A major roasting equipment upgrade is helping Old Quarter Coffee Merchants grow its wholesale business while strengthening returns for Asian coffee producers.
Yosir Le Cerf feels the weight of responsibility running Old Quarter Coffee Merchants.
Since 2017, the business he co-founded with partner Amelia Hicks has expanded into a fully-fledged green bean importer and roaster, supplying roughly 50 wholesale partners across Australia’s eastern seaboard.
Their vertically integrated business also operates four of its own coffee shops and employs 35 people. But for Yosir, the responsibility is felt beyond Australian shores into the communities in Vietnam, Sumatra, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar, and more, where he sources green beans from.
Of the 60 or so coffees he imports from seven Asian origins, there are farmers he knows personally with livelihoods that partially depend on Old Quarter’s success.
“Given we’ve developed such a niche focusing only on Southeast Asian coffees, I have a deep sense of duty to showcase them in the best possible way. A lot of that comes down to my raw product knowledge and the roasting technology we have,” he says.
“Old Quarter’s strongest driver has always been to build a business bigger than ourselves that creates a win-win outcome for the whole supply chain, simply by its operational structure.”
It’s a philosophy that guided Yosir in the early days, even before Old Quarter Coffee Merchants came to be. Back then, he and his partner rented a shed in Ballina, in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, where he practised on a 5kg roaster for months before opening for business.
Once ready, he served coffee by day and roasted by night. They were simpler times, fuelled by the love he held – and still has – for Southeast Asian coffee.
By 2017, Old Quarter became official, with its first coffee import arriving via a single pallet of 700kg from a K’Ho family in Vietnam’s Lâm Đồng province – one of the key regions for Vietnamese Arabica.
“That little shed turned into a full blown café, and it became so popular that we expanded out of there into a second warehouse in Ballina. From there, we purchased a 15kg drum roaster that we worked hard and helped us achieve some amazing growth.”
That 15kg roaster was the workhorse for around six years as Old Quarter’s wholesale business grew and he began opening shops in Ballina, Coolangatta, Southport, and Murwillumbah – but Yosir realised an upgrade was necessary to keep up with orders and future-proof the business.
In mid-2025, the business installed a new 30kg roaster from Italian manufacturer IMF, which Roastquip, operated by Will Notaras, exclusively distributes in Australia.
“Our business was at a scale where we needed it – and it has levelled things up considerably,” Yosir says.
“Our model isn’t easy from a cash flow perspective – we’re investing in green coffee well before we can use it – so we had to really max out our existing setup before we were more than ready for the IMF 30kg upgrade.
“The IMF stood out for many reasons – efficiency, a compact footprint, and, importantly, more tools than you need as a roaster. You can be hands-off when needed, or really hands-on when working through a new coffee. That flexibility has been awesome.”
Giving back
The IMF 30kg roaster has enabled Yosir to stay close to his passion while delivering on the commercial realities of running Old Quarter.
It’s a virtuous cycle: by adopting roasting technology that brings out the best of the beans, he’s helping build a stronger market for Asian coffees. With higher throughput, he can accelerate and expand the wholesale business.
The cycle continues, with Old Quarter’s success felt directly by farmers through community projects it funds in Asia. With Yosir visiting Southeast Asia four times a year, those projects vary.
In Vietnam and Laos, Old Quarter has been hands-on, investing in wet mills, drying infrastructure and farming practices.
It has also paved roads in Sumatra to help farmers carry their cherries down steep terrain during wetter months, and installed drinking water filters in schools across southern Laos.
“It creates a genuine win-win. We get improved quality through investing in their businesses and infrastructure, while becoming a reliable, long-term customer,” Yosir says.
“Because of our model, we’re able to invest more in the producers we work with and make sure every cent of the cost of that coffee goes to them. That’s how we wanted to do coffee trades since day one.”
There were several formative experiences that prompted Yosir down this path.
The first was as a 16-year-old when he travelled to Vietnam with his family. From there, his connection with Southeast Asia grew, getting to understand the plight of coffee farmers as he travelled mountainous areas by motorbike.
The second was soon after he left school to study and eventually work in agriculture and environmental science in the Northern Rivers, where his farm had a few coffee trees he would pick, process and roast. It was during this time he got to know Amelia – meeting her at Southern Cross University in Lismore.
“Southeast Asia has helped shape who I am,” he says.
“I wanted to connect my love of Southeast Asia with a business in Australia and give back through it. Coffee is an amazing vehicle for that because it’s all about relationships – and doing it well brings a real sense of purpose, which is what drives and sustains us.”
‘Unlimited power’
Now, with Old Quarter’s new 30kg IMF roaster, that dream can be delivered at a larger scale.
“Having roasted on various machines, we wanted a system that produces amazing flavour clarity, which happens to be one of the things the IMF machines excel at … having the ability to highlight the flavour attributes of these unique coffees in a clean way aligns perfectly with our mission,” says Yosir.
A bigger and better system can be daunting at first, but that subsided once he started putting the roaster to work.
“With the previous 15kg roaster, had to be top of all the variables throughout the day and carefully managing our batch sizes. We gained intimate knowledge on how to roast each coffee, but the IMF has brought a lot more consistency and simplified the way we were thinking,” he says.
“It’s made us think differently about how much time is needed in certain phases to achieve the same results. We’re achieving much faster roasts of around 150kg per hour on a 30kg machine – and I still think we can get more out of it.”
Will, whose Roastquip business became the agent for IMF Roasters in Australia and New Zealand in 2012, says the 15kg, 30kg, and 60kg models are the most popular among local roasters, many of whom are small- to medium-sized and based in capital cities and regional areas.
Roastquip also supplies roasting plants to larger roasters with IMF’s 120kg, 240kg, and 480kg industrial roasters, as well as its integrated silos, blenders and packaging equipment. There are now more than 90 IMF roasters in Australia and New Zealand.
“As Old Quarter Coffee Merchants volume increases, the IMF 30kg ensures consistency is maintained as they continue to grow their business,” Will says.
“With the ability to control bean and air temperatures to one degree accuracy, as well as drum speed and airflow at each step of the 12-step profiles, they can consistently extract the maximum flavour from the beans regardless of whether it’s the first or last roast of the day.”
Other key features of IMF roasters, he says, include the ability to adjust 50 parameters per profile with 1000 profiles of storage, and connectivity to Cropster and Artisan dataloggers.
“IMF Industrial roasters include, as standard, the afterburner, destoner, loader, and continuous chaff extractor in one compact unit, so there is minimal assembly work and therefore lower costs to install the roaster,” Will says.
“Plus, IMF Roasters have a small footprint, saving roaster operators space and therefore rental or interest costs on their premises.”
Those are stand-out features to Yosir too. But ultimately, it’s given him the breathing space to focus on what’s important.
“We are now able to roast what took five days inside two days, and they’re not even big days. Over two days, one of us can roast up to 1500kg and it’s just a breeze. We could probably roast one tonne in a day if we had two people working it – no dramas,” he says.
“It now feels like we have got unlimited power – and it’s there to be utilised, which is a great luxury to have.”
For more information, visit www.roastquip.com.au
This article appears in the June 2026 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
