Interview with Tobias and Lucas of Single O
Tobias: here comes the spiel! My name is Tobias and I work at Single O, I've been working at single O coffee roastery since 2018, and I'm the head of training and education.
Lucas: Hey, I'm Lucas. I've been here just over four years now as well. Probably started around the same time as you. I started working in the Surry Hills cafe and I'm currently the head of retail.
Sweet, let's jump into it. Single O, is a forward thinking, innovative and proactive roastery and I'm really interested in talking to you about your present and future. But let's first take a look back over the last 20 years. Can you tell me where it all began?
Tobias: Sure, that's a good question. Single O kicked off as a little shop in Surry Hills, and they started by buying all this amazing coffee. They had a pretty grassroots start, roasting on this little roaster named Boris in the cafe. From there, Single O just grew and grew and grew. After outgrowing the café roasting space, they moved to roasting off site. They quickly outgrew that space as well and then moved here to Botany and have been roasting and doing wholesale here ever since!
Lucas: Plus, we have a satellite roastery in Tokyo!
Yeah tell me how that started.
Tobias: Yama, the general manager in Tokyo, he used to be a dishwasher in Surry Hills. He graduated to being a barista, then roaster, then bills (who we supply) was heading to Japan so we thought – why not open a roastery. And who better to open the roastery than Yama.
Have either of you had a chance to go and visit Yama?
Lucas: No, not yet. They actually opened a café recently too – just had their first birthday a few weeks ago.
Oh awesome! Can you give me a rundown of Single O’s core values? Let’s go one for one!
Tobias: Have fun, bitches.
Lucas: Make it happen.
Tobias: Don't cut corners.
Haha! And in terms of your respective roles here at Single O, which of these core values do you feel like you action most in your day to day?
Lucas: I think for me personally, make it happen and don't cut corners are probably the main two that I focus on. They’re all so important, but those two are in the forefront of my mind when I'm working.
Tobias: With wholesale, I lean pretty heavily into have fun, bitches. We're mates with all of our wholesale partners, and we go out and visit them a lot. I love travelling around New South Wales, Victoria, up to Queensland, Adelaide and now Tassie as well! There are a lot of places we get to go and visit and have a lot of fun. Most recently, we’ve also held some pretty fun events. For example, we loved hanging out with you guys down in Melbourne for MICE. We held the world parachute competition! The idea was for it to be super inclusive for home brewers as well as professional baristas.
We also took up residency at the La Marzocco stand for a day, we were on the mod bar there which was pretty cool!
Yeah it was a great week! So, in your collective or individual opinions, what do you think makes Single O’s coffee special and what do you think your communities like most about it?
Lucas: I love that our green buyer isn't afraid to buy coffees from unique places. There are often trends in specialty coffee, and our buyer looks for beans that have undergone different processes or are from different regions and varieties, she's not afraid to branch out. We'll be buying coffee from you know, Southeast Asia followed up by delicious COE from Colombia followed up by a Sumatran natural. I think we’re approachable for people who are just getting into specialty and want to try different regions. And then we've got some really expensive shit as well.
And Tobias, when it comes to training, what are your main focuses? Could you possibly give me a speedy verbal summary of your training structure?
Tobias: We tailor our sessions to what our customers want to learn, so it really depends on the scenario. We do all sorts of trainings, from workflow efficiencies to cupping sessions to recipe based training. We want to inspire young baristas to work in specialty rather than just smash out brews.
Lucas: I think product education is a really important part of what you do as well. So that when a cafe customer wants to chat to the barista about their coffee, the baristas can talk about the product confidently!
Coffee education is such a sensory experience, I'm wondering how you adapted your training model during covid when you couldn’t have a shared sensory experience with your customers?
Tobias: It was a lot of guesswork, and it was kind of tricky. One of the biggest challenges was doing a dialing in session with a new customer over the phone. You’re like ‘How does it taste, does it taste under or over extracted?” and they're like, “What the hell does that mean?” Okay, let's go back and start again. We're gonna go south to north, we're gonna see if we can find a spot in the middle. It took a lot more time to do dial in sessions, and I learnt a lot about our coffee, and a lot about Zoom and Facetime, haha!
In your respective opinions, what steps do you think should be taken to ensure the environmental sustainability of the coffee industry, while preserving the livelihood of the growers? Who is the ownness on?
As far as coffee sustainability, we are a member of World Coffee Research, which is a coffee industry funded non-profit dedicated to science based agricultural solutions to secure a diverse and sustainable supply of coffee varieties that will grow well in changing environmental conditions. When I first started learning about coffee. I thought there were only two species, Robusta and Arabica, and now I of course know that there are a few more, and many varieties within each species. It’s important that the industry have resources to focus on growing varieties that will thrive in changing circumstances. The climate is changing, and we're not able to reverse that. The bottom line is that we're going to have to pay more for coffee, particularly high-quality Arabica coffee, and that feeds back into the fair pricing.
Very well said! I’m interested, how does your partnership with La Marzocco feed back into your core values?
Tobias: La Marzocco make the best machines, and they are the most appropriate machines for the diverse customer base that we have. We have a customer who's running all our origins- that’s six different origins a week! They want a machine that has multiple brew boilers, so they can totally nerd out. And then we have another customer who owns a gelateria and wants to have a delicious blend espresso to put on top of some gelato to make a nice affogato. And they want to be able to focus on one coffee or two coffees at a time, so they use a PB versus someone who's nerding out using a new GB5 X ABR.
Lucas: La Marzocco have been making super durable machines for a very long time. And being able to refurbish machines is like, the most important thing. If you want to be sustainable, the first thing you should do is try and use equipment that has still has life in it, rather than buy a new machine. I mean, the Linea Classic has been around for almost thirty years, and it’s still a machine that can produce a delicious coffee. So why would you not be utilising machines like that? Refurbishing them, getting spare parts from Brewtech, fixing them up and sending them back out into the field for another six years.
So true, second hand forever! So tell me, what’s next for Single O?
So we've got new branding, which you'll see across all of our packaging. The most exciting part of that is the retail bags. It has been so great to work with new artists, all of our 1kg bags have new artworks on them. It used to be random acts of art now it's just art on every bag. There's a whole lot bubbling away next year, with origin trips to Kenya and maybe Honduras.
That’s really exciting! Hope 2023 is a good one for you guys! Thanks so much for meeting with me today.
Lucas: All good!
Tobias: No worries!
