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.

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.

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.

Connie first fell in love with the coffee industry when she was working in ad sales at Fresh Cup Magazine, a trade journal for the coffee industry, in the late 1990s. By the early 2000s, Connie recognized that the burgeoning third-wave roasting community was looking for ways to connect and share information. “I saw this little niche segment that could probably use its own voice and its own educational outlet,” she explains.

So in 2004, six months after leaving Fresh Cup, she founded Roast Magazine with the goal of creating that platform.

Connie has served as the publisher for Roast Magazine for 20 years. While the publication has kept its focus on producing a beautifully designed, engaging hard-copy magazine—one that’s the gold standard for many specialty coffee roasters—they’ve also expanded their offerings to serve the roasting community in new ways. In 2011, they formed a partnership with Daily Coffee News, an online publication platform aimed at the specialty coffee industry. They’ve published six books for coffee professionals, branched out into podcasting, founded the Roaster of the Year award in 2005, and kicked off the first Roast Summit in 2020.

Connie says that the same thing that drove her to found Roast still fuels her passion—her love and respect for the roasting community. “People always ask, ‘Well, what do you love about what you do?’” she says. “One-hundred percent, it’s the people in the industry.” 

Serving the community has inspired Connie and her team at Roast to set high standards and work hard to keep raising the bar. “We want to it look amazing. We want it to read amazing. We want it to feel amazing,” she explains. “We really love serving the coffee industry, and I think that helps keep us where we’re at.”

While Connie’s frequently asked about her favorite coffees and brands, she says that coffee lovers really need to explore to choose the right coffee beans for their individual tastes. Connie explains, “It doesn’t matter what my favorite coffee brand is; it needs to be what your taste palette likes, what you like, because I feel like there’s so much variation in coffee roasting, and some people like it one way, some people like it another way. … So trust your own instinct and go with what you like.”

In 2020, Connie and Roast Magazine added Roast Summit—an educational conference for coffee roasters—to their already impressive variety of offerings. For Connie, it’s a chance to for roasters from across the country to learn from one another and to find community. “We really wanted to be able to provide an event that’s low cost for people, to be able to bring people together, provide this platform at a reasonable entry point,” she says. “We’re just trying to bring the community together.”

According to Connie, they have plans to push the scope of the event even further in 2025. The 2025 Roast Summit, which will be held in October 2025 in Portland, OR, will include both Roast Summit and the first Portland Coffee Festival—plus a major surprise that will be announced in January!

Roast Magazine website: https://www.roastmagazine.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.

Yannis has spent most of his career working in the beverage industry. “I’ve done every beverage that we consume except water,” he says. In 2009, the company that he worked for made the strategic decision to transition into coffee. The thriving specialty coffee community quickly won him over, and he started to volunteer with what was then the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe (SCAE), where he eventually joined the board.

What he loved most, he says, is that the entire community was pulling toward a common goal—to make coffee better. He eventually joined the SCAE full-time and served as the deputy CEO during the merger between the SCAE and the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) in 2017, which formed what’s now the SCA.

Today, as CEO of the SCA, Yannis leads a team that’s taking a global approach to support and promote specialty coffee. That work includes developing innovative tools to improve coffee standards (including the creating of a new Coffee Value Assessment System), providing continuing education across the specialty-coffee value chain (including their new Coffee Skills diploma program), and supporting research into all aspects of specialty coffee—from consumer trends to the science of roasting.

They also partner with numerous other coffee organizations, including the National Coffee Association and the International Coffee Organization, all with the goal of representing the interests of specialty coffee and creating a more sustainable industry.

Yannis says what inspires him today is the same mission that captured his attention when he was first introduced to the world of specialty coffee: “make coffee better.” He explains that the work he does goes beyond the coffee itself, though. For Yannis, “it’s about people, it’s about fostering those global coffee communities and supporting activities to make coffee more sustainable, equitable and thriving endeavor for everyone in the value chain.”

Yannis believes the SCA has an important role to play in educating consumers about the true value of specialty coffee.  He explains, “[Coffee] is all about taste and how consumers perceive the value of what they’re drinking. … It’s moving more from being a functional beverage to becoming an indulgence…” To that end, Yannis says that the SCA has plans to develop more education programs designed for coffee lovers. “We’re going to be bringing training to the consumer,” he says, “because the more informed the consumer and the more trained [they are], I think that will give us the opportunity to create more value from the consumer side, and it’s key for our industry.”

