A London-based speciality coffee company that sells freshly roasted beans by subscription, online and in supermarkets.
Pact Coffee sells speciality-grade coffee, roasted in small batches in Haslemere and delivered to customers' homes by subscription. It has also moved into business sales and supermarkets, starting with a Waitrose listing in October 2023 and, in 2024, deals with Whole Foods Market, Ocado and Gopuff.
It was founded in 2012 by Stephen Rapaport, who began by selling coffee by post from his kitchen, sealing the bags by hand, and later moved out and hired his first employee. The company was first called YourGrind. A 2014 profile describes his aim as upgrading everyone's coffee taste by making fresh, carefully roasted beans widely available. In that era the company used an algorithm to learn each customer's taste.
Its current mission, from its B Corp profile, is to improve the lives of farmers in an industry that often treats them unfairly. It buys through a direct trade model and says that in 2021 it paid on average 60% above the Fairtrade base price. It became a Certified B Corporation in July 2022 and reports being carbon neutral for its own operations (Scope 1 and 2).
The company is headquartered in the London Borough of Southwark, with the roastery at Haslemere in Surrey. A September 2024 trade article names Paul Turton as chief executive and describes the company as London-based. Wikipedia's account says the company moved to Bermondsey in June 2013 and renamed itself Pact Coffee, built a first roastery next to the London office, and moved roasting to Haslemere in 2018 while keeping the head office in Bermondsey. Will Corby joined in 2014 as head of coffee and built the sourcing programme, which buys directly from farmers in Central and South America and East Africa, and Paul Turton became chief executive in 2017. It reports 11 Great Taste Awards between 2022 and 2024 and a pledge in May 2025 to source at least half its coffee from women or gender-equity groups. Earlier profiles describe a customer community team that phones customers about their experience and a head of coffee who travels to meet farmers, though those details are from 2014 and may have changed.
People in a business like this work in coffee buying and roasting, quality control, subscription and customer service, e-commerce and marketing, retail and wholesale accounts, logistics and finance. It is a useful example of how a direct-to-consumer brand can add supermarket sales without losing its online roots.
Website: www.pactcoffee.com
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