Landed Coffee Roasters is not just another coffee roastery.
Our past interests, professions and experiences have influenced our values from the get go.
Our team grows, processes, roasts and brews specialty coffee on a daily basis. We appreciate, respect and understand every part of the value chain. Specifically, as roasters, we aspire to make our contribution to the value chain, sustainable and delicious.
To understand our values, it’s good to know where we come from. It all started in 2015, when Mary’s parents Ricardo and Haydee, decided to save a dilapidated colonial house in Venezuela. On the land that came with the house, they found the remnants of a long forgotten coffee estate. Their curiosity elevated, they decide to revive the coffee production as well and bring back a tradition largely abandoned to neighbouring Colombia and Brazil.
As only a place like London can enable, Mary and Charles found themselves conversing about Soil Degradation, Brexit and their past travel experiences while sharing a bowl of Pho and a few local craft beers at a Veitnamese Café in the Soho district.
Little did they know that this meeting would be the start of their lives together and lead them into the exciting world of Specialty Coffee. Fast forward two years and Ricardo and Haydee’s progress at the Hacienda motivated the Team to start roasting coffee, with the eventual aim of importing Hacienda el Recreo’s coffee as soon as the plants matured.
Since our backgrounds were not originally in the food industry, as we immersed ourselves in the farm we quickly realised that every industry be it chocolate, wine, beer, pepper or whisky has a world and a half behind it.
Coffee is our favorite one of them all, naturally, but it would be irresponsible to ignore our fellow artisans and not learn from each other.
Our sister company Primos de Origen explores these relationships much more in depth. In the mean time try out our monthly pairings.
True sustainability tackles three pillars:
environmental, social and economical.
The social pillar
We do our best to learn about the people behind each coffee, their history, culture and origin and the efforts they put in to working in harmony with their surroundings. We also bet for long-term projects where you can see the effect on new infrastructure and training programs being reflected on improving cupping scores year on year.
The economical.
Not only do we pay a fair price, we do our due diligence and make sure to read over our green coffee importers’ annual transparency reports. This way we can truly understand the economics of the industry.
The environmental
We mainly work with coffee that comes from small farms. We are conscious that there are plenty of instances where producers do not use harmful fertilizers yet they do not have organic certifications. We believe this is where analysing, outweighing factors and balancing the three pillars comes into play. We would never buy organic certified coffee, originating from a 100 hectare plantation in what used to be the amazon, over non-certified, forest grown lots from smallholders in rural areas. It is simply not a sustainable decision.
Apart from an ethically sourced cup of coffee, we want to offer you something that tastes special – something different and delicious. We take time to source exceptional coffees and develop their roasting profiles in order to offer you a selection that contains different flavour and aroma profiles to please any palate.
When it comes to wholesale, we do our best to go above and beyond what you normally would expect from a coffee roastery, custom tailoring the coffee to suit your style, helping you design the flow of your café, on site events and more. We have lived through it and learnt from our mistakes so you don’t have to.
We are a small but dynamic team that includes everything from coffee growers to roasters to designers. What unites us is that we want to “Broaden your Horizons” with regards to what you think coffee is all about.
Meet Mary our head of sales & designer: Born and raised in Venezuela with Spanish Grandparents, Mary spent her formative years in Switzerland and speaks fluent Spanish, English, Italian and French.
She graduated from UofT in Toronto, Canada with a degree in Civil Engineering specializing in Renewable Energy before completing her Masters in Sustainable Design and Engineering at UCL in London. She was working as a renewable energy analyst when her parents introduced her to coffee and cacao.
Mary has spent a lot of her time between origin and the roastery, with her engineering background she assisted in the design of an automated drip irrigation system, road planning and workflow designs of the farm.
Mary keeps us up-to-date with the differences and similarities between specialty coffee and cacao. When it comes to cacao, she holds certifications with the Cacao of Excellence and the University Ghent’s CACAOLAB covering Harvesting, Postharvesting and Chocolate Making Processes and techniques. She is an official cacao taster certified by the FCCI and chocolate by the IICCT.
Following her passion for coffee, in addition to the SCA courses, she is a certified Q-Processor (equivalent to an oenologist in the world of wine) by the CQI which she puts in great use every harvest season.
Meet our head roaster and head of production: Charles is half Swiss, half Irish, was raised in Hong Kong and speaks fluent English, German, Norwegian and is getting on with his Spanish.
He completed his studies in Comparative Politics in Bergen, Norway and a Masters in Environment and Sustainable Development at UCL, UK before going on to work for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Government Innovation Team where the main focus was on the Mayor’s Challenge – an ideas and innovation competition for cities and mayors to generate bold new ideas that solve urban challenges and improve city life.
It was in London where he met Mary. Coincidentally he was working on Latin-American cities and through conversations of stock market prices, value chain complexities and dates throughout London’s specialty coffee cafés he quickly found himself immersed in the world of coffee.
After training in Florence, Italy and obtaining the certifications from the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) for Roasting, Green Coffee, Barista and Sensory, he is the one who works in the background to try and bring that coffee to life in the cup.
4 years down the road he has found groove and he keeps logging and analysing all his profiles as well as attending Roasters Retreats to meet peers learn about the newest tendencies in the industry.
Meet the parents: passionate about coffee, cacao and their country, Venezuela. Ricardo and Haydee began the adventure of recovering the coffee crops on their Estate and decided to add one of Venezuela’s most famous crops – cacao – as well.
They spent long and intense periods of learning and testing until they were ready to sewing seeds and start production in earnest.
They love visiting plantations and other local producers to try other coffees and cacaos and share knowledge.
They are both IICCT certified chocolate tasters and Ricardo like Mary is a Q-Processor. Their goal is to put Venezuelan Specialty Coffee on the map and offer the highest quality cacao on the market.
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