Can Science Save Specialty Coffee?

World Coffee Research Works Toward the Industry’s Long-Term Survival

As communications director for World Coffee Research, I have weekly conversations with people—from roasters to producers to bankers to everyone in between—about what the organization does. Almost uniformly, people are curious about our work, and express a sense of its importance, but few seem to feel as if they truly understand what we do.

That’s normal. Most of us haven’t cracked a science textbook in years. To further complicate the matter, we as an organization sometimes have tunnel vision, talking about individual projects at the expense of focusing on the larger mission and research agenda. When Roast asked me to provide an update on our work, I immediately thought of these conversations, so rather than dive right into the status of this or that research trial, I thought I’d take some time to explain who we are, what we do—and perhaps more importantly, why we’re doing it.

Read the full article here.