Emotions and Details Emerge as SCA Plans Takeover of “The Q”

On Thursday, April 23, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) announced it is taking over what’s known as “the Q,” the flagship education and certification platform of the nonprofit Coffee Quality Institute.

Coming on the eve of the SCA’s flagship North American trade show in Houston, the announcement on behalf of two of the coffee industry’s most influential and historically impactful nonprofit organizations elicited a broad range of emotions from specialty coffee professionals, many of them negative.

“I think that there are a lot of people who are on the inside of the system — who are lecturers or [Q] instructors or graders, people who have built consulting businesses on the backbone of this — who are feeling pretty sidelined and confused right now,” Chris Kornman, a Bay Area coffee professional and author of the book Green Coffee, told DCN in Houston.

The deal between the two organizations, which will result in what the SCA is now calling the “Evolved Q,” is likely to reshape and consolidate how green coffee is professionally evaluated on a global scale, with implications for producers and commercial buyers alike.

Effective Sept. 30, the CQI cupping form and protocols — which date back to the SCA’s now-retired 2004 cupping form — will be replaced by the SCA’s Coffee Value Assessment (CVA), which was formalized in November after approximately five years of development.

Coming as a surprise to most people in the Q community, last week’s SCA announcement also sparked widespread speculation regarding the making of the deal, including theories that the SCA had acquired CQI or that there had been some form of forced takeover.

In the three days immediately following the announcement, Daily Coffee News spoke with more than 20 current or former Q instructors, Q graders and/or authorized SCA trainers (ASTs), both on and off the record, regarding their reactions, which ranged from cautious optimism about the future of the Q program to feelings of surprise, betrayal and outright anger.

We also spoke with leaders of the SCA and CQI in search of clarity regarding the partnership terms.

The Deal

The business terms of the SCA’s takeover of the Q were not immediately presented. DCN has since confirmed that it involves a 10-year licensing agreement, through which the SCA is taking over the Q program for an annual fee of $250,000.

Additionally, the SCA will be donating 5% of its education programming revenue to a fund to support CQI’s international development work.

Executive leadership from both organizations assured DCN that the deal was made in good faith and that the SCA was not acquiring any of CQI’s assets.

CQI CEO Michael Sheridan, who was appointed in 2023, plainly refuted one rumor that had been circulating throughout the convention center, which was that the agreement was precipitated by the threat of legal action by the SCA over CQI’s use of the 2004 grading form and standards in the Q program.

“There was definitely no threat of legal action,” Sheridan told DCN, noting that CQI had been re-exploring a “collaborative option” with the SCA since the beginning of 2025, despite affirming for CQI members in late 2024 that it did not plan to abandon the 2004 form.

“As we entered 2025 and started to look at the lay of the land and our mission, we sort of saw two options, broadly. One was a competitive option and one was a cooperative option,” Sheridan said. “Our mission is producer-centric — it’s to improve the quality of coffee and the lives of the people who produce it — and we engaged in conversations at that time with SCA about what a cooperative option would look like.”

The Timeline

Competitive tensions between the two organizations date back to at least 2022, when the SCA announced that it was establishing a task force to support professional coffee cuppers. In that announcement, SCA CEO Yannis Apostolopoulos described a perception of dissatisfaction with the “current administration of the Q program” among people in the Q community.

That announcement came without warning to the previous CQI CEO and board, according to sources familiar with the matter.

“I think it’s no secret that the relationship between the organizations wasn’t on great footing back in 2022,” Sheridan told DCN. “We’ve worked with the leadership of the two organizations over the last year to reestablish dialogue and build some goodwill. And there have been ongoing conversations, but the conversations specifically that led to these agreements were very recent.”

The terms of the SCA’s licensed takeover of the Q came together within two weeks of the Expo eve announcement, multiple sources confirmed.

“This show became a timeline that we needed to reach,” Sheridan said. “If we were going to come to an agreement, we needed to do it before the show.”

SCA’s Apostolopoulos pointed to a separate SCA announcement — also made over the weekend — regarding a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the Colombian Coffee Growers Federation (FNC) designed to promote the CVA throughout Colombia.

In conversation with DCN, Apostolopoulos described the CQI form and the CVA as competitive by nature.

