For a long time, we didn’t exist as an independent coffee division within the Leto group of companies. We bought coffee the same way most cafés and shops in Dubai do — from suppliers, already roasted, with many of the decisions already made by someone else.
It worked, and it taught us a lot. But it also meant that the taste of every cup we served was shaped by choices we hadn’t made ourselves.
The point where simply buying coffee stopped being enough
At some point, that stopped being enough for us. We already had a clear idea of what we wanted coffee to taste like — both for ourselves and for our guests — but we kept running into the limitations of using coffee roasted by someone else. All we could do was hope their idea of how that coffee should taste matched ours.
If we wanted to serve coffee we would genuinely choose to drink ourselves, and coffee we could proudly put in front of our guests, we needed to be the ones making those decisions.
That is essentially how Memories Coffee was born as a roastery. It wasn’t about following a trend or opening a roastery simply because, like many others at the time, we thought it was the fashionable thing to do. At some point, we realised that we had grown enough as a team to stop depending on someone else’s roasting decisions and start making our own.
Why we felt ready
Deciding to roast coffee is easy. Doing it well is much harder. We didn’t want to open a production facility just to make a mediocre version of the coffee we had previously been buying from others.
We waited until we had people on our team with real expertise — people who understood roast profiles, knew how to reproduce them consistently day after day, knew how to source coffee, and were willing to honestly say when a particular lot simply wasn’t good enough rather than telling us what we wanted to hear.
That is still how we work today. A coffee doesn’t end up under the Memories Coffee name simply because it is convenient or inexpensive to source. It gets there because our team has tasted it, believes in it, and is willing to stand behind that choice.
Almost four years later
We launched our own production almost four years ago, and we haven’t stopped learning since — exploring new origins and processing methods, making mistakes in the roastery and learning how to fix them, and gradually developing a clearer understanding of what we are genuinely good at.
We have grown gradually rather than rapidly, and that has been intentional. We would rather add one new coffee whose quality we can truly stand behind than five we are not completely confident in.
That is also why “people over profit” is more than just a line on our website. It is part of the reason we decided to build our own production in the first place — so that the coffee inside every bag reflects what we genuinely want to drink and serve to our guests, rather than simply what was easiest to buy.
Where we are today
We are still a relatively small roastery, and we are comfortable with that. Every bag carrying the Memories Coffee name passes through the hands of people who understand what they are looking for in the cup. We roast on equipment we chose ourselves and know inside out, and we select origins and individual lots deliberately rather than simply because they happen to be available.
If you would like to taste where almost four years of this process have taken us, explore our coffee range and judge it for yourself.