For Yannis, promoting research and education across the value chain, from producers all the way through consumers, creates new opportunities for helping coffee entrepreneurs create products that coffee lovers will embrace. He explains that “The consumers, for example, in Greece, they like different coffees from the consumer, let’s say, in Japan. If we capture that, we can make correlations of what are the consumer preferences in order to associate that with like how we discover value. And then it’s all the other extrinsic attributes, like how we harvest the coffee, how we process the coffee… The more we know, we [create] more value.”

Supporting and sharing that research with producers, for example, allows them to better understand the wider market demands that may not always be transparent and aren’t necessarily captured by coffee quality scores. “The whole idea is create a system that captures data and shares that data between producers and buyers,” he says. “The producer doesn’t have to take all their coffees and come to Coffee Expo that we do every year in the US. If their coffees are not right for the US market … [their] coffee might have value somewhere else in the world.”

Specialty Coffee Association website: sca.coffee

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.

In 2014, Bill was working as the CEO of a society for public relations professionals when he realized he wanted to try something new and saw a posting for a job as the CEO of the National Coffee Association (NCA). He wasn’t a coffee-industry insider when he initially applied for the job with the NCA, but he read, researched, and studied up on the industry before his interview. “I did not pretend to be an expert,” he explains. “But we talked about associations, we talked about industry change, and it turned out we’ve been a good fit for each other.”

As Bill prepared to transition into his new role, he threw himself into learning all he could so he could hit the ground running. He used his vacation time at his previous job to learn more about coffee. Bill says, “I spent two weeks in Colombia. We went from laboratories to research facilities. So before I showed up on day one, I kicked the tires a little bit, and I was really excited.”

Bill has served as the CEO of the NCA—an organization that focuses on, to use his words, “the business of coffee”—since 2014. At the NCA, Bill leads a time that helps coffee companies—big and small—by serving as an advocate for the industry and by offering tools to help coffee businesses grow and thrive. As part of that work, they offer a variety of services—from hosting a yearly convention for coffee professionals to publishing market research on coffee trends to promoting research on the health benefits of coffee.

Bill says he’s inspired by the impact he can have by serving the coffee industry and helping it become more successful, the impact of which creates ripples that extend far beyond the coffee industry itself.

He explains, “I help a really important industry be more successful. That means more jobs, it means more tax income, it means stronger supply chains for the people that rely on them. And for all of us who are just coffee drinkers and not professionals, it makes our mornings better. So one of the reasons…I love what I do [is] because I think it reflects how I want to see the world and what I want to see happen as we get older.”

Bill believes that coffee drinkers have more power than they realize in helping to promote an industry that supports coffee entrepreneurs, long-term sustainability, and great coffee. It starts, according to him, with being curious. “If you want to make a contribution or donation to a charitable organization helping coffee farmers, that’s a great thing you can do,” Bill says, “but the most important thing that consumers can do is learn about their coffee.”

Being educated consumers can help coffee lovers not only understand and appreciate where their coffee comes from—which will help them better understand the price of sustainable, ethically sourced coffees—but also appreciate the amount of knowledge and work it takes to bring really great coffee to market. That information can completely reshape your perspective on your morning cup. For example, Bill says that coffee drinkers are often surprised to learn that coffee grows on trees and that those trees can live 20 to 30 years. That knowledge paints a pretty incredible picture of the rich, complex agricultural system that makes your whole bean coffee: “Imagine rows of coffee that have been there through a generation that are providing your morning cup of coffee and what that means—what it means for the environment, what it means for the farmers, and what it means for where your coffee came from and how far back it goes.”

Bill said one of the realizations that’s shaped how he thinks about coffee is understanding the challenges, the knowledge, and the planning required to be a coffee farmer. Bill points out that while farmers in the US benefit from things like government subsidies and reliable roads, coffee farmers very rarely have access to those same infrastructure systems. That reality is the inspiration behind the NCA’s Origin Charity of the Year program, which seeks out organizations supporting coffee-growing communities.

Each year, the NCA chooses a top charity and several runners-up, celebrating those and helping them gain greater visibility and attract more donors. By highlighting and supporting organizations that help coffee farmers succeed, the NCA is helping to support the agricultural heart of the coffee industry.

In 2023, for example, they selected Days for Girls, an organization that supports women and girls in coffee-growing communities by giving them access to personal hygiene products and menstrual health education, combatting the stigma around menstruation and allowing women to manage their menstrual health so they can continue to attend school and work during their periods.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/williammmurray/

National Coffee Association website: https://www.ncausa.org/

NCA X: https://twitter.com/nationalcoffee

NCA Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/nationalcoffeeassociation

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.

