Smelling the opportunities for coffee in Silicon Roundabout
As the founder of café chain Grind, David Abrahamovitch knows a lot about coffee — his business now encompasses a 20,000 sq ft bean-roasting factory in Bermondsey and 12 London coffee shops, plus another in Los Angeles in partnership with Soho House.
But in the early days, coffee made him sick.
“When we started, we partnered with someone else to roast for us, and we visited them before launch to design our own house blend,” the 37-year-old entrepreneur explains.
“When you taste coffee you’re supposed to treat it like a wine tasting and spit it back out once you have tasted it, but no one told us this… So [friend and now investor] Kaz [James, an Australian DJ] and I were both sick on the train on the way back from the first tasting, because we’d drunk about 50 different coffees in two hours.”
Today Abrahamovitch drinks more carefully — while Grind sells more than a million cups a year from its cafés, plus five million cups of its coffee sold at Soho House branches around the world.
It started back in 2011, when he was 25. “My dad passed away, and I inherited the family business — a mobile phone shop inside a small circular building on Old Street Roundabout,” he explains.
“I loved the building and wanted to keep it as I’d spent a lot of time there with my dad, but I didn’t love the mobile phone business, so I decided that a better use for it would be a coffee shop and cocktail bar. It was the necessity of needing to do something in order to pay the rent that was the catalyst for the first site, Shoreditch Grind.”
It was a difficult time: it was only 12 months between the funeral and Abrahamovitch opening the store: “I started pretty quickly — it had been three years of hospital visits with dad, and it was good to have a distraction, something else to get on with.”
Abrahamovitch set about ripping out the space and turning it into a café: cooking up a brand, menu, design, managing the construction, buying equipment, and recruiting and training staff.
It cost around £150,000 to open the first location. “By then, we were so short on money I had to borrow £500 from my mum to put a cash float in the till,” Abrahamovitch admits.
Luckily Shoreditch Grind’s first day, in June 2011, made enough for him to pay his mum back. “I think we took about £700 — it was such a relief to have some cash in the till. I still have a photo in my phone of that first day’s takings.”
It was serendipitous timing to open a coffee shop in Shoreditch. “We were lucky that the building was in a very visible spot, just as all the tech businesses were moving in.”
Still, diversification has been key to Grind’s success. “Getting the space to work as a cocktail bar too transformed the financials, and made it possible for me to raise money. Without the cocktails, it wouldn’t have been attractive enough to investors.”
Espresso martinis and more are sold until 11pm at some branches, while Grind also began selling compostable coffee pods for Nespresso machines in 2019. “Little did we know just how much this would not only change the business for ever, but also would save it during lockdown less than a year later.”
“Our pods are the first in the UK to be certified as home-compostable, which means they biodegrade in weeks, not centuries,” Abrahamovitch says. Grind now sells 30 million compostable pods a year, helping turnover hit £22 million this year, and be on track to exceed £30 million in 2024.
Looking over Grind’s success, Abrahamovitch says, “I’ve no doubt my dad would be unbelievably proud and would love it. But it’s still impossible for me to get my head around the fact that one of the best things in my life, this business coming about from that one building, came because of the worst thing in my life. I’d still trade it all in a heartbeat to have my dad back.”
Founded: 2011
Staff: 270
Turnover: £22m for the year to April
Headquarters: Shoreditch
