The ECS+COHO Interview Series: Nick Garnell, Managing Director, Gourmet Coffee Bar & Kitchen

In partnership with the ECS+COHO Expo 2025, 24-26 November at the JW Marriott in Berlin, World Coffee Portal presents an exclusive series of interviews with influential voices in Europe’s coffee and hospitality industries

Nick Garnell founded Gourmet Coffee Bar & Kitchen Ltd in 2007 after struggling to find the perfect coffee on his daily commute. After opening its first outlet at Stockport railway station, Gourmet has grown to 35 cafés and coffee kiosks across the UK railway network – from Weymouth in Dorset to Preston in Lancashire. 

Serving coffee grown by the Cocarive cooperative in São Paulo’s Caconde region, Gourmet is one of the UK’s leading independent travel hub coffee operators and has long sought to champion a thriving UK specialty coffee industry. 

How do you convey the value of your specialty coffee offer to busy commuters? 

We are still a relatively small company and therefore cannot assume that rail passengers will know our brand. Our task then is to try and communicate a speciality coffee offer to passengers on the go, who are likely to be under a time constraint and probably focused on other things. Additionally, we face a backdrop that the speciality coffee industry in the UK has singularly failed to communicate to consumers what the term actually means or implies.  

So simply stating ‘speciality coffee’ is clearly not enough. We must try and imply quality through the cumulative impact of the shop fit. This is not about emotion (much as we coffee sellers’ egos might wish this were true!), it is about implying quality through the look and feel of the design and delivering on this as the potential customer gets to closer quarters – through clear layouts, menus, good merchandising, point of sale and, crucially, engaged and efficient service.  

“Everything is subordinate to an efficient, clear layout” 

Making good coffee takes time. How do you maximise speed-of-service for customers in a rush?  

How many of us have had the experience of going into a beautiful-looking coffee shop, a triumph of designer aesthetics, subdued lighting and muted colours, only to find that we don’t really know where we should be queuing, or placing our order, or how to access that perfectly spot-lit croissant? It turns out that the human experience has been put some way down the design brief. We may have the time and inclination to stick around and work it out; we may not.  

Our station environments have proved brutal task masters for us in this – if we cannot immediately communicate to our customers what they need to do to get their coffee and how long they may have to wait to do so, then we will lose them – they have trains to catch. Everything is subordinate to an efficient, clear layout. We need people to be able to see at a glance what the deal is. Have the subdued lighting and muted colours by all means, but this comes second.  

Amid soaring costs, how can UK speciality coffee operators work together to create a more prosperous industry? 

Speciality coffee is better than regular coffee. Objectively better. Why do those of us who sell it not collectively make it our business to tell people this?   

Individual coffee shops are, of course, in competition, and we have our own messages that we want to deliver to potential customers in an effort to win business from one another. I have no problem with that – but we surely all have an overriding interest in trying to make those potential customers understand that if they want something more than tired offerings of big brands, then the collective umbrella of ‘specialty coffee’ is where they should turn.