Coffee Sketcher

Mathieu Theis

Properties3
descriptionFrench-born, Zürich-based co-founder of MAME — a four-time Swiss Barista Champion who came third at the 2018 World Barista Championship and now buys the green coffee his own company roasts.
tagsperson, france, switzerland, zurich, barista, competition, green-buying
aliasesMatthieu Theis, Mathieu Theiss

8 min read

Mathieu Theis

Mathieu Theis is a French-born, Zürich-based coffee professional who co-founded the Swiss roastery and café group MAME with Emi Fukahori in 2016, and who has won the Swiss Barista Championship four times and finished third in the world in 2018 (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23; Sprudge — every World Barista Championship finalist, ranked, accessed 2026-07-23).

He is the rarer half of a common pairing. Plenty of baristas win a national title and open a café. Mathieu kept doing both at once for a decade — still competing in 2026, ten years after his first title — while taking over the job that decides what the company actually sells: buying green coffee. MAME’s own site puts him on sourcing and Emi on competing and coaching (same source), which makes him one of the few people in this wiki who is both a stage competitor and the buyer at the other end of the chain.

He was born in France and now lives in Zürich, and he competes for Switzerland — the reason a sponsor profile files his nationality as Swiss while MAME’s own page and an equipment-maker profile call him a Frenchman (Urnex — Mathieu Theis, accessed 2026-07-23; MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23; Acaia — competition profile, via the research report). National championships gate entry to the world round by country of competition, not by passport.

Story

The climb, 2015–2018

His record starts not with espresso but with latte art: third at the Swiss Latte Art Championship in 2015. The barista title came the next year — first at the Swiss Barista Championship in 2016 — and took him to the world round in Dublin, where he finished 50th (Urnex, accessed 2026-07-23). He came second at home in 2017, then won again in 2018 (same source).

That 50th place is worth pausing on, because it is the part of a competition career nobody puts on a poster. The World Barista Championship opening round runs to roughly sixty competitors; 50th means he did not reach the semifinals. Two years later he was on the podium.

2018: third in the world

At the 2018 World Barista Championship in Amsterdam, Mathieu placed 3rd with 396.5 points, behind Agnieszka Rojewska of Poland (493) and Lex Wenneker of the Netherlands (436), and just half a point ahead of fourth (Sprudge, accessed 2026-07-23; corroborated by MAME — About us and Urnex, both accessed 2026-07-23).

2018 was MAME’s year twice over: the same season, Emi Fukahori won the World Brewers Cup outright with a Laurina from Daterra. Two people, one company, two world finals, one world title — see her note for the coffee that did it.

2019 and 2024

He won Switzerland again in 2019 and finished 6th in the world at Boston with 394.5 points — a score essentially identical to his 2018 podium, in a year the whole final scored higher (Sprudge, accessed 2026-07-23; MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23). This is exactly the trap the World Barista Championship note warns about: scores only mean something against the other competitors in that same final.

MAME’s own results list adds 8th at the World Barista Championship in 2024 and a fourth Swiss Barista Championship title in 2026 (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23).

YearEventResult
2015Swiss Latte Art Championship3rd
2016Swiss Barista Championship1st
2016World Barista Championship (Dublin)50th
2017Swiss Barista Championship2nd
2018Swiss Barista Championship1st
2018World Barista Championship (Amsterdam)3rd — 396.5 pts
2019Swiss Barista Championship1st
2019World Barista Championship (Boston)6th — 394.5 pts
2024World Barista Championship8th
2026Swiss Barista Championship1st

The 2015–2018 rows come from the Urnex ambassador profile, the 2018 and 2019 world scores from Sprudge’s compiled finalist list, and the 2018/2019/2024/2026 rows from MAME’s own about page (all accessed 2026-07-23). Where the three overlap they agree.

