How life changing accident led to a new career as an ethical coffee roaster

In 2011 he had a car accident and life changed dramatically.

As he was finishing his qualifications to be an engineer, he was knocked off his push bike and suffered damage to his brain and long-term health and neurological complications, meaning he wasn’t in a position to go back to a full-time job.

“I’d had a car accident and it left me quite badly disabled and I have a lot of problems with headaches,” he says.

"Because of the job I had at the time I wanted something a bit easier to do and a bit more flexible. "Unfortunately, I had to pack in the job that I was in at the time to focus on my health and try and get myself better through a neurologist. Once I started to get my health back, I started to find jobs that would be suitable for my circumstances and work that wouldn't be too intense and allow me not to break myself. A coffee shop seemed ideal.”

His two little girls wanted him to open a coffee shop like in the Disney movie Princess and the Frog – so that’s exactly what he did.

Frazer founded Frazer’s Coffee Roasters – as an ethical roastery to give back to the city and community of Sheffield by sourcing the best coffee beans from all around the world.

He used his experience in mechanics, along with getting hold of the UK’s strongest steel in Sheffield and built his own roasting machine from top to bottom. He then travelled to coffee-origin countries, visiting more than 100 coffee farmers and met the team behind each of his coffee bags.

By roasting ethically sourced, Fairtrade coffee beans, Frazer ensures he is supporting the livelihoods of the communities who grow and produce the beans.

Celebrate Yorkshire’s history with us by signing up to our weekly Heritage newsletter “I’ve always loved coffee at home. My mum always had great coffee in the house, and we had neighbours who were from Eritrea, which is a big cultural thing for them as well. And so we were always around coffee, but it was never a career path – but I decided to give the coffee shops a go.

"I worked in a couple of coffee shops, and I got more into it. A friend at home showed me how to roast coffee in a little frying pan, and I kind of saw a little bit of that from an Eritrea point of view, and I just fell into it.

"I absolutely fell in love with it, the hospitality of it, dealing with people and being involved in making great things and doing good food and giving me a sense of purpose.

"The more I got into it, I realised that there were no local businesses that were offering that kind of great produced coffee locally. And a lot of the good shops that I spoke to said they got their coffee from London and as a Yorkshire-born person I thought there would be a better option on our doorstep that you didn’t have to go down to London for – you can get local produce like you would with fruit and vegetables."

Using his engineering expertise Frazer turned an old £50 barbecue he bought off Ebay into a functional hand-turned coffee roaster. Frazer started his journey by roasting coffee beans in his back garden up until his barbecue became to small to process all of his sales. He then started building his own roastery and grew the team to six passionate coffee loving individuals.

A fateful conversation in a Meadowhall coffee shop then left the shop owner asking to try Frazer's coffee which led to him asking for some to sell in the store.

Frazer gave him a batch and a couple of hours later he received a phone call saying he had sold it all – it was so popular and people asked for more.

Frazer says it spurred him into renting a premises out and he says he: “Borrowed and begged and pleaded with my wife to let me start this journey.”

“It was very slow to begin with, but I started to get a bit of traction, and within three or four years, it went from roasting by hand on a little hand cranked homemade coffee roaster to where I decided to turn it really serious.”

Frazer spent six months building a wholesale coffee business.

“We sold it to one or two people, to where within year five I was supplying more than 100 coffee shops online business, and we were really starting to really take off.”

Determined to avoid buying from a commercial importer, Frazer started making connections and reaching out to small plot holder farmers or cooperatives around the world to see if he could buy their coffee beans and at what price it would be sustainable for them to do so for a long period of time

“I soon realised to get that level of information and create that connection, I needed to go and see them.” So Frazer headed to the deep central jungle of Uganda, Peru, Brazil and Columbia as part of his travels visiting coffee farmers.

“They’re not privy to stock markets going up and down and left and right. It's what they can afford to keep as a sustainable model, and we review that on a regular basis, and that's effectively how we got going.

“Then after all this time of Covid and uncertainty, I was really of the opinion that what would work really well would be to take it from that original humble beginnings to a bit like an open brewery model.

“So this is where we're at now. And this is where I've gone from being a wholesaler and an on-line online retailer and growing that market.”

Frazer says he wanted to open a coffee shop where you could see your coffee being roasted in the background.

“I found a premises within the Sheffield City Centre. It needed a lot of work. So it's taken me the better part of eight months to renovate.

“It’s an old fire coach repair station from the 1900s and I've repaired the whole building. So we now roast our coffee on site.

“You can see it all being produced and manufactured in the background with the ability to house 60 people, and we've got a full espresso coffee menu and as much of a choice in coffee as you could possibly get.

“Effectively, it was the dream to one day open something like that, and we've had this now for over a year, and the response has been astronomical.

“I’m very lucky that I have had support from the local community and beyond. It's giving the opportunity to coffee farmers across the globe to work in a direct sense. That's the most rewarding part of it – that I get to showcase the hard work these people do and give them a voice on another side of the continent or another side of the world.

“I never, ever thought something like that would be possible when I first decided to start doing this. We’re tiny. Even now we're small, but that really is the best part about this – giving them a voice. It's really lovely.”

www.frazerscoffeeroasters.co.uk