Jeff I.
Yelp
Among the roasters I've visited, there are three worth visiting in Toronto: the LSC, Pilot, and then de Mello.
The quality of coffee at de Mello is 90% miss and 10% hit. The light roast coffees (basically all of them) are underdeveloped and overly sour. I've tried over ten different roasts of theirs and have found only one I enjoyed to date, which is the Rwandan Fugi. It's worth noting that they have a buying philosophy which probably affects the quality of beans they get. They have this idea of promoting a "balanced and comprehensive" purchasing model by not focusing only on the small handful of high quality producers. Here's the catch: with the amount of specialty coffee that the world consumes, this is balancing act is inevitable and the idea of only high quality producers getting attention just can't happen.
One possible reason for the second-tier roasting is that they offer far too many beans - too many to have time to properly calibrate each roast. At the same time, this is one thing I'll give to de Mello: the title for having the most roasts available in Toronto. I'm sure this will be an exciting factor for some.
The website is poorly made and the store-website coordination is terrible. Whenever I hit back on the website, the page does not take me to my original coordinates. This makes navigation a pain. In addition, whenever I see something on the website that I want, it's not guaranteed to be in store so I have to call each time before stopping by.
Lastly, the stamps on the bag are either smeared and will smear. This feels careless and not thought through.
So why four stars? It has some of the right ideas, and its existence is generally healthy for advocating specialty coffee.