[[{“value”:”Image: Brian Sweeney
Dear Green Founder Lisa Lawson details the rise of specialty coffee in Scotland and building a business that puts sustainability front and centre.
Thriving coffee scenes are usually the result of multiple players coming together to raise the standard and engage the local community, yet in Scotland one woman has led the charge for more than a decade.
Since establishing Glasgow roastery Dear Green in 2011, Lisa Lawson has worked tirelessly to nurture an interest in specialty coffee in her city and beyond, share knowledge and support small businesses, and ultimately put Scotland on the coffee map.
Alongside running her own successful business, Lawson has launched the Glasgow Coffee Festival and grown the project over the past 10 years to become Scotland’s largest coffee event. Thousands of baristas, café owners, equipment manufacturers, and interested home brewers attend the event annually. She has also brought the AeroPress Championships to the country, was a founding committee member of the Independent Coffee Guide Scotland, and has hosted and judged multiple Specialty Coffee Association competitions.
Naturally, these are only the top line of Lawson’s many industry achievements, her biggest being the thriving Scottish specialty coffee scene that many would attribute to her efforts behind the scenes.
“When I started Dear Green, I knew everyone in the Scottish coffee scene by name because there were only around 10 of us,” Lawson tells Global Coffee Report.
“Over the past 13 years that number has slowly multiplied and now there are hundreds and I don’t know everyone anymore. We used to be one small network, but now there are multiple groups on multiple channels, with baristas becoming social media stars and new businesses springing up all the time. It’s cool. It means I can step back a little and not feel like I have to be the one organising everything.”
Lawson in the early days of Dear Green. Image: Dear Green
Aussie inspiration
Living in Sydney at the turn of the millennium, as a young university graduate Lawson was working in hospitality when she stumbled into the city’s early specialty movement.
“I was working as a chef and got to know Toby Smith, the Founder of Toby’s Estate [one of Australia’s specialty coffee pioneers]. I became the company’s first employee. It was a really exciting time: the sun was shining, I was pouring latte art at farmers’ markets, and there was enthusiasm about this new wave of coffee,” she says.
Lawson worked alongside Smith, learning the skills of the roasting trade for two years until her visa ran out, at which point she hopped across to New Zealand to immerse herself within its emerging coffee shop community. When she finally made it back to her hometown of Glasgow in late 2002, she felt deflated by the quality of coffee she returned to.
“It was all big frothy cappuccinos with burnt milk and dark-roasted Robusta blends. The idea of quality coffee in Scotland was a barista using an espresso machine – a novelty that people didn’t have at home,” she says.
Unable to get her hands on the high-quality Arabica beans she’d grown to love, Lawson gave up drinking coffee altogether and for the next few years worked in the wine industry. It wasn’t until 2010 that she revived her interest in specialty coffee.
“In the late 2000s, it was hard to know what was going on in the coffee industry in the United Kingdom (UK) as not many companies used email or had websites. However, there was a scene emerging: Square Mile in London, Small Batch in Brighton, and Extract in Bristol were some of the brands starting to do exciting things,” Lawson says.
“Yet, no one was doing it in Glasgow, so the only way I could get involved in this new wave of coffee was if I did it myself. I thought, ‘what do I have to lose?’.”
Lawson took a massive risk and, already in debt, bought a 12-kilogram roaster for £17,500 (about US$22,500) online that she wasn’t sure would even turn up. She hadn’t thought through the gas installation or the ventilation in the space she had lined up, yet within a few weeks she was the owner of a roastery.
“I was using a room within a former architect’s firm as my roasting space. I completely chanced it, knocking a brick out of the wall to feed the roaster’s flue outside,” she says.
“Through my work in the wine trade, I had picked up six wholesale customers when I started out. I bought 200 kilograms of coffee, roasted it and then delivered it to the clients around the city by bike.”
Image: Dear Green
Scotland’s emerging coffee culture
By the time Dear Green was fully up and running and in a dedicated roastery space, the concept of specialty coffee was gaining interest in Scotland, with a growing scene of venues paying attention to the quality of the beans they served. To ensure these baristas were getting the best out of her coffees, Lawson trained all her wholesale customers.
For Lawson, 2015 represented a major tipping point for Dear Green, and the wider specialty scene, when the roastery moved to new, bigger premises in the city and hosted the UK Roasting Championships with John Thompson of Coffee Nexus in Edinburgh.
