LDC Top 50 2026
Vikki Hodge
Co-Founder and Managing Director
Rave Coffee
After running a coffee van in Australia, Vikki Hodge and her then husband Rob returned to Britain, bought a Turkish coffee roaster and launched Rave Coffee from a shed in Cirencester.
“The UK coffee industry was very cloak and dagger. We wanted to open it up,” she says. They became the UK’s first coffee roasters with a glass-fronted roastery, allowing customers to watch their coffee’s journey from bean to cup. Today, the business employs almost 90 people and roasts every order fresh. “We focus on our values, not what our competitors are doing. From paying farmers fairly to donating 1 per cent of sales to environmental causes, we’re constantly striving to be better.”
From paying farmers fairly to donating 1 per cent of sales to environmental causes, we’re constantly striving to be better. We’re coffee with a conscience.”
Q&A
What do you look for when hiring people?
Our first employee was actually a forklift driver who used to come into our cafe twice a day and had so much enthusiasm for coffee. I’ve stuck with that ever since. You can teach skills, but you can’t teach passion. I always tell my managers to trust their gut too. Nobody’s perfect but if someone has the right attitude, that comes through to customers.
What’s it like running a business with your ex-husband?
It works really well. We separated about 10 years ago, but we’ve always been aligned when it comes to Rave. Rob looks after marketing, e-commerce and roasting, while I’m more focused on operations, culture and people, so we don’t tread on each other’s toes. When you’ve spent 15 years building something together, you develop a shorthand. Most decisions take us about two minutes.
What would you like to do next?
For the past five years I’ve been doing a counselling course in Block Clearance Therapy (BCT), which explores subconscious patterns and negative beliefs. As I step back slightly from the day-to-day business, I’d love to spend more time mentoring our managers and eventually helping other founders, particularly women in business. There’s still a big difference in the way we’re treated; I’ve often had to push Rob forward in meetings because some people don’t want to deal with a female leader.
