Taro Suzuki

Taro Suzuki (鈴木太郎; romanised as Taroh in his company’s own English filings) is the President and Representative Director of Saza Coffee, the family roastery in Hitachinaka, Ibaraki, that has twice been the lead buyer on the most expensive coffee ever sold at public auction.¹² He took the presidency on 19 June 2020.

He is the reason a company of roughly twenty cafés in a seaside prefecture two hours north of Tokyo shows up at the top of the bid sheet at Best of Panama.³ Ibaraki Prefecture’s own export listing calls him, in English, “Geisha Hunter”⁴ — a nickname his company uses on its packaging, and a fair description of the job: he travels to producing countries and to competition cupping tables and picks the lots himself.

The unusual part is that he is not only a buyer. He is a trained horticulturalist who manages coffee farms in Colombia, so he sits on both sides of the trade — growing Geisha as well as bidding for other people’s.

Story

Third generation of a theatre-turned-coffee family

He was born on 19 December 1969 in Katsuta City, Ibaraki (now Hitachinaka). His grandfather ran the Katsuta Takarazuka Theatre, the cinema business that the company was originally incorporated as in 1942; his father, Yoshio Suzuki (鈴木誉志男), opened a café called Saza alongside the theatre in 1969 and turned it into a coffee company.⁵

So the coffee business and Taro Suzuki are almost exactly the same age, and he is the third generation of the family to run the company that owns it.

He studied plants, not business

His route into the family firm went through agriculture rather than management. He worked as a commercial food supplier at 23, sat university entrance exams at 25, studied fruit-tree horticulture at Tokyo University of Agriculture, and graduated at 30 — at which point he joined Saza Coffee. He then interned in the quality-management division of the FNC, Colombia’s national coffee growers’ federation.

“Fruit-tree horticulture” is not a detour. A coffee cherry is a fruit and a coffee plant is a small tree; someone trained in orchard science is trained in exactly the variables — rootstock, pruning, altitude, ripeness at picking — that decide what a cupping table later tastes.

He went back to school at 50, enrolling at the University of Tsukuba’s graduate school in 2020, where he holds a master’s in agricultural science and researches the quality of roasted coffee beans. He also sits on the board of the Japan Specialty Coffee Association.

The Geisha obsession

Wikipedia’s account dates his first encounter with high-grade Panama Geisha to 2006 — a year when the variety was still a curiosity outside a small circle — and it has defined his buying ever since. Search snippets of Saza’s own Geisha page describe him making repeated trips to the Gesha area of Ethiopia, where the variety originally came from, looking for its source.

The “Geisha Hunter” title is not just marketing shorthand. It is attached to an actual product: Ibaraki Prefecture’s export listing describes the Geisha Hunter 5P blend as “a careful selection of only the best Geisha coffee… created by Saza Coffee representative, Taro Suzuki, also known as ‘Geisha Hunter’,” combining “the world’s three major Geisha varieties from Panama, Ethiopia, and Colombia”.

That list of three origins is the whole biography in miniature: Panama is where he bids, Ethiopia is where he goes looking, and Colombia is where he farms.

Growing it himself in Colombia

According to the Japanese Wikipedia biography he began managing Saza’s Colombian farm in 2008 and established his own farm, Tres Edgardito, in 2011, and owns a 25-hectare property in Timbío, in the Cauca department, planted with about 80,000 coffee trees including Geisha, where he also conducts breeding research.

The coffee reaches customers as Finca Saza Colombia Geisha (washed) — one of the two flagship export products the prefecture lists for the company. The estate has its own note at Finca Saza; see Saza Coffee for how it sits next to the auction purchases.

To verify

The Colombian farm numbers do not fully agree between sources. This note’s figures (25 ha in Timbío, Cauca; 80,000 trees; farm managed from 2008; “Tres Edgardito” founded 2011) come from the Japanese Wikipedia biography of Suzuki. Saza’s own farm page has since been reached and confirms the headline figures — 25 hectares, Timbío in Cauca, 1,950 m, about 80,000 trees⁶ — so those can be stated as fact. What is still unsettled is the founding year (1996 / 1997 / 1998 across three company-linked sources), the expansion arithmetic (the official timeline’s +20 ha in 2008 and +21 ha in 2011 do not fit inside a 25 ha total), and the spelling of the second parcel (Tres Edgardito / Tres Edgaritos / Los Tres Edgarito). Those three are tracked on Finca Saza.

