Coffee Matchmaker: Multi-Perspective Cupping for Experienced Tasters
Workshop Description: Effective cuppers do more than just taste coffee – they catalog attributes to develop a high-resolution picture of each coffee and use this information to match each coffee with its ideal market. Since markets are diverse, cuppings must be able to cup according to different – and sometimes multiple – perspectives.
This hands-on workshop explores multi-perspective cupping, helping participants strengthen their use of the CVA Descriptive and Affective Assessments and become more agile in their ability to match coffees with buyers or consumers who will appreciate them. Anyone with prior cupping experience is welcome!
Date: Sunday, April 27, 2025
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Room Number: 361DEF
Category: Cupping
Price: $252 $170 (SCA Member) / $200 (Regular)
Booking: To book your place in this Workshop, head to the Specialty Coffee Expo Registration Portal and add a session to your order. Already registered? Simply enter your email address and badge code to access your booking and add other paid events to your badge.
Instructors
Rob Stephen (he/him)
Managing Director, Covoya Specialty Coffee
Rob Stephen is the Managing Director for Covoya Specialty Coffee in Providence, Rhode Island. Since entering the Specialty industry over 35 years ago, he’s worked at several nationally known coffee companies, and has had the opportunity to work in retail, roasting, quality, international development and coffee trading. In addition to being a Q Grader instructor for many years, he is also a Past President of the SCAA and of Coffee Kids, and represented the USA at the ISO council on international coffee standards (TC34:SC15) for several years. Specializing in quality standards development and supply chain optimization, he has lectured extensively at coffee events and trade shows around the world, and conducts training sessions regularly for the SCAA and the Coffee Quality Institute. Email: rob.stephen@covoya.com
Coffee & Climate: A Collaborative Workshop to Better Understand Climate Change
Workshop Description: Discover the causes and effects of global warming together, using coffee-specific examples, in a systems-thinking workshop. It is designed to act as a climate change primer for anyone thinking about the business risks and impacts of global warming on coffee.
In order to tackle coffee decarbonization or think about your company's carbon footprint and build resilient supply chains, we must first understand the problem. The aim of the Climate Fresk is to explain the fundamentals of climate science based on data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in a collaborative game and discussion format. Participants will create a collective climate collage in relation to the specialty coffee sector. This makes it easier to understand what's at stake and empower each participant to walk away ready to turn potential climate business challenges into action!
This workshop is a coffee focused version of the Climate Fresk, which was created by Cédric Ringenbach to provide an accessible and engaging tool for climate awareness and education.
Learning Objectives:
Clarity on what's driving global warming and the current and future expected impacts on coffee
Confidence to enact climate adaptation, mitigation or resilience strategies
Build community, reinforce mission, purpose and values thinking
Enable sustainability advocacy beyond those who have sustainability in their job title
Date: Saturday, April 26, 2025
Time: 1:30pm - 4:30pm
Room Number: 370AB
Category: Green Coffee, Business
Price: $252 $170 (SCA Member) / $200 (Regular)
Booking: To book your place in this Workshop, head to the Specialty Coffee Expo Registration Portal and add a session to your order. Already registered? Simply enter your email address and badge code to access your booking and add other paid events to your badge.
Instructor
Mel Bandler (she/her)
Sustainability Strategist & Educator
MEL BANDLER is a green belt Climate Fresk facilitator passionate about raising climate awareness. She is a sustainable sourcing professional who empowers brands to act on sustainability and engage purposefully with consumers.
What Drives Value in Coffee? A Participatory Dialogue and Tasting
Workshop Description: We must work collectively to distribute value equitably in the coffee sector, and participatory consumer culture offers chances to create and share value. Through a World Café Dialogue and an interactive tasting session, participants will explore how our coffee preferences are shaped by tasting, listening, and learning.
In the dialogue and tasting exercise, we’ll explore the role of extrinsic coffee attributes—elements of a coffee’s story that you can’t taste or smell—in shaping consumer preferences and coffee's market value. Participants will track their perceptions of coffee quality, using a version of the SCA’s Coffee Value Assessment Affective Form to examine how their preferences shift when provided with new information.
Key Takeaways:
· Explore Value Creation in Specialty Coffee: Understand how extrinsic attributes, such as information about sustainability practices, processing methods, and branding, influence coffee's value.
· Examine Consumer Preferences through Tasting and Data: Use interactive tasting and real-time data to show how information influences preference, exploring how these insights shape value perceptions and can inform marketing strategies for producers, retailers, café owners, and traders.
· Engage in Collaborative Dialogue on Market Dynamics: Share perspectives on what creates value in coffee and how it can be more equitably distributed, with a focus on practical applications in farm, roastery, and retail settings.
Each participant plays a crucial role in shaping this discussion, and all perspectives are welcomed. This workshop seeks to capture the value that each person contributes to the coffee sector. Participants will leave with deeper personal and collective insights about how value is shaped —helping them to create meaningful coffee experiences that drive value and make coffee better for all.
This dialogue is part of the Specialty Coffee Association’s (SCA) multi-year project on Equitable Value Distribution. At the end of each discussion round, groups will present their key findings. These presentations will be recorded and anonymized and, alongside testimony from similar dialogues in Mexico, Côte D’Ivoire, and Indonesia, will inform the SCA’s 2025 Report on Equitable Value Distribution.
Date: Saturday, April 26, 2025
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Room Number: 361DEF
Category: Cupping
Price: $252 $170 (SCA Member) / $200 (Regular)
Booking: To book your place in this Workshop, head to the Specialty Coffee Expo Registration Portal and add a session to your order. Already registered? Simply enter your email address and badge code to access your booking and add other paid events to your badge.
