Gardelli Specialty Coffees
Gardelli Specialty Coffees is a specialty coffee micro-roastery in Forlì, in the Emilia-Romagna region of northern Italy, founded and run by Rubens Gardelli (GSC Story, accessed 2026-07-23; Unpacking.Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). Its shop, roastery and café share one address: Via Camillo Versari 2, Forlì, a space the company calls la Caffeteca (Gardelli Specialty Coffees shop, accessed 2026-07-23).
Why it belongs in this wiki: Italy invented the commercial vocabulary of coffee — espresso, cappuccino, the bar counter — and then spent seventy years roasting dark and blending for consistency. Gardelli is the opposite argument, made from inside Italy. It roasts light, sells one farm at a time, prints the producer’s name on the bag, and states its position as a slogan: “Acidity is not a crime” (Unpacking.Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). That is a direct shot at the taste the Italian industry — Illy and its peers — trained the world to expect. The reason anyone had to listen is the trophy: Rubens Gardelli won the World Coffee Roasting Championship in 2017.
The company
| Attribute | Detail |
|---|---|
| Legal name | GARDELLI SPECIALTY COFFEES s.r.l. (Italian VAT/P.I. 04373480401, REA 406172) |
| Base | Via Camillo Versari 2, Forlì, Emilia-Romagna, Italy |
| Founder | Rubens Gardelli |
| Model | Micro-roastery, café (la Caffeteca) and online shop in one location, plus wholesale and export |
| Style | Light, omni-roast profiles; single origins and rare microlots, plus a few blends |
| Best known for | The 2017 World Coffee Roasting Championship title |
An s.r.l. is the Italian equivalent of a private limited company — the roastery is an incorporated business, not a sole trader, and its VAT and business-registry numbers are published in the shop footer (Gardelli Specialty Coffees shop, accessed 2026-07-23).
Omni-roast is the practice of developing one roast profile per coffee that is meant to work both as filter and as espresso, rather than roasting the same green twice at two different profiles (Unpacking.Coffee, accessed 2026-07-23). It is a harder target than it sounds: espresso extracts far more aggressively than a pour-over, so a roast light enough to taste clean through a filter can taste sharp and thin through a machine. Committing to omni-roasting is a claim about roast precision — and it also halves the number of separate lots a small roastery has to hold.
How it got here
The company’s own history page gives an unusually specific timeline (GSC Story, accessed 2026-07-23):
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1982–1985 | The Gardelli family runs a bar; Rubens’ earliest memories are behind the counter |
| 1996 | His mother, Cinzia, opens a bar called Santa Fè in Forlì’s industrial district |
| 2002 | Rubens joins the management of Santa Fè — his first real training as a barista — and the idea of roasting starts |
| October 2008 | After seeing an open, visible roaster in a Californian café, he returns to Italy and starts experimenting with a small copper tool on his home stove |
| 2011 | A contract with a previous roaster ends; he launches “Rubens Gardelli Torrefazione Artigianale”, logo a cobra head with the initials RG |
| 2012–2013 | Santa Fè is renamed Gardelli Specialty Coffees; the kitchen closes so the space can be given over to roasting, and the cobra becomes the current swan, an emblem the company describes as elegance and refinement drawn from Japanese brushstroke art |
| 2014–2017 | Four consecutive Italian roasting championship titles, and second place at the world Brewers Cup in 2014 |
| 2017 | The World Title — the World Coffee Roasting Championship |
| 2018 | A new production facility opens and Gardelli Specialty Coffees Srl is formally established |
| December 2020 | la Caffeteca opens at Via Camillo Versari 2, replacing the original bar, which closed permanently during the COVID-19 lockdown |
Two things are worth pulling out of that list. First, the business grew out of a family bar rather than being founded as a roastery — the counter came first, the drum second, and the customer-facing café has never gone away. Second, the sequence runs kitchen → roastery → world title → factory: the 2018 production facility and the Srl arrive after the championship, which is the usual shape of what a competition win does to a small coffee company. It is the same mechanism Simple Kaffa and Emi Fukahori illustrate on this wiki — a public verdict on a person, converted into a business.
To verify — when the company was actually founded
Three different founding dates are in play and they are answering different questions. Unpacking.Coffee states flatly “Established 2010.” Gardelli’s own history page gives 2011 for the first branded roasting venture and 2012–2013 for the name “Gardelli Specialty Coffees” — and then says the Srl was established in 2018 (GSC Story). The 2010 figure is not supported by anything on the company’s own site. The defensible statement is: home roasting from 2008, a trading brand from 2011, the present name from 2012–2013, and the current legal entity from 2018. No corporate registry filing was consulted for this note.
Competition record
Rubens Gardelli won the World Coffee Roasting Championship in 2017. Three independent sources agree: the company’s own history page refers to winning “the World Title” that year; Coffeedesk, a European specialty retailer, calls him “the winner of The World Coffee Roasting Championships 2017”; and Unpacking.Coffee identifies him as “the 2017 World Coffee Roasting Champion” (all accessed 2026-07-23). The shop homepage still markets the coffee as “roasted by World Coffee Roasting Champion Rubens Gardelli.”
The World Coffee Roasting Championship is one of the seven world championships listed on the World Coffee Championships roster, now run under the Specialty Coffee Association. The route is the same as for the World Barista Championship and the World Brewers Cup: win your national title, and that is your ticket to the world stage. Gardelli’s national record and his world title line up with that route — the Italian championships came first.
Italian roasting championships: four titles. Unpacking.Coffee calls him a “four-time Italian Coffee Roasting Champion,” and Gardelli’s own page dates them as four consecutive wins across 2014–2017 (GSC Story). Coffeedesk independently confirms the 2014 win specifically, describing it as the “2014 WCE Italy Coffee Roasting Championship.”
