Join us for a conversation with Simone König, Director of European Sales at Cafe Imports, a proud partner of Standart Issue 36.
Hey Simone! Can you tell us about your role as the office manager at Cafe Imports Europe and walk us through a typical day—how it starts and ends?
A day of working in green coffee is never the same, which is the most exciting aspect of my job. Our daily work is determined by several factors, including the time of year and crop that we are planning or receiving, customer interest, and which European coffee event is currently taking place. My job involves planning our warehouse inventory in cooperation with our green buyers and phenomenal quality control department; strategizing our sales focus and making sure that all our customer interactions, from sales to sampling, serve our most important client base, which is small to medium roasters; and last but not least, managing our brand representation at Europe’s important coffee events, such as World of Coffee or London Coffee Festival.
Coffee Sourcing
How do market trends and customer feedback influence your coffee sourcing process at Cafe Imports Europe? What are the key factors you prioritize when selecting coffees?
We at Cafe Imports have always stayed true to our original sourcing model: ours is a stratified buying model encompassing all the quality tiers within specialty that a given farm produces. We don’t just buy the very best coffees; rather, we focus on ‘buying coffees better’. This approach involves a commitment to producers to purchase as much of their coffee production as possible while working with them on setting achievable quality premiums that work to increase quality across all their production. This approach has its foundation in our goal to supply a broad specialty coffee menu to roasters whose values align with ours. We view ourselves as a sourcing company that stays close to the ground at origin to best consider the counterparties' perspective. Therefore, we try to operate outside of trends, given the often-short-lived popularity and the implications for producers in adapting to them too quickly. We prefer to source our coffee with the intention of creating real, sustainable, and long-lasting benefits for our producer-partners. However, when we see flavour preferences shift over a longer period—such as the increased demand for natural-processed coffee from Central America and unique processing techniques more generally—we look for opportunities with our partners to cater to these tastes. The majority of our coffees remain terroir-driven, but in seeking a balanced approach between the demands of the day and long-term profile success, we always follow the guidance and evaluation of our quality control team.
Education & Knowledge Sharing
Coffee farming and roasting are two very different fields, yet Cafe Imports Europe offers educational opportunities in both areas. Could you share some examples of educational programs or initiatives that have received positive feedback?
We offer a wide range of online classes that are free and accessible for anyone along the supply chain, and which cover different subjects in coffee. We know that, especially in the roasting and café sectors, the training of staff can be challenging when the market is so fast-paced and needs to adapt constantly. Therefore, we invite anyone to take part and make use of these classes. We always want to give our coffee community insights into what we do and to help connect the coffee-producing and coffee-consuming worlds.
In Berlin we also offer tasting classes, focusing on our new sensory evaluation tool called the Coffee Rose. Developed by our Director of Sensory Ian Fretheim, this new cupping tool, for internal and external use, revolutionizes coffee evaluation. We invite our roasting community regularly to get to know the new tool and to cup coffees with us in a way that they have not experienced before.
How do your employees stay up to date with the latest trends, research, and developments in the specialty coffee world to ensure that they can effectively share their knowledge with the broader coffee community?
Cafe Imports is a Bcorp-certified company, which ensures that all of our employees have allocated funds for professional and personal development in order to stay on top of their craft and knowledge. We have also developed internal systems for check-ins between departments to help us connect globally with green buyers, our sensory team, supply chain crew, and our colleagues in the US and Australia. And lastly, you will see the Cafe Imports Europe team at multiple times throughout the year at festivals, coffee shows and with their roasting clients to ensure a frequent exchange of knowledge from all sides.
Relationship with producers and roasters
How does Cafe Imports Europe ensure fair and transparent relationships with both coffee producers and roasters?
Unlike some other importing companies, Cafe Imports employs staff for relationship management on both sides of the purchases and sales of green coffee. Cafe Imports employs six green buyers, all specializing in certain origins or regions. They manage fundamental inventory for the company globally, visit exporters and producing partners on the ground regularly, and engage in new projects to seek potential in undiscovered regions or with producing partners that have yet to be introduced to specialty production. The model pays off: about 28 per cent of our relationships at origin are longer than 10 years.
The same goes for our roasting community: at Cafe Imports Europe, we have a team of six that will help with sourcing your menu. We can provide regional market knowledge if requested, supply curated coffee menus depending on your specific needs, and are available via phone or email. We understand that there might be challenges in roasting operations within a certain market, and can tailor our offerings to mitigate them.
Could you walk us through the steps you take to build trust, maintain transparency in pricing and quality, and foster long-term partnerships with both farmers and roasting partners?
Circling back to our stratified buying approach, through which we are fostering trust and long-term relationships, we hope to decrease the workload for our producing partners and provide stability even when certain crops or harvests do not meet the highest cupping standards. We know that our menu caters to different roasting needs and can therefore support our producing partners by sharing the risk of a crop and finding different sales outlets for their coffees. Our sensory team in the US is one of the best in the industry and evaluates coffees as objectively as possible to ensure that quality at Cafe Imports is aligned with the highest standards.
We supply our purchase contracts to the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide to help the industry gain further understanding on supply chain pricing and to ensure that we are still paying justified prices in the origins we source from.
We also publish an annual progress report that displays our average purchasing prices within a certain country and brings it into a wider perspective. In 2024, Cafe Imports paid 29 per cent above the average specialty price across all origins we source from.
This interview was published in collaboration with Cafe Imports.
