Announcing the 2024 SCA Annual Report
TO OUR MEMBERS, VOLUNTEERS, PARTNERS, AND THE GLOBAL COFFEE COMMUNITY:
As we reflect on 2024, it is impossible to ignore the extraordinary pressures continuing to shape the coffee industry today. Around the world, coffee prices and logistics have continued to experience significant volatility, driven by climate disruptions, shifting global demand, and economic and sociopolitical uncertainty. Despite a growing, global demand for exceptional coffee, many businesses—of all shapes and sizes—faced tighter margins.
Amid this rapidly changing landscape, our role as a convenor and connector has never felt more clear. By offering globally relevant tools and standards, creating spaces to surface and consider challenging problems, and celebrating the people who make coffee better, we will continue to leverage our unique position in coffee’s complex value system to help the industry navigate what lies ahead.
In 2024, we focused on doing a few important things well and transparently. We adopted and published new standards within the Coffee Value Assessment, formally retiring the 2004 cupping form and placing shared, evolved quality language at the center of our education and research. We welcomed a broader, more diverse community through a new free associate membership, lowering barriers to participation while preserving meaningful ways to contribute and lead. And we kept our promise to bring major events to new regions by delivering World of Coffee in Asia and strengthening the platforms where our industry connects, learns, and does business.
We also worked to pair program growth with financial responsibility, investing in the most valuable aspects of the work we do on behalf of our industry: conducting research, developing standards, creating education for coffee professionals, and producing events. We did all of this while maintaining financial discipline, continuing to build the reserves that ensure we can keep serving the specialty coffee industry in uncertain times. That balance matters: our work spans multiple time horizons. Producers still face disproportionate risk and rising costs. Many businesses face turbulent seasons. The path to a more equitable value distribution requires persistence, partnership, and data we can trust.
Throughout 2024, our community continued demonstrate the qualities for which they have long been known: care, ingenuity, and a willingness to share knowledge. That these qualities persist in our community, despite all the uncertainty we have faced over the past few years, never ceases to fill me with gratitude. Thank you to the producers who continue to invest in quality under pressure. Thank you to the baristas, roasters, and retailers who serve their communities with craft and hospitality. To our volunteers—chapter leaders, judges, committee members, and instructors—thank you for sharing your time and expertise. To our staff, whose professionalism and heart make our ambitious work possible, thank you.
You are the SCA.
With appreciation,
Yannis Apostolopoulos
Chief Executive Officer
Specialty Coffee Association
