I’m outside a unit on a small industrial estate in Upton Scudamore, a few miles from Frome, Somerset, which houses Girls Who Grind—a coffee roastery run by Fi O'Brien and Casey LaLonde. When I enter the building I’m welcomed by a light, airy space, the walls strewn with bright colours. It’s a stark and refreshing contrast to the grey, October world outside.

This moment instantly feels like a great way to sum up what Girls Who Grind is: a refreshing contrast to many of the other roasteries that make up the speciality coffee scene in the UK.

Fi and Casey come from very different backgrounds, with coffee being their common thread. Fi, originally from Melbourne, comes from a history of café management and creative strategy, the two of which often merged. Casey is a coffee roaster from Upstate New York.

Casey found her way into coffee through a Sociology degree, studying fairtrade and trading models in coffee. On her first trip to a roastery she fell in love with coffee roasting and decided that this was the job for her. She had every intention of pursuing this career when she moved over to the UK, but with two small children her visions of roasting with them in tow, while also running her own business were, understandably, not quite as achievable as she’d dreamed.

By happy coincidence—or twist of fate—both Fi and Casey both ended up moving to Frome and attending the same baby yoga class. They got to know each other over many cups of coffee; their different yet shared backgrounds and their joint loves and hates of the coffee industry.

Crucially, their skills seemed to complement one another perfectly. Fi was managing a café in Frome and working alongside her husband in brand strategy. But when Casey suggested starting their own roastery it was the perfect opportunity to move on and, as she says, make the change they wanted to see in the industry. I caught up with them over a cup or two to chat about opening their own business, and their experiences of working in speciality coffee so far.

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Nicci Peet: Tell me a little bit about the reasons for starting Girls Who Grind.

Fi O’Brien: It isn’t that there were things we weren’t a fan of, it was more about what we wanted to see: a celebration of women within the coffee industry. That was our focus. Hence why we decided that it was going to always be supporting women within the industry from the producer all the way through to the end drinker.

Casey LaLonde: The coffee industry is very male-dominated, especially on the roasting side of things. We’ve always wanted to roast but it was either: start our own business, or go and work for a roastery that was owned by a guy. They were the only options.

I’ve got nothing against men but I’ve worked at a roastery before and feel like there's only so far you can advance, and we wanted to do this for ourselves. Starting a roastery is really difficult and it’s not generally done by women. There are a lot of women in the industry but not so many who own their own businesses.

NP: What are your core values at Girls Who Grind?

FO’B: As a business, it’s to champion and celebrate women in the industry all the way through the chain. But, as far as sourcing goes, we have a pretty refined sourcing philosophy, or policy, and that is that we only buy our coffees from female producers that are in power positions.

NP: How do you go about finding female producers?

CL: We find them in a variety of different ways. Mostly we work with small importers who are in the UK and they work directly with the farmers. We want to see that transparency. We work with this one husband-and-wife team, the wife is Columbian and they insist on paying the farmers directly cash-in-hand, which we love.

A lot of times there's not a lot of transparency in the value chain and so we like to support people where we know the money is going directly to the farmer. We work directly with our producers in El Salvador and we work everything out together. We work out the price, if we have an issue with the coffee we deal with them we don’t deal with anyone in the middle. We take each coffee separately and have a unique relationship with each of them.

NP: Can you tell me a little bit more about the issues in coffee farming?

CL: Women in coffee make up the majority of the workforce. Probably more than 70% of the work that goes into coffee is done by women but it's generally unskilled labour: they’re not in positions of decision-making. They’re not the ones that are actually making the money. They’re doing the hard work and not really seeing any of the benefits.

So what we’re trying to do is highlight those stories so more women can see that this is an option for them. We want to support organisations that are investing time and money in women by providing education and access to the market.

NP: Where do you see Girls Who Grind going?

FO’B: We have massive plans for Girls Who Grind. We look at it as a coffee company but, we want it to be much more than that. We don’t get too insular with just focusing on the coffee industry.

We want to be able to spread our message outwards and so, we want to do lots of things, perhaps even a Girls Who Grind festival and events but still with that core message and value at the centre of it all. One day we’d love to have our own outlet in various city locations—countries even—but yeah we’re definitely looking outwards and not being too insular with it that's for sure.

NP: You had your pop up at Glitch, how was that? Was it a bit of testing ground?

FO’B: Yeah, it was. Because we have such strong core values it's really hard to bend that to fit within another space. It's not to say that they weren’t great people. And, it was a great opportunity to test everything out and see if it would work, but it just cemented that fact that if we do this we need to do it on our own terms, in our own space, so that we don’t have to change any of our core values to fit other people’s business models.

The whole premise of Girls Who Grind is for it to be accepting and open to everybody, not just women, you know? We have both men and women that really believe in what we’re saying and doing, but [we want] to have a space that's open and warm and welcoming to everybody.

The situation we were in may not have been the best fit for everyone to feel comfortable in those kind of surroundings. It was cool and hipster and all the rest of it, and some people feel uncomfortable in that situation. We don’t want it to feel like that, we want it to be fun and cool but also open to everybody.

NP: Is that kind of accessibility an issue in coffee?

Both: Definitely.

CL: It's not that accessible to people and people are intimidated when they go into coffee shops.

FO’B: And there’s like some too-cool-for-school barista spouting information at you.

CL: You shouldn’t be afraid when you walk up to a coffee counter—its coffee.

NP: I think this tends to be a theme across all, I never know the right word to use... “craft drink industries.”

FO’B: Essentially it’s just coffee and there [are] amazing nuances within that but I think the barista’s job, or the café’s job is to educate in a non-condescending way and be excited to share that information. Making someone feel awkward and uncomfortable is the opposite of what coffee should be.

