Yannis Apostolopoulos Speaks Frankly About the Past, Present, and Future of Specialty Coffee
Dubai – Qahwa World
The 5th Wave Podcast published a long interview with Yannis Apostolopoulos, CEO of the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), under the title “The Past, Present and Future of Specialty Coffee.”
Given the importance of the insights shared, Qahwa World republishes the full conversation with minor editorial adaptation.
In today’s episode we’re speaking with Yannis Apostolopoulos, CEO of the Specialty Coffee Association.
First established in the 1980s, the SCA is the largest coffee trade body globally and represents thousands of coffee professionals – from producers to baristas – all over the world.
In this conversation, Yannis discusses the evolution of the SCA and its ongoing efforts to make coffee more sustainable, equitable, and resilient, through research, standards, and education. He also shares his perspectives on the key challenges and opportunities in the industry, from climate change and sustainability to navigating economic uncertainty and the evolving role of technology and AI.
5thwave-the-business-of-c the-past-present-and-futu
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One of the conversations that needs to be at the forefront is about risk. Who is taking the risk and who gets compensated for that risk? Welcome back to the 5th Wave Podcast. I’m Geoffrey Young, Editor-in-Chief of 5th Wave.
In today’s episode, I’m delighted to be joined by Yanis Apostolopoulos, CEO of the Specialty Coffee Association. First established in the 1980s, the Specialty Coffee Association, or the SCA as it’s often known, is the largest global coffee trade body representing thousands of coffee professionals from producers to baristas all over the world. In our conversation, Yanis discusses the evolution of the SCA and their ongoing efforts to make coffee more sustainable, more equitable, and more resilient through research standards and education.
He also shares his perspective on the key challenges and opportunities for our industry, from climate change and sustainability to navigating economic uncertainty and the evolving role of technology and AI. Welcome, Yanis. It’s very nice to be here.
Very nice to see you, Geoffrey. We see each other around the world at different spots and really, really excited to have you here actually in the studio, in Serendipity Studios. I wonder if you’d just give us a little bit of intro just on your own career and what drew you into the world of coffee.
So first of all, thank you for having me. It’s really an honor and a pleasure to be here. Well, coffee is an interesting story.
My background is mostly in wines and spirits. And around 2009, the business I used to work for decided to get into coffee. And the more I get to know coffee, I just think that coffee has this amazing, I would say, attribute that brings people in.
And you meet people, the community, the actual beverage. It’s so unique in many ways. I think it was the first time in my career that I realized, okay, I’ve been selling wine, spirits, or soft drinks.
But this time, it’s something that it’s actually good for your health. And you can contribute in making an impact or a difference in the world by impacting the livelihoods of many people. And that’s what drew me into specialty coffee.
I got involved as a volunteer in the Greek chapter, then as a board director. And then during, I would say, the initial conversations between the merger between SCAA and SCAE, the European and the American organization, I found myself working for SCAE and leading eventually SCAE around end of 2018. Wow.
So that’s a good seven years already. Almost seven. Yeah.
Little I know that the year after I become the CEO, there would be COVID and everything would change in the world, at least when it comes to trade shows, because as you remember, it used to be just trade shows. Now we’re doing much, much more. And we at SCAE are trying to make coffee better, to make coffee more sustainable, equitable, and thriving as an endeavor for everyone in the value chain.
And we do that by doing research. We use the research to set standards. And one of our most famous standards is the capping form and the capping protocol, which we recently changed based on the work we’ve done around the coffee value assessment system.
And then we educate people around the world in using those standards and trying to make them get skills to, I would say, focus on the gaps that we have in the coffee industry. And then we do events to try to bring people together and use those opportunities to disseminate the information of our research and standards. So research events and bring people together at events.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it’s a formidable organization, I must say.
I was wondering if you could share how many people the SCAE educates in a given year. It’s very interesting. First of all, I have to say that it’s a collective effort.
I have an amazing team of people. They are really passionate about making coffee better. It’s a collective effort from the SCAE board that changed a lot over the years, but also the executive team.
On an annual basis, we educate over 80,000 people globally. It’s really something which I find it very interesting because a lot of people want to get engaged in the coffee industry. We have a lot of, say, churn when it comes to people who are trying to find a career in the coffee industry.
And what we’re trying is to provide tools and education to do so. It’s very interesting. And I think professions around hospitality are going to be much, much more attractive in the future, given the changes that we’re going to see in the global workplace with AI.
I think people will always enjoy experiences in food, in coffee. And coffee is a very human product at the end of the day. Exactly.
Now, thinking about those gaps, what do you think are the key issues that you and your organization are faced with out there in a world? For our industry, you get to speak to a whole array of human beings, from coffee farmers to people that produce equipment, to traders, to all the way down to the baristas, the roasters, and everything. The array of people that you talk to on a daily basis, it must give you a good instinct in terms of what are the big topics for our industry that we need to face over the next decade or two. What are you concerned with? …
