Today, with help from presenter Chad Trewick, you’ll learn about the inception of and future plans for the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, a project housed at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. The Guide uses donated contract information about industry pricing behaviors that are anonymized and aggregated to create tables to serve as a guide to help both sellers (producers) and buyers (exporters, importers, roasters) land on pricing that does not rely on the volatile commodity price as a baseline.

With producers facing issues of climate change, migration of the younger generations to urban areas, and fluctuating coffee prices, it has become increasingly difficult for smallholder farmers to be successful and sustainable. Here, a panel discussion featuring Jörn Severloh, Christopher Mujabi, Karina Orellana, Sara Morrocchi, and Kathrine Löfberg brings together coffee industry leaders and farmers to discuss these critical issues to find common understandings and a path forward.

This session brings together recent work on the history and anthropology of coffee in the context of a discussion about the role of specialty in rebalancing the fundamentals of the market. Professor Jonathan Morris presents an overview of the history of price volatility across the five eras of coffee history he has identified, with some suggestions as to how this might be resolved in a sixth era as producer countries start consuming their own coffee. 

Consumer-driven changes will reshape the global coffee world. To help companies throughout the coffee value chain prepare for the future, today’s presenters - Maria Castroviejo and Michaël de Groot - look ten years ahead at key change they expect to stir up the coffee market, offering a TED-style discussion about how changes in consumer preferences, their perspective on coffee, and their buying behaviors will change the global coffee world.

In today's lecture, learn about the science driven by the SCA's Research Center, with reports on projects and outputs of our research streams in sensory science, coffee extraction, coffee freshness, and more. Many of these projects are still ongoing, so this is a chance to get a sneak-peek of soon-to-be-published studies, including the first-ever update of the brewing control chart, and work that's just starting.

In today's lecture, representatives from the SCA Sustainability Center and Board of Directors identify factors that contributed to the wholly unsustainable economic position facing many coffee producers.

Throughout its long history, coffee has been cast in very different roles: exotic beverage, colonial good, global commodity – but also as a staple of the local cuisines of the countries where it was produced.

Each year, the Specialty Coffee Association’s Best New Product Competition recognizes new products that represent quality and add value to the specialty coffee and tea industry. Eight different product categories are evaluated using the “Best I.D.E.A.S.” criteria set out by the SCA, with a winner declared in each category.

Design Lab is a platform for showcasing great design in specialty coffee, taking place at World of Coffee for the first the time in Berlin this June. Design Lab was established at our 2016 Expo in Atlanta, focusing initially on coffee packaging, but has grown to include new showcases and will now be present at two shows.

The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) is proud to announce the winners of the Best New Product and Design Lab Awards at the 2019 World of Coffee in Berlin.