Candice’s father was living in an apartment just off Portobello Road in London when she was a teenager. “It was very much the golden era of Portobello Road,” she says. “Lots of independent stores,” including an established coffee shop where she applied for a job.

When the manager asked about her experience—with things like using a portafilter and steaming milk—Candice admits she bluffed her way through. “Never ever ever ever touched anything but a Mr. Coffee before in my life,” she recalls.

She got the job but says her lack of experience became quickly apparent. The first time she attempted to steam milk, her boss, who was sitting on the other side of the café, called over to her that the milk was burned. Candice jokes, “I was like, ‘Does he have cameras in the milk jug? How does he know what’s going on?’” When she asked how he knew, he told her he could hear that she hadn’t put enough air in. “My mind was blown from that moment,” she says. “I wanted to know everything about coffee.”

Today, Candice is a renowned coffee roaster and consultant, a highly respected educator, and a passionate advocate for equity in the coffee industry. She serves as the Chief Coffee Officer at Rosta Caffe and is the Founder & CEO of her own coffee company, Kandake Boutique Coffees. She is a Q-Arabica Instructor for the Coffee Quality Institute and a trainer for the Specialty Coffee Association.

Candice says her passion for learning shaped her approach to coffee, and being able to teach other coffee professionals continues to fuel her own growth.

Her curiosity shaped her career from her earliest days in the coffee industry. Nine months after she started working as a barista, she began experimenting with roasting, and eighteen months later she passed her Q-Grader exam—and became one of only 12 Q Graders in the UK at the time. Less than two years after passing her Q, she was invited to train as a Q Instructor.

For Candice, stepping into her role as an educator has been one of her proudest moments. When she started her Q-Instructor training, she recalls realizing, “Now I get to teach this. Now I get to help people. And it felt really good that all of the stuff that had been poured into me, I now got to pour into other people.”

Candice’s advice can be summed up in four simple but powerful words: “Drink what you like.” She says that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with just embracing the tastes you enjoy.

“Learn about what you like, and do it unashamedly. There is nothing wrong with having your Starbucks. There is nothing wrong. It means farmers get paid. That’s all I care about. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying your Frappuccino. There’s nothing wrong with really loving a delicious single-origin pour-over. If you limit yourself, all you’re doing is limiting your experience in coffee.”

In 2020, when Candice was working as director of roasting for Royal Coffee, she organized a live webinar called “Race & Specialty Coffee,” and invited Phyllis Johnson, president of BD Imports, to join her in a discussion about the inequities Black coffee professionals faced. Thousands of viewers attended.

When Johnson launched the Coffee Coalition for Racial Equity (CCRE), an organization dedicated to creating a more equitable and racially diverse coffee industry, she invited Candice to step into a key leadership role. As part of their work, the CCRE spearheaded NKG PACE, an internship program designed to “bring more Black Americans into coffee.”

Candice says that she hopes her experiences will help more people recognize that “coffee is for everybody.”

“I just want to keep giving back and keep showing people that people like me have just as much right to be in an industry that is founded on the labor of Black and brown people,” she explains. “I think it’s really important that people like me exist and do things and are visible, because I get it all the time now, get people of color come up to me and be like, ‘I saw you years ago’… It didn’t really resonate with me how important my story was until it started to come back to me.”

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_candygram

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

“I tripped and fell,” Patrick jokes. “That’s what I always tell people. I literally tripped and fell. I had no intention to get into coffee.”

Thirty years ago, Patrick was studying to be a winemaker and was working in Hawaii, running a wine/ice cream/sandwich store. He says tasting Kona coffee was his first experience drinking coffee “that didn’t taste like asphalt,” and changed the way he thought about coffee.

The shop’s long hours had started to wear him down. “I talked to the owner,” he recalls, “who I got—out of pure selfishness—to sell the beer and wine license so that we could close the store before midnight or one o’clock in the morning. So we started doing coffee instead.”

Patrick is true serial entrepreneur, running four different coffee operations. He’s the owner of Infusion Distribution, a multifaceted business that offers a wholesale inventory of brewing equipment and beverage supplies business consulting, and equipment repairs and servicing. He’s also the owner of Infusion Coffee and Tea Crafters, his roasting company and cafes in Arizona, and the founder of the International Barista Coffee Academy (IBCA), where he offers courses and consulting for coffee professionals.

