Specialty Coffee Wiki

Cafe Imports

Properties3
descriptionAn independent specialty green-coffee importer founded in Minneapolis in 1993 by Andrew Miller, now operating on three continents — and, through its free education library and its long-running water activity study, one of the most-cited reference publishers in the specialty trade.
tagsorganization, importer, trader, green-coffee, united-states, minneapolis, education, b-corp
aliasesCafe Imports North America, Cafe Imports Europe, Cafe Imports Australia, cafeimports.com

9 min read

Cafe Imports

Cafe Imports buys unroasted coffee from farms, cooperatives and exporters and sells it to roasting companies. The company describes itself as “an independent importer and developer of some of the world’s finest specialty green coffees.”1 That is the same structural job Sucafina, ECOM and Falcon Coffees do — see Green coffee buying for what the job actually involves — with one difference that matters: Cafe Imports is not owned by a larger group, where Falcon sits inside a Nasdaq-listed parent and Sucafina and ECOM are multinational trading houses in their own right.

The thing a reader is most likely to have met, though, is not a coffee. It is the company’s free education library — origin guides, variety pages, processing explainers, cupping forms and maps that this wiki, and much of the trade, quotes constantly.2

How it started

Cafe Imports was founded in 1993 by Andrew Miller.3 The company tells the origin story on its own mission page, and it is unusually concrete for a corporate history: Miller started the business with a $70,000 loan from his mother-in-law and a friend named Vido from Brazil, bought a first container of coffee from Vido’s father’s farm in Brazil, acquired a warehouse and a van, and hand-delivered the coffee himself for the company’s first five years.3

An interview with Miller gives the same story with a slightly different frame — an overloaded Astro van, and 40,000 pounds of Brazilian green coffee as the opening purchase.4 The company’s own retelling and the interview agree on the year, the lender, the sum and the Brazilian origin, which is about as well-corroborated as a founding anecdote gets.

Where it is

WhereWhat
Minneapolis, MinnesotaHead office — 2617 East Hennepin Ave, Minneapolis, MN 55413
Roseville, MinnesotaWarehouse — 2280 Walnut St, Suite 200, Roseville, MN 55113
EuropeRegional arm — Cafe Imports Europe
AustraliaRegional arm — Cafe Imports Australia

The two Minnesota addresses are published on the company’s own contact page.5 The company’s mission page states plainly that it operates in the USA, Europe and Australia;3 a profile written by the University of St. Thomas, where partner and SVP of sales Noah Namowicz studied, says the same in different words — the company “operates on three continents.”6

What it sells, and what it gives away

The commercial side is ordinary importing: sourcing, shipping, warehousing and selling green coffee to roasters, with sample roasting, cupping and buying advice attached.1 Alongside it sits a sister small-bag company called La Bodega, which sells smaller quantities than a full pallet — the format a small roastery actually needs.6

The unusual side is the publishing. Cafe Imports maintains a free public education library covering more than thirty producing countries, plus variety pages, harvest and processing explainers, sensory-analysis material including its own “Coffee Rose” flavour wheel, roasting guides and origin maps — and a paid online school, Ed+U Academy.2 It also publishes working tools: a cupping score card, sample-roasting guides, an Ikawa sample-roast profile and its Water activity research.2 The company’s stated position is that “Education is at the core of everything we do” and that the material is “here for you to use and share.”2

That giving-away is not charity, exactly. A green importer’s whole business depends on roasters being able to tell a good lot from a bad one, so teaching the market to taste carefully is a way of growing the market for what you sell. But the practical result is a large, free, reasonably careful reference corpus, and it is why this wiki’s notes on washed, pulped natural, dry milling, Variedad Colombia and Nicaragua all end up citing the same importer.

The water activity study

Cafe Imports’ single biggest contribution to specialty coffee’s technical vocabulary is its long-running study of Water activity — the measure of how much of the water in a green bean is chemically free to drive spoilage, as opposed to simply how wet the bean is.

The study was run by Ian Fretheim, the company’s Director of Sensory Analysis, with US sensory lab manager Megan Person. It began in 2012, accumulated more than 25,000 readings, and was published as a 42-page report on 11 February 2019.7 It is the reason the measurement entered the specialty trade at all. This wiki’s Water activity note carries the detail — including the important caveat that the widely circulated numbers attributed to the study were not read at their source.

