Starting a coffee company wasn't on Drew Paten's bingo card. Mr Paten, a proud Gunai (East Gippsland) man who grew up in Naarm (Melbourne), says the idea came from a group chat.

Every Wednesday, he and friends would have a Zoom call to check in on each other during the COVID-19 pandemic and the idea percolated from there.

Mr Paten and his two friends and business partners, Dr Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch (a Taungurung man) and Jordan Carter (a Ngarrindjeri/Wemba Wemba man), kept the idea brewing, adding layers to it until they decided to go for it.

"My work was with mentoring youth, young mob," says 28-year-old Paten.

"Shannon just said out of the blue, 'why don't we do something with this', holding up a coffee cup, and then Jordan said 'we could make coffee'.

"He has a background in systems engineering and he's never talked about coffee before, so it was a bit random.

"We joked around about it, then started saying 'imagine if', 'what if', thinking about what we could do with it, and the more we talked about it, the better the idea became.

"It was too good not to give it a go."

Four years ago, the trio did just that, and Talwali Coffee Roasters came to life.

Talwali means "clan relations between neighbouring clans", an apt name for a product known for bringing people together.

Through the Coles Nurture Fund, Talwali Coffee Roasters has been granted $400,000 to help it become the first Indigenous-owned business to grow coffee locally, using an innovative system powered by renewable energy.

Coles' Nurture Fund, which is now in its 11th year, has awarded more than $40 million in financial support to 119 Australian producers in a wide range of industries.

The idea of the Fund is to help recipients turn innovative ideas into real-world solutions that benefit producers, the environment and customers.

Currently awaiting patents for the technology for the coffee growing process, Mr Paten is tight-lipped on the new technology but he has promised to keep us informed.

Meanwhile, the trio has paused the coffee roasting business while they undergo research and development.

"We are looking at how we can innovate the industry, be creative and lean on sustainability. Coffee is quite a wasteful industry," Mr Paten said.

"We are cautious and conscious that we are quite new to the industry, but we want to see if coffee growing in Australia can be a full end cycle of sustainability, using solar and reutilised energy, which is part of our testing. It's new ground."

They plan to test growing coffee in Victoria, NSW and Queensland.

The dream, Mr Paten says, is for Talwali Coffee to utilise profit to give back and contribute to community spaces.

"The big dream is to become a leading force in the coffee business and not just secluded as an Indigenous business, where we feel pigeonholed, but to be recognised for a quality of product and not just our identity," he said.