Julia’s diverse career path included time as a DJ, a band manager, a consultant at Price Waterhouse Coopers, and a serial entrepreneur who has founded numerous successful companies. When she was working for United Airlines—where she helped develop the first airline snack-box program—she got her first taste of the food industry, which eventually led her to found her own company that produced ready-to-eat meals.

Julia says she realized that while “consumers love better-for-you foods” and plant-based options, many products exploding in the market weren’t sustainable long-term or scalable to meet increased demand. She and a group of other experts in the food industry set out to create a milk alternative that was both scalable and provided a protein-packed, nutrition-dense alternative to dairy, which led them to create the first commercialized sesame milk, Hope and Sesame. They realized that the best way to gain traction in the market was to build up demand with a group of industry professionals who were interested in an improved plant-based option—baristas! They designed a formula specifically for coffee beverages, which they called their Barista Blend. They set to work designing coffee recipes that would catch coffee professionals’ attention and build demand for their product and started attending coffee events like Coffee Fest.

As the CEO of The Planting Hope Company, an award-winning company focused on plant-based, sustainable foods, Julia says she’s excited by the opportunity to leverage both her entrepreneurial experience and her creativity while making a meaningful impact. “Combining creativity in business, such as what we’re doing with The Planting Hope Company, is very fun and very exciting,” she explains, “because there’s the ability to take and expand and scale and change the world on a whole different level that doesn’t interfere with that creativity. It actually supports bringing that to fruition.”

Hope and Sesame, their flagship product, is proof of how powerful that synergy can be—creating a product that fulfills the demand for plant-based milks while keeping an eye toward long-term impact. Sesame is a sustainable crop that requires very little water and no pollinators or pesticides and is actually a staple of regenerative agriculture and permaculture.  Not only that, Hope and Sesame is made using two “upcycled products”—sesame pulp produced by the sesame oil industry and aquafaba, a byproduct of hummus production.

Julia says that she’s focused on making a meaningful positive impact by being informed, intentional, and realistic about the future of food. She says that between climate change and population growth, the food industry needs to come to terms with the reality that we will need to feed 10 billion people on the planet by 2050 in an increasingly precarious agricultural system. While there are incredibly nutritious crops being promoted—like almonds, quinoa, and avocados—none of them are scalable or sustainable in the long run.

She’s passionate about building a company that’s focused on products that are delicious and healthy using systems that can account for the changing needs of the global population and planet. “Our mission at The Planting Hope Company,” she says, “is to take really scalable crops that we can grow, and currently grow around the world, with few resources…and make them the core of great tasting food that are easy swaps for everyday food people eat all the time around the world. With that type of food, we can feed 10 billion people in 2050.”

Julia says they designed their Barista Blend sesame milk with coffee lovers and coffee drinks in mind—a process that took a full two years of additional research and product testing.

While many of us love lattes and Americanos, 75% of the global population is lactose intolerant. Sesame milk offers a plant-based alternative that’s nutrient dense and, per serving, delivers the same amount of protein as cow’s milk. It can be frothed, foamed, and steamed as well as dairy, which makes it an easy swap for baristas or at-home brewers, but it’s also smooth and creamy enough to pair beautifully with cold brew and iced coffee drinks.

Julia says The Planting Hope Company embraces every opportunity to make sure their organization reflects the communities that have helped shape its success. Julia says that they’re a woman-led, woman-managed company by design. Eighty percent of their advisory board is women, and Julia says she hopes to add even more women to their board of directors. “Let’s face it,” she explains, “90% of the people that make decisions about what new food products to bring into the home are women. And what we’ve found consistently is that there are hundreds of well-qualified women who are under-boarded right now. They’ve got the capacity and the kudos and the bona fides to be able to perform on boards, and they’re interested in joining boards that align with their interests.”

They’re also proud to be a Chicago company, not just because they are embedded in the city’s thriving startup ecosystem, but also because of the centrality of Chicago, and the Midwest, to the American food industry. Julia points out that while so much infrastructure and support has focused on companies located on the coasts, “this is where we grow the food. A lot of the staple food is in the middle of the country. This is where we have a lot of the centralized food processing. This is a great place to do distribution because you can hit the coasts. Food entrepreneurship needs to be in Chicago.”

