Newport’s Caffe Isola – where a family business is outdoing the national chains by growing their own Island Roasted brand in a distinctive setting.
Many of us start our day with a coffee. For the Burgess family, coffee has been the beginning of a business that is now reaching its second decade and involving six members of the family, with a full staff of almost 20 people. Their Island Roasted brand of artisan coffee has been familiar to coffee aficionados for many years. Now their bespoke blend is reaching a much wider audience since the latest Caffe Isola opened its doors in December 2017 in the former Beavis store in Newport’s Node Hill. At the end of last year the café moved into another new phase, with the opening of the upstairs mezzanine floor, providing new retail and training space.
“We’re open seven days a week and we’re consistently busy,” says owner Dan Burgess. “We felt there was a need for a place like this. Across the day you’ll see business people here having a coffee with their laptops, families meeting up, students as well as coffee fanatics who find us through social media whilst on holiday. It’s a very diverse customer base.”
Dan and his father Colin founded Caffe Isola in Newport back in 2006, opening their first shop in Watchbell Lane. A year later they moved to Pyle Street where Dan’s wife Viviana joined the team to take over the food side of the business, bringing her Sicilian heritage. Taking on the current much-loved Beavis building has been a big investment in both money and time. It’s very much a team effort now, run by Dan and Viviana, with Dan’s sister in law Stef and manager Dani, who originally joined as a barista.
“We had been looking for a new site for a long time,” Dan explains. “We looked at other properties in Newport but to invest properly we needed to buy rather than lease. When the option to buy the Beavis building came up, it worked. We knew to stand out above the chains. Having a far higher quality product wasn’t enough and we have invested to bring the ‘wow’ factor. The first step was to restore the building to its former glory. We did the layout design ourselves and we used local tradespeople to do all of the work. All the money was spent here for the benefit of local people and that ethos goes right through the business, supporting other businesses and producers whenever we can.”
It’s an investment that is paying off, bringing in new customers and new opportunities. The larger space means Caffe Isola now opens for food and themed evening events. Moving to bigger premises means the business has more than doubled in size, creating more than ten new positions with up to twenty staff work across the café and retail floor.
Stef Burgess joined the business nearly five years ago after a ten year career in pharmacy management. She’s married to Dan’s brother Larry, who is predominantly involved in the wholesale side of the business, the Isle of Wight Espresso Company, producing their own Island Roasted brand of artisan coffee. Dan’s mother Lynn is also part of the team, looking after the office and finances.
“Dad and I started roasting our own coffee commercially back in 2010,” Dan explains. “It’s definitely an exciting and interesting market to be in. Our success is based on the consistent quality of our product, and a lot of effort goes into keeping it that way. Buying coffee is quite a complicated process, it’s linked to market and exchange rates so you’ve got to look ahead and think about your growth. We’re now producing nearly 30 tonnes of coffee a year with customers both on and off the Island, which makes us a pretty reasonable sized player in the artisan field. It’s a proper commercial business, not something we just dabble in.”
Customers will soon be able to watch the beans being roasted in the café, as the upstairs floor will also provide a new home for one of their drum roasting machines. With their wholesale coffee business also growing steadily it’s going to be another busy year for the team.
“We aren’t stopping yet,” Stef laughs. “We’re growing the business sympathetically and in stages. We want to get it right. At the moment we’re planning a new wholesale building for Island Roasted. We don’t want to dilute what we do at Caffe Isola by trying to replicate it with another shop in another area. The great thing about a family business is that we share the same mindset. We all bring different skills and experiences and it works really well. We all live and breathe it. You have to! You put the passion in and you get the results.”
