Dubai-based Raw Coffee Company enjoyed its best year in 2020 and has revealed expansion plans for the coming 12 months.
Company co-owner and CEO, Matt Toogood, told Arabian Business that he expects an 8 percent increase in net profits for the past 12 months, while he said year-on-year revenue was up by 21 percent.
With an air of caution in his mind, he said “2020 was the best year for this company that we’ve ever had.”
“I’m really scared about saying that because there’s been so many people that I know who have been impacted directly and our community that has been dramatically affected by 2020. I’d hate to think that people thought we took advantage of the situation because there’s a number of companies around the world who have done that.”
The company, which was founded in 2007, recently struck a deal with logistics giant DHL to extend its GCC delivery after witnessing an increase in online sales of 70 percent in the last year.
Toogood, who runs the business alongside co-owner and managing director Kim Thompson, said that from completing 50 deliveries-a-day prior to the lockdown in March last year, that rocketed up to almost 400 deliveries as Raw focused on the B2C market.
“When we came out the other side and we experienced a summer where everyone was trapped here we were generating three and four times the sales we normally would in the summer months,” he said, adding the B2C market was “increasing month-on-month”.
Matt Toogood and Kim Thompson
He said that “every single number” on the company’s profit-and-loss has “gone in the correct direction”, including the recruiting of 20 more members of staff, taking the workforce number to 62.
“We realised that there were things getting outsourced that we were far better to take the hit of employing people and get them done in-house,” he said, adding six or seven additional people will be hired in the next couple months. While staff salaries, which were cut at the height of the pandemic, were restored by November and employees received a pay rise in January, said Toogood.
He also explained that they completely rebuilt their financials and logistics systems, which resulted in a 200-300 percent improvement in the back-end of the company.
In terms of future plans, Toogood said: “We’re going to be opening a manufacturing facility in Saudi Arabia in the near future.”
Raw currently buys its coffee from nine different countries, through South America, Central America, Asia and Africa.
He explained that one of the key pillars of the company is to keep things local. He said: “Going back to when I was a kid, coffee is a product that should be drank fresh. It doesn’t need to come straight out of the roaster and drink it, it needs to be about ten days to two weeks – some coffees are good after six weeks, but basically after six weeks it’s done.”
He added: “We buy unroasted green coffee that is produced once, maybe twice a year by our suppliers. That product is very stable for up to a year or 18 months as long as it’s kept in the right conditions. It makes more sense both from a tax perspective and a cost of transport perspective, to import those green beans into Saudi and then roast them on site.”
Raw currently buys its coffee from nine different countries, through South America, Central America, Asia and Africa. “Ninety-nine point nine percent of the coffee that we are buying is directly traded with people that I have shaken their hand,” said Toogood.
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