Every May is Small business month in the USA. Here in the UK we just get the one day to celebrate small businesses, Small Business Saturday which takes place in December. This doesn’t seem right considering all of the benefits of small businesses to the UK. Alone we are small, but collectively small businesses are might, representing over half of the UK’s employment and turnover. So we’re going to post a few things about our and other small businesses over the next month, starting with this post about who we are and what we do.
The Roasting House is run by Adam & Kimberley. We started it back in 2011 with a tiny little Gene Cafe coffee roaster and some green coffee beans, mostly to fund our own coffee habit and to get the coffee we wanted to drink, i.e not the excessively dark roast that was most commonly available. After moving from London to Nottingham, we decided to launch our Coffee Club subscription to share different coffees from around the world, delivered only locally using bicycles. People seemed to like it and our little club grew.
Before Roasting House, Adam had previously run an ethical food and household goods shop called Gethical where coffee was the best selling item, and I had freelanced, doing copywriting and web admin; we both loved the idea of being self-employed and didn’t enjoy office life. We also launched, and eventually closed, Plastic Free Pantry, an online plastic-free food and household goods store.
We always come back to coffee because we love it so much. Every single coffee we roast is something we want to drink. We never choose cheap, bad beans just to cut costs because that’s not what we enjoy drinking. We like to know where our coffee has come from so we choose small lots from small farms which can be traced back to its origin. Adam likes smoother coffees whereas I prefer the wilder, fruitier flavours so we choose a range to keep us both happy.
We’re now based on the outskirts of Sheffield and have a slightly bigger (but still tiny) roaster, but we’re still happily and intentionally small and still doing as many of the local deliveries by bicycle as we can, although we’ve upgraded to an e-bike now to cope with the hills!
We hope you’ve enjoyed this very brief potted history of our small business. Stay tuned for more #SmallBusinessMonth posts coming this May. We’ll cover how we source our coffee, our zero waste to landfill approach, using bicycles in business and more!