Australian-based Bermudian businessman Will Young went Down Under for only a year — but 20 years later he’s selling coffee with a conscience and is one of the biggest suppliers in the country.

Mr Young now owns a string of Campos Coffee shops in three Australian states plus one in the US and is a major supplier of roasted coffee to the sector in Australia.

But Mr Young, the son of Ward Young, former owner of the Phoenix Group and BGA, and ex-UBP MP Kim Young, said business was about more than making profits and that his company not only practised fair trade principles but backed humanitarian efforts around the globe.

Mr Young explained: “Our central philosophy is the business we have built, the last thing I want to do is make a lot of money and drive around in a Ferrari.

He said: “We’ve built something that is a force for good in the world. If we can expand that and do more good, that’s fantastic — that’s why we’re expanding into America.”

And he added he hoped to expand the Campos brand, based in Sydney, into the booming Chinese market as well.

Mr Young said that regular customers could spend thousands of dollars a year — and that it was right that “all that money, time, energy and dedication is going towards something fantastic as well”.

Campos Coffee supports a range of projects in coffee-supplying countries, including backing a team of heart surgeons who travel to Rwanda in Africa to perform operations on children who otherwise would not have access to surgery.

The company has also built a school building on the Pacific island of Papua New Guinea, bought a heavy-duty tractor for a coffee-farming co-operative in Kenya and built hundreds of drying beds, is a major supporter of a school project in Ethiopia, built a school library in El Salvador and supports a literacy programme in Tanzania.

Mr Young said: “If you are a successful coffee organisation, it’s incumbent on you to do these projects and respect your customers, employees and producers.

But Mr Young, whose mother is Australian-born, only went to the country as backpacker on an extended holiday and to go surfing.

He said: “I wasn’t very good at surfing — I tried for a whole year and I saw a lot of coffee machines, but the coffee was disgusting and I didn’t like coffee anyway.”

Mr Young, however, changed his views after he visited a small coffee shop and had a cup “incredibly better than any other coffee I had ever had before”.

He worked as a gardener and also worked in restaurants at nights and decided to open his own coffee shop in 1998 in the central business district of Sydney.

Mr Young ran the business solo, making the coffee, starting baking muffins and cleaned the shop at the end of the day.

The punishing schedule, however, took its toll and he ended up ill in hospital.

Mr Young said: “I realised I had to change everything and learn how to train people — I trained other people how to make coffee and started to be quite successful.”

But major redevelopment in the area hit trade and, after the first Australian Starbucks opened right across the road, he closed the business.

Mr Young said: “I went travelling around Australia for two years and learnt more about what Australians wanted in a coffee business.”

After returning to Sydney, he found Campos Coffee in the Newtown area of Sydney, a small, traditional, independent shop in an working-class area which became an arts hub in the 80s and 90s.

Mr Young said the business offered a coffee shop downstairs and a place to live upstairs, but the elderly owner did not want to sell.

But he added: “We worked out a deal where I worked for free for eight months, he could retire and I would buy the business after that.”

After Mr Young took over, he installed coffee machines, chairs, tables, started playing music, roasted his own coffee and the business took off.

He said that after around eight years, he started a wholesale coffee business which “went very well” and Campos now has hundreds of partner cafés.

Mr Young explained: “Other cafés are happy to have our brand because it’s a values-based operation here.”

He added: “I never thought I would leave Bermuda — the plan was to go back to Bermuda after a year. But I have no regrets. I have a great family — a wonderful wife and three kids.”