The Specialty Coffee Association is now accepting nominations for the 2024-2025 SCA Board of Directors. Nominations close on Tuesday, June 26, and interviews with the Nominating Committee will take place in July. The SCA will announce the slate of candidates selected through the interview process by Wednesday, August 31.

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.

Visitor registration is now open for the 2023 World of Coffee trade show taking place June 22-24, 2023, at Athens Metropolitan Expo in the historic city of Athens, Greece. World of Coffee is Europe’s premier coffee trade show, organized by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) and proudly supported by Host Sponsor BWT water+more.

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.

We are so excited to announce World of Coffee Busan 2024, produced and delivered by licensed partner Exporum. World of Coffee Busan will take place at the Busan Exhibition & Convention Center (BEXCO) May 1-4, 2024, and will feature the 2024 World Barista Championship. This inaugural World of Coffee in Asia will run in addition to the SCA's annual World of Coffee trade shows in Dubai, scheduled for January 21 to 23, 2024, and Europe in June 2024.

The winners of the specialty coffee industry’s most prestigious awards for design were announced today at Specialty Coffee Expo 2023. The Coffee Design Awards is a platform for showcasing great design in specialty coffee across three competition categories; branding, packaging, and spaces.

The winners of the specialty coffee industry’s most prestigious awards for design were announced today at Specialty Coffee Expo 2023. Each year, the Best New Product Awards recognizes new products that represent the best in quality and value to the industry. This year’s competition saw winners across nine categories. The following Best New Product Awards winners were announced by members of the SCA board and presented at Specialty Coffee Expo 2023.

Earlier today, SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos formally introduced the beta version of the SCA Coffee Value Assessment on the Re:co Symposium stage, a thought leadership event that takes place prior to the Specialty Coffee Expo in Portland, Oregon. Yannis also unveiled an Early Adopter program designed to help the SCA refine the system’s protocol and forms through community feedback before it moves through the SCA’s standards development procedures.