The Planting Hope Company: https://www.plantinghopecompany.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.

Laura is a 30-year veteran of the coffee industry whose career has one clear unifying thread: finding ways to support other coffee entrepreneurs. In 1993 she founded Espresso Supply, Inc, which provided cafés with the equipment they needed to thrive. At the time, coffee-shop culture in the States was just starting to gain traction, but Laura explains, “[equipment] was hard to get.”

Laura saw a unique opportunity to start a business that could support that burgeoning industry while also taking care of her young family. “The primary driver for starting Espresso Supply was I had a young child and was having a family,” Laura says. “So I needed employment that allowed me to have more flexibility… And I found a way to help people by giving them the tools that they need while providing me the lifestyle that I needed.”

Laura says there were a lot of naysayers when she was first starting her business—many people truly believed that cafés would never take off in the States and that her supply company was simply too niche to be successful. Of course, neither assumption proved true. Laura stayed the course and ran that business successfully until 2021!

Laura’s latest venture is her contribution to helping the specialty coffee market grow—by making it easier to brew the perfect cup of coffee at home. As CEO and founder of SimplyGoodCoffee, Laura’s on a mission to bring barista-worthy results to home brewers. Their one-of-a-kind brewer cuts through the complexity, allowing the true character of the roast to shine through.

This isn’t your average coffee maker. The SimplyGoodCoffee brewer adheres to the rigorous standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)—think precise temperature, optimal wattage, and even a dedicated bloom phase for perfect coffee extraction. Laura hopes that more brewing-equipment companies will start to embrace those same standards, for the good of the whole coffee industry: “I want to make that the rule, not the exception.”

Laura said that designing SimplyGoodCoffee’s brewer was her way of supporting specialty coffee roasters. While they were roasting up perfect whole beans, their coffees didn’t always have a chance to shine because many American coffee drinkers were using subpar brewing equipment at home, without every realizing it.

Laura says that presents a huge challenge for specialty coffee roasters because when someone brews a subpar cup at home, they tend to assume the problem is the coffee. According to Laura, “It’s very challenging if people buy [specialty coffee] and they brew it on an underpowered brewer, and it’s sour because it was under-extracted or bitter because it was over-extracted. They don’t become repeat customers. We’ve got to [help] them get good results in their cup.” By designing a coffee brewing system that took out the guess work, Laura hoped home brewers would be able to recognize how special the coffee truly was—and why it was worth the price.

Laura hopes all coffee lovers will hear this message: “Bad flavors are not the fault of the coffee for the most part.”

Most home brewers simply aren’t powerful enough to brew the best cup of coffee. Laura explains, “There’s 69% of people probably brewing on a 900- to 1100-watt heater. You should have 1400 watts or higher,” which follows SCA guidelines. Laura says it’s one of the easiest things consumers can verify since wattage information is included on every brewing machine. If yours is below 1400 watts, Laura says, it won’t matter how spectacular your beans are; you won’t be able to brew a really great cup of coffee.

Laura hopes that SimplyGoodCoffee’s brewer will be a way to bridge the knowledge gap between coffee professionals and coffee consumers about how to brew coffee—and help bring more coffee drinkers to the specialty coffee market. Laura explains, “There’s been a lack of education for the consumer about what actually creates a great cup of coffee and what’s necessary. … I have a lot of friends in the coffee business, and I want to and every one of them to be wildly successful.”

She hopes that her brewer will help each side better appreciate the other. She says, “…there are a lot of people who would truly appreciate having [specialty coffee brewed] in their homes, and they’re just unaware of how to get it or how easy it is.”

SimplyGoodCoffee: https://simplygoodcoffee.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.

Kevin started his career in entertainment and video production, including making award-winning comedic training videos in the early 1990s. When he lost his job, he met up with a friend to nurse his wounds over a cup of coffee. After giving his friend a full taste-profile analysis of the coffee they were drinking, Kevin’s friend suggested he try his hand at writing about coffee. “He said it, I think, kind of sarcastically,” Kevin recalls, “but I went home that night and I wrote about 10 articles.”

He formatted it as a newsletter he called Coffee Companion and shared it with his friend. “He took this newsletter, and he sent it to USA Today with a Post-It note on it that said, ‘This is my friend Kevin. He likes coffee better than sex.’” USA Today highlighted Kevin’s work in a blurb—which led to 10,000 requests for copies!

