The Little Marionette Blog

A focus for us at The Little Marionette is to invest in relationships at the farm gate by building sustainable buying practices so that we can support our farmers, year after year.

Our coffee-hunter and head-of-coffee Tyler recently returned from Central America where she visited our producers in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama and headed to the Producer & Roaster Forum, organised by Perfect Daily Grind.

When The Little Marionette’s founder, Ed Cutcliffe, decided to start up in London, he realised that the coffee culture would be quite different from ours back in Australia. Luckily, two of his co-workers, Kirby Sinclair and Wesley Cusick, had moved to London to train, play and coach squash. During their time there, they found they couldn’t get a decent coffee anywhere. Otherwise, they loved the city and wanted to move there!

Processing coffee is the method of removing the outer fruit (cherry) to expose the green beans. The method adopted by each farm is based on many factors, including water supply and climate. Their primary objective is to ensure the least possible incidence of defects and optimal flavour.

Three weeks. Three countries. Eleven farms. One producer and roaster forum. One blockchain coffee auction. Countless new relationships forged. Endless great friends made. Multiple long-term plans with our primary farmers set in place. Yup, it was a pretty successful trip.

Australia’s coffee culture is world-renowned, and rightly so. Recent years have seen a huge focus on sustainability and the environment – which is awesome and something we fully support at The Little Marionette – but who should be footing the bill for this in a low-margin industry?