Roast Coffee

Roast Coffee & Tea Co. owner Nez Hewitt loves roasting gourmet, artisan coffee beans. She is a perfectionist driven by the desire to optimize the flavour of each bean. She delivers these beautiful beans directly to customers, giving her business a tremendously personal touch. Devoted customers order her full-flavoured coffee beans over the phone or via the Roast Coffee & Tea Co. website. Nez both delivers the beans herself as well as shipping them via Canada Post.

The road to her unique business model was all started by a coffee epiphany in Seattle, where she sampled different brews in the city famous for launching Starbucks. Encountering varying degrees of satisfaction and disappointment at different coffee shops, it was at a cafe at Pike Place Market she decided to give up her graphic design job and begin the quest to make the perfect cup of coffee. “I wanted to know why coffee is sometimes so bad and why it is sometimes so good,” she says. “I took all my nerdiness from design and transferred it to roasting coffee.”

Nez took a roasting course in Idaho and opened a stall at The Market on Macleod. Initially selling her roasted beans made with a “nerdy,” meticulous attention to detail, she also started brewing her coffee. "My customers would say to me, 'We really enjoy your coffee. Why aren’t you serving it to us at the market?'" she explains. But running the shop took her away from roasting, which she says is her main love. Hence she decided to close the shop and transform Roast into a unique coffee delivery business.