2024: The Year Wrapped Up

We roasted and shared beautiful coffees.

This year, we shared over 70 unique and delicious coffees from Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Ethiopia, Kenya and Rwanda. Most of these coffees were grown and processed by dedicated and quality-focused producers who we’ve been working with for many years. Others came from talented producers we were introduced to while travelling and tasting coffees. We fell in love with these stand-out lots on the cupping table and were excited to introduce them to our customers, and we hope to continue featuring them for years to come.

For every coffee we purchased and shared, we made a contribution to World Coffee Research (WCR) via their Check Off Program. WCR is an important organisation that uses advanced science to combat and mitigate the impact of climate change on the coffee supply chain. We also contributed data to the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, which aims to create new pricing benchmarks for specialty coffee, moving away from the commodity market towards a more relevant, equitable and transparent model. 

We renovated our 1st shop, and opened our 10th!

In May, we reopened the doors to our first ever shop at the Prahran Market and welcomed customers back into the lovely renovated space – updated with the wonderful design team at Studio Goss. In a nod to our roots, we reinstalled the original 5kg Probat roaster in the nook under the stairs, we began to offer our weekly cuppings (tastings) again, and we even put a baguette with Annie Smithers’ incredible jam back on the menu, just as it was when we first opened 15 years ago.

In December, we opened our tenth Market Lane shop – in the iconic art deco Mitchell House building in the heart of the CBD on Wurrundjeri Woi Wurrung country. For the design of this shop, we partnered with the brilliant Sarah Trotter of AOA Christopher Peck, who used soft, buttery colours, curved forms, brass fixtures and a feature light From Volker Haug and Flack Studio to create a cosy, warm and luminous shop space (our smallest yet)!

We've long admired Mitchell House, for both its architecture and its inhabitants – it’s home to a community of amazing Melbourne creatives and small businesses. We’re so excited to be joining this community, and making and serving coffees in this special part of the city.  

We continued our commitment to being a sustainable business.

This was our third full year of being a carbon neutral business, and we continue to calculate and reduce our emissions wherever possible and offset those we can’t avoid. This year, we installed recycling stations in all our shops that didn’t already have one. And our team focused on finding ways to decrease single-use materials in our shops. For a fortnight in November, we offered $1 off every drink purchased in a reusable cup, to help reduce single-use waste and encourage more sustainable habits.
 

And we celebrated 2 years of being a B Corp.  

As a business, we are constantly looking for ways to improve and progress our business and, in 2024, we were proud to mark our second-year anniversary as a B-Corp certified company.  One of the things we love about the B Corp process is that it is not just a box-ticking exercise – rather, it provides a framework and structure to benchmark our business practices against the best and most sustainably run businesses around the world, and to hold ourselves accountable to our own standards and objectives. This is an iterative and ongoing process and one that we are committed to as we continuously seek to deliver good coffee that is good for everyone. 

We continued to walk alongside Children’s Ground.

In 2024, we continued to admire and support the crucial work that Children’s Ground does in collaboration with and support of First Nations children, families and communities.

In April, we hosted a pop-up at our roastery with our friends from Attica, with all proceeds from filter coffee and Attica’s Basque cheesecake sales donated to Children’s Ground. We ‘Wore it Yellow’ in our head office during Reconciliation Week and, during NAIDOC Week, we donated $1 for every bag of beans we sold. Throughout the year, we also donated all proceeds from our gift-wrapping service, with stunning wrapping paper designed by Goreng Goreng artist Rachael Sarra. Through these initiatives and others, we donated over $13,500 to Children’s Ground in 2024.

This year, we continued our fixed monthly volunteer day with Children’s Ground, with two Market Lane team members offering their time and help with projects at Children’s Ground’s head office in Melbourne/Naarm. This is a paid volunteer day for our team members, and another way that we’re able to meaningfully connect with and support this incredible organisation and the work they do.

In October, Market Lane co-owners Jenni, Fleur and Jason travelled to the Northern Territory to visit Children’s Ground. They had the privilege of spending time on Arrernte Country, visiting some of the communities Children’s Ground works with, and meeting Children’s Ground’s founding chair and Arrernte elder, William Tilmouth. The trip was an incredible chance to listen and learn; it was a moving and motivating experience that will help inform and deepen Market Lane’s partnership with Children’s Ground going forwards.   

As well as other fantastic organisations.

We were also proud to support other important organisations and community initiatives this year, including Supporting Strong Women, Scarf, StreetSmart, Food Bank and the Santa Clara Scholarship Program. Altogether, we raised and donated over $11,000 to these organisations, as well as $5000 in in-kind donations.
 

We held some super fun and engaging team training events. 

These included a palate calibration course with our Training Manager Einar, a tour of La Marzocco’s showroom and workshop, a drink tasting with NON, a ‘World Tour of Whiskey’ session with Dominik Holzer, and a wine and coffee tasting with the team from Mac Forbes Wines.
 

We hosted friends from afar.

