Cafés and Coffee Roasters Editing and Proofreading Services

Speciality coffee has developed a descriptive vocabulary that works beautifully among people who share it and fails completely at the counter. A bag reading "blackcurrant, rhubarb, honey — washed, 1,900masl, SL28" tells a trained palate a great deal and tells a customer holding two bags and a queue behind them almost nothing they can act on. The same customer would buy the right coffee immediately if someone told them it tastes like fruit rather than chocolate and is best without milk.

We edit what cafés, roasters and coffee businesses produce — bag and retail packaging copy, tasting notes and flavour descriptions, origin and producer information, brewing guidance and recipe cards, menu and counter copy, subscription and coffee club material, wholesale and trade documentation, barista training and dial-in guidance, website product pages and shop copy, café signage and specials boards, sustainability and sourcing claims, event and cupping session material, and staff scripts for recommending coffee. Our editors work on the writing a customer meets at the counter.

Tasting notes are the industry's most-produced and least-useful writing, because they are written by people who taste for a living for people who do not. Three fruit descriptors on a bag are an accurate description of a cup and an unusable basis for a decision. We rewrite these so the note leads with the axis a customer can actually place themselves on — whether this is a fruity coffee or a chocolatey one, whether it is bright or heavy, whether it works with milk — since almost every customer knows which of those they prefer and none of them knows whether they want blackcurrant; so the specific descriptors follow for the people who want them, because they are accurate and the enthusiasts are a real audience; so the brewing suggestion is one method with actual numbers rather than a range of options; and so the origin story is present without being the first thing, since the producer's name matters and does not help someone choose. Roasters who lead with the axis sell more of the coffee the customer actually wanted, and get fewer bags returned.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including sourcing information, pricing and unreleased products. We are editors rather than roasters, tasters or sourcing specialists, and we offer no view on flavour, quality, grading or sustainability certification. What we can do is make the writing useful to a customer standing at the counter.