Like many small businesses, our journey started at the kitchen table. Early 2021 we began brainstorming ideas for a family business. We arrived at coffee roasting… the intriguing hands-on craft side of it, our families love for espresso (since migrated to a love for light roast), and the growth of specialty coffee in Scandinavia over the past 10 years all contributed.

Our first finding was that many coffee roasting businesses fail because they lack the starting capital for a high-quality roasting machine. Great roasting lays the foundation for satsified customers; “Let's not cut that corner”.
Our family economy and entreprenurial spirit influencing us, we asked ourselves “Why spend 1,000,000 SEK to buy a premium roasting machine? How hard can it be to build one ourselves?”
So Martin, the mechanical engineer, sat down and started researching machine blueprints while Einar started learning about roast control.

The moment that work began, something clicked. A potential was released. The right people found us, the right competencies connected, and suddenly we were in motion in ways we never planned for.
After the first phases of prototyping, we landed more and more in the conviction that we had something real to contribute - specifically with sustainability, global climate challenges, and roasting automation - to the world of coffee roasting.

We got in touch with Swedish innovative authorities where startups compete to secure funding with the criteria that a new product has the possibility to alter an industry, accelerate the societal shift to sustainable practices in business, and speed up our collective arrival at the U.N. climate goals.
That competition was won by us and we have since won public innovation funding 4 more times, the latest coming from the Swedish Governmental Energy Authority, meaning our startup has achieved the unusual feat of securing public funding a total of 5 times in Sweden.

With the help of our project partners and a lot of hard work, we managed to build the first production machine in our basement.
And that’s how the NORDRE story went from idea to reality.