Rabbit Island Coffee Now 19% Better - Here's How
Continuous improvement is something we lean into a lot in our lives. Whether it’s health, lifestyle, learning, or even household chores, we’re always looking for ways to do things better and smarter. It’s part of human nature, we’re wired to strive for more while using less energy.
So naturally, we’ve been beavering away behind the scenes, not just making our business run more smoothly but, most importantly, making our coffee taste even better.
How much better? 19% better!
But before we explain where that number comes from, let’s take a quick step back.
The Journey So Far
If you’ve followed our story, you’ll know that when we took over Rabbit Island Coffee Co. three years ago, we were relatively new to the world of specialty coffee. Sure, we’d pulled a fair few shots back in our UK days (and would love to travel back in time to taste those now with our slightly more refined palates). We even explored a few coffee business ideas while living in Wellington, but nothing quite stuck, except for one thing: our deep love for a daily brew.
Fast forward three years, and we’ve been obsessively upskilling, tinkering, and honing our craft with one big goal in mind: To stand out as one of New Zealand’s best independent specialty coffee roasters. It’s ambitious, we know, but you have to aim high, right?
Why? Because we’re proud people who want to deliver coffee at the highest standard possible.
How? By continually improving every part of what we do, from roasting to the final cup.
A Supportive Community
One of the things that has made this journey so rewarding is the incredible specialty coffee community here in New Zealand. From day one, we’ve been blown away by how open and supportive other roasters and coffee professionals have been, sharing their struggles, tips, and tricks with honesty and generosity.
It’s a rare thing to find in business - people openly offering insights and lifting each other up rather than competing in silence. That transparency has been invaluable as we’ve refined our craft, and it continues to inspire us as we push for even higher standards.
The Continuous Improvement Cycle
We follow a simple but powerful inhouse framework:
Measure → Interpret → Refine → Repeat.
Measure: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Our Diedrich IR12 coffee roaster is fitted with precision probes that track every batch. This data is sent via Bluetooth to our laptop, giving us detailed records of each roast’s performance.
Interpret: We analyse our roasting data in two ways:
1. The Roast Profile Curve. Think of this like a fingerprint for each batch. It tells us exactly how heat was applied throughout the roast. 99% of the time, we can predict how a coffee will taste just by looking at this curve.
2. Cupping (Tasting). This is where the magic happens. We blind taste every batch and score it for body, sweetness, aftertaste, and more. It’s the ultimate reality check on how the coffee truly performs.
Refine: With both sets of data in hand, we make small, informed tweaks to our roast profiles. Sometimes even a tiny adjustment, like slightly changing the heat at a specific moment, can result in a noticeably better-tasting coffee.
Over time, these small changes add up to significant improvements.
Repeat: This process never stops. It’s not just about roasting either. Every detail matters:
· Ethically sourcing and storing green beans
· Deciding which origins to use in our blends
· Perfecting roast profiles for each coffee
· Storing and packaging roasted coffee
· Labelling with clear roast dates and origins
· Delivering coffee at peak freshness
Each step contributes to the final flavour in the cup.
So, Where Does the 19% Come In?
Over the past three years, our coffees’ cupping scores have increased by over 19% across our entire range (which now includes eight different coffees!).
Most of this progress came through small, steady improvements, but recently, we took a big leap forward by working with one of the world’s top coffee roasting consultants.
We’ll save the full story for another blog post, but let’s just say the results so far have been incredible… and we’re only getting started.
What’s Next?
We’ve just invested in a few new toys: our first green bean moisture reader and a coffee colour analyser. These tools will give us even more data to fine-tune our process and push our coffee quality higher than ever.
We’re fizzing with excitement about what’s to come. Every tweak, every piece of feedback, and every roast brings us closer to our goal of delivering some of the best coffee you’ll ever taste.
So, when you sip your next cup of Rabbit Island Coffee, know that it represents thousands of hours of learning, testing, and improving, all to make sure you enjoy a damn fine coffee.
Stay tuned for the next chapter, where we’ll share more about our work with our new consultant and how it’s shaping the future of Rabbit Island Coffee Co.
Bryn