Specialty Coffee Wiki

Kentaro Maruyama

Properties3
descriptionThe 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.
tagsperson, japan, roaster, cup-of-excellence, green-coffee-buying, direct-trade
aliases丸山健太郎, Maruyama Kentaro, Kentaro Maruyama (Maruyama Coffee)

8 min read

Kentaro Maruyama

Kentaro Maruyama (丸山健太郎) is the founder and president of Maruyama Coffee, the Karuizawa roastery that became Japan’s most persistent buyer at green-coffee auctions.12 He is best known outside Japan for two overlapping things: spending roughly half of every year on the road in coffee-growing countries, and sitting on the judging panel of the Cup of Excellence — the international competition that scores a country’s best lots and then sells them at auction.23[

If you want the company’s story — the failed café, the thirteen shops, the auction bid sheets, the five straight national barista titles — that is on Maruyama Coffee. This note is about the person and the roles he holds in the wider industry.

The short version

RolePresident, MARUYAMA COFFEE Co., Inc.
Founded the company1991, in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture
Started buying at origin2001
Time spent overseas”Nearly half a year” in producing countries, by his own account
Competition roleInternational judge, Cup of Excellence
Industry rolePast chair of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence board

All of the founding, location and travel details come from the company’s own official pages.12

Founder, not employee

Maruyama started the business in 1991 in Karuizawa, a resort town in the mountains of Nagano Prefecture northwest of Tokyo.12 He has been its president ever since — the official company profile names him as president, and the president’s letter on the same site opens, in his own voice, “I am Kentaro Maruyama, the President of Maruyama Coffee.”12

He was in his early twenties at the time, and by his own telling he ran the place for about a decade as a home-roasting café operator before the thing that reshaped the business happened: he concluded that the quality of a coffee is mostly decided on the farm, long before it reaches a roasting drum.4

That conclusion is the hinge. It is why he stopped buying through importers and started going to the source.

2001: going to the farms himself

Since 2001 he has sourced green coffee by visiting farms in person, and he now spends close to half the year in producing countries — South America and Africa in particular.2 A Japanese equipment-maker interview puts a number on it: around 150 days a year overseas.3

Two things make this unusual rather than just energetic.

First, it is direct trade in the literal sense — the roaster physically in the room, at the farm and at the auction, rather than a broker acting on his behalf. Maruyama Coffee entered the Cup of Excellence auction system the same year, 2001.

Second, the buying is not really about volume. Maruyama is a small company by global standards, and the lots it chases are often tiny — 20 to 100 kilograms. It typically bids as part of a buying consortium with other roasters, splitting a winning lot several ways. The Maruyama Coffee note has the auction-by-auction record, including Cup of Excellence wins in Brazil, Burundi and Rwanda.

The judging and industry roles

Maruyama serves as an international judge for the Cup of Excellence, the competition run by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence.53 International judges are the second panel in the COE process: a national jury shortlists the lots, then a panel flown in from buying countries re-cups them and sets the final scores that determine the auction.

He has also chaired the organisation that runs it. ACE’s own site lists him among the past chairs of its board of directors, identified as “Kentaro Maruyama — Maruyama Coffee, Japan.”6 He is not on the current board, which is chaired by Maryna Gray of Bean Box.7

His company’s Japanese green-coffee site adds that he received the Speciality Coffee Association of Europe’s Young Entrepreneur Award in 2004.5

To verify

“Honorary director” versus “honorary president” of ACE. Maruyama Coffee’s own Japanese page calls him an honorary director of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence.5 A Japanese interview site calls him Honorary President of the same organisation.3 Those are different offices. Checking ACE’s own pages resolves neither: its about page lists him as a past chair of the board, and its current board page lists only two emeritus figures — Geoff Watts and ACE founder Susie Spindler — with no Maruyama entry of any kind.67 Until ACE publishes an honorary title in his name, treat “past board chair” as the documented role and the two honorary titles as unconfirmed.

To verify

His membership of the Specialty Coffee Association of Japan board. One interview describes him as a member of the board of trustees of SCAJ.3 That is a single secondary source; no SCAJ board roster was consulted, and neither Maruyama Coffee’s own site nor ACE mentions it. Plausible, but unconfirmed here.

To verify

The “cups more competition coffee than anyone” claim. The same interview describes him as “a cupper who attends coffee competitions more often than anyone else in the world,” and a roaster directory makes a related claim that he has cupped more Cup of Excellence coffees than any other buyer.38 Both are superlatives that nobody actually tracks or publishes, and they rest on secondary pages. The verifiable version is narrower: he is a long-serving COE international judge who spends roughly 150 days a year at origin.253 The same flag already exists on Maruyama Coffee.

Why he matters to this wiki

Three reasons, all downstream of the same decision.

He is one of the people who made record auction prices normal. The pattern described on Japan coffee market — Japanese and Korean roasters clustered at the top of nearly every Cup of Excellence bid sheet, alongside Saza Coffee, Takamura and Korea’s Terarosa — has Maruyama at the front of it. Prices on Cup of Excellence records by country repeatedly carry his company’s name.

He is on both sides of the table. Being a COE international judge and a COE buyer at the same time is normal in this industry, and it is worth understanding rather than being surprised by: judges are drawn from the buying trade precisely because those are the palates the auction is calibrated to. It also means the scores and the prices are set by overlapping groups of people.

He built a competition pipeline out of it. A roastery that owns some of the highest-scoring green coffee on earth can hand its baristas material nobody else has — which is the argument the Hidenori Izaki note makes about the 2014 World Barista Championship, won by a Maruyama employee.

To verify

Ownership of the company. No source consulted states who owns MARUYAMA COFFEE Co., Inc., what its shareholding looks like, or whether Maruyama holds it personally. The official profile establishes only that he is president and that the company is capitalised at ¥100,000,000.1 Notes elsewhere on this wiki that describe Maruyama Coffee as “owned by” him are going beyond what the sources support — the safe wording is founder and president.

Footnotes

  1. MARUYAMA COFFEE — official company overview ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  2. MARUYAMA COFFEE — message from the president ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Cores Gold Filter — special interview with Kentaro Maruyama ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  4. Sprudge — A brief history of Japan’s remarkable Maruyama Coffee ↩

  5. Maruyama Coffee green-coffee division — 代表挨拶 (representative’s message) ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  6. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — about us, including past board chairs ↩ ↩2

  7. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — current board of directors ↩ ↩2

  8. day9.coffee — Maruyama Coffee, Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture ↩

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