Our people

Training and mentorship

People are trained into the work rather than left to pick it up. Development is structured through tailored training and mentorship, from learning a new skill to progressing into a role with more responsibility, and progress is recognised as it happens rather than only at the point of promotion.

Bearing on the coffee — Almost every quality-critical decision at a dry mill is a trained judgement: whether a delivery is dry enough to accept, when a sorter is drifting, whether a stack has been built badly. Equipment does not make those calls.

Staff engagement

Team-building workshops, social activities and interactive problem-solving sessions run regularly, on the straightforward view that people who talk to each other outside a shift communicate better during one.

The stated aim is collaboration, trust and a sense of belonging. The observable result is a workforce that raises problems rather than working around them.

Bearing on the coffee — A mill runs on information moving upward quickly — a batch that smells wrong, a sorter throwing too much good coffee, a container that arrives dirty. Whether that information travels is a cultural property, not a procedural one.

Casual workers are included

Casual employees are treated as part of the workforce rather than as an outside labour pool. Open communication channels, skills training and recognition programmes extend to them on the same terms as permanent staff.

This is deliberate and it is worth stating plainly, because in agricultural processing the casual workforce is usually the group that does the hand sorting, the bagging and the loading — and is usually the group left out of a culture statement.

Bearing on the coffee — Hand sorting, stack building and container loading are done largely by casual staff. A buyer relying on the loading record is relying on the care of the people who built that load.

Wellbeing and safety

Wellness programmes and a working safety standard are treated as part of the operation rather than as a benefit bolted onto it. The team takes part in community safety and health initiatives alongside local partners.

Every two weeks the staff play football together. It is a small thing and it is not a quality control measure, but it is a real and continuing one, and it says more about how the place runs than a mission statement does.