There are some pretty flexible definitions in coffee, and microlots and macrolots (or community lots, as we refer to them) are among the terms that differ, depending on whom you ask. It’s easier to start with microlot. Coffee Shrub has defined it as “a lot produced separately, discretely picked or processed to have special character.” Similarly, The Roasterie blog uses…

Jeremy Moore says he found his taste for coffee following his parents around the coffee shops of Europe. Much later, he and his wife Erika turned their shared love of coffee into a wholesale roasting business and later also cafes. The guiding idea behind both enterprises is that it's not enough to just serve good coffee or do a good…

As coffees from Ethiopia arrive in the store — three washed and three natural — our head of content spoke with Bruck Fikru, general manager of Volcafe’s operation in Addis Ababa (Volcafe is Genuine Origin’s parent company). They discussed both how coffee works in Ethiopia and how — though there isn’t yet a Volcafe Way team in place there, due to the…

“I knew I wanted to be in the hospitality industry, I just wasn’t quite sure how,” says Joy Park, owner of Elabrew Coffee and Lightwave Coffee Roasters in Los Angeles. “As corny as it sounds, I love serving people. If you take a moment to feel what it feels like to make someone’s day. I love it.” Park went through the…

“Profitability is good to chase, but hard to achieve,” Elizabeth Mbau said back in May, on a call from Costa Rica. In April, Mbau joined our team as the Africa coordinator for Volcafe Way, bringing with her experience from Technoserve, where she monitored a coffee initiative in Kenya; the Rainforest Alliance, where she oversaw the impact of a certification program…

“I got in touch with the IWCA chapter here in Guatemala, called Mujeres en Café, and I started talking to Celeste Fumagalli, who was then the president. We started talking, and we arranged a field trip for all the producers to learn about the Volcafe Way.” Maria Renee Morales, assistant manager at Peter Schoenfeld, GO’s sister company in Guatemala, recently…

By Jen Hurd World Coffee Research (WCR) recently hosted a lecture and tasting around its new F1 coffee hybrid varieties at the Buckman Coffee Factory in Portland, Oregon. As someone who’s always loved Punnett squares, I was very excited to learn more about the type of research being conducted and to get a better understanding of what the future holds. WCR…

Emily Smith spent several years as a quality-control manager for a large specialty roaster in Washington State before becoming an independent consultant to smaller roasters, helping them to build greens portfolios, explore purchasing options and make better decisions around pricing and logistics. Perhaps inevitably, she’s now also roasting herself, and with a partner will soon launch a brand under a…

Riley Thomson is based in San Jose and, after years in the field as a farmer support technician, now oversees the Volcafe Way Farmer Support Organization (FSO) in Costa Rica—a country he moved to as a boy, from Canada. Riley attended Costa Rica’s prestigious Earth University, which focuses on providing its global student body with sustainable-agriculture expertise they can apply…

When women are involved — particularly, when women are board members or are in leadership roles, and especially when there are at least three of them — companies do better. They make more money, produce better products and they’re better places to work. A growing body of data has proven this out. In coffee communities in Tanzania and elsewhere, our farmer support teams have likewise…