Empire Coffee Roasters is a family-run coffee roastery and cafe based in the Pirimai Plaza precinct in Napier, established in late 2016 by friends Ethan and Michael. What began as a wholesale coffee business inside a Napier furniture department store grew into a full cafe, opening to the public in September 2018.
Today Empire Coffee Roasters is run by founder Ethan alongside his mum Kathleen, having pivoted its customer-facing space into a smaller coffee bar serving coffee and fresh pastries. The space also stocks a range of local and New Zealand-made products, reflecting the business's ethos of small businesses supporting one another.
Beyond the cafe, Empire roasts and sells its own coffee blends, single origin coffee, decaf, and capsules, available to order online alongside brew equipment and filters. The business also has a Tearfund partnership, and offers coffee subscriptions and boxsets for regular customers.
In the Pirimai Plaza precinct in Napier, Empire Coffee Roasters has grown from a shared dream between two friends into a family-run fixture of the Hawke's Bay coffee scene.
Empire Coffee Roasters was established in late 2016 by Ethan and Michael, after Ethan's long-held dream of starting a coffee roasting company turned into a real plan over a few good local craft beers and plenty of conversation. The business began purely as wholesale, operating out of a furniture department store in Napier, before Ethan and Michael established a larger cafe in the Pirimai Plaza precinct, opening to the public in September 2018.
The years since haven't stood still. In 2019, Michael departed Empire to start a new chapter of his own, the same year Ethan and his wife Shontelle welcomed their first daughter, Octavia. Then came 2020 and the disruption of a global pandemic, followed by the arrival of Ethan and Shontelle's second daughter, Macy, in 2021. Through all of it, Empire Coffee Roasters kept going.
Today, Ethan runs Empire Coffee Roasters alongside his mum Kathleen, having pivoted the customer-facing side of the business into a smaller coffee bar and operational space. The cafe serves coffee and fresh pastries, and also stocks a range of local and New Zealand-made products — reflecting a deliberate ethos of small businesses working together to support each other rather than competing in isolation.
Beyond the cafe counter, Empire roasts and sells its own coffee across several lines: house blends including Gatehouse and Kings & Queens, single origin coffee, decaf, and coffee capsules. A special edition release, Gatehouse: A Journey Within the Blend, has also featured in the range. For regular drinkers, subscriptions and boxsets are available, alongside brew equipment and filters for anyone brewing at home.
Empire also maintains a Tearfund partnership, connecting its coffee business to wider charitable work — a detail that fits with the same community-minded approach reflected in stocking other local NZ-made products alongside its own coffee.
Empire Coffee Roasters doesn't pretend to know exactly what its next chapter looks like, but as the business itself puts it, good coffee and great people will always be part of the journey. For Napier locals, that's meant nearly a decade of steady, family-run coffee roasting, a cafe worth stopping into for a coffee and pastry, and a shop shelf that champions other small Kiwi businesses alongside its own.