Instructor
Alexa Romano
Writer | Researcher | Barista
Alexa Romano is a social & cultural anthropologist, barista, and writer investigating the complex relationships that address social, economic, behavioural, and cultural productions and conceptions of equity (and value) between and amongst coffee consumers and producers. Her research at Stanford University explored (un)ethical behaviors as defined by various actors and stages throughout the coffee sector, particularly using case studies from Costa Rican small holders and US specialty coffee consumers. Ethnographic, photographic, and qualitative methods ground her approach.
Boost Your Social Ventures: Sustainable Project Funding through Crowdfunding
Workshop Description: This workshop is designed for leaders and entrepreneurs in the coffee industry who aim to transform their ideas into impactful sustainable initiatives. Led by Olga Velásquez, CEO of Raíces Colectivo, participants will benefit from her extensive experience in sustainability and fieldwork across Central America. Olga will share insights on various initiatives and discuss critical elements that enhance project viability.
Conducted entirely in Spanish, the workshop will focus on formulating projects that attract mass funding by refining key elements that resonate with potential donors. Participants will take their own ideas, analyze their specific challenges, and access valuable background information on other producers. They will learn how to utilize Raíces Colectivo’s free crowdfunding platform to support their initiatives.
Additionally, participants can develop a sustainable investment initiative that can be funded directly through their commercial partners or submitted to the platform. Through practical exercises, attendees will create compelling proposals and effective crowdfunding campaigns. The session will be recorded and published in English, ensuring wider accessibility. By the end, participants will understand how to transition from ideas to well-structured projects ready for crowdfunding, empowering lasting change in their communities.
Date: Saturday, April 26, 2025
Time: 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Room Number: 371AB
Category: Business
Price: $252 $170 (SCA Member) / $200 (Regular)
Booking: To book your place in this Workshop, head to the Specialty Coffee Expo Registration Portal and add a session to your order. Already registered? Simply enter your email address and badge code to access your booking and add other paid events to your badge.
Instructor
Olga Velasquez (she/her)
Social Coffee Research and Founder, Raices Colectivo
Olga Velásquez is a Business Administrator specializing in Finance and Marketing, with 15 years of experience in social program design and evaluation. She focuses on fostering a coffee value chain that transcends sustainability, emphasizing inclusion and innovation. This vision is rooted in her extensive experience in Central America, where she collaborated with feminist movements, child rights organizations, and health and humanitarian aid initiatives. Under her leadership, Raíces Colectivo has become a key player in the intersection of sustainability, social inclusion, and strategic development, driving impactful change and spearheading new initiatives through creative solutions, data-driven methodologies, and regional collaboration.
Regenerative Thinking: A Design Thinking Toolkit for Specialty Coffee
Workshop Description: The practice of sustainability requires the dynamic careful balance of social, economic, and environmental priorities. Achieving this balance is by nature complex, as the connections are usually not clearly defined or emerge in scales (time or space) not easily identifiable by conventional analytical approaches. This challenge calls for a new (collective) mindset and leadership capacity, being more conscious, purposeful, and strategic to create this sustainable future (intentionally), generating greater possibilities for all actors in the coffee value chain.
Design thinking is a human-centered (user-centered) approach to problem-solving that amalgamates stakeholders’ need through empathy and an adaptive process rooted in practice and action-learning. The use of prototypes for making tangible the product or services help the designer re-think solutions to bring new perspectives and ideas, transforming the way people, organizations, and businesses solve these problems and create shared-value solutions.
This workshop will introduce prototyping techniques from design thinking for solving a set of real sustainability challenges in the specialty coffee sector that will allow the generation of a creative solution (prototype) that intersect desirability, viability, and feasibility. The blend of theoretical elements with action-learning offers a new way to understand problem solving and social innovation to make coffee better, for all.
Our goal is to provide actionable knowledge that support sustainability professionals, coffee companies and producer organizations in the specialty coffee industry to incorporate skills and mindsets that facilitate the generation of transformative solutions that are regenerative and distributive by design, and that consider sustainability an ongoing practice for learning how to make the right thing the right way, a commitment for create a coffee sector of shared opportunity, shared responsibility, and shared prosperity.
The workshop is inspired by the Theory U philosophy, Doughnut Design for Business tool, and the Human-Centered approach to innovation that will be adapted to the specialty coffee context to create an impactful and dynamic activity for all the participants.
Date: Friday, April 25, 2025
Time: 1:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Room Number: 370AB
Category: Brewing/Sensory
Price: $252 $170 (SCA Member) / $200 (Regular)
Booking: To book your place in this Workshop, head to the Specialty Coffee Expo Registration Portal and add a session to your order. Already registered? Simply enter your email address and badge code to access your booking and add other paid events to your badge.
Instructor
Andrés M. Montenegro J. (he/him)
Sustainability Director, Specialty Coffee Association
Andrés Montenegro is the Sustainability Director at the Specialty Coffee Association. He is graduated as Agroindustrial Engineer and holds a M.Sc. in Process Design and Management with a major in food-bioprocesses. With over 15 years of experience navigating the coffee industry, he has focused his professional activity in the intersection between private companies, civil society, and governmental organizations for joint creation of innovations with shared purpose. As a coffee lover, and self-described coffee geek, he is passionate about findings ways to make coffee better, acknowledging the handprint & footprints to keep the coffee ritual thriving in tandem with society & environment.