He’s also the owner of 3 Coffee Guys, a company he runs with two of his friends and fellow coffee educators, which offers “on-site coffee education” by organizing origin trips that allow coffee professionals to learn about the process of creating coffee, from farm to cup, and he’s working on producing a forthcoming documentary, Brewsed, that offers a window into the economic, social, and environmental impact of the coffee industry.

Patrick says the part of his job he enjoys most is his role as an educator. In 2010, he became the 43rd person to receive an SCA Diploma, and two years later, he first became involved in coffee education when he was invited to help design the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe’s (now part of the SCA) education program.

Being so closely involved in that processed showed him the importance of offering greater coffee education: “It’s something I saw a need for, and its something I really enjoy. I think that’s what I enjoy probably most, is doing the education.” Patrick is an award-winning coffee educator, and through the IBCA, he offers courses in everything from roasting to latte art to equipment maintenance.

Patrick wants consumers to stop being hyper-focused on getting the freshest roasted whole bean coffees, because coffee roast dates do not tell the full story.

“We actually did tests where we tasted coffee roasted last week and we tasted a coffee we saved for over nine months, and you could hardly tell in the bag. … Coffee doesn’t have to be roasted yesterday and drank today. It can actually age quite nicely, up to about thirty days, depending on the bag, depending on the situation.”

How can consumers educate themselves about whether or not their coffee is fresh? Patrick says to ask the roaster. “It should be something that the roasters should communicate,” he explains. “If they can’t communicate with you, they’re not very well-educated. They really need to be able to educate you.”

“I had always had this dream to take coffee people, or people that wanted to get into coffee, and do a seed-to-cup educational program,” Patrick says, which was the inspiration for 3 Coffee Guys, the company he runs with friends Ricardo Viellegas and Damien Burgas.

Patrick says the goal was to offer coffee professionals the opportunity to get a hands-on, immersive experience that showed them the entire coffee journey, and educated them on the entire coffee value chain. Over the past five years, 3 Coffee Guys has organized trips to numerous coffee-producing countries, which include shadowing coffee producers, cuppings, and SCA-certified coursework.

Patrick sees this work as an opportunity to educate roasters on the full value chain of coffee and create an understanding of the importance of sustainable pricing models: “What I love most about it is the people [at origin], the people are…what inspires me to continue to try to help and do whatever I can in my little corner of the world.”

Infusion Distribution: https://www.infusiondistributionusa.com

Infusion Coffee & Tea Crafters: https://www.infusioncoffeetea.com

IBCA: https://www.ibca-usa.com

3 Coffee Guys: https://www.3coffeeguys.com

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Lucas, a fifth-generation coffee producer, says his earliest memories are of playing around the coffee trees of his family’s coffee farm in the Espirito Santo region of Brazil. While he pursued his degree in civil engineering, and worked in the construction industry after he graduated, he was still involved with the farm and always thinking about ways he could improve their processes.

He quickly found parallels between the analytical mindset required for engineering and the practical problem-solving needed to be successful in coffee production. Civil engineers, he explains, “have this background of research, so we’re always trying different things, testing different things, and the way they can help. Also on the farm, we try different things and different processing methods and also different ways of growing, planting.”

While Lucas has always been involved with his family’s farm; he dove into coffee production full time in 2016. Today, he serves as commercial director for his family’s business—Café Fazenda Venturim—an award-winning producer of fine Robusta coffees. In addition to their 80-hectare coffee farm, which Lucas runs with his father and two brothers, the business includes coffee processing and coffee roasting.

Lucas is also a certified Q-processor, a Q-processor Robusta instructor, and a Robusta professional instructor for the Coffee Quality Institute, and he serves as a cupper and a coffee consultant.

Lucas is on a mission to change the narrative around Robusta coffee. The product of the incredibly versatile and adaptable Coffea canefora plant (often referred to as conilon in Brazil), Robusta coffees were long dismissed in many parts of the world—believed to be lower quality and bitter tasting compared to Arabica coffee. Lucas believes that educating roasters, baristas, and consumers about Robusta’s unique flavors can shift the industry’s perspective. Rather than trying to conform to and imitate the flavors of Arabica coffees, he’s working to establish a distinct value for Robusta.

In order to hone their high-quality green Robusta, Lucas and his family have experimented with various harvesting and processing methods. The discovered, for example, that harvesting only very ripe coffee cherries, drying slowly, and processing using fermentation all helped unlock Robusta’s natural flavors.

