Yannis Apostolopoulos

CEO, Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)

Takeaways

1

Yannis was already a beverage-industry veteran when he fell in love with the shared mission behind specialty coffee: “make coffee better.”

2

As CEO of the Specialty Coffee Association, Yannis leads a team that’s taking a global approach to support and promote specialty coffee.

3

Yannis believes that consumer education into the value of specialty coffee is key to helping the industry grow and thrive.

Expertise: coffee industry, coffee industry trends, sustainability, education, coffee valuation

Coffee insight: Most coffee on the market today still comes from smallholders, where “farmers themselves provide most of the labor of nurturing, protecting, picking, and processing unroasted coffee.”

Coffee fun fact: In spite of more than a century of research, we still don’t fully understand the chemical source of coffee’s unique, complex flavor.

U3 Top 3 What’s your favorite brewing method? espresso What’s your coffee drink of choice? freddo espresso How many cups of coffee do you drink a day? 5 to 7

Yannis’s Coffee Origin Story

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.

Yannis’s Current Role

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.

What Fuels Yannis’s Work

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.”

What Yannis Wants Coffee Drinkers to Know

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.”

How Yannis Cultivates Community through Coffee

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.”

Where You Can Find Yannis

Specialty Coffee Association website: sca.coffee

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