A good incentive was that 4% — a gross annual rate on idle balances — I work in seasons, so I have to hold a lot of liquidity for the big payments later.
Rubens Gardelli, Founder, Gardelli Specialty Coffees
In a workshop between Bertinoro and Forlì, in the Emilia-Romagna hills, Rubens Gardelli tastes coffee he knows nothing about. The samples arrive from importers each season — this June it is the new Ethiopian, Kenyan and Ugandan harvests — and he roasts each lot on a small copper machine, brews it, and scores it without ever seeing the name of the farm, the variety or the price. In December 2017, in Guangzhou, that discipline made him World Coffee Roasting Champion, a title that, as he likes to point out, stays with you for good.
The workshop is Gardelli Specialty Coffees, and Rubens calls it his kingdom, a dream that came true. It is also a real business with real numbers: a seasonal one that has to buy a whole year of coffee in a few months, hold the cash to pay for it, and ship a perishable product fresh to customers and companies around the world. Some time ago, looking online for an account that would treat that idle cash better than his previous one did, he came across the fintech Vivid.
A kingdom that started on a stovetop
Gardelli did not begin with machines. He began behind the kitchen of a small traditional bar, roasting green beans in a 50-gram copper drum that he set directly on the stove. There was no money for professional roasters, so he built his own — helped, he says, by a friend from Modena everyone calls “the Leonardo da Vinci of Modena,” a man who can make anything, and by Giuseppe Laghi. First a two-kilo machine, then a five-kilo one that is still in the workshop, and finally, once he had earned enough success to save a little, the machine he uses today: a fifteen-kilo roaster on paper, though he never loads more than ten.
He stops there on purpose. The current machine is still an artisan roaster rather than an industrial one, fitted with software that reads the temperature inside the drum so he can profile each origin on its own curve. But the ceiling is a choice, not a limit imposed on him.
I don’t go any further. I’ve reached the limit I consider right, and I don’t want to grow more, because I want to keep the control over quality I’m after — with growth there’s inevitably a lowering, a standardisation of quality.
Rubens Gardelli, Founder, Gardelli Specialty Coffees
Buying coffee blind
Selection, Gardelli says, is the foundation of everything he does, and he does it exclusively by blind cupping. When the importers send their samples — hundred-gram packets that each stand in for a lot of three, four, five thousand kilograms — he roasts them separately on a small copper machine and tastes them by the cupping protocol: five cups per lot, ground coarse, roughly seven grams to a hundred grams of water at ninety-four degrees. He spits, the way a wine sommelier does, so the caffeine does not overwhelm him by the end of a session that can run to twenty or thirty cups.
Five cups per sample is not a ritual; it is quality control. A defect — the taste of potato, an over-fermented note, a chemical off-flavour the palate learns to recognise — might hide in the first cup and only surface in the third or fourth. If it shows up, the lot is rejected. What survives, he buys, and reputation does not get a vote.
This is how I buy coffee — not by the name. The famous producer from Colombia who won some competition? Fine, send me the samples, I’ll taste them blind, and if they’re good, I’ll buy them.
Rubens Gardelli, Founder, Gardelli Specialty Coffees
What “specialty” actually promises
Ask Gardelli where the best coffee comes from and he separates volume from preference. By volume, his main supplier is Brazil. By taste, the coffee he loves is Ethiopian and Kenyan — Ethiopia because it is the genetic birthplace of arabica, where the plant still grows wild in the forests and where varieties exist that are found nowhere else, and Kenya because it is simply his favourite cup among all the producing nations. Altitude is the deciding factor: from around fifteen hundred metres up, a coffee gains the floral and fruity complexity that a plant grown near sea level, however carefully tended, can never develop.
That obsession with origin is only half of what the word specialty means to him. The other half is the promise to the customer, and it is the part an industrial roaster structurally cannot match.
I roast the coffee for you and I tell you exactly when I roasted it, and I send it to your home — to you as a company or as a private customer — two or three days after roasting, which an industrial roaster can never do.