Recognizing that knowledge gaps often prevented coffee professionals—including roasters and baristas—from experimenting with Robustas in creating whole bean coffee, Lucas’s family started their own roastery to help showcase the possibilities of Robusta. “Maybe people don’t know how to roast this coffee, and they are not roasting properly, and that’s why they don’t like it,” he explains. “So we [did] a lot of courses on roasting and research and started to send samples.” They also experimented with brewing methods and techniques that could ensure Robusta’s flavors had a chance to shine.

Coffee lovers often associate sustainability with environmental factors and agricultural practices. Lucas says that while preserving natural resources is crucial for ensuring the future of coffee production, economic sustainability is just as important—though often overlooked. Fair prices ensure that future generations will see coffee farming as a viable, desirable livelihood.

Lucas explains, “There is nothing sustainable if you cannot pay for [it.] … [My children] will never grow coffee themselves if I get home every day complaining about how difficult it is to grow coffee and to live [on the income] from coffee. For sure they won’t [want to] do this. They will try to study to become doctors and lawyers… So I think the challenge is to do it properly, to give them a good life, education, and dignity. That way they can get interested in staying in coffee…”

For years, Lucas’s family farm produced high-quality Robusta coffee, but the stigma surrounding the bean hindered its popularity and market value. Lucas successfully advocated for Coffea canephora growers to join the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA).

His goal was not just for his family’s farm to receive recognition for their fine Robusta, but for all canefora growers to have access to the opportunities available in the specialty market, which has the potential to create greater sustainability in the coffee industry as a whole.

He says, “Our state has 40,000 families growing canephora, growing conilon, for example.  All these people were excluded from the specialty coffee scene and opportunities. …All these people probably [wouldn’t] have enough income to continue growing for the next generation because growing commodity coffee in a small scale is not worth it. Today we have this possibility, if they put [in] some energy and some effort, they can also reach this differentiation market, improve their incomes, and maybe the next generation of their families will continue growing coffee. I think that this is the moment.”

Café Fazenda Venturim website: https://fazendaventurim.com.br/

Café Fazenda Venturim Instagram: @cafefazendaventurim

Lucas’s Instagram: @lucas_venturim_fv

LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucas-venturim-722070143/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Dehab was a professional accountant and had spent her career working in finance and administration as an auditor and a cost and budget division head for numerous different companies. As Dehab describes it, “I came to the coffee business by coincidence.”

She and her husband were shareholders in a coffee farm in southwest Ethiopia, but they’d never even visited the farm until one of their partners passed away. Initially they traveled to the farm to see it first-hand so they could make decisions about how to move forward with the business.

After seeing the farm and learning more about the Kafa Biosphere Reserve, which is home to their farm, she was inspired to take on the responsibility of managing the operation herself.

Today Dehab is the general manager of Diamond Enterprise and Dahab Specialty Farm, a specialty coffee farm of more than 300 hectares (650 acres) nestled within the buffer zone of Ethiopia’s Kafa Biosphere Reserve, the largest UNESCO biosphere reserve in the country.

In fact, the Kafa Zone was designated as a protected area in part because of its rich connection to coffee history; its rainforests are the natural home of more than 5000 wild Coffea arabica varieties and are famously linked with one of coffee’s most popular origin stories. Legend has it that a local goatherder named Kaldi noticed that some of his goats seemed unusually energetic after eating berries from a particular tree; after trying the fruit himself and noticing a boom in his own energy, he set out to spread the word about this incredible plant—what we today call Coffea arabica.

Beyond their prized Arabica green coffee—which they offer in natural, honey-processed, and anaerobic processed varieties—Dahab Specialty Farm also produces and exports two more unique products: three types of teas and three varieties of local honey.

Dehab’s work is driven by two powerful pillars: empowering women and ensuring environmental sustainability. Her farm’s unique location provides a front-row seat to the delicate balance between coffee cultivation and nature preservation.

Kafa’s protected status underscores the incredible benefits of sustainable agricultural practices, not only for the environment but also for the flavor of the coffee. Dehab says that because their coffees are grown within the forest, the cherries mature slowly, giving the coffee beans a unique flavor while helping reduce the degradation of the forest.

Dehab is also passionate about empowering women in her local community. Her full-time, permanent staff includes a dozen women. Recognizing a gender gap in administrative roles in her local area, Dehab has helped them gain training in key administrative tasks, like managing coffee storage and documentation. More than sixty percent of her seasonal employees are also women. Her expansion into the raw honey market was rooted in her commitment to supporting local women by providing them training in beekeeping, empowering them to generate income for their families.

