To celebrate UK Coffee Week (4-10 MAY 2015) we have a special guest blog from Marco Olmi of The Drury Tea and Coffee Company. Drury were the first UK-wide tea and coffee company to take up the Living Wage!
My name is Marco Olmi and I'm the Sales Director of The Drury Tea & Coffee Company, a family-run business based in London that specialises in the production and supply of high quality teas and coffees. We became an accredited London Living Wage employer in January 2015.
Our business was established in 1936 by my grandfather and his two younger brothers, and we supplied first tea and then coffee to the catering establishments of London. Fast forward 79 years and we're doing exactly the same thing, albeit on a slightly larger scale as we move into a new factory and headquarters in the Royal Arsenal development in Woolwich, where we will be tripling our production capacities and expanding our horizons even further.
We've always been a family business, in every sense of the word. I grew up understanding and respecting that one of the most important business relationships is that between an employer and employee and we have been very lucky over the years to first find and then retain staff of the highest calibre; men and women that I first met as a young boy coming down to work alongside my father for the day during the school holidays, who then became colleagues when I joined the firm at the age of twenty.
Twenty-seven years later, and I still work with great people, some of whom joined the year I did and a few even before that. I sincerely hope that the next generation, should they wish to join the family firm, will have the same experiences I did, as I believe this is the basis for our company's success.
This is why our commitment to the London Living Wage is so crucial to the future growth of our business, it sends out a very clear message that we are committed to paying a fair wage and that we respect that relationship between employer and employee.
Much is made of the ethical sourcing of coffee, and of course this is vitally important (we work closely with the Rainforest Alliance™, sourcing most of our green coffee from Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms) but we can't ignore that ethos when the coffee arrives on our shores - it is right that the growers are paid a fair price for their coffee, but it is also right that the people who roast, pack and deliver it in the UK are paid a fair wage too.
The Living Wage is more than just empty ideology, it makes sound business sense in a competitive market - you retain valuable staff, and your company is certainly more attractive to potential customers; we're already noticing the difference. Besides which, I do think my grandfather would have approved.