London, 2011: A Spanish Barista and a Coffee Cart

Jordi Mestre had spent two years working in some of London's best coffee shops when he decided to stop working for other people and start working for himself. In 2011, he set up a coffee cart — a portable espresso operation — and began serving coffee at some of London's most iconic street markets. He became a nomadic barista: moving from market to market, building a clientele through the quality of what was in the cup rather than through any fixed address or brand. The name came naturally. Nomad.

A year after opening the cart, Mestre entered the Spanish National Barista Championship — competing in Madrid for the right to represent Spain at the World Barista Championship. He won. A month later, guided by his mentor Rob Dune, he placed 15th at the WBC in Vienna. This performance opened the door to his first roasting job: at Nude Coffee Roasters, an East London micro-roastery where he learned that coffee production didn't end at the espresso machine — it began long before it, in the green coffee, the roast development, the sourcing relationship.

In 2013, Mestre won the Spanish championship again. He had now been national champion twice, had competed at the World Barista Championship twice, had learned to roast, and had built Nomad into a recognised name in London's specialty coffee world. It was time to go home.

Barcelona, 2014: Building Something From Nothing

When Jordi Mestre returned to Barcelona and opened NOMAD COFFEE LAB in 2014 — at Passatge Sert, in the El Born neighbourhood — there was no specialty coffee scene in the city to join. Spain's coffee culture was, and largely remains, defined by dark-roasted espresso: strong, bitter, served in small doses with milk, priced cheaply. The idea that coffee could taste of jasmine, bergamot, passion fruit, or blackcurrant — that it could be served light-roasted and prized for its origin rather than its intensity — was not merely unfamiliar to most Barcelonans. It was actively confusing.

Mestre's solution was not to soften the message. He opened a space "where coffee is the only protagonist" — no food menu, no distractions, coffee served through multiple brew methods including espresso, V60, AeroPress, cold brew, and cold drip. He hired Fran González that summer as the first team member; González wanted to learn to roast and Mestre taught him. González is now a partner and Head of Coffee at Nomad. Their partnership — now more than a decade old — is the backbone of everything Nomad has become.

Rather than hiring a salesperson to push their roasted coffee into Barcelona's cafés, Mestre recognised that the knowledge gap was the real barrier: café workers didn't know what specialty coffee was, and couldn't sell what they didn't understand. Nomad began offering training programmes — first to their wholesale clients, then to anyone who wanted to learn. Those programmes became a defining part of Nomad's identity and now encompass a full academy covering home barista training, cupping workshops, and professional certification courses.

Zero Investment, 45 Countries: The Organic Growth Story

Nomad has never taken external investment. Every café has been opened with money the business generated itself. Every hire has been made when the business needed a person, not when a funding round allowed it. "My thought process is always to grow organically, grow the way we can afford growing, without investors," Mestre has explained. "We have always opened cafés that we can afford, we hire people when we need more people."

The result of this discipline is a business that is genuinely, measurably profitable at every stage of its growth rather than a venture-backed operation burning cash toward a hypothetical future. By the time Nomad reached 45 countries and 205 cities of distribution — more than 50% of total sales international — it had done so without a single euro of outside capital. The business is the product of the coffee's quality and the team's execution, and nothing else.

In 2025, Nomad placed #25 in the World's 100 Best Coffee Shops ranking. In the Roastful 2024 expert-panel ranking of the world's top 100 roasters, they placed #7 — the highest-ranked Spanish roaster in the world, and one of only a handful of non-Nordic, non-Anglophone roasters in the global top 10.

"Making business is just a human relationship. We choose very well the people we want to work with." — Jordi Mestre, Nomad Coffee