Coffee Collective on Creating New Industry Standards
Coffee Collective on Creating New Industry Standards
Coffee Collective is building a better world through coffee. We talk about their philosophy and how their business model takes care of their suppliers, employees, and customers.
Klaus Thomsen is one of the Founders of Coffee Collective. For nearly, 15 years they have been pushing the coffee industry to do business differently. Their goal is to explore and unfold exceptional coffee experiences in a manner that gives better living conditions to coffee farmers across the globe.
In this episode, we discuss their many initiatives from transparently sharing what they pay for coffee, creating the first union in Denmark for baristas, and going carbon neutral by 2022.
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Episode Transcript
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 3:17
So, I would love to start with the founding story of how Coffee Collective got off the ground.
Klaus Thomsen, Coffee Collective 3:24
Yeah. Well, we started back in 2007 and we were three, at that time, young baristas. We had been baristas for a number of years and at this point in our career, we'd actually moved in different directions. So, I was responsible for a coffee shop. Our partner, Peter DuPont, was responsible for roastery, and the third guy, Casper, was in England doing wholesale operations. And we started out actually working together in another company and realized that there was a lot of stuff we felt we could do better. And that's always a good steppingstone for doing your own thing. So, we got off the ground back then. I had won the World Barista Championship the year before, and that also created some opportunities for talking about coffee and traveling the world learning about coffee and bringing some of those experiences back to Denmark where we could see the coffee market was still in a very early stage and there wasn't really a lot of things going on at that point. So, we thought, “Well, we got to do it ourselves.”
Analisa Winther, Nordic FoodTech Podcast Host 4:39
What was it back then that you thought you could do better?