What We Learned at World Of Coffee Copenhagen

Last month, Dan and Row took a trip to this year’s World of Coffee in beautiful Copenhagen.

World of Coffee is the largest international trade show in the coffee industry, hosted by the Speciality Coffee Association. Each year it takes place in a different city - it’s a place for both people and brands from across the coffee spectrum to come together to meet, learn, collaborate, and of course party.

Dan and Row had three main goals for their trip: To strengthen existing relationships, to form new ones, and to get the lowdown on the latest innovations and trends in coffee sustainability. Naturally, they travelled everywhere by bike, although they didn’t always think to check the weather forecast…

Friends Reunited

It is an unavoidable fact that the coffee we roast is grown a long, long, way from our home in the Surrey Hills.

To regularly visit countries such as Brazil and Guatemala would require time, money, and unnecessary air miles - so top of the list of priorities was to catch up with our friends from Carmo Coffees (producer of our Brazil Signature Espresso) and Finca Medina. In fact, this was the first time Dan and our amazing Guatemalan contact Antonia had met in person, having established our relationship over video calls in the past two years. Watch this space for the fruits of these face-to-face cocktail bar conversations…

Of course, it isn’t just coffee producers who attend a global event such as World of Coffee. It was fantastic to put faces to names along every step of our supply chain - shipping partners, packaging suppliers, and commercial equipment manufacturers.

Forming New Relationships

With producers from so many countries under one roof, it’s the perfect place to source coffees and meet producers from new origins. For us, the focus was on Asia and Africa.

In the past several months, Dan has been on a mission to find a way to get coffee from an old Kenyan friend to our roastery in the UK. Visiting World of Coffee has helped move this forward, allowing him to discuss with potential export and import partners how this might work. In fact, he bumped into a former colleague from his days working in coffee and cacao traceability, which we hope will be the perfect starting point!

We’ve got our fingers crossed that we might be able to expand our African coffee offering in line with our responsible sourcing policy in the future.

The Future of Coffee 

Large international events such as World of Coffee foster collaboration between businesses across all sides of our industry, with the aim of creating meaningful positive change. In this sense, it is a little different from more consumer-focused events such as London Coffee Festival. Row said she was so busy meeting people that she only had time for one cup of coffee in a whole day! 

World of Coffee always features talks from experts in a variety of fields, which this year included topics such as coffee and the circular economy, global coffee trends, and compliance with laws surrounding deforestation.

It sounds like they had a pretty great time, and the office has been buzzing with ideas since their return. To stay in the loop with the latest news from our roastery and new releases, be sure to sign up to our weekly newsletter (and get 10% off your next order in the process).

Team CFC ☕