Our mission is to get people drinking better coffee. Our ethos is quite simple: we are intent on giving you a product better than you have any right to expect. We have been roasting speciality coffee for nearly 25 years and during that time we’ve learnt a thing or two about what makes a great cup of coffee. From the type of beans, to the duration of the roast and to the temperature at which to brew the coffee, we’ve done our homework. Even though our heart is in coffee roasting we like innovation, and over the past 5 years we have been working tirelessly developing some exciting instant coffee products to brighten up your daily mug.

“Why instant” I hear you say? Well, despite having gained a reputation for being a cheap and savourless option for a caffeine fix, we know it’s capable of more. We happen to like instant coffee. We like how easy it is to make. No need for filters, or expensive machines. Just a kettle and a spoon (or a finger/pen/key, whatever is handy). We know how good instant coffee can be and we like that there is room for improvement. If you start with the best ingredients and prepare them with care you end up with a great product. And when you add a little bit of natural flavour in to the mix, ooh la la! Did you know that 85% of all coffee drinkers in the UK drink instant coffee at some point in the day? Surely there should be more of a choice than what’s currently available on the market. This is why we’re not shy to shout “we love you, freeze dried coffee!”.

Sustainability and the environment are at the forefront of everything we do, whether its knowing which farms our coffee comes from to how much we pay our employees, or to the choice of transport company we use to distribute our coffee. We are very aware that certain sectors of the coffee industry have been engaging in some unacceptable practices for years, and this is why we are committed to fair and ethical trading.

Click here to download our ethical trading policy.

Littles Ltd. was founded in Finland in the early 80's by myself Henry Little, and my wife Leila. Originally trading as Aromix, the idea of roasting specialty and flavoured coffee came to us whilst on holiday in California where we had found several independent roasters all making extremely good quality coffee. Intrigued by this, we went and visited a couple of them and learnt a little more about the process of coffee roasting. At the time, finding a really good cup of coffee in Finland, like the ones we remember drinking in California was near impossible. Obviously we spotted the gap in the market and thought we'd try our hand at independent coffee roasting.

To cut a long story short, we eventually bought a unit with a roasting factory, but until this point I had still never roasted a single bean myself, so one evening the previous roast master taught me the art as I took notes. We soon found that our coffee was proving to be very popular so we thought we'd branch out and try making flavoured coffee, another idea we'd picked up from out travels to California. At the time, we were the only company producing flavoured coffee in Northern Europe and within a short period of time we were selling our coffee in the largest supermarket chain in Finland. Soon after this however, the largest coffee roaster in Finland had cottoned on to the success of our flavoured coffee and started manufacturing their own. Unfortunately the might and influence of the largest coffee roaster in Finland was far beyond what we could take on and the market started suddenly feeling a little claustrophobic.

In 1995 we decided that the monopoly of the large roasters in Finland was holding us back and tarring the market with poor quality coffee, and so we decided that a move abroad could broaden our horizons. It was down to a simple calculation really - Finland has 5 million people to sell coffee to, England has 60 million. In August 1995 we packed up our factory and moved to sunny old Devon, Heathfield to be precise. We soon outgrew our facility there and in 2004 we relocated to Dunkeswell to a brand new facility. We've been here ever since and the company has gone from strength to strength.