Alliance for Coffee Excellence

Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE)

The Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE) is the nonprofit that runs the Cup of Excellence competition and its online auctions across many coffee-producing countries.¹

ACE grew out of the first Cup of Excellence, held in 1999 in Brazil, which created the world’s first online green-coffee auction.² Since then, Cup of Excellence auctions have generated $60M+ in cumulative revenue for winning farmers.³

Someone had to pay for it. ACE’s own history records that it was incorporated in late 2002 as a Montana nonprofit, organised by Susie Spindler as its first executive director, and that it “relied heavily on donated support from The Brazil Specialty Coffee Association (BSCA),” with Marcelo Vieira becoming ACE’s first chairman.⁴ A Marcelo Weyland Barbosa Vieira is named among BSCA’s founding group. The competition that now sets green-coffee records worldwide was launched on a Brazilian trade association’s money — see Brazil Specialty Coffee Association.

ACE’s current Executive Director is Erwin Mierisch, a fourth-generation Nicaraguan producer from Fincas Mierisch who worked as the competition’s operations manager and a head judge before taking the post.⁵

ACE does not build the bidding software itself. From late 2022 the Cup of Excellence auctions ran on M-Cultivo’s platform; in March 2025 ACE and COE announced they had “decided to part ways” with M-Cultivo and moved to a provider called V-Auction.⁶ No reason was given publicly by either party.

Related

• Cup of Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country · Best of Panama
• George Howell — one of the original team behind the first Cup of Excellence in 1999
• Brazil Specialty Coffee Association — the Brazilian association whose donated support funded ACE’s founding
• M-Cultivo — the auction platform ACE used from late 2022 until March 2025
• Erwin Mierisch — ACE’s current Executive Director, and a producer at Fincas Mierisch

Official links

• Official site — Alliance for Coffee Excellence

Footnotes

1. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — official site ↩

2. Cup of Excellence — official site ↩

3. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — competition & auction results ↩

4. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — About us — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the late-2002 incorporation, Susie Spindler as founding executive director, the BSCA donated-support wording and Marcelo Vieira as first chairman ↩

5. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Staff — confirmed via WebFetch; Erwin J. Mierisch listed as Executive Director ↩

6. Tea & Coffee Trade Journal — Cup of Excellence begins transition to new auction provider (28 March 2025) ↩