West Yorkshire coffee roasters Dark Woods Coffee are celebrating after being awarded a host of stars at this year’s prestigious Great Taste Awards.
The awards, which are known as the Oscars of the food and drink world are organised by the Guild of Fine Food each year and are acknowledged as a benchmark for quality across the industry.
Darkwoods, who are based on the edge of Marsden village in the West Yorkshire Pennines received a total of 19 stars including 8 one stars, 4 two stars and a coveted three stars for their Panama La Huella “Cafe de Panama” Red Honey coffee.
Founded in 2013 Dark Woods have established a customer base that includes some of the country’s top cafés and restaurants as well as well-known retailers including Fortnum and Mason and Liberty of London. Picking up numerous industry awards along the way the team now also run a barista school and pop-up café from their refurbished Victorian textile mill beside the Huddersfield Narrow Canal.
Specialising in sourcing and roasting coffees from around the world, the majority is purchased either directly from producers or through longstanding buying arrangements with estates and speciality exporters, and it’s the development of these relationships and sustainability that drives the teams purchasing decisions.
Thanks to these strong business values, 2020 has already been a successful year for the Dark Woods team having been officially certified as a B Corp earlier in the summer. Certified B Corporations are businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.
Director Ian Agnew said: “Working through the B Corp assessment process has helped us to frame our sustainability goals and challenge our values and aspirations as a business. We’re very proud of our team and partners in helping us to become one of the UK’s first indie coffee roasters to be certified as a B Corp and see this as the starting point in our efforts to continuously improve our sustainability and social impact goals, alongside being a successful profit-making business.”
For more information and to buy their range online visit www.darkwoodscoffee.co.uk