Imvelo Brands Limited joined the Specialty Coffee Association on 8 September 2026. We want farmers’ names and records to survive the journey from origin to the buyer.
Zambia grows under 0.05 per cent of the coffee on earth.
What the association is, briefly
The SCA in its present form is nine years old. In January 2017 the Specialty Coffee Association of America, founded in 1982, and the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe, founded in 1998, merged into one body. Apostolopoulos was deputy chief executive through that merger and took the top job in January 2019.
It is a membership organisation and it is also a standards body, which is the part that matters. The SCA writes the protocols the trade runs on: how you prepare a cupping sample, what water you brew with, what a defect is, and until recently what the word “specialty” meant on a bag. When the SCA changes a form, prices change.
The part that damages our own case
Start with the thing that makes us an awkward messenger.
We buy from smallholder farmers. What we cannot yet do is put most of their names on a bag. Cherry goes into a washing station, the washing station's output goes into a lot, the lot becomes a container, and the record thins at every hop. We can name the province. We cannot always name the cooperative. So we are about to argue inside the association for a standard of traceability we do not yet fully meet ourselves, and that is worth saying before anything else.
The country around us does not make it easier. About 97 per cent of Zambia's exportable coffee grows on five estates in the Northern Province, Ngoli, Isanya, Kateshi, Luombe and Nsunzu, run by Northern Coffee Corporation Limited, a subsidiary of ofi, the food-ingredients arm of the Singapore-headquartered Olam group, which bought in during 2012 and now runs more than five and a half million trees there. It employs around 3,000 people year-round and above 15,000 at harvest. The smallholder sector sits beside that, and it is the part with almost no infrastructure behind it.
The second piece of counter-evidence is the structure we are joining. Coffee Watch's 2025 report on tariffs found that coffee-producing countries account for about 74 per cent of the volume of global coffee exports and receive about 57 per cent of the value. The 2026 Coffee Barometer traced a kilogram of coffee retailing at €9.71: the farmer's gross was €2.05, and the net, after production costs, €0.41. About a tenth of the value in the cup rests on unpaid work by members of coffee-farming households.
Twenty years of barometers have not moved that. It would be foolish to suggest a membership certificate will.
What we put on our product pages
We have removed legacy SCA cupping scores from our product pages. Origin, processing, flavour and roast help people choose their coffee.
The record behind the coffee matters too: where it grew, who produced it and how it reached the roastery. That is the work we want to bring into the association.
What we actually want to do in there
The people who funded Imvelo did not come out of coffee. Between them they have run agricultural businesses, put technology onto farms that had none, managed value chains end to end, and built AI systems. The last of those is also the day job of Imvelo's founder, at a clinical AI company building a world model of human health. Coffee is the same class of problem with worse data and less money: a very long chain, most of the information lost at the first hop, and the people at the start of it holding none of the record.
We already run this argument in two other rooms. Imvelo Studios is a gallery and a three-month residency in Lusaka, and five per cent of what Imvelo earns goes to it and to Zambian artists; that is on our own site and it is the reason the labels are commissions. Zambian work from that wall went to Africa Basel this year. Jiva Sounds does the same for musicians. In both cases the mechanism is dull and it works: put the person's name on the thing, get the thing in front of a market that pays properly, and keep the record of who made it attached to it.
Coffee is harder than art or music because the chain is longer and because the record gets stripped at export. A smallholder above Lake Kivu, on the Congolese side, sells cherry into a washing station that blends it into a lot that becomes a container that becomes a bag with a roaster's name in Hamburg or Portland. Every hop erases a name. That is the hop we want to close, and closing it is worth more to the farmer than any certificate on our wall.
The technical work behind that is not exotic. Geolocated plots, a harvest record that survives the wet mill, weight and moisture captured at the point of purchase rather than reconstructed later, and enough of a model on top to price a lot without three months of sample shipping. Agriculture has done this in other crops. Coffee has done it in pockets, and almost never for the farms furthest from a road.
Five things we will argue for
We are one company member. These are the positions we will argue for.
Publish the membership arithmetic by country of residence, split between producing and consuming countries. If it is bad, say so. Nothing moves while the number sits unpublished.
Make membership accessible to growers in producing countries. Their participation matters to the standards the trade sets.
Make the extrinsic assessment carry information back down the chain as well as up it. The CVA has a field for where a coffee came from. It should pay the person it came from.
Publish which seven languages the forms are in, and which growing regions that leaves out. A standard written in a language a grower does not work in is a standard written about them. Say which seven.
And count roasting as origin work. Green coffee crosses most borders freely. Roasted coffee meets a tariff, which is one reason the drum sits in the consuming country and the margin sits beside it. We roast Zambia's coffee in Zambia. That is a trade position as much as a taste one, and the SCA is one of the few rooms where it can be put to the people who buy green.
The ask
If you grow coffee, run a washing station or a cooperative, or roast in Zambia, the DRC, Tanzania, Zimbabwe or Rwanda, and you are an SCA member or have looked at joining and decided against it, we want to hear from you. Especially if you decided against it. The reason will be more useful to this argument than ours.
And if there is already an SCA national chapter anywhere in this region, tell us, because we have not found one.
More from this series: Kasama, where the coffee grows and what the miombo does for the cup.
Frequently asked questions
Is Imvelo a member of the Specialty Coffee Association? Yes. Imvelo Brands Limited holds an SCA company membership issued on 8 September 2026 and valid to 8 September 2027.
What is the Specialty Coffee Association? A global membership and standards body formed in January 2017 by the merger of the Specialty Coffee Association of America, founded 1982, and the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe, founded 1998. It writes the trade's cupping, water, brewing and defect standards, and it runs the education programmes and the competitions.
Does SCA membership mean a coffee is better? No. Membership is a company or individual joining an association. It is not a quality certification and it says nothing about any particular lot.
Did the SCA get rid of cupping scores? It replaced the 2004 cupping form with the Coffee Value Assessment standards, SCA-102, 103 and 104, adopted in November 2024. The new system records what a coffee tastes like separately from how much a taster likes it, so a single number out of 100 no longer carries the meaning it did.
Where does Imvelo's coffee come from? We buy from smallholder farmers. The Zambian lot comes off the plateau around Kasama in the Northern Province, at 1,300 to 1,400 metres. We also roast lots from Rwanda, the DRC, Tanzania and Zimbabwe.
Sources
Specialty Coffee Association, certificate of company membership, Imvelo Brands Limited, issued 8 September 2026, signed Yannis Apostolopoulos. SCA merger announcement, January 2017 (SCAA founded 1982; SCAE founded 1998). Daily Coffee News, “SCA Officially Adopts New Cupping Forms and Standards”, 5 November 2024, on SCA-102, SCA-103 and SCA-104 superseding the 2004 Cupping Protocol and Form. Coffee Watch, “Unfair Business: How Tariff Wars and Tariffs Crush Coffee-Growing Countries”, 2025 (74 per cent of export volume, 57 per cent of export value). Coffee Barometer 2026, June 2026 (€9.71 retail kilogram; €2.05 gross and €0.41 net to the farmer; unpaid family labour). Global Coffee Report and Nkwazi Magazine on ofi and Northern Coffee Corporation Limited in Zambia's Northern Province. Imvelo Studios and Jiva Sounds, imvelobrands.com.