Rubens Gardelli, Founder, Gardelli Specialty Coffees
Each coffee goes out as a single origin, its botanical variety named, with the recipe of his one and only blend disclosed rather than hidden. It sits in a niche that prices above the commercial average — the rarest lots, a Geisha, can reach sixty euros for a hundred grams — but squarely within the specialty market when you compare it to other roasters across Europe. His customers have learned how he chooses, and they know that what he sells, he sells because it is good in the cup.
Three failures, then a title
Gardelli started competing in 2014, on an Italian circuit tied to World Coffee Events, the most recognised competition series in the sport. He entered two disciplines, brewing and roasting, and won both national titles at the first attempt. The world stage worked like the old European Cup: only national champions advanced. In brewing he came second in the world on his first try, an early exploit, but roasting was the craft he actually wanted to prove, to others and to himself, and there the first world final left him around fifth.
Then came a run that most people would read as failure. He won the Italian roasting title a second year, a third, a fourth — and each time the world final went nowhere. He kept going anyway.
One of my main strengths is never giving up — persistence. When I set myself a goal, I want to reach it.
Rubens Gardelli, Founder, Gardelli Specialty Coffees
For the fourth attempt he changed his preparation completely. He studied what the three defeats had taught him, arrived in Guangzhou days early, found a local roastery with the same machine he would face on stage, and trained harder physically than in any year before. He won. His reference point through all of it is Gandhi, whose autobiography left a deep mark on him: the values, and the persistence that won a nation its independence without war. He tries to carry the same principles into how he runs the company, which operates on solar power, charges an electric car from that same solar energy, and has moved its packaging entirely to compostable material — down to the tape on the box.
The money behind a seasonal business
Gardelli’s calendar is unforgiving in a way that is invisible in the cup. When the season opens, the harvests arrive from Ethiopia and Kenya at once, and he has to pay for a year’s worth of coffee up front — coffee he will then sell across almost the whole year that follows. That means holding a large amount of liquidity for months, waiting to become large outgoing payments. His previous account paid nothing at all on that money.
He first heard of Vivid about a year ago, while searching online for a provider where he could open a personal account. Vivid came up. Then, by ordinary post, a promotional postcard arrived at the workshop, addressed to the company — and that was the thread he pulled, reading up on the conditions, the account, the payments, and opening one.
With my previous account the rate on the balance was zero. Now it’s 1.3% — which is still more than zero.
Rubens Gardelli, Founder, Gardelli Specialty Coffees
In practice, he uses the Business Account to hold and move that seasonal liquidity, and the Interest Account to earn a return on it while it waits — a gross introductory rate of 4% when he started, which drew him in, and a standing rate since. Cashback is another feature his old provider never offered. He is candid that the headline rate has come down from the introductory offer, and equally clear that a return on idle cash, for a business whose whole model is buying a year ahead, beats the zero he was used to.
In practice it works as a business tool: it puts money that would otherwise sit still to some use, and he rates the conditions highly and the app — which he uses on both desktop and phone — as well made.
Gardelli himself drinks only three or four espressos a day — all arabica, which carries about half the caffeine of robusta — and at home, rarely, he uses a moka and a hand grinder. His advice to anyone thinking of entering specialty coffee is the least romantic and most useful thing he says: expect to need a great deal of patience, and no salary at the start. He kept the bar that supported him precisely because the roastery, alone, could not yet feed him. What carried him was patience, persistence, and a refusal to compromise on quality — and, when he was ready, the nerve to test himself in competition, because that is where you find out how good you really are.
Disclaimer: This article reflects the individual experience of a Vivid customer and is provided for general information only. It is not legal, financial, investment or tax advice, and it is not a guarantee of future results. Where a return on funds is involved, the value of investments can go up as well as down, and you may get back less than you invested. Product availability, rates and conditions depend on your plan and may change. Information is current as of August 2026. Please seek qualified professional advice before making financial decisions.
