Peoples - Specialty Coffee Roaster in Wellington

Peoples Coffee started in 2004 as a small café and roastery in Newtown, Wellington, built on the idea that coffee can “do good and feel good”. In 2025 it began a new chapter under the ownership of Karamu Coffee. It roasts in Wellington.

The coffee is organic and ethically sourced, bought through long-standing partnerships with small-scale farmer cooperatives. Peoples pays an organic premium so that farmers are rewarded for the extra labour and cost of organic growing, and it is a living-wage employer. Its origins include Brazil, Ethiopia, Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Honduras, where it buys from Café Orgánico Marcala (COMSA), a cooperative in the Marcala area of La Paz founded in 2000. The decaf is decaffeinated with the Swiss Water Process, in keeping with its organic practices.

For more than 20 years Peoples has supplied cafés, restaurants and offices across Aotearoa, with barista training and professional equipment, and its café partners use compostable takeaway cups and lids from Ecoware. Its coffee is poured at cafés across Wellington, the Hutt Valley, Porirua and the Wairarapa and in Dunedin, among them The Leafy Stop in Kilbirnie.

The retail range runs from Don Wilfredo, the multi-origin flagship blend roasted for espresso, to Sebastiana Martinez, its darkest roast, and the Tadesse Meskela blend. Aty Zarkeiwin is a blend that acknowledges women cooperative members across the organic coffee-growing world, and the single origins come from Ethiopia, Mexico and Honduras.