The coffee industry in Puerto Rico is an integral part of the island's culture and identity, and the motivation to be better every day is crucial to the local economy and the well-being of communities. 2023 Re:co Fellow ARNALDO GRATACOS, a young Puerto Rican specialty coffee entrepreneur and educator, is on a mission to revitalize the island’s coffee industry: here, he shares a little of its history and offers a path forward.

The SCA Poland Chapter has selected three new coordinators to join the committee until the current two-year term is complete in 2024.

If you are an SCA member based in Poland, cast your vote for the SCA Poland Chapter committee now.

SCA Sustainability Director ANDRÉS MONTENEGRO hosts a conversation on doughnuts & coffee with ERINCH SAHAN of the Doughnut Economics Action Lab; discussing how embracing the circular economy can lead the coffee sector to a sustainable future and make coffee better, for all. Register on Zoom for Thursday August 17, at 4pm BST.

The 2023 SCA Poland Chapter Election has started! That means that it’s time to make your voice heard by nominating and voting for the volunteer committee who will be leading the chapter's activities for the next two years. 

The Coffee Science Foundation is excited to announce this output from a project intended to understand the role of labor in specialty coffee.

The SCA Greece Chapter has selected two new coordinators to join the committee until the current two-year term is complete in 2024.

El equipo de Desarrollo del Conocimiento de la SCA, como parte de la Agenda de Café Sostenible de la SCA, está implementando una encuesta dirigida a los actores de la cadena de suministro del café para evaluar y rastrear el impacto sobre cómo el valor es creado, medido, y distribuido en las cadenas de valor del café, hacia el objetivo más amplio de lograr una distribución equitativa del valor (EVD).

The SCA Knowledge Development team as part of the SCA Sustainable Coffee Agenda is implementing a survey aimed at actors across the coffee supply chain to assess and track the impact around how value is created, measured, and distributed in coffee value chains, toward a broader goal of equitable value distribution (EVD).

Today, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) released updated Rules & Regulations for the 2023 World Latte Art, World Coffee in Good Spirits, and World Coffee Roasting Championships. These rules will be used for the first time at the Taipei World Coffee Championships, hosted at Taiwan International Coffee Show in Taipei, Taiwan, from November 17-20, 2023. 

The 2023 NCDT Market Research Series is an exclusive compendium of the most in-depth coffee industry market research currently available. The SCA is partnering with the NCA to help deliver key insights to coffee professionals.

If you are an SCA member based in Greece, cast your vote for the SCA Greece Chapter committee now.

We’re never entirely sure what the future holds, but the past few years have made it feel particularly unpredictable.

The Specialty Coffee Association is the world’s largest coffee membership association, with a sustainability-driven purpose deeply ingrained in its structure as a non-profit trade organization: to make coffee better.

Anthropology Professor EDWARD F. FISCHER, author of Making Better Coffee: How Maya Farmers and Third- Wave Tastemakers Create Value, explains the different types of value, ways of determining worth, and how we create economic value by drawing on other sorts of values (moral, social, political, and other cultural values) through the lens of his fieldwork in Guatemala.

Anthropologist SARAH BESKY, PhD considers the relationship between tea’s sensory lexicon and ideas of quality across tea’s colonial history and current-day trading practices, highlighting that quality is far from an objective measure—and that it must be constantly reproduced in practice, including how we choose and use words to adjudicate quality over time.

CHERYL HUNG, lead researcher for the NCA's National Coffee Data Trends studies, traces the impact of the pandemic on coffee consumption in the US and Canada, highlights the collective urge to reconnect, and calls for the coffee community to focus on marketing the emotional benefits and the “softer” aspects of America’s favorite morning beverage.

Lead author Dr. MACKENZIE BATALI shares the results of a controlled and systematic study exploring the impact of the cold brew process on the sensory profile of the beverage it produces, recently published in MDPI’s open access journal, Foods.

Corresponding author HELEN VAIKMA shares the results of a study market mapping the sensory attributes of five different categories of plant-based beverages.

VAUGHN TAN highlights where uncertainty (which is not the same thing as risk) exists within specialty coffee’s supply chain, and questions whether the industry’s previous emphasis on the “direct” in “direct trade,” combined with a drive to rebuild leaner coffee supply chains, has had unintended side effects.