Dark Horse Coffee

Now, he’s the co-owner of the Kapiti Coast based coffee company, whose bustling roastery is located on Sheffield Street in Paraparaumu.

There, beside a quaint industrial-style Dark Horse Espresso Garden, internationally sourced Arabica beans are lovingly roasted using state of the art equipment.

The rich and chocolatey Dark Horse Coffee blend is then packed into environmentally friendly packaging and shipped across the country to customers and distributed to wholesalers.

“Dark Horse was introduced to Kāpiti in 2016, as the brainchild of former Raumati Social Club owner Matthew Payne and his wife Rachel Deller-Pincott,” says Blair, who joined the company in 2019 after a career as national sales manager for Tuatara Brewery. 

“Matt returned from working in hospitality in Melbourne, where coffee was being roasted quite differently and had changed his perspective on what good coffee could taste like.”

When he couldn’t find a coffee brand that gave him the darker, richer, and more chocolatey blend he wanted for his cafe, Matt decided to roast his own.

He began trialling his coffee on customers and quickly realised he was onto something, setting up a little coffee window on Sheffield Street, where the Dark Horse hub is now humming.

In 2019, Matt welcomed Blair and former brewery co-founder Simone Vasta onboard as business partners, and Dark Horse took a bold investment step setting up its own roastery. 

“I probably used to offend Matt back in the day with my hot chocolate orders,” Blair laughs.

“I didn't like coffee because the New Zealand blends were too bitter for me. Dark Horse was a great breakthrough with its lovely balance and rounded flavour. What I really enjoyed about it were the things I enjoy about good craft beer - the balance, nuance, complexity, and mouth feel.”

Dark Horse began gaining traction as foot traffic to the area increased. Soon, their coffee was being purchased in wholesale by cafes from Paekākāriki to Foxton and they ventured online.

“Off the back of that, having brand presence across multiple channels, we gained entry into supermarkets. It's a very competitive, highly penetrated category but we were really fortunate to have some great support,” says Blair, whose business now supplies to around 50 cafes. 

“In particular, our two local Foodstuff supermarkets, New World and Kāpiti PAK’nSAVE, jumped on board straight away.” 

Blair agrees there’s massive opportunity in Kāpiti for artisan food businesses to drive profitability, providing they can get the rest of the marketing right.

“We’re very fortunate because there’s a wonderful heritage for local handcrafted, artisan producers here,” he explains.

“If you go right back to Kāpiti Cheese, Kāpiti Ice Cream, and Kāpiti Olive Oil, they all became household names for premium quality products. Even though some of these brands are no longer local, that artisan essence still remains.”

With the Expressway now a major driver for visitors to the coast, Blair has seen a trend with tourism and online sales. 

“We have about 250 reviews on our website and a huge number say they tried our coffee when they were in Kāpiti because their friends took them to Dark Horse. Now, they order our beans online.” 

A further allure of Dark Horse Coffee is its loud sustainability practices, which includes using soft plastics, a hybrid vehicle fleet, and a special on-site recycle bin for soft plastics.

“A big change for us was moving to soft plastic recyclable packaging for our bags, while maintaining the product quality,” says Blair, whose company has the slogan Leave Less Hoof Prints. 

“They have an awesome little re-closable zipper on the back, which very few of our competing brands have.” 
The team are also proud of their Loring roaster, dubbed the ‘Rolls Royce’ of roasters in the industry, which uses 80 percent less emissions than traditional hot-air roasters.

“As a result, we’ve managed to take our coffees to new levels of flavour and consistency too,” he concludes.

“You need to celebrate all those little wins.”