Mt Atkinson Coffee

General information

Mt Atkinson coffee was started in 2007 as a coffee cart in Titirangi. It has a very loyal customer base of people who come down a get a great coffee. It is a place to meet, have a chat and catch up with locals.
In 2010 the owner (Jacob) was invited to go to Uganda to help build some classrooms in a school for war effected children. On sharing this with some of the customers they started to help with the fundraising for him to go. Almost half the money for the trip was generously provided by the customers of the coffee cart.
After the building part of the trip Jacob went exploring and checking out the coffee plantations of Eastern Africa. He worked on some coffee farms and met with local growers. What he saw was ideal conditions for coffee growing and harvesting but a real lack of infrastructure for the local growers to use. This meant that they didn’t get the yealds that they could, and they couldn’t process the coffee well enough to compete with the rest of the world supply.
Jacob saw a real opportunity to help. So on return to New Zealand he looked at ways that he could use his business to contribute, and so Mt Atkinson coffee roasters was started. The vision of the business is to roast premium coffee and build up the volume of sales so that it is viable to invest in dealing directly with the farms in East Africa and importing the coffee beans from there.