Coffee Price Crisis Webinar: Spotlight on the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide

Updated February 11, 2019: Thanks to all who joined us for the first in a series of webinars hosted by the SCA’s Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative. Professor Peter W. Roberts of Emory University and Chad Trewick of Reciprocafé spoke to Ellie Hudson of the SCA about the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, launched in December, introduced by SCA Executive Director Emeritus Ric Rhinehart who spoke about the SCA's new initiative.

Coffee Price Crisis Webinar: Spotlight on the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide
February 11, 2019
7:00am PST / 3:00pm GMT


What is the SCA doing about the coffee price crisis?

The SCA’s Coffee Price Crisis Response Initiative, led by a team of staff and volunteers of the SCA’s Sustainability Center, is aimed at understanding the crisis and providing alternative price discovery mechanisms for the coffee sector. Click here to learn more about the initiative and to find additional resources. Over the coming months, the SCA will host a series of webinars and events to amplify the work being done in this field by individuals in the private sector, academia, producing countries, and others in the coffee community.

What is the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide?

In our first webinar in this series, Peter and Chad will present and answer questions about the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, a project run by researchers at Emory University that relies on an expanding group of data donors – roasters, importers, exporters, and others – who provide detailed contract data covering specialty coffee transactions from recent harvests. Using this anonymized information, the Transaction Guide serves as a report on the distributions of recent Free on Board (FOB) prices— prices paid for coffees that are delivered and placed onto the ship at the port in the country of embarkation— for green specialty coffees. Download the guide on their website.

About our panelists

PETER W. ROBERTS

Peter is Professor of Organization & Management at Emory University and Academic Director of Social Enterprise @ Goizueta.

His research interests relate to how the behavior and performance of organizations evolve over time. Recently, he directs his interests in entrepreneurship and organizational performance toward topics in the field of social enterprise. His current projects focus on social entrepreneurs and accelerators, on micro-business development, and on the global specialty coffee industry.

For the past several years, he has also been spearheading Social Enterprise @ Goizueta, which focuses on making markets work for more people, in more places, in more ways. This led to the establishment of the global Entrepreneurship Database Program, the Start:ME accelerator program, and the Transparent Trade Coffee and Grounds for Empowerment programs.

Peter’s Ph.D. is from the University of Alberta. Before taking up his current position at Emory University, Peter served on the faculties of Columbia University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Australian Graduate School of Management.

CHAD TREWICK, Reciprocafé

After more than two decades working on the roaster side in the Specialty Coffee industry as a director of coffee, Trewick formed Reciprocafé, LLC a consultancy prioritizing mutual benefit in coffee value chain support. Trewick has also spent time gaining a deeper understanding of the financial side of the coffee market.

Chad’s goal is to broaden industry understanding of supply end challenges. His focus is to maintain access to green coffee as a raw material while strengthening the entire value chain encouraging scalable mutually beneficial relationships.

The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide is one of his current projects. Chad is a long time volunteer at SCA–a past board member. He drives the industry toward transparency and underscores, as a threat to Specialty Coffee’s existence, financial challenges in countries where coffee is grown.