Thomson's Coffee

Thomson's Coffee's story

Thomson's Coffee traces its origins to 1841, when 24-year-old David Thomson, a tea and coffee merchant from Edinburgh, moved with his young family to Glasgow and opened his first shop on St Vincent Street. The business quickly became part of Glasgow's coffee scene, supplying local coffee houses and manufacturing the Naperian vacuum coffee pot. After David Thomson's death in 1892, William Addison took over, and the business passed through his descendants, relocating several times. In the 1960s Thomson's built a custom roastery on Glasgow's Southside, still in use today, and expanded with stores in Ayr, Edinburgh, and Troon. The Renfield Street shop closed in 2005 and the Addison family retired; the business was sold in 2011 to the Jenkins family, its third owning family. In 2015 Thomson's installed Scotland's first Loring Kestrel S35 roaster, enabling smaller specialty batches and the launch of its Core and LAB ranges. The company later returned to retail with a popup café in the Glasgow Arches (2018–2019), opened the community café 1841 in Glasgow's Westend in 2020 with former team member Grant Dick, and in 2022 opened Thomson's HQ in Giffnock alongside its in-house Burnfield Bakery.