The European Union (EU) recently reached an agreement on a new "first-of-its-kind" piece of legislation, the EU Deforestation Regulation, with the aim of preventing companies from selling commodities that are linked with deforestation and forest degredation around the world on the EU market. With other countries (including the US, under the Forest Act) considering a similar shift from voluntary sustainability intitiatives to a more regulatory approach, this is an important and pivotal time to understand the impacts of "due dilligence" legislation. Raina Lang will lead a panel from Conservation International exploring the practical implications of the new legislation.

Everything is Cold
What are some of the cold coffee options at the forefront of broadening coffee’s consumer base? This sensory experience, a blind tasting of cold coffee options prepared in multiple different ways, was inspired by Cheryl Hung’s plenary talk and a seminar covering all the learnings of the Coffee Science Foundation's multi-year research project on cold brew with Professor Bill Ristenpart, Julia Leach, and Peter Giuliano.

What You Drink = Who You Are
Inspired by plenary talks from Andrea Hernández and Bill Durrant, this sensory experience explores the increasing diversity of consumer-packaged goods and how products are often used to show (or tell) people who we are by virtue of what we consume.

Specialty coffee consumers and experts alike agree that a key part of coffee quality is the natural sweetness that is a part of high-quality coffee flavor. Recent research has confirmed that, counterintuitively, the sweetness in coffee does not come from sugars in the bean. This has created something of a mystery among coffee experts and sensory scientists—if sugars do not make coffee taste sweet, what could be the reason for the sweet taste of high-quality coffee?

*This is part two of a two-part seminar designed for an audience who cup professionally or who are already familiar with some of the coffee value assessment system outputs over the past four years.

Over the past four years, the SCA has undertaken a project to evaluate, evolve, and expand the SCA cupping protocol as a part of its Coffee Value Assessment System development project. An early adopter form and protocol, based on the learnings of this project, will be released in early 2023. Across this double seminar session, Re:co participants will be introduced to the logic underlying the evolution of the cupping protocol in the first session before receiving first-hand practical experience with the early adopter protocol and form. The guided, intensive training session includes descriptive training, including how to use references, and a deep understanding of the affective section of the new system.

This seminar will be offered twice at Re:co 2023, with the AM session designed for an audience who may be new or less familiar cupping and this project. The afternoon session is designed for an audience who cup professionally or who are already familiar with the project's outputs over the past four years.

*This is part two of a two-part seminar.

Building a vision for a thriving and profitable coffee sector touches most if not all the actors in the coffee system. Moreover, this challenge calls for a new collective mindset and leadership capacity, being more conscious, purposeful, and strategic to create this future intentionally with greater possibilities for all actors in the coffee value chain.

Sustainability is not a goal, but a pathway that we need to continuously create to make coffee better, for all. As trailblazers, we need to shape and build new pathways for the development of the specialty coffee sector, embracing economic models and sourcing approaches that generate and distribute value equitably, fostering a global coffee community to make specialty coffee a thriving, equitable, and sustainable endeavor for the entire value chain. We also need innovative tools and the proper mindset to dynamically improve and adapt business models and sourcing practices towards this emerging future.

This double seminar session will help coffee companies and organizations in the specialty coffee industry create the awareness to trigger positive action on coffee sustainability. Participants will learn how to identify their most transformative ideas to become regenerative and distributive in their core operations before identifying the recommended changes needed to make their ideas a reality. By the end of the second session, participants will have built a “beacon” to guide themselves on their ambitious journey for assessing their current impacts, be able to generate transformative ideas in response to these assessments, and regularly explore business and sourcing redesign in order to meet their goals.

Inspired by the Theory U philosophy and the Doughnut Design for Business tool, this double seminar will speak directly to a specialty coffee context to create an impactful and dynamic activity for all who join.