James Gourmet Coffee

James Gourmet Coffee has been delivering premium coffee from around the world directly to its customers since 1999, but relocated to Ross-on-Wye around five years ago. ‘We had four of us trading out of a 550ft square shed,' says director Peter James. ‘We just needed some elbow room.'

The change of scene allowed the company to invest and give the business a fresh lease of life. ‘When we moved to Ross we brought in some roasters from the states and put more money in, and we did see an increase in business,' he says. ‘We were quite pioneering - there were very few micro roasters in the country doing what we were doing at the time, so there was an instant demand.'

The business now has six staff and a nationwide client base. It supplies coffee to shops and restaurants in and around Ross, and customers can also pick up their coffee in person if they prefer. ‘If people want to buy coffee for home there's the website but they can also call in if they want to pick up their coffee without having to pay postage. We do some local deliveries ourselves but most of what we do is courier based - especially if we're sending coffee to Inverness or somewhere like that.'

The website is handily arranged according to taste - ‘light, easy drinking', ‘fruity and flavoursome', ‘gutsy and roasty' - as well as by region. ‘That's what we're about, rather than arranging it by price,' he says. ‘If people are at home looking for coffee they're not that bothered about where it's from, they just want a good product.'

So is there anything particularly unusual on sale? ‘Well, we have the entire crop of Pitcairn Island coffee,' he says. ‘One of our customers introduced us to the woman who was growing it - the whole crop was in the region of about 3 or 4 kilos and we paid £100 a kilo for it. The reason we paid over the odds was because we wanted to encourage her to keep going, and also use it as a vehicle to put her in touch with the people who deal in micro island coffee - so hopefully in the future she'll have a reason to grow more coffee. A business is a vehicle - I may be a little naïve on that score, but I'm not just driven by money. I want to have the best possible coffee that we can, that's ethically sustainable.'

While passionately committed to the ethical and sustainability agendas, James Gourmet Coffee doesn't use ‘fair trade' badges on its products. ‘They're for the media - for corporations to have a stamp,' he says. ‘The biggest irony is when the big chains say all their coffee is fair trade, because they're always going to use more than is produced as fair trade on the planet, and ‘fair trade' is very often the minimum common denominator anyway - ‘I'm going to pay you what it costs to produce your coffee, no more', which for me is not sustainable. That or planting trees among coffee plants so they can call it ‘rain forest friendly.' People are taken in by it - a little bit of misinformation goes a long way.'

Alongside the coffee, tea and chocolate, the company also sells grinders and coffee makers. ‘We only sell the ones that we like and we use. On that basis we don't sell many coffee machines for home because most aren't good enough for what people pay - we try and sell things that you don't find everywhere. We sell AeroPress, Eva Solo and some interesting cafetieres - not just ‘here's another cafetiere that you can buy in your local DIY store.'

www.jamesgourmetcoffee.com