I Want Coffee, Not Coffee
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 …
Does Quality Ensure Sustainability?
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 …
The Case for Active Goodness
By Ric Rhinehart It was in 2000 that Google employees Paul Buchheit and Amit Patel first wrote a phrase on a conference room whiteboard, three little words that would become the unofficial statement of corporate values for the company: “Don’t Be Evil.” The phrase, akin to the medical version of “First, do no harm,” was …
What Can Specialty Coffee Accomplish?
By Peter Giuliano As we all know, coffee is a uniquely global product. Grown only within the tropics and typically consumed outside of them, coffee is one of the rare luxuries that transcends boundaries and cultures. This unique element creates a deeply, completely global industry where we regularly use names and words from a number of different …
Connecting to the Cause
How to Find Charity (Even) When Deciding Not to By Tim Castle No matter who they are or what they do, people look for connections and community. After all, it’s not for nothing that we call ourselves “social animals.” right now, it’s “social media” and a digital “social network,” but 10,000 years ago it was …
Reassessing the Role of Certifications
By Tracy Ging About a year ago at the annual roasters Guild retreat, we posed the question in the roundtable discussions, “is fair Trade dead?” We selected the subject because it was a trending topic. in side conversations, blog comments and on the roasters Guild forum, people were discussing the purpose of an additional premium …
Friendly Competition: There is No “I” in Coffee
By Lily Kubota Mac vs. PC. Facebook vs. Twitter. NBC vs. ABC vs. Fox. We live in a world of competition, one in which companies knock their opponents in ads, product devotees push their favorites and make fun of the others in YouTube videos, and customers are expected, always, to choose a side. It is, …
Competitions and Competitiveness
What it Means when Baristas Compete By Tracy Ging “What’s the deal with barista competitions?” That, it seems, is a common question from some members of the coffee industry. Many people know what the competitions are, they understand how they work, but all-in-all, they find that the whole production resembles a Christopher Guest movie—while they …
Things I’ve Learned (that might help you too)
By Nicholas Cho I’m doing it over together with Trish. And by “it,” I mean “it” in terms of the coffee business. After building up two coffeebars, coaching four USBC Regional Champions, and establishing a great reputation for our coffee program, I’m starting from scratch now, and I can’t tell you how excited I am …
Do-Overs in Coffee: How to Get a Fresh Start
By Trish Rothgeb Recently, I was asked to sit on a panel with a handful of other industry people to discuss, “How we got here.” Which apparently meant, as one of my colleagues so insightfully and somewhat facetiously observed, “We must have arrived!” My response was: “Really? Hey, that’s great!” The reality was more like …
Wide-Spread Enjoyment, One City at a Time
The Regional Strategy of Alterra Coffee Written by Tracy Ging / Interview with Lincoln Fowler The age of Facebook seems to teach the value of scale and global connectedness. Concepts of local seem a bit quaint…and business strategies predicated on local connectedness simply seem out of touch. Or are they? When Facebook connects people in …
Go Your Own Way
Taking Calculated Risks for Better Business By Shanna Germain In the coffee industry—and in other industries as well—we hear about the successful risk-takers and innovators all the time. They’re the ones that make the news, the ones that get interviewed in the New York Times and in the best food magazines, and the ones that …