Out in a pocket of East London you'll find Star Lane, where our roastery has been since we started over 20 years ago. Since then, coffee culture and especially speciality coffee has transformed, with third, fourth and even fifth waves crashing through the past few decades. Throughout these years, we’ve constantly progressed and developed to move with the time, while keeping our mission at heart: to make the world discover the joy of speciality coffee.
Inside the roastery, you’ll find our talented team who roast your coffee to order, meticulously pack it up and get it shipped direct to your door. We've made an exciting development moving these roasting operations to a larger space on our road in Star Lane.
Growing with demand
As the demand for high quality, ethically sourced and fresh coffee grows, we grow too. To ensure we maintain our coffee quality and service, we’ve invested in a larger space to allow us to work efficiently and continue roasting the coffee you love.
As a mission-driven and impact business, we measure our work against our Impact Strategy. Our three pillars work together to make one another stronger: Quality of Life, Quality of Business and Quality of Coffee. Making the move to a larger space and ensuring we’re set up to continue expertly roasting coffee is an essential move in creating a strong business model with strong operations so we’re a business for the future, and for the future of coffee.
“With the rise of demand for freshly roasted sustainably sourced coffee, roasted-to-order, we had to ensure we continue to offer exceptional customer experience. Increasing our on-demand roasting and packing capacity allows us to share the joy of great coffee with more coffee lovers and ultimately enhance their coffee experience. We always place our consumers at the front of all business decisions. We’re building a business for the future.”
- Violeta Stevens, Managing Director
What's new?
Our new space is located in the same corner of Star Lane as we’ve always been in so from the office meeting rooms to our Loring roaster, it’s just a minutes’ walk!
The larger space ensures there’s more ease for the roasting and packing team so they can keep up the great work freshly roasting and packing coffee to order:
- Specially designed for efficiency. With the extra space, we’ve been able to optimise operations by ensuring everything our roasters and packers need is perfectly placed for their benefit - including packing benches, easy-to-reach equipment and coffee accessories. There are more plans to further enhance this with extra machinery to help make the fiddly jobs that bit quicker!
- Moving space. Between the specially designed areas, there is generally more space making it easier, quicker and more enjoyable to get about
- New lighting and heating. We've installed the most energy efficient lighting and heating to minimise our environmental impact -- read more about what we're doing to reduce our carbon footprint in our Annual Impact Report 2021.
- Roasting room. Perfectly distanced from packing, the roasted coffee is situated in the same room but can be closed behind a door to help maintain a healthy noise level for our packing team
More coffee, more impact
For you, this means you’ll keep receiving freshly-roasted coffee direct to your door, at the same high quality with great service. As always, your favourites will be available to order online and you can expect to keep seeing more unique and exciting limited edition coffees throughout the year. We’re really excited that so many people are choosing to pick high quality speciality coffee, which means we can keep purchasing coffee from our partners and continue to make an impact.
Our sourcing initiative, Union Direct Trade, means we work in partnership with farmers to improve both quality of coffee and livelihoods, long term. In 2021, we paid over $1 million in price premiums to our farmer partners; paying 36% above the Fairtrade minimum price and 18% above the average internal world market price. We sourced 39% of our coffee from partners we’ve worked with for over 10 years and 72% from partners we’ve worked with for over 5 years. Read more about how choosing Union coffee makes a different in our Annual Impact Report 2021.
We make a difference together. Thank you choosing Union, without you, it wouldn’t be possible.
