2024: The Year Wrapped Up

Market Lane Coffee: Can you tell us about your background in hospitality?

Tom Pye: I’ve mostly worked in cafés and wholesale, particularly in specialty coffee, with a bit of experience in restaurants and bars over the years.
 

And you spent time working in hospitality overseas?

Yes, I’ve worked in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, so across three countries.

Did each of those countries have a distinct hospitality culture? Were there key things you took away from your time working in each place?

Definitely. In London, I opened Origin Coffee Roasters’ first retail location. Now, they’ve got five in London, one in Bristol, one in Edinburgh, and a few in Cornwall. That experience was invaluable – it gave me insight into opening a business, without the financial risk. It gave me a perspective that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I was involved in everything, from picking the location to the fit-out and opening, and even the day-to-day trade. That hands-on experience was huge.

My time in New Zealand was a little different – it really shaped my approach to hospitality. The focus there was on the experience beyond just the coffee. Coffee is important, of course, but it’s also about the connections it fosters. People meet friends for coffee, go for walks with a coffee – it’s more than just a drink. That idea really stuck with me. I think there’s a real warmth and generosity in the service there. There’s no pretentiousness at all; it’s just part of the standard.

London was interesting because people were really open to drinking filter coffee; it was way easier to sell than in Australia. Since the UK has more of a tea-drinking culture, there wasn’t that ingrained espresso habit, so people were more willing to try filter coffee. 

Can you tell us more about the book ?

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It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).

It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).