Spring Boot Kafka Consumer not consuming, Kafka Listener not triggering

I am trying to build a simple spring boot Kafka Consumer to consume messages from a kafka topic, however no messages get consumed as the KafkaListener method is not getting triggered.

I saw in other answers to make sure that AUTO_OFFSET_RESET_CONFIG is set to "earliest" and that the GROUP_ID_CONFIG is unique which I did, however still the KafkaListenerMethod is not triggering. The application simply starts and doesn't do anything:

Application Started

  .   ____          _            __ _ _
 /\\ / ___'_ __ _ _(_)_ __  __ _ \ \ \ \
( ( )\___ | '_ | '_| | '_ \/ _` | \ \ \ \
 \\/  ___)| |_)| | | | | || (_| |  ) ) ) )
  '  |____| .__|_| |_|_| |_\__, | / / / /
 =========|_|==============|___/=/_/_/_/
 :: Spring Boot ::        (v2.1.4.RELEASE)

This is a sub project of another gradle project and build.gradle for this subproject is as below (MAIN_CLASS_PATH has been correctly provided in the code):

apply plugin: 'application'

mainClassName = <MAIN_CLASS_PATH>

dependencies {
    compile "org.springframework.kafka:spring-kafka:${SpringKafkaVersion}"
    compile "org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter:${SpringBootVersion}"
    compile group: 'org.springframework', name: 'spring-tx', version: '5.2.2.RELEASE'
}

Java classes:

Start.java:

import org.springframework.boot.SpringApplication;
import org.springframework.boot.autoconfigure.SpringBootApplication;

@SpringBootApplication
public class Start {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            System.out.println("Application Started");
            SpringApplication.run(Start.class, args);

        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

KafkaConsumerConfig.java:

import org.apache.kafka.clients.consumer.ConsumerConfig;
import org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.StringDeserializer;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Bean;
import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.kafka.annotation.EnableKafka;
import org.springframework.kafka.config.ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory;
import org.springframework.kafka.core.ConsumerFactory;
import org.springframework.kafka.core.DefaultKafkaConsumerFactory;

import java.util.HashMap;
import java.util.UUID;

@EnableKafka
@Configuration
public class KafkaConsumerConfig {

    @Bean
    public ConsumerFactory<String, String> consumerFactory() {
        HashMap<String, Object> props = new HashMap<>();
        props.put(
                ConsumerConfig.BOOTSTRAP_SERVERS_CONFIG,
                <KAFKA_SERVER_ADDRESS>);
        props.put(
                ConsumerConfig.GROUP_ID_CONFIG,
                UUID.randomUUID().toString());
        props.put(
                ConsumerConfig.KEY_DESERIALIZER_CLASS_CONFIG,
                StringDeserializer.class);
        props.put(
                ConsumerConfig.VALUE_DESERIALIZER_CLASS_CONFIG,
                StringDeserializer.class);
        props.put(ConsumerConfig.AUTO_OFFSET_RESET_CONFIG, "earliest");
        return new DefaultKafkaConsumerFactory<>(props);
    }

    @Bean
    public ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<String, String>
    kafkaListenerContainerFactory() {

        ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<String, String> factory =
                new ConcurrentKafkaListenerContainerFactory<>();
        factory.setConsumerFactory(consumerFactory());
        return factory;
    }

KafkaConsumer.java

@Service
public class KafkaConsumer {

    @KafkaListener(topics = <TOPIC_NAME>)
    public void consume(@Payload ConsumerRecord<String, String> message) {
        System.out.println("Consumed message: " + message);
    }
}

The KAFKA_SERVER_ADDRESS and TOPIC_NAME have been correctly provided within my code. Also I have checked that the topic actually contains messages in it already.

Any ideas as to why this doesn't consume any messages from a kafka topic?