For Dehab, “Coffee is not only a drink. It’s by far better than that.” In Ethiopia, coffee plays an important role in bringing the community together. Every family prepares coffee at least once—and sometimes up to three times—per day. The process typically takes about an hour and includes home-roasting green coffee in pans over a charcoal fire. Dehab says this coffee ceremony is a purposeful way to create fellowship, especially among women:

“You call your neighbors. There is a phrase called buna tetu—you send the children in the room to call your neighbors that the coffee is ready. So everybody in the neighborhood comes. And especially for women, it is a kind of gathering. …They discuss about their kids, they discuss about the husbands, their own problems, maybe. They talk [about] everything. Everything is raised over the coffee ceremony So we can say it is a connection point for the women. They can share their problems, and then they can get advice from their friends. …It’s a very big social event which builds motherhood. That’s how they build the connection within the society.”

When Dehab took the lead at the farm, she saw an opportunity to support and empower the local community, especially women, around her farm. She learned that while that men were generating income by raising bees in hives set up in the forest, women were often excluded from that work.

Collaborating with a local NGO, Dehab developed a comprehensive training program for women in modern beekeeping techniques, ranging from constructing hives to identifying and transferring queens. Dehab then provided graduates with dedicated space on her farm to install hives.

The unique, high-quality honey is a direct product of the farm’s thriving ecosystem. “Since the beehives are located inside the coffee farm, and coffees bloom between February and March, if we harvest in a very calculated way, … it is a monofloral honey,” Dehab explains. “When you open the jars for the honey, it smells like the coffee flower. … We sell it under the name ‘coffee honey,’ and it has a very floral taste.”

Dahab Specialty Farm website: https://dehabcoffee.com

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Scott says he grew up a “Midwestern coffee drinker”—brewing pre-ground, canned coffees. After he graduated college with a degree in chemical engineering, he worked as a research engineer at Kraft Foods. When his wife decided to pursue graduate work at University of Washington in Seattle, Scott found a position as a process engineer in what was then a “little expanding startup company”—Starbucks.

Today Scott is the Chief Sales Officer for PROBAT, the leading global manufacturer of high-quality roasters, and he’s proud to be part of the company’s 155-year legacy of excellence. An owner-managed, family-owned business, PROBAT is considered by many roasters to produce the gold standard in equipment. Scott estimates that PROBAT roasting machines account for 30–40% of shop roasters and 60–70% of commercial roasting machines in use today worldwide.

Scott says PROBAT is committed to building enduring machines that not only stand the test of time but also adapt to the ever-evolving needs of coffee roasters. By investing in innovation and supporting their customers, they aim to help their customers produce consistently delicious roasted whole bean coffee. “We’re increasingly getting the ability to do things like remotely join you and watch you roast and help you improve the situation, fix something, diagnose errors,” he says. “We’re becoming as much a technology company as we are a roasting company, because it takes technology to run these pieces of equipment.”

“I get really excited about helping customers get the product at the quality and cost that they want and being environmentally compliant and being labor compliant and all the other things they need to do,” Scott explains. This passion for supporting coffee roasters drives his work at PROBAT, and Scott is especially proud of the company’s reputation for producing roasters that stand the test of time and for their sustainability efforts.

Despite the coffee roasting process contributing only 2-4% of the industry’s carbon footprint, PROBAT has taken proactive steps to minimize its impact. They’ve set a goal to be carbon neutral by 2030 and have implemented initiatives like shifting to solar-powered manufacturing at their German plant and pioneering recirculating roasters.

We should celebrate coffee’s ability to unite people and make their days better. As Scott puts it, “[Coffee] brings you joy, a little bit of comfort, a little bit of relaxation. It brings people together. … I am really happy to be working for a company in an industry that brings people together in a positive way.”

And while specialty coffee is gaining traction in the market, Scott thinks it’s important to remember that all coffee has value when viewed from this perspective. Scott points out that “90% of the people on the planet are getting their daily joy out of not specialty coffee. … There’s a place in the whole value chain of coffee.” Whether you’re indulging in a single-origin gesha or a packet of instant, Scott says the most important thing is that it makes you happy: “If that’s where coffee goes, and that’s what brings that person joy, then that’s great.”