“At that point I was already part of the Roasters Guild of Europe, and the previous year the Commonwealth Games had been held in the city and we’d hosted a pop-up coffee bar. Previously, it had felt like Glasgow and Edinburgh, and Scotland overall, had been behind other cities such as London and Berlin in terms of coffee. However, after that year, there were so many new cafés and roasteries, the scene was beginning to mature,” she says.
“Being so engrained in the industry, it was hard to see how far we’d come from the inside looking out. I’ve always gone to international events and wanted to feel connected to the rest of the coffee world, and that gave me a good perspective.”
In the years since, the interest in specialty coffee in Scotland has only continued to flourish. Dear Green has grown alongside the industry, slowly increasing its output to around one tonne of coffee per week, which Lawson and her team distribute to their wholesale and domestic customers across Europe.
“My goal when I started the company was simply to create an income to survive, and for the first five years I was paying my staff members more than I paid myself,” she says.
“I’ve always wanted to do business differently: I’ve never wanted to follow the normal path. I’m ambitious and want to see growth because that is progress, but I want that growth to be organic and sustainable.”
Image: Dear Green
Sustainable philosophy
Since the early days of Dear Green when beans were delivered by bike, the business’ impact on the planet and the people it interacts with has been front of mind for Lawson. Launching on a tight budget meant equipment was second-hand and furnishings upcycled, and as the company has grown the team have invested in modern, energy-efficient equipment.
Reducing waste has been a priority since day dot, and Dear Green was one of the first roasters in the country to introduce biodegradable packaging for domestic customers and reusable buckets with vacuum-sealed lids for wholesale partners.
“We don’t have all the answers, but we ask all the questions and have adapted our processes along the way to find the best solutions to minimise our carbon output,” Lawson says.
In 2020, Dear Green gained B Corp certification, which Lawson believes cements many of the values of fairness and equality on which she founded the company.
“After seeing some of the best and worst practices during my own employment history, and visiting some of the world’s poorest coffee-producing countries, my goal has been to create meaningful and lasting change. I want to set an example that prompts a shift towards accountability and transparency in business,” she says.
“Gaining B Corp certification is one of our proudest moments at Dear Green.”
Lawson’s environmental interests extend to her extracurricular activities. The 2018 edition of the Glasgow Coffee Festival, which Dear Green continues to run, was the world’s first single-use cup free coffee festival, saving thousands of cups from ending up in the bin.
In terms of the future of specialty coffee in Scotland, Lawson is aware of the hurdles the industry will have to face over the coming years.
“Coffee is just non-stop, people love it. I’m confident coffee is going to take over tea as the main beverage in the UK in the next few years. However, there’s also the fact that because of climate change coffee might not even exist by 2050,” she says.
“There are also a lot of other challenges in the industry right now. Businesses are still recovering – or not recovering – from the COVID-19 pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis. I think operators who are smart, passionate about what they do, and who are offering excellent products and service will get through this.”
As other countries with a more mature coffee industry have already discovered, as Scotland’s specialty scene develops, competition between businesses increases.
“We didn’t have any competition locally when Dear Green started. There’s a lot more competition now. There are lots of new small roasteries popping up. I think the key to success in business is having good ethics,” she says.
“Despite that, there’s still a very strong community between coffee business owners here. I’m regularly in touch with other female roastery owners and at Glasgow Coffee Festival each year you can see how happy everyone is to interact with each other.”
As new talent comes into the fold and the Scottish coffee community continues to grow, Lawson might just be able to take more of a back seat after 13 years of driving momentum – although that seems unlikely to anyone who’s met the powerhouse roaster.
“I love the dynamic of being in the coffee community. As a roastery owner, you never know what might happen from day to day,” she says.
“On a Monday I might be doing quality control, Tuesday could be problem solving a technical issue for a customer, Wednesday hosting a coffee farmer from Colombia, Thursday talking in Scottish Parliament, and Friday flying off to origin. It’s crazy, but I love it.”
For more information, click here.
This article was first published in the September/October 2024 edition of Global Coffee Report. Read more HERE.
The post Lisa Lawson on the rise of specialty coffee in Scotland appeared first on Global Coffee Report.
“}]]
