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[title]Salvatore Malatesta helms St Ali, a coffee roasting business in Melbourne with over 500 national accounts. The business, down a typical Melbourne laneway, has expanded over the past 15 years, with both and cafés all over town and a series of specialty stores called Sensory Lab. If you've ever wrapped your mitts around a quality cuppa on a trip down south, chances are you were sipping one of St Ali's quality brews, that's how entwined with Melbourne's coffee culture they are. Now, with cafés largely out of action around Victoria, Malatesta has proved himself the prince of the pivot, using the brand's website and an eye for craftsmanship to keep staff employed and to provide Australia with all manner of artisinal edibles and Covid-19 products.
"Our primary business was coffee roasting, sourcing and supplying... and life was pretty grand until Corona came and smashed us in the face," Malatesta says over the phone when we reach him from the relative safety of our Sydney office. St Ali was fortunate enough to escape much of the employment horrors that have faced the Melbourne hospitality industry thanks to a few savvy decisions Malatesta made in January this year. Starting with a fateful call from an industrial chemist friend who had an over-supply of hand sanitiser for a corporate client, Malatesta was sought out to freshen up the soon-to-be essential product's branding and went halves in the business. Miraculously, this was before Covid-19 even hit Australian shores.
"For a short period we rode the world's largest hand sanitiser wave. Purely by accident," Malatesta says. "I went from my usually pretty relaxed lifestyle to working 90 hours a week in random suburbs. With 72 staff who were usually working in the coffee business (and would likely be laid off) now making hand sanitiser."
What followed was an intense six weeks of selling the sartorially branded sanitiser on St Ali's website. And though sales of that particular product have slowed down the idea became a permanent skew for them and lead to St Ali becoming a go-to site for other locally made and artfully created products.
Malatesta reflected on the speed of the brand's pivot saying, "I learnt something from that experience. Punters trust us and they trust our brand, and they trust our decisions. So I thought, why don't we set up a general store?"
St Ali's grocery store, or thoughtful provisions as Malatesta calls it, stocks things he likes eating and curating. It started with selling organic eggs and unhomogenised milk in the café and went so well he started placing carefully chosen products and groceries on St Ali's website. The thoughtful provisions range from locally made sauces, tinned sardines and some curious gin mayo from Amsterdam for which they nabbed the exclusive distribution rights, to other lockdown treats like puzzles and artist-made notebooks.
Continuing on the collaborative mateship train, Malatesta also started stocking masks made by another friend of his. "This is the good thing about getting older and having been kind to people along the way," Malatesta says of his community-driven product sourcing. The eventual line of copper and hemp masks was released on the website (read all about them here) and naturally went gangbusters, selling thousands of units in only two days. Breathability of the fabric is the core feature of the St Ali range of masks and snoods, and Malatesta recommends these for hospitality workers who need to wear masks for an entire shift or all day.
"I think you guys [NSW] aren't that far behind us in terms of Corona risk, and I hope you don't get to stage four, but I reckon masks will become compulsory soon," he points out.
Though St Ali is cheerily stocked to the eyeballs with covetable products that are deliverable to most places in Australia, Malatesta isn't exactly celebratory of his good fortune.
"It wasn't all joy, there were lots of tears, but we're in a sort of sweet spot right now. I mean, hospitality has been absolutely fucked. It's been decimated and it's gonna take a miracle for the industry to come back. I feel particularly sorry for Melburnians, stage four is gonna spell the end for a lot of people... I'd really love to just get to the other side of this and get back to what we love to do, which is roasting coffee."
Malatesta proclaims his love for Sydney over the phone, saying he is always on the lookout for a site, coffee partners, wholesale customers, good grocers and discerning cafés to work with. He is also inviting Sydney-based artisans and makers from craft beer makers and distilleries and local artisanal communities to get in touch to be stocked on his supremely popular site. St Ali's store is set on becoming a beacon of local business support Australia-wide and it's more than on its way.
Malatesta is also inviting Sydneysiders to get involved and to nab some of their quality goods with a super-special deal for Time Out readers. Have a browse of the St Ali website and get 15 per cent off everything when you use the code 'WELOVESYDNEY' at check out.