Groundwork opened its first café in Venice Beach with the goal of sharing “the very best organic coffee we could find” with the neighbourhood, and demand grew so quickly that it started roasting around the clock inside the Venice café. The building is a turn-of-the-century brick structure said to have been built with a horse stable for the carriage trade; the Wolff family ran a catering business from it in the 1950s, and Groundwork leased it in 1991 and installed its first roaster under an old oven hood, roasting there for the next ten years. The Venice café is still the flagship, with brunch and pastries.

The roasting now happens at a 5,000-square-foot headquarters in North Hollywood, where solar panels power the building, silos hold more than 25 varieties of green coffee and two 70-kilo low-emission roasters sit in the middle of the floor, with a cupping room that doubles as the training centre and a tearoom where the teas are blended by hand. A second roastery in Portland came with the purchase of Kobos Coffee, Portland’s original micro-roaster, in 2016. Everything is certified organic; Groundwork is a Certified B Corp and launched what it calls the first Regenerative Organic Certified coffee. Its motto is “Work hard. Be kind. Good things will happen.”

Across Los Angeles the cafés each sit in a building with a past: the North Hollywood Historic Train Depot from the 1890s, a registered State Historic Landmark on the Metro; a former Wells Fargo bank in Hollywood, one of the neighbourhood’s oldest multistorey buildings; a Venice Boardwalk building with one of the earliest elevators west of the Mississippi; and rooms in the Downtown Arts District and Larchmont Village, plus one in Santa Monica. The kitchen team makes pastries from scratch and the menu includes salads, sandwiches and a line of cold brew.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: Groundwork Coffee