MATTS W.
JOHANSSON

Matts Johansson was born in 1959 in Norrköping, a Swedish industrial town. At sixteen he left home for the Swedish Navy's officer training programme, where he spent four years learning leadership, logistics, and cooking. The military gave him discipline, structure, and a professional foundation in the kitchen.

After completing his service he moved to Stockholm, where he worked his way through the restaurant industry. He was recruited as kitchen chef at Hard Rock Café Stockholm during its Swedish launch, overseeing a staff of roughly seventy people. From there he was hired as restaurant manager at IKEA in Linköping, where he ran large-scale food operations and developed the initiative to sell hot dogs and ice cream at the checkout. The concept caught Ingvar Kamprad's attention. It became a permanent fixture and is now standard in every IKEA store worldwide.

He left IKEA and travelled the world. He worked in kitchens and restaurants in Australia, the United States, and elsewhere, picking up ideas about how food and hospitality could work differently. By the time he arrived in Gothenburg in the early 1990s, he had seen how cafés functioned in cities all over the world.

What he found in Gothenburg was roughly thirty cafés in the city centre, all serving the same burnt brewed coffee. He decided to change that. Not by importing a concept, but by building something from scratch: a place where the coffee was excellent, the space had character, and people could meet and be seen.

That conviction has driven every venture since. Whether it was an espresso bar, a roastery, a sourdough bakery, or a zero-waste food destination built on contaminated land, the starting point was always the same: find something with unrealised value, build the infrastructure to reveal it, and create a place where people want to be.