Allpress Espresso to relocate Japan roastery for Asia wholesale growth

Allpress Espresso is moving its Japan roastery from Tokyo to Miyota, Nagano, a shift aimed squarely at growth in wholesale across Asia. The Auckland-based specialty coffee group said the relocation will help it serve more customers faster, as it leans on Japan as a production base rather than treating the market as a café-only outpost.

The move matters because Allpress is not acting like a small operator testing a new city. The company said it now serves more than 2,200 independent cafés around the world and operates seven roasteries across Asia Pacific and Europe. In that context, the Japan relocation reads as a scale play, with production capacity, logistics and distribution reach doing the heavy lifting behind the brand’s next phase.

Japan has been part of that strategy for years. Allpress said its Tokyo roastery opened in 2014 and has roasted coffee for partner cafés across the country since then. The site in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa became both a wholesale base and a public-facing café, while a Toranomon café opened in 2020, extending the brand’s footprint in Tokyo without changing the fact that wholesale remained the core business.

The company said the Tokyo roastery will close and operations will move to Miyota from autumn 2026. Allpress described the relocation as a necessary step in its long-term growth as a specialty coffee brand. That timing gives the business room to reset production in a location better suited to serving accounts across Japan and neighboring Asian markets, where speed, consistency and supply flexibility matter as much as the coffee in the bag.

The broader signal is clear. Specialty coffee growth in Asia is increasingly tied to where roasting happens, not just where cafés sit. A roastery in Japan can shorten lead times, sharpen wholesale service and keep the brand close to one of the region’s most exacting coffee markets. For Allpress, that is a smarter bet than chasing consumer expansion for its own sake.

Allpress was founded in New Zealand in 1989 by Michael Allpress, and Asahi Beverages bought the business in 2020, marking its entry into the coffee market. That backing has given Allpress the structure to make infrastructure-heavy moves like this one. Moving production to Miyota looks less like a tidy operational change than a statement about where specialty coffee power is concentrating in Asia, and who is best positioned to serve it.