coffee, tea, herb tea, cocoa from thirty origins

the tea and coffee plant

certified organic, fairly traded and other fine produce

 

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OFFER!
 £8 for your personal
choice of three samples of freshly roasted gourmet coffee, total 500gm 

tealeaf Retail Prices
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LINKS
  click here for fair trade foundation, organic farmers and growers, raw coffee prices, ethical junction, INK publishers, etc etc



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More about
the tea and coffee plant

updated October 2008

important information for all coffee lovers

1. The flavour of coffee starts to decay within days of roasting
2. It happens because the fine aromatic oils break down.
3. This happens however the coffee is packed.
4. Thousands of people have found the answer
5. The solution is to buy your coffee freshly roasted and store it in the fridge or freezer.



 


Our History

  • In 1985 journalist Ian Henshall started roasting coffee literally on the street corner in Portobello Road, London as way of financing his magazine Outlook, which was launched in 1987. The Evening Standard ran a feature on the combined operation. The coffee took off somewhat more than the publishing.. 

  • Reality hit Ian Henshall in a big way in 1994 in the form of newborn twins Stephen and Timothy with partner Jutta Wuttke, who later became well known to our Friday customers. Publishing was still a financial drain and Ian dropped  Outlook, but with support from New Internationalist, The Big Issue and others, he helped form INK, the umbrella organisation for the UK's alternative press. The main visible result of INK so far is the INK joint subscription leaflet, of which 300,000 are printed and distributed in the UK.

  • The coffee shop was opened in 1997 near the old market stall. The wholesale business started to grow. With demand for organic produce booming and hardly any other roasters certified as organic it was a good time to increase capacity.

  • The boom in our wholesale business began when we identified a source of coffee that was both organic, fairly traded and high quality. Since then our silver packs of coffee from Guatemala, Mexico and Peru have become a familiar sight to London's coffee purchasers in many different outlets. We now believe we have the largest range of organic and/or fairly traded coffee in the UK

  • Starstruck . Then came a Hollywood movie, which most of us took little notice of at the time, Notting Hill . Of course hardly any of it was shot down here, and our sizeable minority of black people evaporated from Notting Hill's Notting Hill. The shop rents went up, the tourists flocked and the corporations moved in. In the wake of the stars came, you could probably guess it, Bill and Hillary. No, he didn't drink any of our coffee but he dined at a pub which sells it. Unfortunately there was a power cut at the time. As so often before, Clinton had greatness within his grasp but it eluded him.

  • Philosophy. Ian and Jutta moved to Brighton in 2002, but Ian is to be seen in the shop most weeks. Ian mainly handles new business, web and marketing activity, and suppliers. The philospohy: if your supplies are good the demand will follow. This seems to have worked so far.

  • The famous Electric Cinema opposite our shop reopened in 2002 and after massive building work added a preposterously expensive restaurant. It is one of the oldest cinemas in the world, but that's another story...

  • In 2003 we amalgamated with John Hedges' roasting operation in Brick Lane, Spittalfields and stopped roasting in the shop to make more space for customers.

  • Permanent. In July 2004 the shop moved to its third location in our parade, this time permanent, fully refurbished and custom designed for us. Danny Davies, general manager for five years left to pursue new opportunities in Australia. During his time our turnover has grown by around 600% and our payroll from three to ten.

  • Ian co-authored "9/11 Revealed" published in the UK and the US in August 2005, the first mainstream published book to question the official story of the attacks that became the pretext for war without end. The book had a three page serialisation in the Daily Mail,and became a non-fiction best seller, but was still ignored by most of the establishment.

  • 2005 was a busy year, we moved the roasting operation to larger premises in Acton, London NW10.

  • New Roaster. In early 2006 we purchased a (very) second hand Probat L12 10kg coffee roaster. Shortly after, we consigned the latest of our home made roaster series to the skip. However our pre-war Uno shop roaster can still be seen in the shop, it was used by us not so long ago in Spittalfields

  • In September 2007 Ian's second book was published: “9/11 The New Evidence” and he has become a regular guest on the less mainstream media, from Talksport to Al Jazeera. In September 2008 on BBC Southern Counties radio he confronted producer Guy Smith who made the BBC's “Conspiracy Files”, a grossly misleading 9/11 whitewash.

