Excelsa Coffee Company

Excelsa Coffee Company is an American green-coffee importer and roaster in San Diego, California, and it is the one company in this wiki whose entire business rests on a single coffee species: Excelsa. It buys, imports, roasts and sells nothing else.¹²

That is an unusual bet. Excelsa is a large, drought-tolerant tree from Central Africa that spent two decades classified as a variety of Liberica before a 2025 genomic study split it back out as its own species — and it moves in such small volumes that the International Coffee Organization publishes no statistics on it at all. There is effectively no established trade to join, so the company’s pitch is that it is building one: a low-caffeine, heat-hardy coffee for a warming climate. See Climate change and coffee for why that argument keeps resurfacing.

“Importer” here means the company buys unroasted coffee abroad and brings it into the United States itself, rather than buying from a domestic broker’s list — the same posture described on Cafe Kreyol and, at a much larger scale, Sucafina.

The company

Attribute	Detail
Founded	20141 (LinkedIn says 2019 — see below)
Co-founders	Michael Mazzotta and Olin Patterson1
Headquarters	San Diego, California — 4796 Niagara Ave, 9210734
Model	Green importer and roaster, wholesale and direct-to-consumer2
Species	Excelsa, exclusively1
Origins sold	Own farm in Nicaragua; Philippines, South Sudan, Vietnam2
Ownership	Privately held3
Staff	11–50 (self-reported)3

The company’s wholesale line is handled directly by Patterson, whose address is published on the site as the contact for business buyers.²

The founders and the origin story

The company’s own telling starts with a personal problem rather than a coffee one. Michael Mazzotta, then a full-time commercial real estate broker, went looking for a smoother, less anxiety-inducing alternative to his daily coffee and worked his way to Excelsa, which carries naturally less caffeine than Arabica.⁵¹ He brought in Olin Patterson, described in the trade press as a consumer-packaged-goods strategist who had previously scaled products such as avocado oil, and the two set out to “put Excelsa on the map.”¹

Both are named as co-founders in an interview with the packaging trade publication MTPak Coffee, which also gives the founding year and the San Diego base.¹ Neither has a note here yet.

What it sells and where it comes from

The company describes itself as “your premier source for premium single-origin Excelsa coffee,” sourced “from our own farm in Nicaragua and handpicked from the Philippines, South Sudan, and Vietnam.”² Owning a farm and importing from three other countries at once is a wide footprint for a company this size, and it reflects the practical problem of the species: there is no established Excelsa supply chain to buy from, so it has to be assembled origin by origin. MTPak reports the company works directly with farmers to build that chain from the ground up, and is working toward organic certification and regenerative growing practices.¹

Nicaragua is well covered in this wiki as an Arabica origin; the other three are not documented here at all, and none of them appear in specialty Excelsa records anywhere consulted. The species’ known growing countries — India, Uganda, South Sudan, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines — line up with that list, so the sourcing map is plausible on its face.

Packaging is a deliberate choice rather than a branding one: recyclable stock bags with stickers applied instead of custom-printed bags, and kraft paper tape on mailers, framed as a waste-and-cost decision.¹

To verify

Farm and lot detail. No farm name, municipality, altitude, harvest window or processing method (natural, washed, honey, anaerobic) is published for any Excelsa Coffee Company lot on the pages consulted.²¹⁵ The Nicaraguan farm is referred to only as “our own farm.”

Product lines. This wiki’s Excelsa note describes three lines — Origins (green coffee), Reserve (hand-selected micro-lots with experimental processing) and House (its own roasts and blends) — sourced to the company’s site. The relevant store pages returned HTTP 429 and could not be re-read for this note, so the line structure is recorded but not re-confirmed.

Buyers and prices. No wholesale or retail price list, and no named café, roaster or retail account, appears in any source consulted.

The claims worth checking

Two of the company’s headline claims are marketing statements rather than measured ones, and both matter enough to state carefully.

To verify

“The largest importer of Excelsa coffee in the USA.” This appears verbatim on the company’s own site.² It is self-reported, with no customs data, trade association ranking or third-party audit behind it in anything consulted. It is also close to unfalsifiable in practice, since nobody publishes Excelsa import volumes — the ICO does not track the species. Treat it as a positioning claim.