“Imagine if we had made this announcement with FNC and we had two systems in place,” Apostolopoulos said. “Are we truly serving producers if we have two systems in place, competing? When, for the first time, a producing country comes to the table and says, ‘this is how I want quality of my product to be evaluated,’ then I think we are serving our mission and our purpose.”

Sheridan expressed regret over the communication of last week’s announcement, while simultaneously sharing optimism regarding CQI’s work moving forward with SCA grant funding.

The SCA/CQI deal comes as many development-focused nonprofits in the coffee sector are struggling with funding, due to tightening purse strings within the private sector amidst historically high commodity coffee prices, the unexpected drying of USAID funding, and other sector-wide challenges.

“I will say that, as excited as I am about the agreement that we have with SCA and what I think it means for the future of our work to serve producers, I do regret that the timeframe didn’t allow us to communicate sooner with our instructors, who’ve been the lifeblood of CQI for 20 years,” Sheridan said. “They deserve better communication than we were able to give them given the timeframe of the conversation.”

Reactions From the Q-Munity

In addition to providing a critical revenue source for CQI and building a shared language of quality among producers and buyers of coffee, the Q system has been transformational in coffee professional development.

Long associated with rigorous educational work and difficult exams, the Q grader and Q instructor marks are typically associated with deep knowledge, expertise and even influence over the value of coffee.

Among many U.S. specialty coffee professionals — particularly those who have invested significant time and money in Q certifications and built businesses surrounding those certifications — reactions were generally fierce.

“There is no other credible way of seeing this than that it was about the form,” said Drew Billups, an independent coffee educator, certified Q Arabica Instructor and member of the Q steering committee. “The insistence that this one form must rule them all is foolhardy. Clearly, people in leadership at the SCA were insecure about their form because they didn’t believe it could rise to the top and prove itself in the marketplace of ideas unaided by this move to suppress a rival.”

Ryan Vigil, the owner of Carte Coffee in Walla Walla, Washington, said he was scheduled to attend a recalibration in Dallas to renew his Q Grader certification on April 28 and was “flabbergasted” by the announcement.

“Owning a small company and living in a rural community, it’s difficult for me to finance these trips, and even more so the required three-year recalibration,” Vigil said, noting that he ended up paying hundreds of dollars to change existing travel reservations associated with his Q recalibration. “In small business every cent counts, and now I don’t have that money to re-invest in my company, and I will not be re-certified.”

Evan Gilman, a coffee professional based in the Bay Area who recently obtained Q instructor status while also letting his SCA instructor status (AST) lapse, repeated a concern shared by numerous Q certification holders regarding the quality of education.

“I believe that the educational rigor of CQI was such that it really provided a basis for communication globally among various actors in the coffee industry — a community of certified educators who were able to work together very easily and were trusted by many different coffee businesses,” Gilman said. “With SCA, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to trust the rigor of their education.”

Like nearly all Q graders interviewed, longtime coffee educator, former SCA committee volunteer and Bird and Bear Coffee Founder Dan Streetman said he was disappointed with the surprise nature of the SCA/CQI announcement, and expressed sympathy for Q graders and instructors all over the globe who’d built their businesses based on the benefits of Q certification.

Streetman said he “understands the vision that the two organizations are trying to achieve” through a globally unified system for coffee quality, yet said he’s not yet convinced that the CVA system will be globally accepted.

“As an AST, and someone who’s worked with CQI, my concern is in the administration of programs, since I find it much easier to work with CQI,” Streetman, who is certified as a Q Grader and AST, said. “Of course there’s going to be challenges around administering programs globally. And I think that the SCA membership right now, rightly, is kind of asking the SCA to, like, ‘please be good — please, please be good at what you do.'”

Longtime Q Grader and former SCA volunteer Spencer Turer of Coffee Enterprises was among the many professional coffee cuppers who expressed some skepticism about how the adoption of the CVA will play out within the “evolved” Q.

“I think because the CVA can be used for brewed coffee or cupped coffee, and the information is relevant to finished product, as well as coffee supply chain, I think the uses and the way that it’s been researched and presented are a little wider and varied. So, I’m optimistic in that point,” Turer said. “But I’m not sure how fast exporters, importers and roasters are going to be able to pivot to be able to use a completely different method of analysis.”

Other coffee pros, like Vigil in Walla Walla, were less willing to wait upon evolution.

Said Vigil, “I will not give them another penny of my money.”

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