OUR STORY
THE STORY BEGAN
It started in 2009, in our home town of Axminster, East Devon. After travelling Australia — as all aspiring coffee roasters seem to — our passion for great coffee took root, and we came home determined to share it.
Back then, the UK was only just waking up to specialty coffee. We opened a coffee bar in Axminster, but couldn't find a roaster we trusted to supply us with the quality of beans we wanted to serve. So we did what any obsessive coffee couple would do: we started roasting our own.
That decision changed everything. What began as a small operation to keep our own coffee bar supplied grew into something much bigger. As demand spread by word of mouth, we moved premises three times to keep up with the growth. Today, The Coffee Factory roastery sits deep in the countryside on the Devon-Dorset border — a working roastery surrounded by fields, where every batch is roasted, rested, packed and sent out by the same small team who started it.
Meet Danny and Justine
The Coffee Factory has always been us — Danny and Justine. We founded the company together in 2009, and seventeen years later we still run it day-to-day from our Devon roastery.
Danny is our Head Roaster. He's spent years studying the craft of small-batch roasting, from green bean evaluation through to roast curve development, and he lights up Dorothy the Probat every single roasting day. If you've ever ordered from us, the coffee in your cup was almost certainly roasted by him.
Justine runs the operational side of the business — sourcing, customer relationships, our trade wholesale accounts, and the small team that supports us. She's the reason every order goes out on time and every customer hears back when they get in touch.
We're a husband-and-wife business, and that shapes how we do things. We answer our own emails. We taste every coffee before it leaves the roastery. And we make decisions based on what we'd want to drink and what we'd be proud to send out — not on what's quickest or cheapest..
How We Source Our Coffee
We know exactly where our coffee comes from and who grew it. We're passionate about sharing those stories — celebrating the provenance of each coffee, the regions it came from, and the people whose hard work made it taste so good.
We aim for 100% traceability across our range. We work directly with a small group of ethically-minded importers who audit the farms we source from, ensuring growers receive a premium well above the cost of production. That premium is what lets farmers care properly for their workers, their families, and the land around them.
Like all fruit, coffee is seasonal — and that's reflected in our offerings throughout the year. As one harvest ends in Ethiopia, another is starting in Colombia or Brazil. Our menu changes with the seasons because we want you drinking each coffee when it's at its peak, not six months after it's lost its character.
We taste every coffee weekly to make sure each one is still drinking the way it did the day it arrived at the roastery. Freshness isn't a marketing word here — it's the rule we live by.
Dorothy and Penny — Our Vintage Probat Roasters
At the heart of The Coffee Factory are two vintage Probat roasters: Dorothy and Penny.
Dorothy is a 22kg 1950s Probat UG roaster — the original workhorse of the roastery and, frankly, the personality of the place. Probat is the gold standard in coffee roasting machinery, and the UG series is legendary for producing roasts of unmatched depth and character. Modern roasters are faster and more automated, but they don't roast like Dorothy does. She came to us needing serious love and was carefully restored, with modern additions — temperature probes, roast logging software, airflow refinements — so that we roast with the consistency a specialty roastery demands while still drawing out the character only a vintage drum can give you.
Penny is a 1960 Probat LG12, and she's named after Danny's primary school teacher — the teacher who recognised his severe dyslexia at a time when many wouldn't have, and whose patience and belief made a real difference. Naming a roaster after her felt like the right kind of tribute: something permanent, something working hard every day, something that produces something good. Danny is severely dyslexic, and it felt important to honour that part of his story rather than hide it. Penny gets fired up alongside Dorothy every roasting day, and between the two of them they produce every bag of coffee that leaves this roastery.
We roast in small batches, every week. Web orders are dispatched throughout the week so the coffee that lands on your doormat was almost always roasted in the last few days. Coffee is at its absolute best within 21 days of roasting — and the difference between truly fresh coffee and supermarket coffee sitting on shelves for months is staggering. That freshness is the whole reason we exist.
Awards and Recognition
Our Commitment to the Planet