How much less caffeine. The company’s own pages say Excelsa has “about half the caffeine of traditional Arabica or Robusta blends,”² while its species-advocacy site excelsacoffee.org gives −40% versus Arabica.⁶ Those two figures do not agree with each other, and neither agrees with the laboratory measurements recorded on this wiki’s Excelsa note, which put Excelsa at 0.86–1.13 g caffeine per 100 g green against Arabica’s 1.2–1.5 g — a gap of roughly a quarter to a third, not a half. “Half” is only true against Robusta, which carries two to three times Arabica’s caffeine. The direction of the claim is right; the size of it is overstated.

Founding year — 2014 or 2019? MTPak Coffee states plainly that the company “was founded in 2014 by Olin Patterson and Michael Mazzotta,”¹ and this note follows that, as does the existing Excelsa note. The company’s LinkedIn profile lists Founded: 2019.³ The company’s own About Us page tells the origin story without giving a year.⁵ The gap is probably first activity versus incorporation, but nothing consulted reconciles them.

Drought tolerance “2–4× Arabica.” Recorded on the Excelsa note as a company claim; there is no published field trial behind the multiplier in anything consulted.

Competitions, scores and certifications

There are none on record. No Excelsa Coffee Company lot appears in Cup of Excellence, Best of Panama or any green-coffee auction result consulted, and neither the company nor the trade press covering it claims a competition placement, medal or SCA event result.²¹⁵

That absence is structural rather than a judgement on the coffee. The major green-coffee competitions are Arabica-only, with Fine Robusta as the single separate track, so an Excelsa lot has no category to enter. The same is true of scores: no SCA cupping score or CQI credential for any of its coffees was found. Any point score on a bag of Excelsa is self-reported unless it is tied to a documented SCA or CQI event.

What it tastes like

The company and the trade coverage describe the species rather than individual lots. MTPak reports a complex cup with notes of fruit, wood and occasionally popcorn, turning chocolatey and creamy at darker roasts.¹ The excelsacoffee.org site adds a smooth, low-acid cup with no bitterness.⁶ Those match the broader species descriptions collected on the Excelsa note — dried fruit, chocolate, spice, sweetness rather than the bright acidity that drives Arabica scores.

Why it belongs in this wiki

Most companies here compete on a famous origin or a famous variety. Excelsa Coffee Company has neither, by design: it picked a species with no auction, no varietal register entry with World Coffee Research, no producer association and no ICO statistics, and made the absence of all that the business case. Whether the climate argument holds is a question for agronomy, not marketing copy — but it is the clearest example in this wiki of a company trying to create a specialty category from scratch rather than buy into one.

Related

• Excelsa — the species the whole company is built on
• Liberica — the species Excelsa was folded into, and split back out of in 2025
• Robusta · Arabica vs Robusta — the two-species framing Excelsa sits outside of
• Climate change and coffee — the argument the company sells on
• Nicaragua — where its own farm is
• Cafe Kreyol — another small US importer-roaster built around one hard origin
• Sucafina — a green importer at the opposite end of the size scale
• Cup of Excellence · Best of Panama · Green coffee auctions — where its coffees do not appear
• Coffee scoring · Cupping · Fine Robusta — the grading systems with no slot for Excelsa
• Coffee Quality Institute · Specialty Coffee Association — the credentialing bodies
• Natural process · Washed process — the processing routes, none documented for its lots
• World Coffee Research — the varietal register Excelsa has no entry in

Official links

• Official site — Excelsa Coffee Company
• Official species site — excelsacoffee.org — the company’s advocacy site for the species itself

Footnotes

1. MTPak Coffee — Excelsa Coffee Company: introducing a climate-resistant species ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. Excelsa Coffee Company — Why Excelsa ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. LinkedIn — Excelsa Coffee Company company page — not directly readable here; details reached this note through the research report ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. Facebook — Excelsa Coffee Co., San Diego CA ↩

5. Excelsa Coffee Company — About Us — returned HTTP 429 on re-check ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. Excelsa — coffee built for a changing climate (excelsacoffee.org) ↩ ↩²