Market Lane Coffee was born from an intuition shared by two Australians who met thousands of kilometres from home, behind the counter at Monmouth Coffee in London. Fleur Studd, a Melburnian who had moved to England in her twenties, was working in a completely different field when she walked into Anita Le Roy's small roastery at Borough Market. Tasting Monmouth's filter coffees, she realised that coffee did not have a single taste but hundreds, shaped by origin, variety and processing. She quit her job to join the roasting team. Jason Scheltus came from Melbourne hospitality, having worked in bars, restaurants and cafés before turning to coffee with a simple conviction: while wine and beer have been understood and refined for centuries, coffee remains largely unexplored territory. At Monmouth, he learned to roast on a small 25-pound direct-flame Whitmee, then helped commission two Petroncini roasters at the London house's new facility. When they both returned to Melbourne in the late 2000s, they reached the same conclusion: finding fresh, traceable, high-quality coffee in Australia was close to impossible.
Fleur first founded Melbourne Coffee Merchants in 2008, a specialty green coffee importer, to create the missing link between the producers she had met on her travels in coffee-growing countries and Australian roasters. A year later, in 2009, she and Jason opened Market Lane Coffee inside Prahran Market, the fresh produce market in the south of Melbourne. The choice of location was no accident: they wanted to reach people who already cared about seasonality, provenance and product quality. To sell coffee the way you sell farmhouse cheese or market-garden vegetables. The cheese analogy is no coincidence: Fleur's father, Will Studd, devoted his career to building a market for artisan cheese in Australia and to changing the rules on raw-milk cheese. Fleur grew up watching this long-haul work, and took a method from it: educate the customer, stand up for producers, never compromise on the product.
From Prahran Market to Nine Addresses
Market Lane grew slowly, without ever straying from its line. No brunch, no homemade pastries, no diversification: coffee and nothing else. As Fleur herself says, their strength lies in this narrow focus on doing one thing as well as possible. Jenni Bryant joined the team in 2010 and became a co-owner in 2019, forming with Fleur and Jason a trio that still runs the business day to day. Today, Market Lane has nine shops across Melbourne, each rooted in its neighbourhood: the "Paris end" of Collins Street in the historic Portland House building, a small terrace house on Faraday Street in Carlton (next door to the Baker D. Chirico bakery), several spots at Queen Victoria Market, South Melbourne, and Sydney Road in Brunswick. The roastery and head office are in Brunswick East, where the team works on a 45kg Probat, using Cropster software to track roasting data. Jason, who oversees roasting, looks for a balance he readily associates with Scandinavian roasters: developing all the sweetness, acidity and body of the bean without imposing a roast character. He names Guatemala and Colombia among his favourite origins, with a soft spot for varieties such as Chiroso Caturra.
An Ecosystem, Not Just a Roaster
What sets Market Lane apart in Australia is the complete structure Fleur and Jason have built around green coffee. Melbourne Coffee Merchants, the sister company, imports directly from producers with whom relationships often go back decades. This closeness to the start of the chain gives Market Lane privileged access to lots they know intimately, season after season. The company has been B Corp certified and carbon neutral since July 2020, a commitment that extends to tracking emissions from shop fit-outs and equipment. It also supports several local organisations, including Children's Ground, an educational organisation led by Aboriginal communities.
Market Lane's influence reaches beyond its own walls. Several former team members have founded places that became Melbourne institutions: Wild Life Bakery, Shortstop, Altius, Holy Belly. Fleur Studd was inducted into the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival Hall of Fame in 2015, in the "Trailblazer" category. But perhaps the best measure of their success is the one Fleur prefers: the moment a customer asks when a particular coffee will be back on the shelves, because they know its name, its origin and its season.
