Authenticity Coffee Company is a Christchurch-based coffee roastery, café, and wholesale supplier founded by Bink Bowler and Reuben Thorne. Bink brings over 20 years in the coffee industry — including 16 years as a café owner — while Reuben contributes extensive experience in leadership, business, and coffee operations. Together they built Authenticity around a simple premise: wholesale coffee should be high quality, freshly roasted, and fairly priced.
Their HQ café is located in the car park at the Colombo Mall in Christchurch, with an on-site roastery visible from the café floor. The café is open 7 days a week, 8am to 5pm. Roasting happens daily, and coffee is supplied fresh across New Zealand.
For home brewers, Authenticity sells a range of named roasted blends online and in-store — Cheerful, Kia Ora, Black Gold, Goodness, Motherland, and Decaf — with retail pricing from $11 to $14 NZD. Green beans are also available for home roasters.
On the wholesale side, the business offers blanket pricing at $29.90 per kg ex GST — a deliberate departure from the variable pricing of larger roasters. Cafés, restaurants, bars, food trucks, and offices are among their wholesale customers. For businesses that want to run their own coffee brand rather than a named roastery's, Authenticity also offers contract roasting under the 'Roasted with Authenticity' model — giving operators the freedom to label the coffee as their own.
There's a particular kind of frustration that only a café owner can feel when a sales rep — who has never poured a flat white in a morning rush, never managed a rota, never sweated a margin — drops in to tell them how to run their business. Bink Bowler had felt it. After 20 years in the coffee industry and 16 as a café owner, he'd seen enough of the dominant model to know it wasn't working for the people actually making the coffee.
Reuben Thorne, with his own background in leadership, business, and coffee, had reached the same conclusion. The two had a history of working together and stayed in close contact over the years. Eventually, the conversation turned to a simple question: why isn't there an affordable wholesale option for cafés that doesn't compromise on quality?
Look at other industries and the pattern is obvious. Waitomo disrupted fuel. Chemist Warehouse made pharmaceuticals accessible. Asahi made quality beer affordable at scale. Authenticity Coffee Company was built to do the same for the coffee industry in New Zealand — a simplified, cost-effective roastery that still delivers fresh, high-quality coffee, just without the inflated margins and the out-of-touch sales model.
The result is straightforward: wholesale coffee at $29.90 per kg, blanket pricing, ex GST. No tiered rates. No surprises. No haggling. Just good coffee at a fair price that cafés, restaurants, bars, food trucks, and offices can actually budget around.
Their house blend, *Cheerful*, is poured daily across a wide range of these businesses — and the fact that it's the entry-level product says something about the standard they're trying to set across the range.
One of the more interesting parts of the Authenticity model is what they call 'Roasted with Authenticity'. Many cafés don't need or want to carry a roastery's brand. The café itself is the brand. So Authenticity offers contract roasting — they roast the coffee, the café labels it as their own. It's a clean, practical option that the big multinational roasters aren't set up to offer in any meaningful way.
For cafés that want to build their own coffee identity without the capital cost of a roastery, it's a direct path to doing exactly that.
Authenticity isn't just a wholesale operation. Their HQ café is located in the car park at the Colombo Mall in Christchurch, open seven days a week from 8am to 5pm. It serves brunch, lunch, and coffee daily — and the roastery is right there, visible from inside the café.
That transparency is deliberate. The coffee isn't being produced somewhere else and shipped in; it's being roasted on-site. Visitors can see the operation in action while having their morning flat white or sitting down for brunch.
Roasting happens daily, and coffee is dispatched fresh to customers across New Zealand. For wholesale accounts, that freshness matters — the coffee reaching a café in Auckland or Wellington was roasted in Christchurch within a very short window.
Authenticity also sells direct to home brewers through their website, with a range of named roasted blends at retail prices. Cheerful comes in at $11 NZD, Kia Ora, Black Gold, and Motherland at $13, Decaf at $12, and Goodness at the top of the range at $14. All prices are per bag.
For those who want to roast at home, unroasted green beans are available too: Black Gold Green Beans at $32 and Brazil Cerrado Green Beans at $30.
It's a business built by people who use coffee every day — and that comes through in how the product range is structured.