Scott’s dedication to mentoring future engineers is a cornerstone of his commitment to fostering a vibrant coffee community. He regularly visits high schools and universities to inspire students to pursue careers in engineering by highlighting the diverse career opportunities available. Scott explains, “There is no kid in school that has a clue what a coffee process engineer is, right? And of course, I want to create more coffee process engineers, but mostly I also want to create engineers that want to create things.”

Scott’s role at PROBAT offers students a unique opportunity to explore their interests through paid internships, and PROBAT’s partnership with the UC Davis Coffee Center allows him to mentor future engineers and help support innovative research that can inspire more students to pursue engineering careers. That not only creates opportunities for students to further their research, Scott explains, it also advances the coffee industry as a whole: “When we seed entities like UC Davis and they develop this knowledge, sometimes we sit in their research presentations and go, ‘Wow, that has some amazing commercial applications. What kind of further seed money can I give you in order to tie that up?'”

PROBAT website: www.probat.com

Scott’s PROBAT page: https://www.probat.com/en/company/about-us/management/scott-stouffer/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Francisco, who grew up in Nicaragua, got his first introduction to the coffee industry at seven years old when his father became a partner in a coffee farm. Four years later, in 1998, his father purchased his own farm, Finca Buenos Aires in Jinotega, Nicaragua.

But Francisco didn’t initially have plans to join the coffee business. He left Nicaragua to complete his undergraduate degree in Industrial Management at Purdue University, then moved to Miami to work as a business analyst for the airline industry. After completing his international MBA at the Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, he returned to Nicaragua in 2014.

Soon after, his father made him an offer: to purchase a coffee farm together, with Francisco managing operations. Francisco embraced the opportunity, and together they purchased Finca Santa Martha in 2015.

Today, Francisco is general manager of L53 Family Estates, a multifaceted family-run operation that includes L53’s two Rainforest Alliance Certified farms—Finca Buenos Aires and Finca Santa Martha—which grow several varieties of coffee, and co-ownership of a dry mill for processing. The final piece is Francisco’s export company, which allows him to sell his own coffees directly and also offer his services to other coffee producers in the area.

Francisco passion for building long-lasting partnerships drives his approach to coffee, something he learned from watching the way his father did business. “Coffee is a relationship industry. That’s it,” he explains.

That focus on relationships shapes every decision at L53—from traceability initiatives to quality testing to their carefully considered pruning practices, which allow them to produce year-round and build long-standing, successful relationships with their pickers.

For Francisco, it’s simple: “One of the most important things I’ve learned throughout the years in the coffee industry is that your word and the relationship that you make with people is valued the most, and that goes from the relationship you make with the people that work on the farms all the way to the people you sell it to.”

Understanding the complex, challenging process of growing, harvesting, and processing coffee can give coffee drinkers a new perspective on their morning brew. From weather conditions that affect the entire harvest to the skill and dedication of agronomists, pickers, and processors, coffee production is a challenging business, and one that requires constant innovation.

“Once you plant a coffee tree, you want it there for the next 20 to 25 years, so you’ve always got to be thinking differently,” Francisco explains. “You’re always learning in the coffee industry. There’s always something new, something different happening. You can do the same processes year over year, and your coffee will always be different. So that makes it interesting.”

He hopes to see coffee shift away from being treated as a commodity in order to create a market that’s more stable—for producers, roasters, and consumers. “At the end,” he says, “it’s something about finding that balance in the coffee industry where there’s an equality for everybody—like you’re paying the right price for your cup of coffee every morning, but at the [other] end, the picker that is harvesting that coffee cherry in the fields and the farms is also getting a decent salary.”

One of L53’s key values is community—finding ways to support, empower, and invest in the people who contribute to their operations. Their Education Bridge program, designed in partnership with World Vision, offers childcare, meals, and educational opportunities for their workers’ children during the harvest period.

When Francisco thinks about the future of his family’s coffee business, he’s focused on the positive impact he can make in their local communities:

“I definitely feel and hope that I can make a lot of changes, not just in the farms, but mainly in the communities where the farms are. … I want the people to be there and feel happy that they have the opportunity that they work for a great farm. … I think what I want to have is more people with the same values that I have.”

L53 Family Estates website: https://www.l53estates.com

L53 Family Estates Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/l53estates

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

“We found that some people were putting a lot of pride into their work,” he explains. In spite of being paid the same as the other producers, these farms were investing significant time and energy to create quality coffee. Jake saw an opportunity to help these kinds of farmers see a financial payoff for their efforts by helping these deeply invested smallholders bring their products to the specialty coffee market.

