Changing coffee culture one step at a time: an interview with Perky Blenders’ Victoria Cozens

If you live in East London, chances are you’ve heard of Perky Blenders. Their name can be found emblazoned across coffee machines and up on signs outside cafes, and their brick-and-mortar outlets are part of many people’s daily routines. The company has made its mark further afield, too, with coffee shops using their beans to fuel connoisseurs and caffeine lovers across the nations and a partnership with Nescafé Azera in 2022 taking their beans to a whole new market.

When Adam and Victoria Cozens founded the company back in 2015, they were motivated by a number of factors; but the most pressing was a desire to spend more time with their newborn child. After a year of maternity leave, Victoria wasn’t keen on the idea of childcare—let alone the costs—and knew that the inflexibility of a nine-to-five wouldn’t allow her to be as active in her child’s life as she would like. The two brainstormed ways to centre their lives around family, and after floating a number of ideas, Perky Blenders was born. Ten years and a second child later, the company is a stalwart of the community, an award-winning brand and is showing no signs of losing momentum.

Of course, many people may want to escape the rat race and try something new, but few will actually take the leap. “You have to have that mindset of wanting to create something, but you have to have the mindset to try it out. If you just keep thinking 'That would be nice', you'll never get anywhere,” Victoria says. “Both of us, as individuals, have always been entrepreneurs,” she continues. “We both have that kind of mind, where we can create something out of our ideas.”

Both city workers had begun to notice the rise of third-wave coffee around central London—something they weren’t seeing in their area of East London, which hadn’t yet become the trendy quarter it’s now known as.

“The third wave of speciality coffee came about from understanding and recognising the change in what we expect the quality of a product to be,” Victoria explains. “There was this growing need and understanding of where the things that we consume come from—not only the necessities but our treats, too.”

It’s similar to what’s happened with breweries, she continues. It used to be that pubs offered mostly mass-produced options, but now people are far more interested in the prestige of their pints. Wildcard Brewery, another Waltham Forest independent, was an early adopter of this mentality—and a great inspiration to the Perky team, Victoria notes.

“If we think about where we might have got our coffee from 10 years ago, in our area it would have just been a high street cafe,” Victoria recalls. As a fellow Leyton local, I can attest that the fanciest option you could go for would be the Costa in the shopping centre—a far cry from the current landscape. In fact, in a somewhat serendipitous turn, Perky Blenders now has a kiosk just moments away from the Costa in question.

“Third-wave coffee means moving from the high street, mass-produced coffee to the more artisan, hand-roasted element of small producers, working with smaller farms, making the traceability of coffee more transparent and bringing awareness to what we're consuming,” Victoria explains. It took time, but the wave’s ripples have made their way out from the city centre to every small town. Now it’s more unusual not to see a specialty coffee shop on a high street, no matter how small. This latest iteration of coffee culture is the fifth wave, in case you’re keeping count.

Responsibility, in all its forms

Perky Blenders formally defined its values about four years ago, stating its commitment to responsibility—“to the planet, to ourselves, to everybody we work with”—as an essential part of its ethos.

A big part of speciality coffee is being aware of how the coffee gets to your cup. Many shops and retailers now include information on how they source their beans and the work they do with those in their supply chains to make sure that everyone involved is getting a fair deal.

“We pay way above Fairtrade,” Victoria says. The well-known standard is actually a “minimum band of expectation” for buyers, she adds. “If you start to drill down into bigger organisations, [their products are] stamped by Fairtrade, but they're meeting the minimum level. With speciality coffee, you should be looking at four or five times that.”

The fact that coffee prices are on the rise has been a news focus over recent months, with discussions around the speed and extent to which a standard flat white has ballooned in cost. Certainly an annoyance for those wanting to get their daily caffeine fix, it signals a more concerning problem.

“The issue is, there have been so many factors on the production of coffee, particularly in the last sort of four to five years,” Victoria explains. COVID, adverse weather conditions and climate change have all driven up the price of coffee at source, resulting in businesses like Perky Blenders having to put their prices up not only to continue their ethical responsibilities but to survive.

When it comes to the environment, a particular focus area for Victoria is single-use cups. It’s something she’s spent a lot of time working on solutions for and is an issue that requires a multifaceted approach.

On a practical level, doing away with single-use cups entirely is an unfeasible business move. Even if people own reusable cups, they might not have them on hand at all times; “You might not go out in the morning and have coffee in your head, but then walk past the shop and think actually, I really want one now,” Victoria says. When their outlets primarily operate on a takeaway basis, the only option would be to turn customers away—not ideal. Instead, Perky Blenders has made a number of changes to encourage its customers to think a little greener.

