Collaboration: The key to coffee’s future

This year’s International Coffee Day theme is collaboration—a fitting focus for the challenges and opportunities ahead for coffee. At World Coffee Research (WCR), collaboration is the engine that powers our impact. The organization brings together scientists, governments, and companies from across the globe to create and deliver the next generation of varieties, ensuring that high-quality coffee continues to thrive in diverse origins for generations to come.

“No single country, institution, or company can solve the complex challenges facing coffee on its own.”

—Dr. Tania Humphrey, Director of Research and Development, World Coffee Research

Working in deep partnership with governments and research programs around the world, WCR supports origin countries to modernize their variety improvement systems, align research with market needs, and apply proven scientific approaches from other crops to accelerate progress in coffee. WCR elevates the industry’s shared priorities for agricultural innovation, driving value for everyone from farmers to consumers.

WCR’s vision is simple but urgent: to unite the global coffee industry in driving science-based agricultural solutions that secure a diverse, sustainable supply of coffee today and tomorrow.

Science without borders: partnering with national research institutes

A deeply collaborative scientific approach is embedded in WCR’s DNA. Together with national institutes and research organizations around the world, WCR is creating new coffee varieties, testing variety performance, and increasing access to high-quality planting material. Some of coffee’s biggest threats—among them, climate change and diseases/pests—do not stop at national borders, and neither should our solutions.

WCR’s global Innovea Coffee Breeding Network in partnership with 11 countries—launched in 2022 with an arabica program and a robusta program launching next month—demonstrates how collaboration can reshape the landscape of coffee science. Through partnership with government research institutions in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, a new generation of climate-resilient coffee trees is being created and tested on a global scale unlike any seen before in coffee. The Innovea network is the largest and fastest globally coordinated breeding program coffee has ever seen. It gives participating countries access to new genetic materials, modern breeding approaches, and shared tools—all while connecting researchers across vast geographies. This partnership model transforms historically siloed approaches to coffee breeding into a dynamic, collaborative force for innovation. This generation-defining effort moves coffee into the era of data-driven and demand-led breeding to maximize genetic gains in yield, disease resistance, and quality at an accelerated pace, shortening the time it takes to create new varieties from 20-30 years down to only eight.

Later this year, WCR will bring together coffee breeders and technical staff from 18 countries to discuss the breeding network and efforts to enhance the creation, testing, and distribution of new varieties around the world.

This transformation is only possible through collaboration, which underpins all of WCR’s work. The organization's research is executed hand-in-hand with the governments of countries that together produce over 40% of global coffee supplies. Earlier this year, WCR led the publication of a new study in Frontiers in Plant Science that involved the unprecedented collaboration of coffee researchers and collaborators from 15 countries at 23 sites around the world. The study provides insights into how 29 Coffea arabica varieties respond to coffee leaf rust (CLR), a devastating disease affecting coffee crops worldwide. This study, which drew on data from WCR’s International Multilocation Variety Trial is the most extensive evaluation of arabica coffee varieties under diverse environmental conditions to date.

“Our research networks show the power of global collaboration,” says WCR Science Director Dr. Tania Humphrey. “By pooling data, expertise, and resources across continents, we’re able to generate insights and innovations that no single program could produce alone. It’s a model not just for coffee, but for how agricultural science must evolve to meet the demands of a changing world.”

A global industry funding shared solutions

Just as collaboration drives scientific progress, it also sustains the resources needed to make it possible. WCR is funded by over 200 coffee companies from every corner of the industry—roasters, retailers, importers, and exporters—who recognize that securing the future of coffee is a shared responsibility. In 2025, these companies made a renewed $10 million commitment to WCR’s worldwide coffee breeding and seed sector strengthening programs.

This collective investment model is unique in agricultural research. Instead of competing, companies come together to fund pre-competitive research that benefits the entire sector. This global coalition demonstrates extraordinary foresight in uniting to protect the foundation of their business—coffee itself.

Through their support, companies enable WCR and its research partners to:

• Develop and test improved varieties that combine quality, climate resilience, and productivity.
• Strengthen seed systems so that farmers can access new varieties.
• Build global research collaborations and public-private partnerships with donor governments that generate faster, more efficient innovation.

The impact is clear: by investing together, the coffee industry ensures that solutions to the most pressing challenges—climate change, disease, farmer prosperity—are within reach.

Securing coffee’s future, together

On this International Coffee Day, as the world celebrates its love of coffee, we also celebrate the collaboration that makes its future possible. From national research programs in producing countries, to global networks of scientists, to the 200+ companies that fund this work, coffee’s future depends on partnership. By joining forces across borders, sectors, and the value chain, we can safeguard diverse, sustainable supplies of high-quality coffee for generations to come.