We absolutely love working with Silvio Leite and Fabiano Borré – our long-time producing partners and dear friends from Brazil – and we were over the moon to host them in Australia in March. The pair visited our shops, as well as some of our wholesale partners and industry friends and peers. They also gave a fascinating, illuminating and entertaining talk at our roastery about their producing work in Brazil’s famous Piatã growing region. We are so grateful to Silvio and Fabiano for travelling all this way and so generously and thoughtfully bringing their work, expertise and coffees to life for our community. It made us understand and appreciate more than ever the hard work, care and dedication that goes into producing the exceptional Brazilian coffees we drink and enjoy every year.

And we travelled to visit our producing partners.

Market Lane Co-founders Fleur and Jason visited Colombia, Jason went to Ethiopia, our Roasting Consultant Toshi visited Brazil, and our Copywriter & Storyteller Abby travelled to Rwanda.

We partnered with wonderful, like-minded businesses.

Our Wholesale & Partnerships team had a great year, sharing and supplying coffee to restaurants, cafes and providores across Australia and the globe. We celebrated eleven years of partnering with the team at Exchange, nine years of partnering with Red Door Corner Store, and ten years of partnering with Shortstop, Altius, and Nick from Hogan Coffee. We also began supplying coffee to some exciting new partners, including A Place, Microlot Coffee House, and Shelter.

In 2024, our Wholesale team hosted a very special Leadership in Hospitality event. The panel featured Claire Stenhouse (Attica) and Tony Nguyen (Aesop) chatting with Jason and Suzie from our team about the steps they take in advance of service to create a warm and welcoming environment for their guests. These fascinating events provide fantastic insight into the ways leaders in our industry approach their businesses and think about hospitality, its challenges and potential. What makes these events even more special is that they are attended by likeminded, talented people from our community, including some of our wholesale partners, other small business owners and our team. We’re already planning our Leadership in Hospitality events for 2025 – watch this space! 

And we collaborated with others.

Including Collective Closets, a Melbourne/Naarm-based fashion label we’ve admired for a very long time. We first connected with Collective Closets co-founders Fatuma and Laurinda when we both had shops on Victoria St at Queen Vic Market. We immediately bonded with the dynamic duo over our shared values and, in particular, our deep admiration and appreciation for East African coffee, culture and craftsmanship. In 2023, we joined forces with Collective Closets to create and retail a beautiful limited-edition bag made from shúkà fabric sourced from Kenya. The bag and the collaboration were such a joy and a success that this year we did it again, releasing an updated bag with a colour refresh, and once again realising our dream of working together as businesses to create and offer something beautiful and useful.⁠

This year, we also teamed up with the brilliant people at Food For Everyone (FFE), a Melbourne/Naarm culinary poster shop that collaborates with people in the food world to transform recipes into art. Market Lane and Food For Everyone’s connection and alignment runs deep, based on a shared commitment to community, a passion for quality food and beverage, and a love and celebration of creativity and local artists and makers. And in 2024, we were very proud to contribute the first ever beverage recipe to their incredible line-up of prints! Painted by talented artist and FFE founder, Gemma Leslie, this gorgeous artwork perfectly captures the simple pleasure and joy of a pour-over coffee moment at home. We couldn’t love it more. 

We celebrated our community.

We love talking to coffee lovers and creatives about the way they like to drink their coffee, their favourite ways to spend a weekend, and the passions, goals and values that get them of bed each morning. This year for our How Do You Brew? series, we chatted to some of the most brilliant and fascinating people we know, including chefs and authors Annie Smithers and Ben Shewry, designer and maker Nicole Lawrence and artist and Food For Everyone founder, Gemma Leslie.

Our Wholesale partners at Only Coffee Project, Panco Café, Madeleine de Proust, and Shortstop generously chatted to us about their businesses and their values and plans for the future. And we were lucky enough to talk to our long-time team member Carmen about her history working in hospitality, her inspirations in the industry, and her favourite coffees from our line-up.

This year, we also gave some members of our community recycled-disposable cameras from Hillvale Photo, and asked them to document their candid coffee moments for us. The snapshots they generously shared with us were beautiful, funny, heart-warming, moving, surprising and delicious. 

We had some very exciting coffee product launches.

Most notably, our Coffee Drip Bags, which have truly changed the way we camp, hike, bike and fly forever! We also released our first ever decaf coffee, San Antonio Decaf, which is the end result of a long process of searching for the right decaffeination process and the right coffee, to create a truly delicious decaf we can drink and enjoy all day long.
 

We turned 15!

And we celebrated with our community at a special open roastery morning at our Brunswick East HQ. To celebrate this milestone birthday, we also released a Bulletin in our shops reflecting on the last decade and a half, we had a birthday bean sale, and we ran a golden ticket giveaway, through which 15 lucky coffee lovers won a year of free coffee beans! We also celebrated members of our team, both past and present, who have contributed so much to the incredibly special culture at Market Lane, and our wider hospitality community.

And that's a wrap!

What a year. Thank you to our wonderful community of producers, team members, industry peers and partners, and customers for sharing our passion for quality coffee, and for all of your support, enthusiasm and friendship this year.

Happy holidays, everyone! We can’t wait to see you for a coffee in 2025.