About Notions Coffee
THE SMARTEST
friend in the coffee world.honest, experienced, on your side
Notions Coffee is a UK coffee consultancy for first-time café and roastery owners. We work at the point where the idea meets the reality — helping people build coffee businesses that are financially sound, operationally tight, and genuinely good to be in.
Founded by Alexandra Marsh — SCA Professional, Q-Grader, fourteen years in the industry — Notions brings the expertise of a large agency to the scale and warmth of a trusted friend.
Alexandra Marsh
Founder · SCA Certified Professional · Q-Grader
01 — The Founder
FROM THE BAR
to the boardroom.
Alexandra Marsh started her career in coffee on bar — making espresso, dialling in grinders, and learning the rhythms of a well-run service. Over fourteen years she moved through every layer of the industry: green buying trips, multi-site operations management, and wholesale programme development for independent roasteries across the UK.
The further she got from the bar, the more clearly she could see the same problems repeating across every business she worked with. Wrong lease. Equipment spec driven by a supplier's agenda. Training that existed in someone's head but nowhere else. Menus priced on instinct, not on numbers. Good coffee, quietly losing money.
Notions started as the conversation she wished she could have had in those early years — honest, informed, and on the side of the owner. It's the same conversation now, just with better tools and fifty more businesses' worth of pattern recognition behind it.
— Alexandra
Our Philosophy
“You don't need to know everything on day one.
That's exactly what we're here for.”
— Notions Coffee
Opening a café is one of the more technically complex things a person can do — and one of the least supported. Most people arrive at it from a love of coffee, not a background in operations, finance, and brand strategy. We don't think that's a problem. We think that's what we're for.
Our Approach
Listen First
We start every engagement by understanding what you're actually trying to build — not by showing you a service menu and asking which one you'd like. The brief comes from you. The work is built around it.
Think Practical
Every recommendation we make is something you can implement. We don't produce strategy documents no one reads or present solutions that require a team you don't have yet. If it can't be actioned, it doesn't go in the plan.
Build Together
We stay involved through implementation — not just the diagnosis. The goal is never to make you dependent on a consultant. It's to leave you with a business that runs better without us than it did with us.
The Team
SCA Pro · Q-Grader · 14 Years
Alexandra Marsh
Founder & Lead Consultant
Alexandra spent a decade working in specialty coffee — on bar, in green buying, and running operations for multi-site independents — before founding Notions. She holds the SCA Professional qualification and a Q-Grader certification, and has worked with more than fifty businesses from pre-opening concept to profitable operation.
SCA Certified · Bar Flow Expert · 9 Years
James Cole
Operations Specialist
James has spent nine years focused on one thing: making coffee bars run better. Before joining Notions, he managed operations for a seven-site group in the North of England, where he rebuilt bar workflows, wrote training standards, and cut average service time across every site. He is the person we send in when the bar is broken.
Packaging · Identity · Digital
Priya Mehta
Brand & Marketing Consultant
Priya leads brand and marketing engagements at Notions, working with cafés and roasteries to build identities that go well beyond a logo. She has a background in independent hospitality branding and brings a clear commercial lens to creative decisions — every element she specifies has a reason.
What They Say
“Notions didn't just help us open — they changed how we think about running a café. Six months in and we're already planning a second site.”
“The bar flow work alone was worth the entire engagement. We're serving 30% more covers in the same footprint, with half the chaos.”
“Finally, someone who speaks like a person and not a corporate consultant. Practical, honest, and genuinely invested in our success.”
ready when you are
LET'S TALK ABOUT
what you're building.
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. No obligation, no jargon — just an honest conversation about your café and how we can help.