  • At the end of 2008 the talk is all of a financial crisis, but so far Coffee Plant is doing fine, with ever more caterers choosing our espresso beans and turnover in Portobello Road booming under the new manager Claudio Ambruoso. We are in the process of buying a new 30kg roaster for Acton

Fair Trade and organic

  • It was in the early nineties that organic and fairly traded coffees first appeared commercially. For us it was obvious: if the planet is to have a decent future, fair trade and organic products are the only way forward.

  • In those days organic was a term anyone could use. Then the EU made it illegal to describe unaudited produce as organic. In spite of the extra paperwork, we believe the audit trail which certification requires is essential to uphold the integrity of the the organic system. An organic crop must not only start off as organic but be transported and processed in a chemical free environment too. Non-organic coffee, for instance, can be fumigated during transport. 

  • As the organic movement has become mainstream, a new problem has arisen - bulk producers supplying supermarkets with cheap technically organic produce which somehow doesn't taste good enough. Crops grown using the wrong strain, in the wrong soil or climate conditions will taste poor whether organic or not.

  • In the coffee market, which is highly volatile, the main advantage of Fairtrade is to put a floor under a market, so that in bad years the producers are not at risk of losing everything to creditors. Until 2007 when the financial world started to go beserk the coffee market was depressed after the IMF put pressure on Vietnam to flood the market with low grade coffee. For nearly ten years we paid about 80% more for our Fairtrade coffee than for the uncertified equivalents

  • Our Fairtrade coffee has been from audited sources for years. By January 2005 our new IT systems were finally able to supply the data needed for official Fairtrade auditing and the use of the Fairtrade Mark. All our Fairtrade coffee is now Fairtrade audited and carries the Fairtrade mark.

  • Since then we have extended both our organic and Fairtrade lines, so that by now most of our coffee is both organic and Fairtrade. This is welcome to caterers who can appeal to two often different markets with our coffee. We advise retailers however that the mains selling point is the quality of the coffee.

  • Why do we have any coffee which is not organic Fairtrade? Some origins still do not supply it, often because their high quality coffee sells very well anyway. This is the case with all Kenyan coffee and many premium estate coffees.


Portobello Market

  • Described in the Evening Standard as creating the best smell in London, our retail coffee is roasted twice each week in Spitalfields and delivered the same day to our main premises in London's Notting Hill district, at the heart of the world famous Portobello Road Market. (Note to visitors: the full antiques and bric a brac markets are only there on Saturday with some on Friday). We are opposite the Electric Cinema, open Monday to Saturday, from 8.00am to 5:30pm, and on Sundays from 10.00 to 5.00.


Wholesale and catering 

  • In the ten years since we first moved into a shop we have built up a large mainly organic and Fairtrade wholesale business with over fifty tonnes of coffee on our books at any one time. 

  • We mainly supply espresso beans in kilos to caterers and ground coffee in valve packs of 250gm for retail. As we roast and pack in small batches we can supply to most requirements. However we advise against sachets for filter machines. These are wasteful and expensive. Far better to use a scoop and a kilo bag of fresher coffee which can be kept in the fridge.

  • Our 250g valve packs are available from London distributors Marigold or, for larger outlets, directly from our Acton factory. They can be bought at Wholefoods, Local Hero, and other retail outlets around the UK.

  • We supply many caterers who are not licensed organically but just like to use top quality ingredients. Most buy our espresso 1,2 and 3 blends. Our pre-ground 250g packs of organic Fairtrade decaf ground for professional espresso are very popular

    Mail order

    We offer a retail mail order and wholesale delivery service. See the price list  and the trade price page for full details. You can order online from our secure server.


 

the tea and coffee plant
180 Portobello Road, London W11 2EB
tel
020 7221 8137 retail shop
020 7655 4574 mail order and wholesale
coffee@pro-net.co.uk