We enjoy nothing more than great conversation with like-minded individuals.

This journey, like many before it, started with a late night conversation over dinner with some good friends and went along the following lines: “Why is it that after hundreds of years of development, we now find ourselves in the 21st Century and we are still unable to make a decent loaf of bread?”

Good question, we thought.

We humans can travel at high speeds, have successfully split the atom, search a worldwide web and landed on the moon decades ago. Why, then, do we find it so difficult to produce good bread? After all, this is something that most of us eat every day of our lives.

We always enjoy a challenge and this dilemma inspired us to set out on a mission with our friends to produce the very best, wholesome bread right here in our native home of Sweden. Together with our good friend Christer we opened our first bakery-café, which we named Olof Viktors, in a traditional Swedish Skånegård. We installed a wood-fired stone oven which bakes all the bread in a traditional way.

While our marketing research would probably make people at any big business shudder and our marketing plan would certainly have set Philip Kotler’s eyes rolling, it was our passion for perfection that drove us on and which led us to the door of Jan Hedh, a visionary and artisan baker in every sense of the word.

Working with Jan Hedh meant making bread, crispbread and unbeatable sourdough starters using only healthy, traditional methods. While ours is a far slower and more skilled process than bakeries typically use, we don’t believe in rushing something as important as this. We live in the hope that if we spend time creating great products, you are more likely to take some time with friends to enjoy them.

The desire to make the leap from countryside to city life led us to Scotland, and more specifically, to Edinburgh, where we opened Peter’s Yard coffee house and bakery near the University in the new Quartermile development at the very end of 2007. Here we enjoy a loyal customer base that started off as friends and we now have the privilege of meeting fascinating people who visit our coffee house every day.

In Edinburgh we teamed up with two guys who run a local coffee roaster. Mike from New Zealand and Gustavo from Chile had set up Artisan Roast back in 2006 turning out great coffee. Together we decided to join forces to offer the best coffee possible to the local community and a great ‘Fika Experience’, which we here in Sweden hold dear as it is a daily ritual that unites friends, coffee and good pastries.

In summer of 2009 we set out to serve a breakfast that would be considered second to none in a small hotel in Österlen, in the heart of the Swedish countryside. We use only great local produce and of course fresh bread from the nearby wood-fired oven. The only thing really missing was a cup of freshly-roasted coffee.

Again, following our hearts, we started to roast our own coffee. We feel lucky to have received a great deal of support from the people at Coffee Collective in Copenhagen, who have been a big help in getting everything going.