Honey Coffee Roasters
Honey Coffee (ハニー珈琲) is a coffee company in Fukuoka, on Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu. It imports green coffee, roasts it, sells the beans, and runs its own cafés.12 Its own account is that it was the first shop to bring specialty coffee to Hakata, the merchant district at the centre of Fukuoka, in 2001.1
Most readers arrive here for one reason: this is the family business Hidenori Izaki grew up in. He started working there at sixteen, and in 2014 became the first Japanese — and first Asian — winner of the World Barista Championship.3 He did not win it for Honey Coffee; by then he was competing for Maruyama Coffee in Nagano. But the shop is where he learned the trade.
The name has nothing to do with honey coffee
This is a common mix-up worth clearing up immediately. Honey-process coffee is a processing method — the skin is stripped off the cherry but the sticky fruit layer, the mucilage, is left on the bean while it dries. No honey is involved there either. Honey Coffee of Fukuoka is a company name, unrelated to that method. Several unaffiliated businesses in the United States also trade under similar names.
The company
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Trading name | ハニー珈琲 (Honey Coffee) |
| Legal entity | 井崎珈琲有限会社 (Izaki Coffee) |
| Company established | 24 April 2006 |
| Specialty coffee retail began | 2001, in Hakata |
| Representative director | Yasuhide Izaki (井崎 康英) |
| Head office | 6-1-37 Naka, Hakata-ku, Fukuoka 812-0893 |
| Stores | 6, all in Fukuoka |
| Business | Importing, roasting, retail, cafés, wholesale |
The 2001 and 2006 dates are not a contradiction. The shop was trading in specialty coffee first; the limited company that holds the business today was registered five years later.1
The head office at Naka, in Hakata ward doubles as the roastery and distribution centre — the industrial end of the business — while the retail arm is spread across the city.4
Where you can actually drink it
All six locations sit in Fukuoka, several clustered around Hakata Station:4
| Store | Where |
|---|---|
| Naka Main Store / Roastery | Naka, Hakata-ku — the head office and roasting works |
| Fukuoka Mitsukoshi | Tenjin, Chuo-ku — basement floor of the Mitsukoshi department store |
| Cafe Miel | Fukuoka Center Building, B2F, Hakata Station front |
| Little Honey | Fukuoka Center Building, B2F, Hakata Station front |
| Takamiya | Noma, Minami-ku |
| Kyushu University Ito Campus | Motooka, Nishi-ku |
A department-store counter, two basement units by the station, a suburban shop and a university campus café is a fairly typical shape for a mid-sized Japanese regional roaster — the pattern described on Japan coffee market, where roasteries lean on retail concessions rather than standalone flagship cafés.
How it buys
The company describes going to farms itself and building long-term relationships with producers, buying lots it says are not available elsewhere — the approach this wiki files under Direct trade. It also sells coffees processed by Carbonic maceration, a fermentation method borrowed from winemaking in which whole cherries ferment in a sealed, carbon-dioxide-filled tank.1 Both are markers of a roaster operating at the specialty buying end rather than the commodity end.
Its stated mission is, in its own words, to “contribute to peace in the home through delicious coffee” (美味しいコーヒーを通して家庭平和に貢献する) — a domestic, everyday framing rather than a connoisseur one.1
The Izaki connection
The link between the roastery and Japan’s only world barista champion is direct and documented from both ends.
The Japanese-language account of Hidenori Izaki’s career states plainly that his father ran the coffee shop Honey Coffee in Fukuoka, and that Izaki was involved in the work there from the age of sixteen — 「父親の経営するコーヒー店ハニー珈琲(福岡市)で16歳から仕事に関わりながら」.3 From the company’s side, the legal entity is literally named 井崎珈琲 — Izaki Coffee — and its representative director is Yasuhide Izaki.1 A 2016 Fukuoka Now report on a new Honey Coffee café identifies its owner simply as “Izaki-san.”2
Izaki went on to join Maruyama Coffee in 2009 while at university in Tokyo, won the Japanese national championship, and took the world title in Rimini in 2014.3 He later founded the consultancy Samurai Coffee Experience and the four-seat Tokyo tasting room Cokuun.
To verify
Whether Yasuhide Izaki is specifically Hidenori Izaki’s father. The two facts sit side by side but no source consulted here joins them explicitly: the biography says “his father” without naming him, and the company filing names Yasuhide Izaki (井崎康英) as representative director without stating the relationship. Same surname, same city, same family business, and the shared character 英 in both given names all point one way — but this is inference, not a sourced statement. No corporate registry or family interview was consulted.
To verify
The 2016 Tsutaya café may no longer exist. Fukuoka Now reported that Honey Coffee opened a café on the 2nd floor of the Fukuoka Building on 29 April 2016, in collaboration with the bookseller Tsutaya, sited by the new-books section and styled after the U.S. West Coast.2 That store does not appear on the company’s current six-store list, and the company’s own site carries notices of store closures. Whether it closed, moved, or was rebranded is not documented in anything reachable here.
To verify
Founding story, size, and any competition record. No founder narrative, capital, revenue, employee count, roasting capacity or wholesale client list was found on the company’s site or elsewhere. Honey Coffee has no recorded placings in any competition covered by this wiki, and the research report behind this note failed to identify the company at all — it returned unrelated American businesses trading under similar names, and stated it could not verify any specialty-coffee entity by this name. Everything above was recovered from the company’s own site, the Fukuoka Now report and Japanese-language biography instead.
Related
- Hidenori Izaki — the 2014 world barista champion who started here at sixteen
- Maruyama Coffee · Kentaro Maruyama — the Nagano roastery he actually competed for
- Cokuun · Samurai Coffee Experience — what he built after the title
- Saza Coffee · UCC Ueshima Coffee · Doutor Coffee — other Japanese roasting companies in this wiki
- Japan coffee market · Kissaten — the market and café culture it operates in
- Specialty Coffee Association of Japan — the national body behind the championship pipeline
- Specialty coffee · Direct trade · Green coffee buying · Carbonic maceration — how it buys and what it sells
- Honey process — the processing method it is not named after
- World Barista Championship — the title that made the shop’s name travel