Coffee entrepreneur Michael Allpress is a perfectionist who values consistency, attention to detail and discipline.

It’s not the suite of values you might predict in a man who is first to admit he spent his high school years “wagging school to go surfing” with best mate Tony Papas, now his longstanding business partner in the boutique coffee roastery Allpress Espresso.

A shy child, Allpress was held back at school to allow him to focus on overcoming the challenge of diagnosed dyslexia. Papas’s garrulousness was a complement to Allpress’s quieter personality and their first foray into business together was “doing odd 
jobs around the neighbourhood for a couple of bob”.

Both men have come a long way since, recently opening a new branch of their stylish roastery-cum-espresso-bars in East London’s fashionably edgy Shoreditch, having successfully traded in New Zealand and later Australia for the better part of two decades.

Papas, who headed up the Australian arm of the business for the past decade, has relocated to London with his wife to steer the new establishment, accompanied by a longstanding staff member who will train new recruits in the company’s meticulous standards.

The three-storey enterprise is the realisation of an opportunity both Papas and Allpress 
have been keenly aware of for some time. “It’s interesting,” says Allpress. “There’s a lot of interesting things happening in Europe around specialty coffee, but none of them are going to London to do it – although London desperately needs it.”

Although local boutique vendors recognise the opportunity, they lack 
the capital and institutional memory Allpress is able to deliver.

Michael Allpress remains in Auckland, for now, where he founded the company in 1987 with a single coffee cart; an idea he had formulated while living in Seattle in the 1980s with his American wife.

“The specialty coffee culture really bloomed in Seattle,” he says. “I knew Starbucks when they only had two stores and used to be true specialty coffee stores. They had hoppers of fresh-roasted coffee and there were single origins from Panama and Ethiopia.”

What really caught his eye in the US, though, was “an old form of merchandising: the espresso cart. This engineer from Boeing had built an espresso cart, put a machine on it and placed it directly under the monorail 
in downtown Seattle and there was a queue out all day long.”

Allpress’s first cart was at Auckland’s Victoria Park Market, soon followed by a second at Auckland University. In 1992, the first roastery was established, to supply his own carts as well as other cafes and restaurants in Auckland. Papas introduced the brand to Australia in 1999.

It’s not just the means of distribution that has changed since those early days. Staff now travel to origin to buy better-quality raw materials directly from the growers, rather than the old traders, who can be “behind the curve”, and the company has developed its own standards of trade.

While Allpress thinks the conventional fair trade ideals are “fantastic” and good work is being done, they don’t allow farmers to add value in a free-market environment nor guarantee the high-quality beans required by Allpress. Instead, Allpress’s standard of ethics is disseminated to all their suppliers, and the company retains the right to make site inspections.

Papas and Allpress recently enjoyed a trip to Tanzania to meet with growers and visit plantations and roasteries, staying at a farm “right on the Rift Valley. It was my first time to Africa, so it was quite a special time … and part of understanding and verifying our standards in relationship to those people.”

Allpress is currently engaged in an 18-month project to develop a set of standards for the internal running of the company, covering everything from HR to advertising to development. “Not just a process document, but a commentary on why we do things a particular way.

“Twenty years ago when I started a coffee cart business, I didn’t realise I’d be getting into environmental psychology and HR management and organisational stuff, that we’re having to deal with today,” says Allpress.

In spite of the company’s considerable expansion, it remains in spirit a “family business”. Papas welcomes staff to stay at his London home, and Allpress’s mother and father were in attendance at the London opening, among the 200 guests. So was Julio, Allpress’s industrial cleaner from Peru, who hopes to return to South America at some point and take up a role in the coffee business. These core values will be a vital anchor in the coming 18 months, which will include expansion to Dunedin, Melbourne and Tokyo. “Everything we do, from our cups to our training manuals, we’re quite disciplined,” says Allpress. “I think it’s a brand the Japanese could adopt without much difficulty.”

Having worked hard for 20 years, Allpress is also considering a sabbatical 
of some sort: to “shake things up”. Already an enthusiastic sailor, cook and gardener, the keen skier is contemplating spending an entire season in Japan. “It’s important for generating ideas and for rediscovering who you are, instead of getting buried in the business.”