To verify — no official scores or rankings were obtained
The official championship record could not be read for this note. The World Coffee Championships site lists the roasting championship but publishes no past-winner list on the page itself; its “Past Rankings” page offers only a 2026 PDF and a link out to a UC Davis digital collection, neither of which was retrieved (both checked 2026-07-23 at wcc.coffee and wcc.coffee/wcrc-past-rankings). So the 2017 win rests on three consistent secondary and self-published sources, not on an official results sheet. No competition score, point total, or host city is documented anywhere consulted — for 2017 or for any of the Italian titles. Treat any specific number you see quoted as unsourced.
To verify — which Brewers Cup, and which places
Two sources describe Brewers Cup results that do not match. Gardelli’s own history page says he placed second in the world at the 2014 Brewers Cup (GSC Story). Coffeedesk instead says he has been on the podium three times in the Italian Brewers Cup — twice first, once second, with no years given. These are different competitions (world versus national) and could both be true, but neither is corroborated, and this wiki’s World Brewers Cup note does not record a 2014 runner-up. Do not state a world Brewers Cup placing as fact without checking official results.
To verify — the 2014–2017 Italian title years
That the four Italian roasting titles were consecutive, in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, comes only from Gardelli’s own site. The count of four is corroborated by Unpacking.Coffee and the 2014 win by Coffeedesk; the individual years 2015 and 2016 are not confirmed by any second source, and no Italian national-body results page was consulted.
What it buys and how it sells
Gardelli’s public identity is built on three things, all reported by Unpacking.Coffee (accessed 2026-07-23): a rigorous blind-tasting selection process for choosing green coffee, omni-roast profiles, and transparency from farm to cup. The visual signature is the pastel pink packaging — unmistakable on a shelf, and about as far from the brown-and-gold Italian espresso aesthetic as a bag can get.
Blind tasting means the buying decisions are made from cups with the origin, producer and price hidden — the same discipline that makes Cupping tables and Best of Panama judging defensible. It removes the roaster’s own preferences and the seller’s reputation from the choice, at least at the point of selection.
The shop sells single origins, blends, and a “rarities” tier that includes Geisha, alongside brewing equipment (Gardelli Specialty Coffees shop, accessed 2026-07-23). Coffeedesk describes the sourcing as buying directly from producers so that a coffee can be traced “from the farm up to packing” (Coffeedesk, accessed 2026-07-23) — a company describing its own practice, with no auditor behind it, in the same way the direct-trade language used by Equator Coffees and the producer-first framing at Sey Coffee are self-descriptions rather than certifications.
Documented lot — Esmeralda El Velo Geisha
One Gardelli coffee is recorded elsewhere on this wiki: “El Velo Geisha Microlots” from El Velo, the newest of Hacienda La Esmeralda’s three farms in Boquete, Panama — natural, 1,750 m, tasting of hibiscus, orange, blackberry, jasmine and lemongrass (Tasting Grounds, accessed 2026-07-23). That puts Gardelli in the same buying tier as Grand Cru Coffee in Hong Kong and Proud Mary in Australia, all taking microlots off the Peterson family’s research farm.
What is not documented
The research behind this note looked specifically for auction results, cupping scores and prices paid with Gardelli’s name on them — Best of Panama buyer lists, Cup of Excellence and Alliance for Coffee Excellence records, published lot sheets — and found none. No lot IDs, no numeric scores, no winning bids, no altitudes or processing details beyond the single El Velo listing above.
That is worth stating plainly, because a roastery that sells Geisha rarities is exactly the kind of buyer you would expect to appear on an auction sheet. It may well have bid; nothing consulted here records it. Compare Klatch Coffee and Angelino’s Coffee, whose presence in this wiki is essentially a record auction price, against Sey Coffee, which like Gardelli is known for how it buys and roasts rather than for what it has won at auction.
Related
- Illy — the other Italian roaster in this wiki, and the tradition Gardelli is arguing with
- Sey Coffee · Equator Coffees · Grand Cru Coffee — micro-roasteries with the same producer-first, light-roast position
- Klatch Coffee · Angelino’s Coffee — roasters known instead for record auction bids
- World Coffee Events · Specialty Coffee Association — who runs the roasting championship
- World Barista Championship · World Brewers Cup — the sibling titles, and how a win reprices a career
- Simple Kaffa · Emi Fukahori — what a championship title does to a small coffee business
- El Velo · Hacienda La Esmeralda · Geisha · Natural process — the one Gardelli lot documented here
- Cupping · Coffee scoring · Premiumisation
Official links
- Official site — Gardelli Specialty Coffees —
gardellicoffee.comredirects here - Official site — GSC Story (the company’s own history page)
Sources
- Gardelli Specialty Coffees — GSC Story (the company’s own history page) — accessed 2026-07-23
- Gardelli Specialty Coffees — official shop homepage — accessed 2026-07-23 (source of the address, legal name and VAT number)
- World Coffee Championships — World Coffee Roasting Championship — accessed 2026-07-23; no past-winner list published on the page
- World Coffee Championships — WCRC Past Rankings — accessed 2026-07-23; offers only a 2026 PDF and an outbound UC Davis link, neither retrieved
- World Coffee Championships — homepage (official) — accessed 2026-07-23
- Unpacking.Coffee — Gardelli Specialty Coffees roaster profile — accessed 2026-07-23
- Coffeedesk — Gardelli Specialty Coffees brand page — accessed 2026-07-23
- Tasting Grounds — Hacienda La Esmeralda, El Velo Geisha Microlots (Gardelli) — accessed 2026-07-23, via the El Velo note