Can you introduce yourself and what you do here at Villino Coffee Roasters

Hey, my name’s Richard. I’m the owner and founder here at Villino Coffee Roasters in Hobart, Tasmania. I’ve been in the specialty industry for about 18 years. We’ve had the business for 17 years. Spent a little bit of time working in the industry in Melbourne before relocating back home to Tazzy to open a cafe.

 

What was the moment that made you decide to have a career in hospitality?

I was always a guy that had a folder on my computer in my corporate job with my business ideas and things that I wanted to do. And I think I was just a little unfulfilled sitting there in a corporate environment, not really feeling connected to what I was doing, and I wanted to explore.

I wanted to try and do something for myself, and we wanted to move back home to Tazzy, and coffee just seemed to be something that I gravitated towards.

What is the idea behind Villino Coffee Roasters?

Villino, as a name, actually means a small home with a yard. So that’s how the cafe felt originally. And whilst we’re a whole lot bigger than that now, those values of being a homely, welcoming type environment still try to be something that we value through the whole business.

We moved to Tazzy with no firm plans on a site or anything like that. At the time I was thinking coffee carts and little things that were kind of like a safe step into the industry, but then this real bricks and mortar place came up and we’re like, “Wow, this seems huge and a really big step. “But I’d done all the research to death and I was like, “Right, let’s just take the plunge.”

We bought this little business and gutted it in six weeks, and before we knew it, we were in there running a cafe. It was myself and my wife and my mother-in-Law, the three of us, just little family cafe. I made every coffee that went out the door for the first couple of years, and it was a real learning experience.

 

What was the journey like going from family run cafe to roastery?

We didn’t really set out on this journey with the goal of being a large coffee roaster or anything. We started with the cafe, and I just wanted to do that really well. And part of that journey was about getting more control over the coffee that we were roasting so that we could provide an even better experience to our customers.

So, we bought our first five kilo PROBAT roaster, set that up in a warehouse, which at the time felt massive. And we used to take off a day a week and start roasting coffee down in the warehouse. And it was just me going in between shifts and down there putting some batches through and my brother-in-law, it’s still a family affair.

And after a while people started to say, “Well, I’m really enjoying the coffee. How do we buy it for our cafe?” And that kind of just naturally evolved into opening a wholesale business. We’ve just organically grown over the years and it’s been just really nice to keep it small and personal along the way.

And then as we went along, we have essentially just responded to that organic growth of the business. And initially that was opening a little hole in the wall cafe just down the road from the main shop that was just to ease the pressure on the demand for takeaway coffees out of the business.

So that popped up about 10 years ago. That’s going great. And then eventually we were just bursting at the seams down at the roastery side of the business, so working out of shipping containers out on the backyard, and we were just out of space, but we needed to really wait until we had the perfect location to move to. And where we are here, it’s in a built up industrial area, but it’s not got a huge amount of foot traffic. So it is still a destination location, and we’re just super stoked in the last 18 months, people continuing to seek us out and we’re just getting busier and busier on the cafe side of the business out here.

Why is Tasmania important to Villino Coffee Roasters?

I grew up in Tazzy, did uni here,  and moved interstate to work in a corporate job. But I think I always felt that draw of coming home to Tazzy. What’s the cliché? You can take the boy out of Tazzy, but you can’t take the Tazzy out of the boy. So yeah, my wife wanted to come back to Tazzy and I saw it as an opportunity.

Back then our food scene hadn’t really exploded down here in Tazzy. We didn’t have a lot of the tourist draw card. So, we were a little bit ahead of that trend, which was great, which meant that we had a lot of opportunities down here to be a bit of a leader or one of the early movers in the industry.

I think there’s something about Tazzy as well that the connections and the relationships feel a lot more real down here. It’s a smaller place, it’s a tighter community. And as a roaster and as a cafe, that’s been awesome for us to be able to connect a lot more closely with the people that we’re working with and supplying and just build really strong long-term relationships with people.

What are some of the trends you’ve seen over the years?

It’s changed heaps over the 17 years that we’ve been in the game here. In the early days, it was a lot more about education for consumers and a lot of the stuff we were doing, whilst it wasn’t groundbreaking, it was new to a lot of the consumers down here in the retail, in the cafe space. We had to talk a lot about what we were doing and serving single origins and pouring latte art and just the technology that we were using and the way we were fussing over coffee.

I think a lot of the things we were doing back then, are now just like the bare minimum you would expect if you walked into a specialty venue. And what we’ve been seeing is this crazy roller coaster of technological advancements in the industry. We’ve seen roasting and cafe technology and the equipment, and the data that’s available to us, the connectivity, all these sorts of things.

What can people expect when they come to Villino Coffee Roasters?

We’ve been in this space for about two years now. And it really is kind of the culmination of our whole journey in the industry and as a business. And we’re super proud of this site. People can come in, they can enjoy a coffee, they can taste the full range of coffees that we roast at different roast levels, served in different brewing methods. They can buy retail beans for home, they can engage with our baristas and talk about what it is that we do with our coffee.

One of the real visions for this space was to create a fishbowl view into the world of roasting. You’re able to come here, sit down, have a coffee, pull back the curtains and see what actually goes on behind the scenes in our business and in a roastery. For us, a big part of it was just showing to people how much we really put into every cup of coffee and every bag of beans that goes out the door.

What’s your favorite blend?

Our house blend, our synergy blend is what lives in my grinder at home for espresso. That’s what gets me started every day. I’m super excited about a new blend that we’re releasing at the moment, which is called Wonderland. So that one’s going to be super tasty, and I think would be really popular.

Why did you chose to partner with The Alternative?

At Villino, we really focus on relationships and quality and the Alternative crew are a really great group of people to work with. And in terms of the quality of the product, honestly, we let our palates do the decision making there. And we did a bunch of blind tastings with the team and ultimately decided that The Alternative milks are the ones that are really allowing our coffee to shine and creating a really great flavor experience for the customers. And a little bit of extra latte art going out the door as well never hurts.

What has been your most rewarding experience?

I come in here and I see all the things that we do in a business laid out in this beautiful building, and it just makes me feel super proud of what we’ve achieved as a business, I think. But ultimately though, the thing that gives me the most pride and happiness is just the team that we’ve created and the people that we work with. We have an amazing group of specialty coffee professionals, some of which have been with us for years and years.

We don’t claim to be the only one or the first one, but I feel like our long-standing presence in the industry here has certainly had an impact. We’ve trained a lot of baristas, we’ve worked with a lot of cafes, and I think we have actually made a difference out there in the Tazzy coffee scene, and that’s just awesome. So super proud of that.