How Mexico's Coffee Community Has Dealt With the Pandemic - SCA Community Spotlight

Confinement in Mexico due to the pandemic started in the last week of March 2020, with 80% of the country’s population staying home for approximately three months. Only activities and businesses deemed essential continued to operate.

This article by the team at the Mexican Association of Specialty Coffee Shops (AMCCE) is part of our #SCACommunity Spotlight series featuring the work of coffee communities around the world. Follow AMCCE on Facebook, Twitter, and subscribe to their newsletter here.

Although the impact was immediately and intensely felt in the large cities, small populations elsewhere were no strangers to the consequences of COVID-19; they only experienced them more gradually. All areas of our country were affected by the pandemic.

We learned from the problem as it presented itself, sizing its reach and trying to predict its consequences. Under such circumstances, even in confinement, our association (AMCCE) began to take action and to make decisions.

We start by identifying, through survey data, the status of coffee shops in the country. We sought to identify coffee shops that opted for temporary closure, ones that remained operational with changes in their service format, and those which could no longer sustain the cost of staying open. One key finding was that those who had to close wholly had a decline in over 70% sales, which ultimately forced them out of business.

The survey was our means to obtain real information, understand particular problems, and empathize with each coffee shop’s situation. We researched specific needs to become a reliable platform of continuous communication that would effectively connect shops with their community by reposting data and testimonials. We looked into the type of educational support that each coffee shop needed at the moment. As confinement measures eased, we announced re-openings on our social media pages, with information such as menus and working hours, and we promoted virtual events hosted by the community.

The team at AMCCE developed an educational platform to create webinars of high-value content as seen from a more globalized perspective so that the community could have the opportunity to make better, well-informed decisions.

On June 9, we hosted our first webinar, focused on the state of the Asia-Pacific coffee market, which provided our Latin American audience with up-to-date information on the situation of coffee trading. Above all, our objective was to explain how coffee shops in Asian countries were the government had managed to contain the pandemic were overcoming new challenges.

The webinar on the state of coffee shops in Asia-Pacific was the starting point for the development of the following online events, which we classified into three thematic axes: human capital and its situation within the coffee industry, the role of the barista as a link to the final consumer at the end of the value chain, and the technical aspects from which recommendations, testimonials, tips, and ideas reinforce that chain.

Topics that followed were Uncertainty as a Generator of Abundance, Innovation in the Face of the Crisis, Development of new Capacities and Business Health, and Skills for Change Management. These webinars were aimed at entrepreneurs, employees, and coffee professionals broadly, as we sought to present strategies, ideas, and tactics with different scopes.

We also hosted a webinar on the impact of COVID-19 on the national and world coffee championships. Baristas had been uncertain about the competitions’ future. We felt it was necessary to provide them with information on the relevant bodies’ decisions and the changes regarding format, regulations, judges’ roles, and how other countries were adapting to the situation.

Over the past few months, we have also sought to deliver information unrelated to the coronavirus to our members, including webinars on patenting ideas, scientific research in coffee production, and an analysis of the future of specialty coffee. All of these sessions motivated great interest and participation due to the excellent research work shared by our world-class speakers.

What’s next?

• We scheduled more webinars through the end of 2020, for an estimated audience of over 53,000 people.

• We continue teaching SCA, CQI, AMCCE Certification Workshops, face-to-face, virtual (using our new educational platform), and mixed format.

• We plan to develop new virtual sensory workshops to meet a demand in the Mexican market for high-level training.

An event as extraordinary as the one we are experiencing requires us to join forces and work as a community to strengthen ties and exchange ideas. As Charles Darwin famously said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.”

This article by the team at the Mexican Association of Specialty Coffee Shops (AMCCE) is part of our #SCACommunity Spotlight series featuring the work of coffee communities around the world. Follow AMCCE on Facebook, Twitter, and subscribe to their newsletter here.