Ben, on the other hand, started working in coffee straight out of undergrad, leaning into his entrepreneurial spirit. At the time, saccharine-sweet bottled coffees were dominating the market, and Ben saw an opportunity to ready-to-drink coffees that were “a bit more intentional and probably back off the sugar just a smidge.” Jake co-founded Bean & Body Coffee with a focus on healthier coffee options. After seven years, Ben found that he could step back from the constant cycle of fundraising and invest energy in learning more about “how coffee actually happens.”

In his quest to educate himself, Ben joined a supply chain forum at the University of Chicago, where he met Jake, who had returned to the States and was working on building Crop to Cup Coffee Importers. For more than a year, their two businesses ran out of the same incubation space, until Ben officially joined Crop to Cup as a co-owner in 2013.

Today, Jake serves as CEO and Ben is Director of Sales for a people-first importing company that serves more than 110 coffee producers from a dozen countries.

On the producer side, their team provides market insights, pre-harvest recommendations tailored to their unique position in the market, assistance with the export process, marketing that leverages each farm’s coffees and story, and transparent reviews of their yearly strategy and recommendations. For roasters, they not only offer an opportunity to identify unique specialty coffees and connect with the producers behind the beans, they also run their operations centered on transparency—focusing on traceability, consistency, and financial accountability.

Jake and Ben say that one core belief underpins everything they do: “Good coffee comes from good people.” Their focus is on helping those good people—specialty coffee producers and roasters—connect to create incredible coffees while maintaining transparency across the supply chain.

That believe in the power of intentionality also inspires their own approach and work. “Most coffee flows down a mountain and is weighed out, tared out on a truck, and then the good stuff is sorted through and that becomes specialty,” Jake explains. “That’s not how we work. We work with very intentional coffees, and they’re separated from the community level on out.”

For Ben, the best thing coffee drinkers can do is lean into their curiosity, dig deeper, and ask questions about the stories behind the coffee they drink.

“The reality of coffee is that a lot of people are going to pretty great lengths to make this whole thing happen,” Ben says. “Yes, it’s our job, but a lot of people are in an industry that doesn’t really pay them as much as they might make in a different sector.” Those stories are worth knowing. You can learn a lot by just asking questions of the people you buy your coffee from, which will help you better understand and appreciate the work that goes into producing your daily cup.

Crop to Cup connects producers and roasters, building relationships beyond business to foster mutual understanding. When producers understand what roasters are looking for, they’re better able to shape their planting and harvest plans; when roasters understand what new, unique green coffees are available and can count on consistency, they’re better able to plan their offerings. That helps both sides work together to create delicious coffees.

But most importantly, the Crop to Cup team serves as invested ambassadors, connecting underrepresented coffee-producing communities with roasters who are excited about their offerings. For Ben, the most fulfilling access of their work is being able “to support farmers that weren’t already being supported, people who were smallholders in situations that wouldn’t allow them direct access into a specialty coffee market. … We’re able to work towards greater access for specialty producers in that way.”

Crop to Cup website: https://www.croptocup.com/

Crop to Cup Instagram: croptocup

Brick-and-mortar offices: Chicago and New York

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Here’s how Bill sums up his story: “I drank a lot of [coffee], and then suddenly one cup just kind of blew my mind, and since then I’ve been really focused on it.”

After drinking lots of cheap coffee to get through graduate program in chemical engineering, Bill was on a road trip 2012 with his family, he grabbed a cup of coffee from a gourmet donut shop in Vancouver, BC. The coffee stunned him.

“I was kind of honestly a little bit outraged,” Bill recalls, “because this black coffee had huge orange and citrusy notes, and I thought they contaminated my coffee. I thought they threw in some orange bits.” The barista explained what created the natural flavor profile. “That just kind of blew my mind,” he says, “that coffee can have anything other than kind of a burned, bitter [flavor].”

Putting his academic hat on, he started looking for research about the science behind coffee, but turned up relatively little. When a colleague, Tonya Kuhl, suggested that they have students reverse engineer an autodrip machine as part of their upper-division engineering labs, Bill had a lightbulb moment: “Why don’t we make a whole class about coffee and attract students from all over campus?”

What started in 2013 as 18 students in a freshman seminar called “The Design of Coffee” has now served more than 250,000 alumni around the world.

Today Bill is both a professor of chemical engineering and the founding director of the UC Davis Coffee Center, a multidisciplinary academic center focused on research to support and improve the coffee industry. That work includes the Undergraduate Coffee Lab, undergraduate and graduate coursework in coffee-related subjects, continuing education and professional development courses for coffee lovers and professionals in the field, and rigorous research into the science of coffee.

