The term ‘fresh’ is thrown about quite liberally in the coffee world, but the word has some quite specific and measurable meaning for us. It’s not simply that our coffee is roasted across New Zealand and Australia that makes us fresh, there’s a bit more to it than that.
Just like good food, the end result is very much dependent on the ingredients. The same applies to coffee. And just like food, coffee has seasons and times of the year when the freshest crops are available from different regions around the world. As soon as the coffee is picked, it starts to degrade over time – just like an apple would. For our roasting and procurement team, it’s imperative that they not only buy premium quality coffee, that’s a given, but also that we are sourcing truly fresh in-season coffee.
This is where our direct model of sourcing coffee works. It means we are on the ground at origin and have longstanding relationships that ensure we are able to get the good stuff. There is a lot of green coffee sitting in warehouses around the world, slowly degrading, which is unfortunate, but that’s not the coffee for us. Imagine buying a sack of potatoes, chucking them in the cupboard for a couple of years, then cracking into them. They’re not going to be in a good way, and the same goes for coffee. While old coffee is still somewhat useable, it’s certainly not going to taste very good.
Once our coffee is here, it’s our goal to roast it and get it to our customers as fresh as possible. This means we roast all of our coffees every day of the week — this way, any order made, is fulfilled with the the freshest roast. For our retail stockists, it means we deliver fresh coffee direct to stores so the bags hit the shelf within days of it being roasted. When you next see a bag of Coffee Supreme on the shelf, you’ll notice our bags carry a ‘Roast Date’ letting you know exactly when the coffee was roasted, not an expiry date set far off in the future. Roast dates show transparency about the freshness of our product.
Buying, roasting, and getting fresh coffee on the shelf has a huge impact on the most important attribute of coffee — taste. Fresh coffee, simply put, just tastes better. It’s more fragrant, easier to use, and the result in your cup is leaps and bounds better than what you’ll get from a bag of something stale and old. You wouldn’t chuck a loaf of stale bread in your trolley and you shouldn’t have to with coffee either. We’re proud to be bringing the freshest coffee to the supermarket aisles in New Zealand. Australia – we're working on it.
Customer satisfaction is pretty important to us, and the freshness and quality of our coffee goes a long way to helping us with this. You can find fresh bags of Coffee Supreme across the nation, both from cafes and selected retailers. You’ll find the nearest spot to you on our Cafe Finder.