Kevin parlayed his successful Coffee Companion newsletter into a long-standing blog. Today he’s written two highly regarded books for coffee drinkers—Great Coffee and The Art and Craft of Coffee. He’s also produced a web series,Mission Coffee Can, about the students behind the North Central College Coffee Lab.

In 2010, Kevin had an idea for a festival celebrating all things coffee. While there were numerous trade shows geared toward the coffee industry, there wasn’t anything specifically for coffee consumers. So Kevin developed plans for the first CoffeeCon—an event designed to give coffee lovers a chance to gather, learn about new companies and taste their coffees, attend seminars focused on things like different brewing methods and grinding tips, and celebrate all things coffee. His first event drew in 1,000 attendees; this year, CoffeeCon welcomed more than 3,000 coffee connoisseurs!

Check out our interviews from CoffeeCon 2023 on our Coffee Shorts page!

Kevin says that what he loves most about coffee is that every cup is bound up in the human connections it fosters. “It’s very important to have the right person to [drink coffee] with. I think that makes so much difference to me. I always remember my favorite cups of coffee first and foremost by who I had it with, and I wanted to stress that in everything I’ve done with coffee.”

Kevin wants coffee lovers to feel empowered by how much control they have over the taste of their favorite drink. “Brewing,” he says, “is as important as anything you can learn in coffee, far more important really than learning how to roast or learning how to choose coffees.”

He says that the person brewing coffee—whether that’s a barista in a coffee shop or a coffee lover brewing a cup at home—has greatest influence over the taste of the end product. As Kevin puts it: “Your job as a consumer, as an end user, is really to know how to take these little beans and turn them into this beautiful elixir with a certain viscosity, a certain taste, a certain acidity, a balance of flavors and extract that all into one cup.”

Kevin wants CoffeeCon to continue to be an experience that brings people together around their shared love of coffee. He hopes attendance will continue to grow; his goal is 5,000 attendees, though he admits that his wife, Patricia (who is also one of CoffeeCon’s board members), would like to reach 10,000. But he also wants attendees to know that CoffeeCon is really their event; in fact, last year Kevin transitioned the organization into a not-for-profit. “I want the consumers to own it in the spiritual sense,” he says. “It should be their show. It’s for them.”

Coffee Companion: coffeecompanion.com

CoffeeCon: https://coffee-con.com/

YouTube: @Coffeeists

Allen was working in the tech industry in the early days of the internet when a colleague offered him an espresso (with beans from the original Peet’s coffee in Oakland). “It was, like, ‘Sure, I want an espresso, whatever that is,’” he jokes. After that Allen found himself experimenting with home roasting and eventually left the tech industry altogether to found Zingerman’s Coffee Company in 2003.

Today Allen supports other industry professionals through his company, Pit Crew Coffee, which works with businesses from small mom-and-pop shops all the way up to national chains. But Allen also leverages his skills, knowledge, and connections to support and invest in up-and-coming coffee professionals, helping small, bootstrapping coffeeshop startups by providing free labor and at-cost equipment and support. “We just do that as kind of a service to the industry.”

Allen is helping other coffee entrepreneurs create successful sustainable businesses by sharing the best equipment and supporting them in making sure those high-investment items are working at their best for years to come.

“For whatever reason,” he explains, “people tend to just run the machine till it dies. You could have a $30,000 machine, that could be as much as a car. And you don’t just run it till it dies because you didn’t change the oil ever.” So Pit Crew Coffee works with coffee entrepreneurs to set up everything from water-filtering systems to preventative maintenance schedules to make sure their critical high-end equipment lasts.

Even having worked with the highest-grade equipment in the industry, Allen says to keep in mind that it’s always about finding a flavor profile that suits your tastes.

What’s he’s learned, he says, is that there is no single way to make an incredible cup of coffee. According to Allen, “There’s no one best coffee. There’s no one best prep method. There’s no one best coffee machine.”

And while, according to Allen, there are no absolutes in coffee, he does believe the one thing coffee consumers should make their baseline is the perfect ratio of water to coffee: 16 to 1. From there, anything goes.

Allen goes above and beyond to help ensure that the next wave of café owners have the foundation they need to be successful. Allen says, “We tend to do work with people, usually for the first year or two as they get started, when we just know it’s something they need and something they can’t afford.”

That support can range from helping bootstrapping café owners purchase equipment at cost to setting up a water filtration system to providing time and labor to help them with technical aspects of their new equipment. “We do that as kind of service to the industry,” Allen explains.

Pit Crew Coffee Service: pitcrew.coffee

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