How a tech-loving Londoner is freshening up your daily Grind

David Abrahamovitch has been part of two coffee revolutions. Firstly, with his Shoreditch shop, Grind – now a mini-empire – he helped kickstart flat white culture in the capital. And more recently, Grind’s compostable pods have made getting high-quality coffee at home easy and eco-friendly. He keeps on top of these diversifying businesses using his Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra for everything from using the S Pen to taking notes on coffee tasting to keeping up with the latest news.

Oddly enough, it all pretty much happened by accident. “Grind started as a side project, I had another job at a tech start-up,” says David, 37. “I never thought of the business as something scalable. We just wanted it to be something we liked, which is probably what made it good.”

Coffee by day, bar by night

David’s father owned phone shops across East London; in 2010, David inherited his last remaining location, on Old Street roundabout. “Shoreditch was becoming cool, the Olympics were coming, the center of London was gravitating east,” says David, an eastender who gained retail experience in his father’s business. “I thought ‘what should this building be?’ It seemed obvious it should be a meeting point, with great coffee in the day, and a bar at night.”

Grind was a huge hit. David extracted the positive parts of the coffee chains – “speed of service, mobile ordering, a card machine that works, nice fit-out, consistency, good hygiene” – but with the fun elements of the indie scene: “a much better coffee , engaging staff, good music,” he says. With waiters taking orders via tablet, tech was also always a central part of the operation. “People really liked it. So I left my other job and raised money to do more sites. We are fully committed.”

Eco-aware expansion with home-compostable pods

Further branches followed, and Grind started to serve food, too. All was rosy, but in 2019, another brainwave would transform the business again. “I realized that I owned a roastery but never made coffee at home,” says David. “The coffee pods you could buy at the time were convenient, but I didn’t like the taste and they were an environmental catastrophe, with 29,000 pods going into landfill every minute. I wondered if we could keep the best bits and get rid of the worst.”

Grind’s pods launched in late 2019 with organic coffee in home-compostable pods, the UK’s first. “We invested in a new roastery, set aside a marketing budget and started to build a small team,” says David. “But then the pandemic happened, and growth in that part of the business exploded.”

With people stuck at home, Grind pulled staff from their shops into logistics. “It’s now grown into a bigger business than the high street one,” says David – although that is expanding, too. “We’re now primarily a direct-to-the-consumer coffee company.”

Technology, of course, has helped his employees stay connected, something that has never been easier than with the Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra, which is great for all-important video calling.

Keeping on top of his business with a Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra

David is never far from his tablet. “I spent a lot of my time in places where a tablet works best, reviewing numbers and giving feedback,” he says. “I want to see stuff that’s too much for a phone, but I don’t need to be sat down typing on a laptop. The Galaxy Tab S8 Ultra has a big, bright, very nice screen, and it’s easy to use. It’s all about accessing information in my job.”

He’s proud of the impact he’s had on his home city. “I’m a diehard Londoner,” says David. “It’s the best city in the world, and I love the fact we’ve built something that lots of Londoners recognize.”

Discover more about the Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 at Samsung.com.