Cris Mellross

It is a family business. The other workers aren’t in the family, but it’s still a sort of small business with a lot of overlapping roles. I came in as sort of the head barista for the retail space and over the last couple of years that’s kind of developed into sort of more marketing, more brand development with where the business should be going in this climate. And sort of trying to forward plan, positioning the business for the next five to ten years, really. So, yeah, it’s changed a little bit. I’m happy where I am now. It’s nice to have some sort of focus on driving the ship a little bit in terms of where you see it down the track, yeah. The day-to-day, you know, they’re all the same but they’re all slightly different. You know, we operate Monday to Friday and the big backbone of the business is obviously wholesale and online customers. So, we tend to run to the logistics of all the freight companies. A general job would be, we kind of get here at 7:45 and turn everything on, open the gates and put the signs out to invite people in. We don’t do a lot of advertising. So, it is a lot of just organic foot traffic or people driving to a waterfall and noticing there’s a roastery and stopping in. But we’ll do some tours during the week. They’re typically planned in advance, and they’re called a “crop to cup” tour. You know, people come and meet at the house, and they can start with a coffee and then we’ll take them on about an hour’s walk around the farm, explain all the regenerative work that they’re doing on the farm. You know, we have beehives, we have the windmill in the creek down the bottom that has a lot of wildlife, and then we just teach people about growing coffee in a sort of subtropical climate. It’s cool. Day-to-day we get our regulars that live around the area, trades people that are driving past and then we’re sort of treating each day with whatever comes through the gate.