Emi Fukahori
Emi Fukahori is a Japanese-born, Zürich-based coffee professional who co-founded the Swiss specialty brand MAME and won the 2018 World Brewers Cup.12
The World Brewers Cup is the filter-coffee world championship: competitors brew by hand — pour-over, not espresso — and are judged blind on the cup they put in front of the panel. Winning it makes the choice of coffee half the story, and Emi’s choice is why she matters beyond the trophy. She won with a Laurina from Daterra in Brazil, at a time when Brazil was widely treated as a country that grew commodity coffee rather than competition coffee.3
Story
From London flat white to Swiss champion
She is from Fukuoka, Japan, and grew up in neighbouring Saga.4 She first met good coffee by accident — discovering the flat white during a year spent learning English in London in 2006 — then studied hotel management and tourism and was working in the tourism industry when she found the competition circuit in 2014.2
She started competing in 2015 and won the Swiss Barista Championship the same year, going on to the World Barista Championship in Seattle; she placed third in the Swiss championship in 2016. MAME’s own site adds a second Swiss Barista Championship title in 2020 and a Swiss Brewers Cup title in 2018.
MAME
In 2016 she and Mathieu Theis — her business and life partner — opened MAME, named after the Japanese word for beans. They “met through coffee championships and wanted to create a community where people can enjoy specialty coffee at its best”.
It has grown well past a single café. MAME’s own account lists cafés opening steadily — MAME Josef (2016), Seefeld (2018), the MAME Roastery (2019), then Plainpalais, Bahnhofstrasse and Saint-Gervais (all 2023), KURO MAME Tokyo (2025) and Getrud (2026) — and the company began sourcing and roasting its own coffee in 2020.5 Roles have split along their strengths: Mathieu handles green-coffee sourcing, Emi competes and coaches other competitors.
Mathieu Theis is a competitor in his own right — third at the World Barista Championship in 2018, sixth in 2019, eighth in 2024, and a repeat Swiss Barista Champion (2016, 2018, 2019, 2026).
The 2018 World Brewers Cup
The 2018 final was held in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, during International Coffee Week — the first time the Brewers Cup had been staged in Brazil.6
Competing for Switzerland, she brewed a Laurina lot from Daterra in the Cerrado Mineiro region of Minas Gerais. The batch was named “Frevo” — after a Brazilian musical rhythm — and was roasted specially for the competition. Laurina is the naturally low-caffeine variety also known as Bourbon Pointu: delicate, floral and tea-like, with roughly half the caffeine of ordinary Arabica.
Winning a world title on a Brazilian coffee, in Brazil, was the point. Brazil is the world’s largest coffee producer but had long been filed under volume rather than finesse; the win put both Laurina and Daterra’s experimental lots onto the specialty map.7 Reporting on her presentation says she revealed to the judges only during the routine that the coffee was Brazilian, and described the cup as “exciting, smooth, clean, special and juicy”.8
To verify
How the Frevo lot was processed, and what it scored or sold for. Laurina elsewhere in this wiki records the winning lot as anaerobically fermented — sealed in an oxygen-free vessel during fermentation — sourced from Perfect Daily Grind reporting. The contemporaneous account from ANBA names the variety and lot but gives no processing method, altitude or cupping score. ANBA also reports that the remainder of the lot went to an online auction scheduled for 21 November alongside 14 other Daterra lots named after Brazilian rhythms, but publishes no price, buyer or lot size. Daterra’s own site does not publish auction results. Do not quote a process, score or price for Frevo.
After the title
She kept competing after the world title, switching to the espresso-bar format: a second Swiss Barista Championship in 2020, and fourth place at the World Barista Championship in 2021.9 She also coaches other competitors, while Mathieu leads green-coffee buying.
MAME’s own locations page now lists six Swiss cafés open to the public — Josef, Seefeld, Plainpalais, Saint-Gervais, Thalwil and Gertrud — plus the closed-to-public Zürich roastery and KURO MAME in Tokyo, which reconciles the homepage’s “6 thriving locations across Switzerland” with the longer opening timeline.10 One unexplained gap remains between MAME’s own pages — see MAME for the detail.
To verify
Her age and when she moved to Switzerland. A 2018 interview quotes her as “31 years old” and “in Zurich, Switzerland for 8 years now,” which would imply a birth year around 1986–87 and an arrival around 2010. Neither figure is stated as a date in any source consulted here, and both are arithmetic on a single interview. Do not publish a birth year.
Related
- MAME — the roastery and café group she co-founded
- Mathieu Theis — her co-founder and business partner
- World Brewers Cup — the championship she won
- Laurina — the variety she won with
- Daterra — the Brazilian farm that grew the Frevo lot
- Bourbon — the variety Laurina mutated from
- Serkan Sağsöz — another national barista champion turned roastery founder
- Coffee scoring · Cupping — how competition coffees are judged
- Premiumisation — the market shift her win rode