Announcing the 2023 SCA Annual Report

2023 Specialty Coffee Association Annual Report

Last year was an exciting and inspiring year for us at the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA). Throughout 2023, the hard work of many enabled us to engage in research, develop standards, expand education, create events, and design experiences with a global reach—all in service on our continuous journey to fulfill our association’s commitment to make coffee better.

Driven by our purpose to foster global coffee communities and support activities to make coffee a sustainable, equitable, and thriving endeavor for the entire value chain, we spent the past three years focused on delivering four major strategic themes: a sustainability agenda focused on the equitable distribution of value, making connections globally and locally, creating opportunities for professional development and individual growth, and delivering outstanding service to the specialty coffee industry. Although you can read more about these within our 2023 SCA Annual Report, I am so inspired by what our team has achieved this year that I want to share some of what has felt particularly meaningful to me.

From the very start of my tenure as CEO, a key strategic theme has been to articulate and drive the SCA’s Sustainable Coffee Agenda. Although we had already begun engaging in conversations about value distribution in the coffee sector as far back as 2018, 2023 brought two major milestones for this strategic theme. First, we officially solidified our commitment to a sustainability agenda centered on value distribution in the coffee industry by publishing the SCA’s Sustainable Coffee Agenda and its theory of change. We also created and introduced the SCA’s Coffee Value Assessment, a long-awaited update to the SCA’s cupping protocol and forms which will enable us to have honest discussions about how value is generated, captured, and distributed along the supply chain. Now that we have a tool compatible with scientific research, we will continue to keep raising research funds to understand value distribution in the coffee sector. We are also turning our attention to community integration: our next goal is to ensure the sustainability programs of a significant number of companies in our community are grounded in the principles of the SCA’s Sustainable Coffee Agenda. To this end, we are embedding this agenda in all our programs and activities—which are also expanding.

In our work to expand our global network and enhance experience by utilizing local communities, 2023 saw us grow our tradeshow footprint beyond North America, the Middle East, and Europe to Latin America (World of Coffee Panama 2026) and Asia Pacific (World of Coffee Busan 2024). We also designed and launched a portfolio of activities and experiences to support businesses and trade. In parallel, we have been working to restructure our approach to chapters, competition bodies, and guilds so that they can become more relevant to local specialty coffee communities while also completely overhauling our membership model to make the SCA more accessible. All of these initiatives will help us reach our goal for this strategic theme, to expand the reach of specialty coffee.

As the specialty coffee industry continues to mature, grow, and diversify, we will continue to create opportunities for professional engagement and individual growth. Over the past three years, we’ve expanded our education offering to encompass additional aspects of the coffee sector with new programs and a flexible diploma system to meet the needs of today’s professionals. We also began creating education to address information asymmetry for coffee producers, supported with the market information we will glean through the new Coffee Value Assessment, by partnering with producer-facing institutions to ensure its accessible to those who need it most. And, across all our education programs, we have heavily invested in making our education accessible on multiple platforms, in different languages, and across different geographies.

The investment we made in making education more accessible was just one part of a significant investment we made across all our systems to enable outstanding service delivery and e-commerce capabilities to serve global business solutions. Internally, we’re working to create community platforms and leadership pipelines which will ensure knowledge transfer and continuity within the organization. Externally, we are creating on-going listening mechanisms which will allow us to redesign stakeholder experiences.

As we’ve compiled this report—and as I’ve reflected on how far we’ve come since the merger—I have been constantly reminded that people are our superpower. There are so many of us working to make coffee better in our day-to-day work throughout coffee’s value system. Many are reflected across our stakeholder groups, and some have contributed their time and energy as volunteers, presenters, contributors, and community leaders across our activities and beyond. To all of those who have supported our activities and the specialty coffee industry in 2023, thank you.

But it is also true within the organization, too: we couldn’t have been successful in all these key strategic areas without our staff. We have come such a long way since unification, grown so much as a remote team with people all over the world, and established the importance of equity, diversity, and inclusion principles within the organization. Although we’ve already increased our investment in attracting, retaining, and training great talent for the future, we’re committed to increasing our spend in staff education, training, and professional development up to 2% of our revenue. I am humbled by the way the SCA’s staff has unified, created a workplace culture of trust, and continues to exemplify the values we discovered last year together. I am grateful to work alongside them in making coffee better.

Last, but certainly not least, 2023 brought strong financial recovery. The merger, followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and all its havoc, left the association in a difficult financial position that we have worked hard to reverse: a significant negative equity of -US$1.8M. At the end of 2023, I am happy to report that the SCA is in its strongest-ever financial position, having built an equity of US$12.5M—approximately six months of financial reserves, should the unthinkable happen again.

As we continue to work towards these key strategic themes in 2024, I am excited for what the future holds. We’ll continue to roll out our new membership model, creating easier ways to connect with each other as well as all the tools, research, resources, and experiences that the SCA creates on our mission to make coffee better. For those of you joining us in Chicago, Busan, or Copenhagen later this year, safe travels—and see you soon!

Sincerely,