Zentveld's Coffee

Our Story - The Beginnings

Established in 1993, Rebecca & John Zentveld moved from Melbourne back to John’s family farm to set up Zentveld’s coffee roastery. In their few years in Melbourne, they developed an appreciation of good coffee, paying attention to roast profiles and cup offerings from Melbourne’s renowned coffee roasting and cafe scene. Of course everything roasted, served and tasted in Melbourne was of foreign bean origin, but Rebecca wanted to set benchmarks for her roasting and desired cup profiles for the newly available Australian estate coffees. Meanwhile, John as a programmer and systems administrator ‘got a real job’ at local Southern Cross University; whilst Rebecca bought a 10kg roaster and set about learning to roast the local beans. Before the internet, without guidance or available roasting courses, it was hands on practice, learning by doing and tasting. It was a pretty unusual career change at age 23 and quite entrepreneurial to leave the city to start roasting pure Australian grown coffee, on the ‘in laws’ farm with only 5 other local growers established. 

It helped that John’s parent’s John Snr. & June Zentveld have a beautiful property in the hills behind Byron Bay, and were local coffee entrepreneurs who pretty much established the NSW coffee growing industry just a few years before. J&JZ Senior worked closely with the Department of Agriculture agronomists (David Peasley in particular) to trial the new varieties, figure out how to grow and to determine the coffee quality right from seed through growing, harvesting and processing to green bean. But that’s really glossing over the details. There was a lot of unknowns with new equipment to be sought and much risk taking in order to start a new agribusiness and encourage other growers to join in; so as to develop a sustainable, viable local coffee growing industry. One that would have to compete against much cheaper-produced, imported coffees of the developing world. So the coffee needed to be really good to gain decent value for their efforts. Given that our cool climate terroire provides the right conditions to grow beautiful coffee in a particularly sustainable and ethical manner (yes it’s a trope, but true) – Rebecca set about learning to unlock the flavour potential of our local coffees, with the nuances of farm processing factors taken into consideration for blend development.

We’ve produced a few well favoured roast profiles and blends to some renown since those early days. Roasters, growers, agronomists, soilcare and wildlife scientists, pro coffee tasters, Australian and international coffee companies all continue to be welcomed to our farm and roastery. We love sharing and learning from them as well as developing our range and on farm practices with our team of coffee aficionados here at Zentvelds Coffee. We always seek to be open to new ideas and feedback. We want to be really good at what we do, and remain at the forefront of the Australian coffee industry – to be truly the Australian coffee specialists from crop to cup – focused on good taste first.