The record purchases — a company act, not a documented personal one

Saza Coffee led the buying consortium for the first coffee ever to pass $1,000 a pound — an Elida Estate Geisha at Best of Panama in 2019 — and was the primary buyer of the $10,013-a-kilogram Elida “Torre” lot at the same auction in 2024. Those two events are documented in detail on the Saza Coffee and Best of Panama results archive notes.

To verify

Whether Suzuki personally placed or led those bids. Every source consulted here credits the purchases to Saza Coffee the company, not to a named individual. Given that he is president, is described by the prefecture as the person who selects the beans, and is nicknamed “Geisha Hunter,” it is a reasonable inference — but it is an inference. No auction record, producer statement or news report reviewed here names Taro Suzuki as the bidder. Do not write “Taro Suzuki bought the world’s most expensive coffee” as fact.

To verify

That he has stopped buying top-lot Panama Geisha. A search snippet from an aggregator site (third-news.com, dated around December 2025) says Suzuki discontinued the annual purchase of the highest-grade Panama Geisha because auction prices had escalated. The page itself was not fetched, the outlet is an unattributed news aggregator, and nothing on Saza’s own site or in trade reporting consulted here corroborates it. If true it would be a significant reversal for a habitual record-setter — which is exactly why it needs a real source before it goes in the body of a note.

Writing and broadcast

He is credited as the supervising editor (監修) of a Japanese coffee reference book published in 2022, and appeared in a 17 January 2019 episode of TV Tokyo’s business documentary programme Cambria Palace (カンブリア宮殿).

Two things this note deliberately does not say

To verify

“Vice President.” A LinkedIn profile for “Taroh Suzuki” in Ibaraki, Japan, lists his title at Saza Coffee as 副社長 (vice president).⁷ Two independent sources contradict that with President and Representative Director: Ibaraki Prefecture’s government export register, and the Japanese Wikipedia entry, which dates the appointment to 19 June 2020. The most likely explanation is a profile written before 2020 and never updated, but nobody has confirmed that. This note follows the government register.

To verify

He is not the Suzuki of “Suzuki Coffee.” Research on this topic repeatedly surfaces Suzuki Coffee Co. (Sarika Gourmet Coffee) in Singapore, a large roastery on Chin Bee Avenue tracing back to Kiyoshi Suzuki, who opened a Suzuki Coffee in Tokyo in 1944.⁸⁹ No source connects that company or that family to Taro Suzuki or Saza Coffee. Suzuki is one of the most common surnames in Japan; treat the two as unrelated unless a source says otherwise.

Related

• Saza Coffee — the company he runs
• Finca Saza — the Colombian estate he manages · Edgar Moreno — the ex-FNC quality director who partnered on it · Federación Nacional de Cafeteros — where he interned
• Geisha — the variety he is named after hunting
• Best of Panama · Best of Panama results archive · Elida Estate · Wilford Lamastus — where and from whom Saza buys
• Klatch Coffee · Grand Cru Coffee — Saza’s consortium partners in 2019 and 2024
• Premiumisation — the market shift his buying both rides and drives
• Cupping · Coffee scoring · Q Grader — how the lots he selects are judged
• Emi Fukahori · Serkan Sağsöz — other coffee professionals who both compete/select and run companies
• Daniel Peterson · Price Peterson — the equivalent second- and third-generation family operators on the producing side

Official links

• Official site — Saza Coffee (サザコーヒー), the company he heads
• Official — Ibaraki Prefecture export register listing for SAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC.
• (no personal website found — he has no separate official presence)

Footnotes

1. Ibaraki Prefecture export register — SAZA COFFEE ROASTER INC. company listing (representative: Taroh Suzuki, President and Representative Director) ↩

2. Wikipedia (Japanese) — サザコーヒー ↩

3. Saza Coffee — official site ↩

4. Ibaraki Prefecture export register — Geisha Hunter 5P product listing ↩

5. Wikipedia (Japanese) — 鈴木太郎（コーヒー研究家） ↩

6. Saza Coffee — official farm page, サザ農園について / FINCA SAZA COFFEE ↩

7. LinkedIn — Taroh Suzuki ↩

8. Enterprise Singapore — Sarika Gourmet Coffee Co. (Suzuki Coffee, Singapore), PDF ↩

9. Vulcan Post — Suzuki Coffee, S’porean roastery with Japanese specialty sumiyaki ↩