Single origin coffee is one of the fundamental elements of the specialty coffee industry, whether it comes from a large region or a single farm. And in order not only to get it from such a single source, but also to find the best possible grain quality, discovering new varieties of good coffee, professional players of the specialty coffee market have organized several auctions for decades.
The most famous of them today are Cup of Excellence and Q auction in the USA.
The Cup of Excellence was organized by the Alliance of Coffee Excellence (ACE). The methodological development of the basis for the competition was started at the end of 1994, and continued until 2000, and the first competition in the history of this auction was organized in 1999.
The Cup of Excellence is still held, being organized in different countries of the world.
Cup of Excellence is a combination of a competition of quality coffee producers and, in fact, an auction where the best lots presented at the competition are sold online and in person. The goal is to find the best coffee of the current coffee harvest season and reward the farmers who produced it not only with a prize but also with a higher premium.
The competition takes place in such countries as Brazil, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Indonesia, and others. According to the rules of the Cup of Excellence, any coffee producer in one of the countries where the competition is held can submit their samples for participation in the current year.
Auction Q in the US is a similar initiative. It was launched in 2004 by the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI), which is the scientific and educational department of the SCAA (Specialty Coffee Association of America).
In its first year, Auction Q facilitated the sale of a small quantity (24 containers) of high-quality coffee (scoring 80 or more according to the SCAA quality standard) with an average selling price of 50 percent above New York Coffee Exchange market prices. In this case, not only special coffee takes part in the auction, but in general all that has high quality. Therefore, the prices at this auction may not be as high as they are for exclusive lots at the Cup of Excellence. In subsequent years of Auction Q, the amount of grain sold at it increased.
In the Auction Q scheme, farmers receive at least 75 percent of the gross sales of their produce. In addition, of these, 2 percent of the funds must be reinvested in local community projects where these farmers work. This program is mostly focused on Latin American producers (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua). This program, although not as popular as the Cup of Excellence, also provides high premiums directly to producers for quality coffee and influences the opening of new regions and farms of coffee origin to the world, which can be specialty or just good.
Manufacturers who win awards in both contests-competitions-auctions (and even just participate in them) receive recognition in the market, which is accompanied by the acquisition of new buyers for their product, building long-term relationships with these buyers, better prices for their product, as well as increasing the market share of their product, which maximally contributes to the development of their production in the long term. In the regular ("mass") coffee market, there are no such opportunities for farmers, because there is faceless trade in pursuit of minimum prices to meet the needs of the mass consumer, who often does not need high-quality coffee.