Another Expo over with and I’m only just now feeling back to my regular self.

Collaboration appeared to be the main theme for me this week. Over and over again, I found myself collaborating with others or finding inspiration through other collaborations. I’ll give you a couple of examples:

  • The Baratza Sette 270W grinder is a collaborative effort between Baratza, Etzinger burrs & Acaia. It won Best New Product!
  • Emily McIntyre and I have been working on our lecture for months now & it was a huge success!

Here were some of the highlights:

  • The lecture “Social Media Marketing for Coffee Companies,” co-lectured with Emily at Catalyst Coffee Consulting, was a huge hit! It was, anecdotally, the most-attended lecture of the entire weekend. If you missed out on it, here’s the link to our slides & handout. P.S. This was only the fourth time we’ve met in person. She lives in Portland & I live in San Francisco, but by the powers of the Internet, we worked out quite a successful workshop.
  • I met quite a few people for the first time in real life! This is probably one of my favorite parts of this event. People I’ve only spoken to online for years were suddenly in front of me for the first time. This includes @jbviau, @banuhatfield. @robbiepmelton, @heygirlhill, and countless others. I wish I remembered to selfie with everyone.
  • For a brief 10 minutes, I was on the Twitch.tv home page with the show Let’s Get Lexi. Lexi, the host, convinced Twitch to live stream the US Coffee Championships on their homepage. The company, bought by Amazon for a measly $1 billion, is a live-streaming platform with over 100 million visitors every month. They recently started a creative channel, which the coffee champs fit perfectly into. So for an entire day, visitors would watch the live stream, join in on the chat, and have their minds blown that a coffee competition existed. It was enormous exposure for the specialty industry!
  • I met up with Carla D. Martin, Founder and Executive Director of the Fine Cacao and Chocolate Institute and a Lecturer in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She’s also an all-around awesome person. We talked chocolate, gender & race in the industry, and her first exposure to a coffee industry conference.
  • I also forced myself to attend more parties this year, but made sure to eat and pace myself. Did anyone else go to the Cafe Imports party that was almost like a rave?
  • I attended both the IWCA breakfast (at 7:30 am on a Saturday!) and the CQI Luncheon. CQI was a client at the time, so I was eating for “business.” However, the work they’ve done at origin & the quality standards they’ve set for the past 20 years truly blows my mind away. It was such an honor working with them!

 

And here are even more photos!

 

 

And if you’re not tired of looking through pictures yet, here’s an album full of photos that I took for Acaia.

 

What’s next?

I’m going to be in Brazil this time next week! It’s been such a whirlwind of 2016 that I’ve decided to take a vacation. So I’ll see you in two weeks, hopefully with tons of fresh photos & a more relaxed outlook on life.