Smelling the opportunities for coffee in Silicon Roundabout

AS THE founder of café chain Grind, David Abrahamovitch knows a lot about coffee his business now encompasses a 20,000sq ft bean-roasting factory in Bermondsey and 12 London coffee shops, plus another in Los Angeles in partnership with Soho House.

- Lucy Tobin

But in the early days, coffee made him sick.

"When we started, we partnered with someone else to roast for us, and we visited them before launch to design our own house blend," the 37-year-old entrepreneur explains.

"When you taste coffee you're supposed to treat it like a wine tasting and spit it back out once you have tasted it, but no one told us this... So [friend and now investor] Kaz [James, an Australian DJ] and I were both sick on the train on the way back from the first tasting, because we'd drunk about 50 different coffees in two hours."

Today Abrahamovitch drinks more carefully while Grind sells more than a million cups a year from its cafés, plus five million cups of its coffee sold at Soho House branches around the world.

It started back in 2011, when he was 25. "My dad passed away, and I inherited the family business - a mobile phone shop inside a small circular building on Old Street Roundabout," he explains.