To verify

The 2024 and 2026 results, and the world placings outside the finals. 8th at the 2024 World Barista Championship and the 2026 Swiss title appear only on MAME’s own site — the company reporting its own founder (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23). The Acaia competition profile also lists the 2026 Swiss win, but it is a sponsor page and returned HTTP 429 on two attempts here, so it was not independently read (Acaia, via the research report). No official archive settles it: the organisers publish rankings as year-by-year PDFs, and their past-rankings page currently offers Brewers Cup files only — no World Barista Championship results at all (World Coffee Championships — Past rankings, accessed 2026-07-23). Sprudge’s list covers finalists only, so it can confirm 2018 and 2019 but is silent on 8th and 50th by design. The Urnex profile is also undated and stops at 2018, which is why older write-ups call him a “three-time” champion. His first name is spelled both Mathieu and Matthieu in secondary sources; MAME’s own site uses Mathieu.

The buying side

Since 2020 MAME has sourced and roasted its own green coffee rather than buying it roasted, and Mathieu leads that buying (MAME — About us, accessed 2026-07-23). Acaia’s profile describes him as “always in search of exceptional green coffee to roast” and quotes his founding belief that specialty coffee “transforms lives, as it did for him” (Acaia, via the research report; the founding-belief line is repeated near-verbatim on MAME’s own page, accessed 2026-07-23).

That job is what turns a competition record into a business. MAME sells its retail coffee in two streams — daily coffees and competition coffees, the small strange expensive lots people take on stage — and runs a competition subscription alongside the ordinary one; see MAME for how that works commercially, and Premiumisation for why anyone pays for it.

To verify

Not one coffee he has bought or competed with is documented here. No source consulted — MAME’s own pages included — names a farm, variety, altitude, processing method, cupping score or price for any lot Mathieu Theis has bought or served on stage. He does not appear as a named buyer in any Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence or Alliance for Coffee Excellence results table consulted for this wiki, and the competitors’ coffees live in event technical sheets that are not publicly browsable. The research behind this note went looking specifically for auction lots, scores and prices attached to him and found none. Do not attach a farm, a score or a price to his name without a primary source.

To verify

Basic biography. No source consulted gives his birth date or year, where in France he is from, when he moved to Switzerland, whether he holds Swiss citizenship, or how he got into coffee before 2015. A European Coffee Trip interview is said to cover the “home barista to national champion” path, but the page returned HTTP 403 on access (European Coffee Trip, accessed 2026-07-23), so none of it could be read here.

Why he belongs in this wiki

Two reasons, and the second is the interesting one.

First, he is one half of the clearest European case of the competition circuit as a business incubator — the pattern MAME shares with Simple Kaffa in Taipei and Serkan Sağsöz in Turkey.

Second, he sits on both sides of the same transaction. This wiki spends most of its time on people who set prices for green coffee (Best of Panama bidders, Cup of Excellence buyers) and people who win titles with it (world champions). Mathieu does both — he chooses the lots and then competes with them — which is precisely the loop that makes a championship result reprice a farm. What is missing is the paper trail: for all the visibility, no lot he has bought is publicly documented, which is a fair summary of how opaque competition-coffee sourcing still is.

Sources

  1. MAME — About us (official site) — accessed 2026-07-23
  2. MAME — homepage (official site) — via MAME, accessed 2026-07-23
  3. World Coffee Championships — Past rankings (official) — accessed 2026-07-23
  4. Urnex — Mathieu Theis ambassador profile — accessed 2026-07-23
  5. Sprudge — Every World Barista Championship Finalist, Ranked — accessed 2026-07-23
  6. Acaia — Mathieu Theis competition profile — HTTP 429 on two attempts 2026-07-23; cited via the research report
  7. European Coffee Trip — Mathieu Theis: from home barista to Swiss champion — HTTP 403 on access 2026-07-23; cited via the research report
  8. World Coffee Portal — Episode 202: Precision and craft, a conversation with the founders of MAME — cited in the research report, not fetched

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