A design award

Cafe Imports has one competition result on this wiki. Cafe Imports / La Bodega won “Outstanding Design Achievement: Commercial Product” at the 2nd Annual Sprudge Design Awards (2024–25 cycle), a public-vote award run by the coffee news site Sprudge.8 It is a design award, not a cupping result — no score, no lot, no price.

Sustainability claims

Cafe Imports is a certified B Corp — a third-party certification assessing a company’s social and environmental performance. The B Corp mark appears on the company’s own site,1 and the University of St. Thomas profile independently records that the company “recently became B-Corp certified.”6 Its stated mission commits it to “sustainable economic development for small-holder farmers with price premiums, traceability, and long-term partnerships,”3 and the St. Thomas profile describes the core mission as being “to uplift smallholder farmers.”6

To verify

  • “Carbon-neutral.” The University of St. Thomas profile calls Cafe Imports “a carbon-neutral importer and developer of fine specialty green coffees.”6 That is a single, second-hand source: the university is writing about an alumnus, not auditing an emissions inventory. No carbon-neutrality claim, offset scheme, baseline year or verifying body was found on Cafe Imports’ own site in the pages read for this note, and the company’s 2018 progress report PDF could not be parsed by this wiki’s fetcher.9 Treat “carbon-neutral” as reported, not established — and see Carbon-negative coffee for how loosely these terms are used across the trade.
  • The B Corp certification date. Miller says in an interview that the company became B Corp certified “just recently” relative to that interview,4 and the St. Thomas page says the same without a date.6 The B Corp public directory returned HTTP 403 when checked for this note, so the certification date, B Impact score and current certification status are unconfirmed.
  • Berlin and Melbourne specifically. The Miller interview names the company’s offices as Minneapolis, Berlin and Melbourne,4 and a business-database profile says Cafe Imports has warehouses in Australia, Europe and the United States.10 Cafe Imports’ own pages confirm the three continents but the contact page read here gave street addresses only for Minnesota.35 The specific cities Berlin and Melbourne are plausible and widely repeated, but were not confirmed at source.
  • No auction, cupping or competition record. Beyond the design award above, no auction price, winning bid, lot-level cup score, named producer relationship or Cup of Excellence / Best of Panama purchase could be attributed to Cafe Imports from any source consulted. Green-coffee buyer lists are patchy, so absence here is not evidence of absence in the world — but nothing specific can be stated.
  • Company size and ownership structure. No employee count, revenue figure, ownership breakdown or corporate registration was verified. “Independent” is the company’s own word for itself;1 no filing was read to confirm there is no outside shareholder.

Footnotes

  1. Cafe Imports — North America home page — the company’s own site; confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “independent importer and developer” self-description, the Minneapolis address, the B Corp mark and the list of services ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  2. Cafe Imports — Education — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 30+ origin guides, the Coffee Rose, the cupping score card, the Ikawa profile, Ed+U Academy and the “education is at the core of everything we do” quotation ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  3. Cafe Imports — Mission — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the 1993 founding, Andrew Miller as founder, the $70,000 loan, Vido and the first Brazilian container, the five years of hand delivery, the mission statement and the USA/Europe/Australia footprint ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  4. Andrew Miller’s Unexpected Journey to Founding Cafe Imports — founder interview; source of the Astro van, the 40,000 pounds of Brazilian coffee, the “Minneapolis, Berlin and Melbourne” office list and the “just recently” B Corp remark ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  5. Cafe Imports — Contact — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the Minneapolis office and Roseville warehouse addresses ↩ ↩2

  6. University of St. Thomas, Opus College of Business — Cafe Imports — confirmed via WebFetch; source of the “carbon-neutral importer” wording, the three-continents statement, Noah Namowicz’s role, La Bodega and the recent B Corp certification ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  7. Cafe Imports — Water Activity in Specialty Green Coffee: A Long Term Observational Study by Ian Fretheim — the study announcement; source of Fretheim’s title, Megan Person’s role, the 2012 start, the 25,000+ readings and the 42-page report ↩

  8. Announcing The Second Annual Sprudge Design Award Winners | Sprudge — the official results announcement; source of the Cafe Imports / La Bodega category win ↩

  9. Cafe Imports Progress Report 2018 (PDF) — the company’s own 2018 report; fetched but returned unparseable binary, so nothing in it is relied on here ↩

  10. Datanyze — Cafe Imports company profile — business database; source of the Australia/Europe/United States warehouse claim, unverified at source ↩

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