History

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, Finnish coffee was notoriously bad and finding a good cup of coffee, 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 7 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.