NP: Coffee, like alcohol, is something you sit down and talk over, so you want a welcoming space.

FO’B: And if it's not like that, why go there? That's something we don’t want it to be when we eventually have our own spaces. We’re gonna change this space up a little bit soon enough and section it off so we’ve got the roastery half and then sort of a brew bar and retail area. It won’t be open as a café all the time because it's a working roastery, but we’ll open to the public on special days and host events, workshops and cuppings, that’ll be in the next few months.

““I was like, ‘fuck this, I just want to just do something for women in the coffee industry.’””

— Fi O'Brien, Girls Who Grind

NP: Do you see yourself here in the space for a while or are you starting to outgrow it already?

FO’B: We definitely haven’t outgrown the space yet but I think we’d also prefer to be even closer to where we live, that’d be quite cool. We’re in Frome, which isn’t a city by any means, it's not Bristol—or Bath for that matter—but it's nice to be around people so they could just drop in. We are very removed here, which can be nice because we don’t get influenced by outsiders too much

CL: To have a proper roastery-café—that’d be really nice.

FO’B: Yeah, that’d be the dream, but that wouldn’t work here. There’re lots of things changing in Frome. This is still a nice space and sometimes I think “oh, I wish we were in London or Bristol” but then you get influenced so much by everyone around you and everyone else's business, and people can be so up their own bum, especially in London.

NP: I’ve seen what it can be like in beer and it can be intimidating.

CL: You don’t need to know how many total dissolved solids are in your coffee.

FO’B: And that's the thing with the coffee industry especially, it becomes so much about the barista and not about the customer and that is where it fails big time, it's about the barista getting their rocks off on their ratios.

NP: And there is nothing wrong with being passionate.

FO’B: There’s nothing wrong with geeking out by any means, but don’t make people feel like they’re not worthy of that coffee if they don’t understand that process, that's the biggest thing.

NP: What do you think people could be doing in terms of accessing a broader audience for speciality coffee?

F’OB: I think how we sell ourselves as a coffee brand is accessible within itself because we don’t use too much jargon. Our main focus is to make incredibly tasty coffee but second to that is sharing the stories of the producers.

With every coffee, you get an information card which shares its story, which I think that in itself gives you that understanding of what the process has been for this coffee in the first place, so you already feel a bit more connected. Our customers are from all over the place and some of them are real coffee heads. Some of them will order and say “I’ve got a french press how do I grind it?” and we try to never make them feel like they’re idiots for doing so.

We try make people feel like they're part of our community—part of our team if you like—and I think that they connect to that. Some roasteries don’t even offer pre-ground coffee, where you’ve already cut off a massive part of the market because not everyone has a grinder at home.

CL: Like on our cards we don’t have recipes like “25 grams of coffee.”

FO’B: I think that freaks people out.

CL: And you need to brew it in 2 minutes and 30 seconds exactly. Most people don’t do that. To read something like that on your coffee can be quite intimidating and it can kind of put you off a little bit.

FO’B: And if people don’t know, they’ll ask.

NP: It's refreshing to hear people acknowledging this inaccessibility and tackling it within your business.

FO’B: We want to make it fun and even with our tasting notes they’re a bit tongue-in-cheek. There’s always a [bit] at the end that’s like “fierce as fuck” or whatever. It’s obviously not a tasting note but it makes everything more light-hearted, and we’re not taking ourselves too seriously.

NP: Your branding reflects that, it's quite bright. I’m assuming that was intentional?

FO’B: Yeah we didn’t want it to be like another coffee brand and we didn’t want it to be a “girl brand,” if you like, so we tried to tackle all of that within the branding.

CL: It needs to appeal to everybody because female empowerment is not just for women. Everyone has to be involved so the brand needs to be appealing to everyone.

FO’B: Our customer split is 60% women, 40% men so that in itself shows that its not alienating men whatsoever. I don't even think they see it as a female brand, they just see it as a cool brand doing cool things, which is exactly what we want. That conversation of equality and female empowerment needs to be across the board, it can’t just be on one side, otherwise, we’ve done the opposite of what we’re supposed to be doing.

We get male couriers dropping off going “ooh Girls Who Grind, what are you doing?” But, at the end of the day, it gets us noticed—and then you can have a conversation about what it actually represents.

FO’B: I know our name can kind of be insinuated as being sexualised but it can be taken so many different ways: grind as far as working hard and succeeding. That's the kind of message behind it, but it is tongue-in-cheek.

NP: Was Girls Who Grind always going to be the name?

FO’B: Yeah it was a weird thing, I had an idea for the name like 2-3 years ago but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was working in a café at the time and I was just pissed off with everything and everyone as I always am, still am. I was like, “fuck this, I just want to just do something for women in the coffee industry.”

I’d just started going back to working in cafés as a barista and every man in that place was just making me feel like shit. They weren’t even good baristas. I was being talked down to the whole time, and it doesn’t help that I’m short so I was even more like [the] little girl behind the coffee bar.

“Oh, we’ll show you how to do it,” and I’m like “fuck you, I’m like double your age for a start!”

CL: New roasteries will come along and it’ll be some guy who started up a roastery and all the other men in the industry flock around him. “Oh they’re doing such cool things, it's so amazing,” and I feel like it's because you’re a man you obviously know how to work a roaster.

FO’B: It drives me nuts.

NP: I guess that's the great thing about Girls Who Grind, you’re doing something tangible to change that

FO’B: The concept that I originally had was to do a festival for women in coffee and start with female baristas and female bands but I had put it away for a little bit. Then Casey and I were sitting in a café and she stopped me and said “I’ve got an idea. We’re gonna have a roastery and you’re gonna be part of it,” and that's pretty much what happened.