People: Founders & pioneers — A–Z

Founders & pioneers (27)

• Achille Gaggia — The Milanese bar owner who patented a steamless espresso machine in 1938 and later the spring-lever mechanism that first produced crema — founder of the Gaggia machine company in 1947.
• Alfred Peet — The Dutch coffee man who opened a bean shop in Berkeley on 1 April 1966, roasted dark and fresh when America drank stale coffee out of a tin, and taught the three men who went on to found Starbucks.
• Anette Moldvaer — The Norwegian cupper who won a World Cup Tasters title, co-founded Square Mile Coffee Roasters in London with James Hoffmann, and has spent since buying the green coffee — the buyer’s half of a partnership everyone remembers for the barista.
• Belinda Wong — The executive who ran Starbucks in China for most of two decades — 400 stores to several thousand, a farmer support centre in Yunnan, and no lot, score or auction bid anywhere under her own name.
• Brett Smith — The co-founder who ran Counter Culture Coffee for its first thirty years, kept it out of the hands of the big buyers that swallowed its peers, and moved to executive chairman in August 2025.
• Brooke McDonnell — The co-founder and master roaster of Equator Coffees in California — the palate behind a company that started in a rented garage in 1995 and ended up part-owning Finca Sophia, one of the highest Geisha farms in Panama.
• David Schomer — The Seattle café owner who co-founded Espresso Vivace in 1988, fitted PID temperature controllers to espresso machines to stop the water temperature drifting, and is credited with turning latte art into a teachable craft in the United States.
• Duane Sorenson — The Washington-born roaster who opened Stumptown in a former Portland hair salon in 1999, made flying to the farm and paying over the odds the American norm, started a bicycle charity for Rwandan coffee growers — and, after Stumptown was sold, came back with a small roastery called Puff.
• Emma Chamberlain — The American YouTuber who founded Chamberlain Coffee in December 2019 and later became its co-CEO — the largest creator-owned coffee brand, and the clearest test of whether an audience can be turned into a coffee company.
• Erna Knutsen — The San Francisco green-coffee broker who put the words “specialty coffee” into print in the early 1970s, sold tiny lots to tiny roasters when nobody else would, and became the industry’s godmother.
• Francesco Illy — The Hungarian-born founder of illycaffè in Trieste in 1933, who patented the pressurised can that keeps roasted coffee fresh in transit and built the 1935 illetta, the machine that first separated water heating from brewing pressure in espresso.
• George Howell — The Boston roaster who built The Coffee Connection, sold it and the Frappuccino to Starbucks in 1994, helped create the Cup of Excellence in 1999, and then spent twenty years arguing that green coffee should be kept frozen.
• Helen Russell — The co-founder and executive chair of Equator Coffees in Marin County, California — a roaster that started with two espresso carts in 1995 and ended up part-owning Finca Sophia, one of the highest Geisha farms in Panama.
• Howard Schultz — The Starbucks chairman and chief executive who turned a Seattle bean shop into a café chain — the person most responsible for teaching the world to buy coffee by the cup, and who appears nowhere in the auction, cupping or competition record this wiki keeps.
• Jack Ma — The founder of Alibaba — not a coffee man at all, but the person behind the three websites and one delivery network through which most imported coffee reaches Chinese drinkers.
• James Freeman — The freelance clarinettist who started roasting coffee in an Oakland shed and turned it into Blue Bottle — the polished public face of third-wave coffee — then left after selling the majority of it to Nestlé.
• Kentaro Maruyama — The Japanese roaster who founded Maruyama Coffee in a Karuizawa mountain café in 1991, started flying to farms himself in 2001, and became one of the most familiar faces in the Cup of Excellence cupping room — and a past chair of the ACE board.
• Lance Schnorenberg — The American roaster who started as a barback at Espresso Vivace in Seattle, spent three years teaching himself on a 1 lb sample roaster in a Bushwick loft, and co-founded the Brooklyn micro-roastery that became Sey — where he buys the green coffee and argues that the roaster’s job is to stay out of the way.
• Liu Qiangdong — The founder and chairman of JD.com — not a coffee man in any sense, but the person behind the company that paid a record price for a Panamanian Geisha in 2025 and then opened a café chain.
• Peter Schlumbohm — The German-born chemist who invented the Chemex coffeemaker in 1930s New York — a lab funnel and flask fused into one hourglass of glass, the one hit in a career of hundreds of inventions, and now a fixture of both museum design collections and specialty coffee bars.
• Scott Rao — The American café founder turned roasting consultant and self-published author whose books and blog set much of the measurement vocabulary specialty coffee now argues in — and who runs the Boulder roastery Prodigal Coffee.
• Taro Suzuki — The horticulture graduate who runs Saza Coffee — the small Ibaraki roastery that keeps setting world records for the most expensive coffee — and who grows his own Geisha in Colombia. Known in Japan as the “Geisha Hunter.
• Trish Rothgeb — The San Francisco roaster who gave the trade the phrase “third wave coffee”, runs Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters, and now steers the Q Grader programme for the Coffee Quality Institute.
• Vanúsia Nogueira — The Brazilian executive who ran the country’s specialty coffee association for fifteen years and then became the first woman to lead the International Coffee Organization — a career built entirely on policy and promotion, with no farm, lot or cupping score attached to it.
• Willem Boot — The Dutch-born consultant, trainer and Geisha grower behind Boot Coffee in California — and behind Finca La Mula, the Panama farm whose coffee took Coffee Review’s number one spot in 2015 at 97 points.
• Yoshio Suzuki — The cinema producer who opened a 15-seat coffee shop inside his family’s theatre in small-town Ibaraki in 1969 and turned it into Saza Coffee — the roastery that now buys the world’s most expensive coffee. Father of Taro Suzuki.
• Zachary Carlsen — The American barista-turned-journalist who co-founded Sprudge with Jordan Michelman in 2009 — how a Drudge Report parody written on café Wi-Fi became specialty coffee’s daily newsroom, and what is and isn’t documented about the man behind it.