Using the same tactics that the government used to discourage smoking, the company has used no images of single-use cups in its marketing for the past four years. Coffee is seen either in a mug or a reusable travel cup, the idea being that if people repeatedly see these alternatives they’ll begin to view them as the norm. Those reusable cups are available in each outlet, too, making it even easier to make a change.

However, Victoria is adamant that individuals need to be taking responsibility just as much as businesses. Government legislation is also key, of course—” you need to start at the top.” But we, as consumers, have to take responsibility too. “As individuals, we should be buying from companies that are being responsible. We should be making those conscious decisions,” she says. Customers, and the public at large, need to pay more attention to their own habits and behaviours and do as much as they can, in however small a way. “If you visit our store every weekday and use a single cup every single time, multiply that up over the year,” she adds, encouraging reflection on the real impact of our behaviours. While something may feel meaningless in the moment, the cumulative effect can be shocking.

On this particular issue, “we're currently coding a bit of software to put the emphasis back onto the individual,” Victoria shares. A flip-round counter will be attached to tills and will update whenever a customer uses a reusable cup. “It’s visual, it’s impactful,” she notes. “When you start to put things in numbers, and you start putting real facts and quantities around things, it helps with that individual responsibility element.” The figures will be released monthly, letting people see just how much difference their small changes make when bundled together.

Employee education

Now a 47-strong team, people management is a key part of Victoria’s job. “No one teaches you those things. It’s a learning curve when you’re running your own business,” she shares. Now, “we’ve got some clear drivers about how we connect with people and bring more opportunity to the people that work with us”, she continues.

It’s important for Victoria that her employees are well-educated on what they’re selling. “We share information with our team about our coffee of the month, and the plants it comes from, arming them with that information. They’re the ones who are going to be talking to the customers, so they need to be empowered with that knowledge,” she explains. This makes a difference for all those involved in the purchasing process; customers feel they’re buying from a place that understands and cares about its product, and employees feel more a part of the company.

Staff need to be behind the Perky values too, she adds, something which comes from the top; “it’s our responsibility to make sure that we’re instilling those values, and instilling them at every touch point”. This has been a challenge as the company has expanded, but “we’re always looking at ways to improve”.

Perhaps the most significant thing that Victoria has learned over the past five years is “the importance of getting people in the same room”, she shares. That can be difficult when operating across several locations and coordinating across numerous schedules, but the company has been able to hold get-togethers with its staff in recent months. Gathering in Project 660, the group were able to talk, share ideas and get to know one another—returning once again to that family value, and the value of being connected to one another.

Still growing

Keeping that sense of connection continues to be important as the company plans to expand even further. Thanks to their success, Perky Blenders “has been approached by quite a few people who would like their own coffee businesses”, Victoria says. It’s a dream of many to run a coffee shop, but the background work that has to go into it can be “daunting”. Understanding leases, cost analysis, business models—it’s a lot to take on.

“We’ve become enablers for other people to have their own shop,” Victoria continues, something she’s understandably proud of. Rather than franchising, she likes to think of these more as partnerships, helping new cafes to get set up and benefit from the extensive experience that Perky Blenders has accrued over the past decade. One such partnership location has already been opened at Royal Victoria Docks, and there are two more in the immediate pipeline.

These are mutually beneficial relationships, too. “Each store that opens keeps the roaster turning,” Victoria says, allowing the company’s E11 roastery to expand and supporting other areas of the business. “Whatever we make, we reinvest so we can move onto the next stage,” she continues. The current roastery is almost at capacity—and with more growth on the way, moving to that next stage will certainly be a priority soon.

For those outside of London, or anyone who prefers to make their coffee at home, Perky Blenders offers delivery across the UK. The reach that the company has achieved through this “always blows my mind”, Victoria exclaims. “I honestly think that most of it comes from the East London community, who have grown up with us, gifted it to their friends and family outside of the area or moved out of the area and taken it with them.”

From the outset, family has been a key part of Perky Blenders. Now, 10 years on, that family has expanded. “Local people feel like they’ve got a bit of ownership in the business,” Victoria observes, something that she appreciates. There’s a real sense of pride among regular customers who have seen the company go from strength to strength, and Victoria sees them as “an expansion of that family value”.

Almost 10 years in, Perky Blenders has made an indelible impact on the local community and is fast becoming a widely recognised brand. With its strong ethical principles, can-do attitude and strong leadership, it’s doubtless that the company will continue to go from strength to strength.

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Lucy Carter is a London-based writer with a strong interest in the arts, entertainment and culture spaces. She can generally be found spending too much time and money at food markets and coffee shops, or going on long walks around the city. To read more of her work, take a look at her Substack and Muck Rack and follow her on Twitter @lucyllcarter.