Bill has also published his own coffee-science research, including a study of the impact of brewer shape, brew time, and roast and strength, and post-brewing storage on the flavor profiles of brewed coffee.

Having navigated the complexities of multiple industries, Bill is certain of one thing: “the coffee industry is special.” Bill sees its combination of camaraderie, enthusiasm, and intellectual curiosity as a real strength of the industry, all of which are clear in the way it’s rallied around the Coffee Center. Partnerships with some of the biggest players in the coffee industry—including Peet’s, La Marzocco, Probat, Toddy, and the Specialty Coffee Association, among others—have made their research and expansion possible.

“[Engineering is] problem-solving. … My colleagues and I have chosen to shine that intellectual firepower on coffee specifically,” Bill explains. “[But] without the support of the industry, without them stepping up and making things happen, we wouldn’t be here having this conversation.”

According to Bill, coffee research is a quest to unlock coffee’s full potential, examining every aspect of the farm-to-cup journey. “If we make quality control cheaper and easier along the entire supply chain,” he says, “then we’re making coffee better along the entire supply chain. We’re making it better for the end users.”

Bill says the single most informed choice you make is starting with freshly ground whole bean coffee: “Buy whole beans, and grind [them] right before brewing. I give a lot of talks to the general public and that blows a lot of people’s minds.”

As the director of the Coffee Center, Bill is spearheading the Coffee Center’s mission to optimize every stage of the coffee journey. One example is the Roastpic app, which was developed by two UC Davis computer-science students.

Leveraging technology, the app gives coffee entrepreneurs quantitative data about their beans—from size to roast profile—using images taken with their phone camera. Producers, for example, can use this information to negotiate for higher prices. Roasters can use the technology to track consistency across roasts and make more informed purchasing decisions.

The Coffee Center is also committed to sustainability, exploring innovative uses for cascara—the coffee cherry pulp typically discarded during processing. The Coffee Center is developing a cascara-based offering to minimize waste, generate additional income for coffee producers, and create a consumer-appealing, antioxidant-rich product.

UC Davis Coffee Center website: coffeecenter.ucdavis.edu

Roastpic app: roastpic.com

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

Tim’s coffee journey began as a teen and spanned over two decades in restaurant kitchens, from Italy to the legendary Spiaggia in Chicago, Illinois. Though immersed in the culinary world, his passion for coffee never waned. In fact, he was an avid home roaster, graduating from stovetop experiments to a full-fledged garage operation.

For Tim and his wife, Patricia, who is also an incredibly accomplished leader in the restaurant industry, the love of coffee ran deep, But they saw it as more than a beverage—it was a social unifier. “We love coffee as a catalyst for what it can do for couples and communities,” Tim explains. “Coffee houses, cafés, historically, have been places where people gather together, and the conspire and create revolution and enjoy a really wonderful beverage and have conversation.” 

Fourteen years ago, when Tim and Patricia were starting to think about their own coffee business, there were very few cafés in Chicago that were as focused on customer-centered service as their restaurant counterparts. So they set out to change that. Big Shoulders Coffee was born—a hospitality-driven roasting company and café that prioritized their customers, their team, and their producers. The name, a nod to Carl Sandberg’s iconic “Chicago,” perfectly captured their vision for a Chicago institution.

Today, Tim is co-founder of Big Shoulders Coffee, an award-winning coffee roasting company with six cafés across Chicago, a booming online retail shop, and a thriving food service wholesale. Their long list of accolades includes being named Small Chain/Franchise Champion in the 2024 Golden Bean World Series and being named the #1 Independent Coffee Shop in the US by USA Today in 2023.

Tim emphasizes that their original mission—connecting people, nurturing relationships, and serving their community—has stayed at the heart of their coffee business, even as they grew from a small roasting operation and a single café to a leader in the coffee industry. 

Tim says he and Patricia wife have never lost sight of what brought them to coffee in the first place—a focus on bringing people together and caring for both customers and their team. “So really, to this day, coffee is second or third,” he says. “People are shocked to hear me say that. Coffee comes well after guests and employees. We are a people company.”

