49th Parallel has been building relationships between coffee growers and its roastery since 2004. Every coffee is roasted and packed at the head office and roastery in Burnaby, a short drive from Vancouver, on four roasters of different sizes and engineering, collected over the years to work with different roasting techniques and flavour profiles. The mission is to “make specialty coffee accessible to more people (in more ways)” with direct trade coffee.

Many of its producer relationships span a decade or more. The coffee team visits partners every year to meet them, tour the farms and talk about future growth, cups their coffees often and shares details of what it buys and what it invests with them in quality and sustainability at farm level.

The first 49th Parallel café opened in Kitsilano in 2007. A second followed in Mount Pleasant in 2012, and with it came Lucky’s Doughnuts, now made on site at both. Kitsilano has an enclosed patio beside a long bike rack; Mount Pleasant has a patio that catches the afternoon sun. The downtown café, opened in autumn 2017, added a small kitchen for egg burgers, brunch plates and toasts with seasonal toppings, an idea one of the founders, Vince, and his wife Marisa brought back from Santa Monica.

In summer 2021 the company opened its first café outside British Columbia, in Old Montreal. The building keeps its exposed hundred-year-old brick and stone masonry around a sleek retro design, and the menu reworks Lucky’s doughnuts around Quebec classics, with a full kitchen for breakfast egg burgers and seasonal brunch. The fifth café opened in Lower Lonsdale, North Vancouver, in March 2022, in a heritage building whose design draws on the hardware store that occupied it in the early 1900s, with repurposed materials throughout.

Coffee on the shelf

Photograph: 49th Parallel Coffee Roasters