What type of coffee company is JustFreshRoasted ?

Date Posted:2 June 2018 

What type of coffee company is JustFreshRoasted ?


When you look at our website, and indeed the sites of many other coffee sellers in Australia, there is no real sense of the size or scale for the business you are dealing with.

Making it even more difficult is that JustFreshRoasted has never been seen in a supermarket shelf or a cafe - so how do you trust a brand you have not tried ?

Well, there are some good reasons why we don't appear in supermarkets or cafes...........please allow us to explain below.

Are we a cafe supplier ? a supermarket supplier ? or a contract roasting operation ?

Well, none of the above actually - we started more than a decade ago as a dedicated online provider of premium grade fresh roasted coffees with a focus on delicious single origins for the Australian and New Zealand markets and our parent company has since grown into the largest specialised supplier of quality online coffees to the Australian home and office markets.

We recognized long ago that to compete in a tough coffee market, we had to offer more for less. That is, give the customer higher quality products and superior freshness for a lower price - call it a basic set of values.

Over our company history, we have never wanted or needed to engage with supermarkets or retail outlets. Unfortunately, despite all the useful information available about managing the freshness of coffee products, supermarkets (that are really only interested in screwing down price and never about quality) and retail outlets continue to have no idea whatsoever about how to treat roasted coffee as a fresh food, or simply ignoring common sense for their own profitable reasons - so they persist in keeping products on shelves until they sell.

That does nothing but destroy a brand's reputation. If you bust your butt creating a great product and then have it's ruined by the middle-man, then it's pretty damn disappointing.

The only smart way to retail roasted coffee is to have the product freshly roasted daily, just like a baker with bread and ship directly to the customer so they can enjoy the coffee at it's peak - cut out the lazy or ignorant middle-man.  It's exactly what we have been doing for a long time - selling direct to customers and JustFreshRoasted is just a natural extension of that philosophy.

As to why you don't see JustFreshRoasted in cafes - well, there's also many good reasons and we have no doubt our views will anger or annoy some cafe owners.

Cafe supply is a mugs game we refuse to play.

Cafe owners are spoilt for choice with coffee company reps hitting them up almost every day. With such abundance, cafe owners can easily manipulate terms with suppliers by demanding unrealistic upfront incentives before the agreement of supply is granted.

Often after substantial investments by the coffee supplier (time and capital outley), the cafe is sold and the new owners have their own brand preferences or need to be "loved", hence another round of investments. The cycle is endless and rather unsustainable.

In theory, investing in a cafe's business - which is what cafes owners are essentially asking their coffee suppliers to do - would be relatively simple and make sense except for a few important points - cafes and restaurants are terrible paying their bills and loyalty is essentially rock-bottom - many cafe owners think nothing of hustling for a better deal if the opportunity arises and accepting lots of free sample coffees from other companies to run through their existing supplier's equipment.

We have been around cafes for 39 years and it's not the pinnacle or peak of coffee quality so often promoted. Sure, great cafes that execute well are deserving in their success, but the reality is there are too many mediocre outlets out there that use their coffee supplier as a free credit provider. All the upfront or ongoing incentives offered to the cafe need to be funded from somewhere, so there you have a key constraint on sourcing the best available ingredients - it's generally not possible as the deal metrics are skewed towards low cost, hence the shopping list of great and expensive coffees is limited.

Cafe supply can at times be hospitality at it's worst - we spent a decade slogging it out in cafe supply only to realize this is totally crazy  - the odds are heavily stacked against us!

Hospitality is a difficult industry with cafes unwilling to pay their bills despite generous terms and in most cases investment of time and capital to win the supply deal. Credit management remains a critical factor in cafe supply and in these modern times, if a business won't pay it's bills, it deserves to fail. With escalating rents and labour shortages, excessive competition from too many cafes in areas without sufficient patron numbers, as a segment cafe supply is only going to become more difficult.

JustFreshRoasted is a brand that sits alongside brands in our parent company portfolio - JustFreshRoasted is a niche offering designed to be nimble and innovative, which, after all, is exactly what the internet is all about.

Whilst it's not appropriate for us to disclose our production volumes publicly, however to give you a sense of comfort, we estimate our position in the total Australian coffee market sits somewhere between the top 5% and top 10% in terms of overall size and capacity.

In other words we are a relatively large coffee company trading in the Australian market. That's including companies operating in all roasted coffee segments within Australia - supermarket, private label, cafes, etc, not just the online sales segment.

The Australian coffee roasting industry is now huge (in terms of supplier numbers) and fragmented with 1,400 brands of coffees being sold. A big portion of those brands are relatively new entrants, e.g. micro-roasters that produce small volumes.

Put into context, when we started there were literally just 240 brands in the market and many of those were imported. The number of imported brands has shrunk, but the number of local brands has exploded. We have been around before the rise specialty coffee and we have ridden the waves of specialty coffee evolution.

Our roasting infrastructure is industrial grade which positions us into the large coffee roaster segment. Our systems are modern and best in class for specialty coffee - we strategically update our platforms every 2 years compared to the industry norm keeping their systems on average for more than a decade. Our most recent investment was a significant plant addition in April 2018.

We have progressed from shop roasters to medium scale up to the most advanced industrial coffee roasting systems available in the world - Brambati's latest generation of full-automated BR series. Our coffee roasting platforms are indeed state of the art and nothing comes close to matching our flexibility, precision and consistency.

Our Melbourne facilities are rated as some of the best available within Australia - a fully controlled environment to effectively manage the wide spectrum of variables during the production of roasted coffee.  

These are significant investments in quality and scale - we operate full lab, R &D, and quality systems.

We have also won more than 30 medals at Australia's most competitive coffee roasting events, numerous gold medals and event champions, but we don't use the tired, old "award winning coffee" tagline to market our products.

Shop with confidence - your coffee is expertly roasted by one of Australia's best coffee roasters on arguably Australia's best coffee roasting infrastructure.