By Marvin G. Perez Rising food prices are eating into corporate earnings, and the coffee industry is no exception. For seasoned traders paying the current price above $2.30 for a pound of Arabica beans this may not be so shocking, especially if they lived through the price spike to $3.18 a pound seen in 1997. …
By SCAA’s Sustainability Council The Sustainability Council created the Sustainability Award in 2003 to promote, encourage and honor the efforts of those serving as role models in fields of sustainability. Each year, the council read about the depth and breadth of the sustainable work being done in all areas across the industry and chooses a …
By Tracy Ging Sustainability has been part of the discourse in the specialty coffee industry almost from the beginning and certainly for a better part of the past two decades. Early on, with vision and leadership bordering on radical, the industry made sustainability part of its mission. The SCAA also encouraged total quality, inclusive of …
By Bruce Mullins The specialty coffee industry’s Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) has officially been launched, and has begun its historic multi-year journey towards a more complete understanding of the science behind coffee quality and coffee quantity. The Initiative—developed over the past 18 months by a consortium of leading specialty coffee roasters, thought-leaders and …
By Tracy Ging with significant contribution by James Hoffmann After the World Barista Championship (WBC) this year in London, I got to be a fly on the wall and listen in on a conversation between Oliver Strand, a columnist for The New York Times, and the six WBC finalists. It was a casual yet deeply …
By Shanna Germain Espresso. It’s a drink, a lifestyle, a ritual, an addiction. It’s an end-goal and a dream concoction. It’s an art and a science, a measurable entity and a mystical experience. It’s also full of controversy, misunderstandings, missteps and flawed logic. To uncover some of what makes espresso such a complicated creation, we …
By Mark Inman In the fall of 2010, a San Francisco-based group called The Seedling Projects organized a group of known food producers, writers, grocers, farmers and chefs to create “The Good Food Awards” (GFA), recognizing producers and food communities around the U.S. that create excellent beer, charcuterie, cheese, chocolate, pickles, preserves and coffee. The …
By Peter Giuliano The coffee plant is barely domesticated. Its cultivated form is almost identical to the wild coffee plants that still grow in the forests of Western Ethiopia. As such, it thrives in environments that mimic the primeval forest; and these forest-like farms—we call them shade-grown coffee plantations—are among the most environmentally positive forms …
Or: How I learned to appreciate cream and sugar again By Nicholas Cho Recently, I had the privilege of producing a “person on the street” video segment that was shown during the 2011 SCAA Symposium. Titled simply, “SCAA Symposium Street Interviews,” the video showed me asking nine random people outside of the Ferry Building in San Francisco a …
By Lily Kubota As with all industries, specialty coffee has a number of long-standing premises that, founded or not, are often taken as something akin to gospel. One of these premises is that better coffee equals higher prices (and therefore, economic sustainability for producers), and that economic sustainability can drive other facets of sustainability. At …