A Matter of Concrete
High quality makes something an investment. In taste, experience or longevity. By product development, supplying high quality coffee, building long term relationships with suppliers and only settling for top-segment products.
Have a look in our shop and you’ll get the idea.
roasting A.M.O.C. since 20/12/2021
Innovation and sustainability are what make today good and tomorrow better. Direct trading with suppliers, developing long-lasting products while giving attention to circularity, waste-reduction and inspire others to do so too.
Our coffee roaster is the state-of-the-art Loring S35 Kestrel, one of the most energy efficient coffee roasters around. Our energy supplier has Gold Standard certification (meaning CO2 neutral gas and only electricity from renewable sources) and we try to reduce, reuse and recycle wherever we can.
In our roastery our goal is to get the best out of every bean.
There’s a Sovda color sorter to sort the coffee beans to perfection. A space designated for quality control. A tasting room. And there are dozens of ideas the future may bring.
We’re not trying to be saints, but we think further than a leaf on a label.
We’re a specialty coffee roastery based in one of the old warehouses of the Van Nelle Factory located in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The Van Nelle Factory* once used to be the biggest coffee roastery in all of Europe. It is quite rare to find a pre-WWII building in Rotterdam, let alone it being a coffee roastery, let alone one that is now a listed UNESCO World Heritage monument.
The factory was built in the New Objective style in the 1920’s, being one of the first buildings ever where concrete was the main material. Now you know, how concrete, just like coffee was and is inseparable from the Van Nelle Factory.
After roasting for 65 years, in 1995 the last bean was roasted and production of the Van Nelle brand moved elsewhere. From this moment on it was thought that no bean would ever be roasted again at this historical venue.
But then we came 26 years later and reignited the tradition in a future forward path.
*if you’re into architecture and design, look up Van Nelle Factory and find out its rich history.
“In 2012 I was in Copenhagen following an internship. Coffee was nothing more than a morning fuel to me back then.
When I walked into the same cafe for the 2nd time in a week the barista recognised me and remembered my order. It made me feel welcome.
That tiny gesture made me realise the value of what a cup of coffee can bring.
From that moment on I knew: I also wanted to work in coffee.
More than a decade later my career has been a wild ride. From starting numerous brands, companies and competing in many coffee competitions. Being on the winner’s podium of quite a hand-full, with the crowning achievement of winning Coffee Masters London 2019.
I was a roaster for 8 years, and an entrepreneur in coffee for 6, before starting A Matter of Concrete made it possible to set up a dream roastery. Putting all the inspiration and ideas that I’ve gathered over the years from all over the world into this dream-coming-true.
I love the indefinite world of coffee.
You can learn something new every day,
just never stand still.”
Homage
When the iconic Van Nelle Factory, where you can find our roastery, was designed almost a century ago, the architects pioneered in their approach with new materials, a futuristic look and essentially choosing function over form
(although it did result in a pretty astonishing building).
Thinking beyond traditional wooden foundation poles and brick & mortar it became a matter of concrete.
We pay homage to this unique feature of this iconic place.
Mentality
We like to think reasoned, future forward and quality driven. Defining our choices based on an unbiased blend of facts and individual taste. It’s not about assuming or following, it’s a matter of concrete decisions based on our vision and hard data. You can find this in our choice of packaging, interior and of course our selection of products.
And lastly: no-nonsense, cut the crap, or “niet lullen, maar poetsen” as we say in Rotterdam: let’s cut to the chase.
Making matter concrete.
We love packaging design, but we hate waste and single-use packaging.
Therefore, we try to find a well thought-out balance between aesthetics and sustainability. The hardest part here is having a food-grade solution that fits not just local waste processing but also national and international. The over-exploited words ‘reuse, reduce, recycle’ are more than a hollow message, like having a green leaf on the label, and we try to live by them as much as possible.
For this reason, you can pick 1 of 3 types of packaging when you order coffee with us:
Our AMOC jars are made from fully recyclable PET. They’re lightweight, which means not many resources are necessary for production. And most importantly, they are reusable for (almost) an eternity.
If you agree with us that opening a new bag and throwing it out as soon as you’ve finished the coffee is nonsense: it’s very hard to find a solution for this. Due to rules and regulations, your standard coffee pouch can’t be used twice, which is why we can’t refill them. Compostable and recyclable certifications are often vague, only apply under certain conditions, or nothing more than a sham. This is why we decided to offer a different kind of bag for our refills, without the valve or zipper, but simply a thin layer of food-grade PP material vacuum-packed. These weigh about 40% less than conventional coffee bags (meaning fewer resources are needed to make them), are easy to recycle in most recycling plants, and take the minimum amount of volume to ship.
BE AWARE: These refills are not intended for retail and may lose their vacuum during transport due to the natural degassing of freshly roasted coffee (we pack the coffee as fresh as possible) or minor punctures caused by sharp beans or other objects. For optimal preservation, we strongly recommend transferring the coffee into a container, such as our A.M.O.C. jars.
Additionally, we do not recommend placing these refills directly into your freezer for long-term preservation. Instead, repack the coffee into single doses (e.g., using our single-dose vials) and freeze those individually.
Please note that refill packs arriving without vacuum seals are not considered a packaging mistake and are not eligible for refunds.
After a long journey trying to find the best packaging for our bigger bags, we came to the conclusion that it’s very hard to find a decent, sustainable packaging that also protects the contents well. We’d hate to see the quality of the contents go to waste because so much energy, water, and other resources are put into making the coffee taste as good as possible. Therefore, we ended up picking our KG bags based on recyclability and barrier properties. This bag is (under certain circumstances) recyclable and has amazing barrier properties to keep those beans fresh and tasty for as long as possible.
Reuse. Reduce. Recycle.
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