely explain.

"This place has such a nice and casual vibe simple, cozy, and perfect for coffee lovers. I tried their V60, and it was excellent: smooth, well-balanced, and full of rich aroma. Definitely a spot worth stopping by if you enjoy a calm atmosphere and a perfectly brewed cup."

Yousef — Google review

It worked, in the way cafés work. People came. The coffee was good. People still stop me about it, which tells you something.

A café changes what one street drinks

It doesn't change what a farmer in Chipinge earns. And that was the point of starting.

That sounds like a tidy line written afterwards. It wasn't tidy at the time. It arrived slowly, over months, as the gap between what I was spending my days on and what I'd carried that suitcase home for got harder to ignore.

A café consumes everything. The hours, the attention, the energy that could have gone into sourcing, into relationships at origin, into the part that actually moves money back up the chain. There's a version of this where you keep both going, however that version wasn't one I liked for me or my family.

So I closed it.

Why upstream matters more than a counter

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. Less than a mid-sized specialty roaster in London turns over in a month — for coffee grown in the Eastern Highlands, at altitudes and in soils that command premiums everywhere else in the world.

You can serve that coffee beautifully in Zurich and the number doesn't move. It moves when the decisions move: who sources, who roasts, who does the value-adding, and which side of the equator that happens on.

Read the full Zimbabwe piece →

We roast coffee. A lot of it.

If you sell coffee under your own name — a café, an office, a shop, a subscription — we roast it for you. Small batches on the electric roaster, or full production runs on the bigger machines.

From 15kg a roast to 1,000kg completed 24 hrs later. That range is deliberate. Most contract roasters won't take your call below a pallet, which is exactly the barrier that stops small brands ever starting. We'll roast one kilo if you ask us nicely :).

All types of coffee, not only the origins we sell ourselves. And we'll handle bagging and labelling if you'd rather not.

Lead time is roughly two weeks, counted from the point the order is confirmed and everything it needs is with us — green coffee, bags, labels. We'll tell you if anything looks likely to slip before you commit.

The same machines roast for our own subscribers — which is where the African coffee, and the reason for all of this, goes.

A different African origin every month

The subscription is the part most people see. It's also how we plan.

Knowing there's a community waiting each month lets us buy in small, intentional batches — including from origins that would never survive a forecast built around volume. Zimbabwe is one of those. So is most of what we send.

No filler, no commodity blends, and never the same bag twelve times.

No. Definitely not another full-service café anyways.

That decision is made, and most of this page is why.

What might happen is smaller. An espresso window, open a few hours, one or two days a week. A pick-up point for subscribers who'd rather collect than wait on the post.

That's the part of a café worth keeping — putting the coffee in someone's hand and talking about it — without the part that consumed everything else.

Anything more than that pulls attention back off what actually matters: the subscription community, and making a visible, measurable difference to where African coffee ends up.