Five origins, five years: why we keep coming back to Mission Coffee Works
Five origins, five years: why we keep coming back to Mission Coffee Works
By Tom Saxon, founder of Batch Coffee Subscription
At Batch, every fortnight we send our subscribers two coffees from independent UK roasters. Choosing those roasters is the best part of the job but it's also one of the hardest.
Most roasters appear in our box once. That's not a slight on them, there are so many brilliant roasters in the UK that we want our subscribers to taste as many of them as possible. Mission Coffee Works, however, has been in the Batch box five times over more than five years. An Ethi, a Vietnamese, a Tanzanian, a Kenyan and a Rwandan coffee. Five origins, five very different coffees, and consistently delicious.
That doesn't happen by accident. So here's a look at why consistently great coffee is so difficult to pull off, and why Mission keeps managing it.
Coffee is a crop, not a recipe
People often assume consistency in coffee means making the same thing over and over. It doesn't. Coffee is an agricultural product. Every harvest is different, weather does what it likes, producers change, and a lot that tasted incredible last year may simply not exist this year.
So for a roaster, consistency really means consistently finding great coffee, then roasting each one in a way that lets it shine. That's a never ending job, and it starts long before a bag lands on your doorstep.
Green coffee has never been more expensive to get right
If you've noticed your bags creeping up in price, you're not imagining it. In February 2025, arabica futures hit an all time high. Prices have come down since, but they're still roughly double what used to be considered normal.
And because roasters buy their coffee months in advance, the spikes of early 2025 have been working their way into retail prices right through late 2025 and 2026. In other words, many roasters have spent the past year quietly absorbing costs they paid a long time ago.
That's worth remembering, because the market price is only the starting point. Speciality coffee is bought at a premium on top of it, and the really exceptional lots, the ones that end up in a Batch box, sit at the top end of that premium.
Everything else costs more too
Green coffee is one bill among many. Running a roastery means energy for the roaster, rent, wages, packaging, postage and the endless small costs that add up quietly in the background.
Every one of those costs has gone up in recent years, and independent roasters don't have the buying power of the big chains to cushion it. Keeping quality high when margins are squeezed from every direction takes real commitment.
A very crowded shelf
When I started working in coffee around fifteen years ago, speciality roasters were something you had to go looking for. Now there are hundreds of them across the UK, and more open every year. That's brilliant for coffee drinkers, and brilliant for us, but it means roasters are competing harder than ever for attention.
In a busy market that busy, you can't coast. Customers have endless choice, and the only thing that really keeps people coming back is what's in the cup.
Keeping things exciting
There's another tension here that I know well from running a subscription. People love reliability, but they also want to be surprised. Our subscribers want every coffee to be good, and they also want to try something they've never tasted before.
The roasters we return to are the ones who can do both: the ones who bring us something new and exciting each time, and who we never have to worry about. That's a short list. Mission is right at the top of it.
Why Mission Coffee Works
What ties those five coffees together is care. The team clearly takes sourcing seriously and from our side, they're great people to work with: reliable, responsive, and every bit as excited about the coffee as we are.
In a year when green prices, operating costs and competition are all pushing in the wrong direction, that kind of consistency is rare. It's the reason Mission Coffee Works is one of the very few roasters we've featured five times, and I'd be surprised if it stops there.
Here's to the next five.
Tom Saxon is the founder of Batch Coffee Club, a UK coffee subscription that delivers two speciality coffees from independent roasters every fortnight. He has worked in coffee for around fifteen years as a barista, roaster and writer, and is the author of The Home Barista.
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