For many, good coffee is a luxury we like to treat ourselves to on a daily basis. Founder and owner of Numero Uno Coffee Roasters, Gina Di Brita is a proud and passionate female figurehead. Numero Uno has a strong vision.

Since 2003, Gina has been ticking all the right boxes when it comes to the quintessential Australian success story. Like many driven entrepreneurs, Gina was determined to kick start not only a business which echoed her cultural heritage, but a business which would evolve, grow, and develop into a forward thinking coffee company … a company that supports like-minded café operators and restaurateurs.

Today Numero Uno supplies some of Sydney’s finest restaurants and cafés and is available exclusively through David Jones’ gourmet food section, Australia-wide.

Numero Uno currently produces eight different coffee blends, including the Organic ‘South Central’ Espresso Blend, which was recently awarded a gold medal at the prestigious CSR Sugar Golden Bean awards. Numero Uno’s success has come from Gina’s focus on her customers.

Getting to know her customers, Gina realised there was a real demand for specialty coffee, roasted and personalised in bespoke batches. Blends developed to suit each client would provide a flexibility and quality the conglomerates simply couldn’t match.

“Our customised Brambati coffee roaster is ideal for personalised batches, and its size ensures that the full spectrum of aromas and flavours are captured – qualities that are often lost during a mass-manufacturing process. Big bulk machines are all about quantity; we’re not. We take an artisan’s approach; each step is done by hand.

“From bean to cup you can see the care we have taken – from sourcing the highest quality beans, right through to our cupping and tasting. It’s easy to define the difference in bean quality and appreciate what goes into a premium cup of coffee.

“I like to support the café owner’s uniqueness, which is a shift away from the overbearing corporate café model,” says Gina.

Too often cafés lose their personality and their reason for being; they wind up becoming highly corporatised places, buried in big-coffee branding, forced into the same stream of impersonality. Moving forward, Numero Uno is truly in a league of its own and will continue to support cafés and restaurants who’d like to preserve something of their individual culture and personality.

Numero Uno is breaking traditional boundaries by deconstructing the trend of café owners resigning themselves to corporatisation.

Numero Uno may be one of the few coffee companies truly focused on understanding and supporting the needs of customers in a largely corporate-driven industry, and the company remains determined to encourage others to re-evaluate what a good coffee and a good coffee experience really is.