‘The Roast’ is a short set of questions that the NZ Roaster Guild put together to profile members. Wendy Simpson owns and runs Global Coffee, find out more about her and her family-run business…
What is your earliest coffee related experience?
Growing up as a child in the 70s we always had percolated coffee brewing in the mornings, my mother would buy coffee beans from the supermarket and get them freshly ground, so the aroma of coffee was always in our house.
When / why did you first get working in coffee? What led you to becoming a roaster?
I had been working in the sales/customer service area of the soft furnishings industry for many years and needed a change so two years ago when an opportunity came up to buy a home based coffee roastary that was internet based, had flexible hours along with a good customer base and with lots of scope to improve and grow the business, I decided it was exactly the challenge I was looking for.
What do you roast on, anything unique about your set up?
We specialise in roasting for the individual coffee connoisseur so we use a small Hans Garanti roaster which means we can roast each customers orders to their specific requirements and as we only roast to order our customers get the benefit of fresh coffee roasted just for them and delivered direct to their door.
What do you find most rewarding about roasting?
Roasting coffee is a continual learning curve and it seems that customers are very fussy (like us) as to just how their coffee should taste so the most rewarding part of roasting is when you get feedback from a satisfied customer that the coffee you sent them was the best coffee they’ve ever had!
Talk us through a typical work day
We typically roast 4 times a week, as we do not have a retail shop all of our orders come through the website or phone, we also sell green beans to home roasters. All of our roasting, packaging,dispatch and admin are all done in the one space.
What are your roles outside of roasting?
Having done everything myself in the past Global Coffee is now a family business with my daughter Meagan coming on board. Meagan is also trained in roasting, she also manages the social media side of the business and helps with invoicing and anything else that needs doing and my partner Stewart is chief engineer and looks after the servicing of the equipment.
Have you visited Origin? Any interesting harvest trip experiences or story? or which origin would you most like to visit and why?
The origin I would most like to visit is in Ethiopia, It was really inspiring hearing Tadesse Meskela speak last year about the Oromia union and as my favourite origin coffee is Sidamo it would be amazing to see the coffee farms around there.