The first roast in June 2017 marked the start of our new roastery in Länna, south of Stockholm, which besides its custom-built speciality coffee roasting process also houses our green coffee storage, warehouse of finished goods, office workspace and visitors’ area for all people sharing our vision of bringing better coffee to the people.
Text by Anders Boajé
The dream of building the most modern speciality coffee roastery in Europe was more than a decade old once it was finally realised, as we started dreaming of this quite soon after Johan & Nyström was started back in 2004. Our first roastery, located in Tullinge south of Stockholm, started out small with a tiny room for a small roaster, a hand-packing station, and a desk for admin work. With the rapid growth of Johan & Nyström and our speciality coffee revolution, we quickly expanded to adjacent rooms in the old factory building where we resided and stepwise custom built a roastery to our own liking. There was lots of charm, mistakes, learnings and “thermal events” (a.k.a. fires).
Soon enough, we realized that the old factory building had its physical limitations and that our dreams were much larger. So, we started planning for building the roastery that would define Johan & Nyström for this and coming generations of coffee lovers, big words but in our view, this was the only roastery dream worth dreaming.
Our Head of Production Joakim Ahlund actually designed the whole roastery process, in MS Paint.
After many years of planning, we could finally start building Europe’s most modern speciality coffee roastery in 2016 and completed the task by mid-2017. The ambition was not only to move our production and team to a new facility, but to enable an immediate doubling of coffee volumes since we had been given the responsibility for all of Espresso House’s coffee, serving some 1 million guests daily in 500 cafés, and to prepare the roastery for doubling these combined volumes many times over in the coming years and decades.
As a workplace, we want the roastery to be an open and inviting place that encourages the teamwork that is essential for delivering speciality coffee with a strong connection to our producers in origins across the world.
The roastery process is custom-built to our own design, which we developed from learnings in our first roastery but also from extensive travels to roasteries in Europe and US. What distinguishes our roastery is its combination of:
- Full flexibility with every new roast batch: every 12 minutes a roast batch is completed and a new one begins, for which we have full flexibility to blend green beans before or after roasting, send beans to any roaster, use the grinder or bypass for whole beans, and send any batch to any of our packaging machines. This enables full flexibility for every batch and enables us to always roast the coffee on order and deliver freshly roasted coffee.
- Full traceability of every coffee bean’s journey: with our automated transport system we have eliminated all manual handling steps while also introduced lots of checkpoints with data capture along the way so that we can trace any green coffees and roast batches completed in minute detail.
- Full transparency along the roasting process: all visitors can follow the roasting process and interact with the production staff, there are no hidden steps.
For a visitor, we want you to feel welcomed to share our vision of bringing better coffee to the people and we happily share all our knowledge from origin travels, coffee buying, roasting process, packaging, and delivery to all that are interested. The roastery has visits daily from customers, partners, coffee producers and coffee-interested consumers. Some come for the experience, some to be educated on espresso machines, some come to discuss coffee blends and some to help us develop further – but all should leave with fond memories of having visited a fantastic roastery, tasted great coffee and met some truly passionate coffee lovers.
