Lecture Description
Can small exporters survive on specialty coffee alone? Can specialty coffee survive without small exporters? While exporters are not considered crucial to the coffee trade, they perform critical functions that allow specialty coffee to exist -- supporting small farmers and processors, facilitating access to finance, marketing, and promoting new coffee producers while helping producers to cultivate products and pricing that will be successful at market (to name just a few!). Hear from them about what threats and challenges they are facing, and what future specialty coffee has if we don't find a way to make small exporters sustainable.
Date: Saturday, April 13, 2024
Time: 10:15am - 11:15am
Room Number: S401D
Instructor
Drew Burnett (he/him)
Director, Goodel Indonesia
Drew Burnett is an exporter of Indonesian coffee and a market development consultant who has worked throughout East Africa and Southeast Asia analyzing coffee markets to identify opportunities to build stronger production and marketing systems that empower farmers and other entrepreneurs to secure resilient coffee-centered livelihoods. Early career work on international development projects led him to Ethiopia, where he led field operations as Deputy Director of TechnoServe’s Coffee Initiative. He now leads Goodel Indonesia, an exporter focused on high-quality, transparently-traded coffees that is catalyzing the development of a more-sustainable Indonesian coffee industry through innovations like digital traceability and profit sharing.
Yuki Minami (she/her)
CEO, Aequitas Coffee
Yuki is an entrepreneur and the CEO of Aequitas. Her background in coffee starts when her great grandparents crossed the oceans in 1927, from Japan to Brazil to work in coffee farms.
She was born in São Gotardo, Minas Gerais state and holds degrees in Modern Languages and Business Management. In 2013, she attended a barista course and experienced the specialty coffee scene in Paris she wondered for the first time about showcasing the family’s coffee abroad. After living and working in São Paulo in multinational companies, she moved back to her hometown to learn about coffee production and dived into a journey of coffee processing techniques and quality control. Several relevant experiences and coming across the high quality of the family’s and of the neighboring producers lead her to found Aequitas in 2017 as an alternative to the traditional coffee trade. Aequitas’ mission is connecting producers to the international specialty coffee market in transparent and equitable relationships.
Sunghee Tark (she/her)
Co-Founder & CEO, bean voyage: women-powered coffee
Sunghee is the co-founder and CEO of Bean Voyage, and a freelance writer. Through her day-job at Bean Voyage, a feminist non-profit she co-founded with Abhinav Khanal, she collaborates with smallholder women coffee producers and youth to co-create a sustainable value chain that works for all. She is often found traveling between LATAM and Asia and when she is not traveling, she enjoys writing about coffee and the incredible people behind it. Her interest in the specialty coffee industry has initially stemmed from her passion to understand the intersectionality of income and gender inequality and her zeal to learn how coffee can play a role has kept her in the industry since then.