Opening a new café – or any kind of hospitality venue – is hard work, but what do you learn when you’ve opened more than 40 of them?
Julien Moussi is always on the lookout for new opportunities. In the almost 14 years since opening his first venue in Fitzroy, Melbourne, he’s created something of an empire with his group of venues, Only Hospitality.
Alongside that, he’s built one of Australia’s fastest growing and best-selling coffee roasters in Inglewood Coffee Roasters.
But it almost never happened.
After starting his career as a personal trainer, Julien moved back to Melbourne to play VFL football with the Box Hill Hawks, before a severe knee injury changed the trajectory of not only his life, but Australia’s coffee scene.
“I discovered my love for coffee while I was playing footy and working as a personal trainer in Canberra,” says Julien. “I got injured after coming back to Melbourne – I couldn’t play for a year. In that time, I asked the club if I could make coffees at the ground and, thankfully, they said yes.
“Dimattina Coffee gave me a coffee cart, and I ended up selling at around 10 to 15 other sporting venues. After about 18 months of juggling I saved around $30,000 to start my first café, Annoying Brother, in 2012.
“Since then, I’ve opened about 40 venues, around 30 of which have been cafés.”
From inner Melbourne to its outer suburbs and surrounds, and even a successful interstate foray to Burleigh Heads, Queensland, Julien and Only Hospitality have become experts at identifying the best spots for new venues.
When scouring for opportunities, he says it’s important to keep it simple and identify local trends.
“One of the first things I look at is the housing market and the age demographic of people purchasing in the area. We look for young families in up-and-coming areas where people like to go out for breakfast or lunch and grab a coffee,” he says.
“It’s important to place yourself in areas with high amenities and high activity, like shopping centres or schools.
“Being off the beaten track also isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because you want good parking and for people to have the ability to walk there. There are a lot of factors involved, but it’s not rocket science.”
A key point of difference for Julien’s model is many of Only Hospitality’s venues require a new fitout, giving him the capacity to reshape them entirely.
“The more dilapidated the four walls, the better for us,” he says.
“I love seeing people enjoy themselves in environments we’ve created, curating a vibe and making a venue have an energy to it – creating that soul.”
Through the success of Only Hospitality, Inglewood Coffee Roasters was born. Cory Slater, who was working with Julien as a barista, was key in starting the venture.
Julien says Only Hospitality’s venues were selling about 500 kilograms of coffee a week when Inglewood started roasting in 2017. Now, the business has grown to look internationally for new opportunities.
“Inglewood roasts about 12 tonnes of coffee a week and we supply roughly 350 venues and 250,000 homes around Australia, plus some around the world,” says Julien.
“We’re doing a lot of direct-to-home coffee, even internationally. With the cost of freight and logistics, we’re looking to roast in London and New York. Hopefully we’ll start this year.
“We’re also looking to upgrade our roaster for the second time in three years. We’re looking at a 350kg Brambati. That will increase our volume fourfold, which means we can start having big conversations with many different people.”
Despite its size, Inglewood is by no means immune from the past year’s significant green bean price rises. But it’s continued to grow, and Julien proudly expresses its wholesale network has remained strong.
“We’ve really focused on trying to grow our revenue faster than costs have been rising. On a percentage of revenue basis profitability isn’t what it was, but revenue growth has been able to overcome those barriers for us,” he says.
“Having that direct-to-consumer retail aspect has allowed us to put retail prices up a little. First and foremost, our wholesale partners need to make money, otherwise they’re not sustainable.
“We’ve been more patient with moving our wholesale price compared to retail. We’ve also pulled other levers, offering free shipping on all online retail orders up until 12 months ago. That’s given us a new way to generate revenue to offset the C-price increase.”
Julien says the shifting coffee habits of consumers offer significant opportunities in both Inglewood’s wholesale and retail spaces, but it’s a balancing act to keep both sets of customers happy.
“I don’t think coffee volume is dropping in venues, people are choosing to have one or even two coffees at home now, people are drinking more coffee, not less,” he says.
“Having a coffee machine is going to be like having an oven or stove. Within the next decade, there will be a coffee machine in every home, so our balance between retail and wholesale needs to be right.
“We haven’t lost one wholesale customer over anything to do with retail marketing, which shows we’re probably getting that balance right.”
In what is typically a low-margin and hyper-competitive industry, this approach has been a key contributor to its growth.
“We’re a tight knit crew and having that element of being hands-on operators is crucial,” he says. “I’m a barista by trade; I still jump on to pour coffees. Nobody is above jumping on the floor and being at the coalface.
“That even helps from a team morale perspective when the staff see us help. My wife was even doing dishes in one of our pubs before Christmas because we had a lot of functions on.
“Things like that really help the culture, it’s what’s worked for us and is an important part of our make-up.”
It’s one of many lessons Julien took from opening Annoying Brother – almost all of which were learned the hard way – but those insights have held him in good stead.
“I was only 23 and I remember crying very, very often in those initial months because it was so stressful,” he says.
“I didn’t make a lot of money, barely enough to pay myself wages, but it was important because I learned to build a model with a cost of goods benchmark, a labour benchmark, and a rent profile. Those things I learned are what our model is still today. Even things like the way we did payroll and reporting haven’t changed.
“It also taught me a lot of resilience, because that’s when everything was on my shoulders. It helped me learn a lot about who I was and who my people were, and they’re the same people now. It was a lot of fun alongside a lot of hard work and stress, but it shaped us.”
From that coffee cart at Box Hill City Oval to building Only Hospitality and Inglewood, Julien equally embraces opportunity and risk – and this tandem Only Hospitality –Inglewood Coffee Roasters juggernaut shows no signs of slowing down.
While there is an inherent risk starting something new, he says it’s critical to not let caution outweigh the potential.
“It’s human nature to have a negative bias but you must try and steer away from that – a lot of people overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity,” he says. “There’s never a perfect time to do something – the ones who just do it eventually come out on top,” he says.
“If you become biased towards the positive, you’ll find yourself on a path to opening your own venue a lot quicker.”
This article appears in the February 2026 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
