Seven New Board Members for the Alliance for Coffee Excellence

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence and Cup of Excellence logos

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence, organizers of the Cup of Excellence awards and auction program that brings together producers and buyers, has announced the election of seven new board members.

Board members are elected by the nonprofit group’s membership to three-year terms, and the board itself is responsible for shaping the direction of the organization and its staff, which is now overseen by executive Debbie Hill, who took over for ACE and CoE co-founder Susie Spindler late last year.

In addition to the new board appointments, longtime ACE associate and former board chair Kentaro Maruyama, founder of Japan’s Maruyama Coffee, has been appointed to ACE’s director emeritus position.

“We are delighted to welcome these new ACE board members, who bring a wealth of global experience, enthusiasm and creativity to our board,” Hill said in an announcement this week. “We appreciate their commitment to ACE and I look forward to working with them over the next three years.”

Without further ado, here are the board’s new members. Most of these names will be extremely familiar to entrenched coffee industry professionals, and their lists of individual accomplishments in coffee extend well beyond what’s shown here:

Dr. Flavio Borem

Agronomist with a Ph.D in Plant Production and full professorship at Federal University of Lavras.

Peter Dupont

Founder, The Coffee Collective, Denmark. Co-author of “God Kaffe.”

Dr. Alon Halevy

Google Research, United States. Author of “The Infinite Emotions of Coffee.”

Sunalini Menon

Founder, Coffeelab Limited, India. Licensed Q- and R-grader and the first professional female coffee taster in Asia.

Shinji Sekine

Wataru & Co Ltd., Japan. Juror for more than thirty CoE competitions, director General/Manager of the Coffee Department for Wataru.

Ann Traumann

Starbucks Coffee Trading Co., Switzerland. Head green buyer for the Starbucks Reserve line.

Will Young

Founder and managing director of Campos Coffee, NSW, Australia.