If you love coffee and want it to be available for the foreseeable future, Tim says, you have to respect the intense labor that goes into farming it. Coffee farming is hard work, and the financial instability of the global coffee market means that many young people in coffee-farming countries are leery of careers in coffee agriculture. In Tim’s words: “Coffee can be cheap, it can be fair in some cases, and it can be good—it can be delicious—but it’s not going to be all three, and certainly not at the same time. We need to find a way to reward farmers that are doing really hard work and pay a fair price for that.”

 “The best cup of coffee is the one that brings us together. I really believe that,” Tim shares. At Big Shoulders, that sense of community extends from the customer to the roasting and café team and the farmers who grow their beans.  For Tim, that means Big Shoulders’ coffees have to taste great—based on their customers’ tastes, not what the professionals deem to be good—but also push toward positive change in the supply chain. 

As just one example, the beans for his current favorite Big Shoulders roast—Manos de Mujer—come from a co-op in Tolima, Colombia, made up by a collective more than 100 women coffee producers. “We’ve really worked hard to figure out a way, with this coffee, to move the needle for women farmers,” Tim says. “So I think this is a group that has been given less opportunity at origin, and we’re trying to move the needle as far as that goes. But it’s a delicious coffee. … It’s a chuggable, delicious coffee.”

Big Shoulders Coffee website: https://www.bigshoulderscoffee.com/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.

After decades of working toward a position as a restaurant executive, Michael’s perspective on his career shifted after he lost his father, who’d had a career in the clergy. “When my dad passed away,” he recalls, “I had thousands of people coming and telling me, ‘Let me tell you a story about your dad…’ … I didn’t want [my] legacy to be, ‘Your dad was great. He got the stock from $4 to $22.’”

So two days before his wife gave birth to their first child, Michael took the leap into entrepreneurship with a close friend who worked in coffee and tea distribution—with a retail concept Goddess and the Baker, a café in the Chicago Loop.

Running Goddess and the Baker gave Michael new insight; he realized that while he loved third-wave coffee, there was a lot about the industry that he didn’t like—especially the lack of variety in choice. There simply weren’t venues where customers could order chef-crafted food and choose coffees from a variety of coffee roasters. In spite of a lot of naysayers, he set out to build a café where customers could choose from different roasting companies, roast profiles, and brewing methods. What started as a single café in 2016, today is an award-winning, with cafés in Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and Dallas.

Fairgrounds also became an integral piece of Michael’s contract food service company, Infuse Hospitality. “Fairgrounds was really our showcase [of our] capabilities in creating and executing and growing super-cool on-trend concepts,” he explains. Today, Infuse services 40 million square feet of custom food and beverage solutions across North America—from cafés to corporate dining facilities to resorts.

Michael says that when he started to think about the legacy he wanted to leave behind, he knew it was about creating change and designing systems that would make the world better. For Michael, “…every single thing that I do, the return on my investment is, maybe if I do this, someone will come and tell this story to one of my children one day when I’m gone. The diamonds in this world, for me, that I spend time seeking out, are the ability to repair the world and make it better while I’m here. To make people feel good, to give them opportunity, to give them something that provides an opportunity for a better life for them.”

For Michael, our daily cup of coffee extends beyond the caffeine boost. It’s a sacred self-care ritual, and you should embrace it, because you take that renewed energy and turn it into a positive impact on the world in the rest of your day.

“Money, you can make more money. Time, we don’t know how much of it we have and once we spend it, it’s gone,” Michael says. “And so taking time for yourself to take a moment, no matter what’s going on in the world, to take that first sip of a hot beverage and have a calming moment or that cold beverage or to sit in a café that makes you feel like you’re on vacation for a couple of minutes.”

Community is at the very heart of the concept behind Fairgrounds. When he was considering names for his café, Michael said the idea of the fair resonated deeply with him. Fairgrounds are venues that embrace choice-—choices of food, activities, experiences. But fairgrounds are also venues where communities gather and unite. He wanted the name Fairgrounds to evoke nostalgia and memories of “a time that we remember all kinds of different people coming together.”

That’s what he wanted to build with Fairgrounds—a place where people could gather and come together. Fairgrounds, he says, is “really a place where anybody, no matter what you believe in, what you look like, whether you’re a coffee novice, you’re a coffee expert, you’re the coffee farmer, you can come there and just enjoy being around others in a really curated space.”

Fairgrounds Craft Coffee and Tea: https://www.fairgrounds.cafe/

Infuse Hospitality website: https://infusehospitality.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-schultz-1291515b/

U3 Coffee exists to create the most meaningful coffee experience for millions of mindful, motivated humans like you. Because here, we’re United by Coffee.