Maruyama Coffee

Maruyama Coffee (丸山珈琲) is a Japanese specialty-coffee roaster and café chain based in Karuizawa, a resort town in Nagano Prefecture in the mountains northwest of Tokyo. It was founded in April 1991 by Kentaro Maruyama, who is still the company’s representative.¹²

It matters to this wiki for two things that turn out to be the same thing.

First, it buys at the top of the auction market. Maruyama entered the Cup of Excellence auction system in 2001 and has been showing up on winning bid sheets ever since — it is one of the names in the East Asian buying bloc described on Japan coffee market, alongside Saza Coffee, Takamura and Korea’s Terarosa.¹

Second, it wins competitions. Its baristas took the Japanese national barista championship five years running from 2009, and the last of those runs produced Hidenori Izaki, who won the World Barista Championship in 2014 as the first champion from Asia.¹

Those are connected. A roastery that owns some of the highest-scoring coffee on earth can hand its competitors material nobody else has — which is the argument the Hidenori Izaki note makes about why his employer mattered.

The company

Attribute	Detail
Founded	April 1991, at the Hiiragi café in Karuizawa
English trading name	MARUYAMA COFFEE Co., Inc.
Representative	Kentaro Maruyama
Head office	1154-10 Karuizawa, Karuizawa-machi, Kitasaku-gun, Nagano Prefecture
Capital	¥100,000,000
Became a limited liability company	2005
Stores	13 — 4 in Nagano, 7 in Tokyo, 1 in Yamanashi, 1 in Aichi
Business	Green coffee wholesale, roasted-bean wholesale and retail, cafés, consulting and seminars

All of the above comes from the company’s own corporate pages, including the store list.¹²³

The Nagano stores are the Karuizawa main store, a roastery-and-shop in Komoro, Harunire Terrace, and a bypass café; Tokyo has seven, including Nishiazabu, Nihonbashi and several station-concourse sites. The Yamanashi store sits inside the Risonare Yatsugatake resort — the first store the company opened after incorporating in 2005.¹³

How it got here

The early history is unusual in that the café failed first, and the company that came out of it was built the other way round — roasting and shipping before selling across a counter.

	Year	What happened
1	April 1991	Founded, operating as the Hiiragi café in Karuizawa
2	1993	Storefront operations at Hiiragi ended; the business went non-storefront — roasting from home, selling only by delivery and mail order
3	1994	Official logo created
4	1995	Roasting facility built on the site of what became the main store
5	1998	The current Karuizawa main store opened
6	2000	Introduced French-press service in the cafés
7	2001	First participation in the Cup of Excellence international auction, and the start of buying direct from origin
8	2002	Acquired the Agua Limpa lot “for an unprecedented price” at the Brazil Cup of Excellence
9	2004	Installed a Probat L12 roaster from Germany
10	2005	Became a limited liability company; opened the Risonare Yatsugatake store
11	2008–2009	Komoro and Harunire Terrace stores opened

This is the official timeline as the company tells it.¹

Two of those rows carry more weight than the rest. 1993 is the point at which the business stopped being a café and became a roaster that happened to have cafés — the reverse of the usual Japanese path from kissaten to chain. 2001 is the point at which it stopped buying coffee from importers and started bidding for named lots itself, which is direct trade in the literal sense: the roaster in the auction room, not a broker acting for it. Maruyama had already spent roughly a decade on home roasting by then — the sourcing came second, after he concluded that quality starts on the farm rather than in the drum.⁴

To verify

Whether the founding year is 1990 or 1991. A travel blog dates the start of Maruyama Coffee to 1990.⁵ The company’s own history page says April 1991, and two independent third-party profiles agree on 1991.¹⁶⁷ Use 1991; the 1990 figure is noted only so it is not mistaken for a second, better source.

The auction buying

This is what the name is known for internationally, and it is worth separating what is documented from what is repeated.

Confirmed on official auction records

Maruyama appears by name on Alliance for Coffee Excellence results pages for at least three Cup of Excellence auctions already covered elsewhere on this wiki:

	Auction	Lot	Score	Price	Maruyama’s role
1	Brazil 2019	Fazenda Paie Filho, Yellow Catuaí, natural — the national winner	92.23	$60.10/lb	Co-buyer with Goodboybob Coffee and Harrods
2	Brazil 2019	Fazenda Primavera, Geisha, natural anaerobic — 2nd place	92.15	$30.50/lb	Co-buyer with Saza Coffee and Proud Mary Coffee
3	Burundi 2019	Gatukuza (Ets Nduwayezu) — the top lot of the last Burundian edition	90.13	21.10–21.20/lb	Co-buyer with Sarutahiko Coffee and others
4	Rwanda 2018	Twumba Coffee, Karongi — the top lot of the last Rwandan edition	90.53	$18.70/lb	Co-buyer with Sarutahiko, Good Boy Bob and Difference Coffee

Sources: ACE’s own results pages for Brazil 2019, Burundi 2019 and Rwanda 2018.⁸⁹¹⁰ Fuller versions of these tables live on Catuaí, Burundi, Rwanda and Cup of Excellence records by country.

The pattern in every one of those rows is the same and is worth naming: Maruyama almost never buys a winning lot alone. It buys as part of a buying consortium — several roasters splitting a bag that is often only 20–100 kg, so each ends up with a few kilograms of the most talked-about coffee of that year plus a share of the announcement. It is the same mechanism Saza Coffee uses, and the reason a record headline price reflects several buyers’ combined willingness to pay rather than one.

Claimed, and not confirmed here

To verify

The 2002 Brazil “Agua Limpa” price. Maruyama’s own history page says it “acquired Agua Limpa for an unprecedented price at the Brazil COE” in 2002 — but states no figure.¹ A travel blog adds that the lot was “Agua Limpa II” and that the price was a record.⁵ No primary ACE auction record for Brazil 2002 was consulted here, so the purchase is reported above as the company’s own claim and the price is left blank. Do not quote a number for it.

To verify

The ¥73,000-per-kilogram Costa Rica lot. A roaster-directory profile states that Maruyama bought a first-place Costa Rica Cup of Excellence lot at ¥73,000/kg, calling it a record.⁶ That is a single secondary source, it names no year, no farm and no auction edition, and it does not match anything on Cup of Excellence records by country. The same page also credits Maruyama with the **first Ethiopia COE 1 and a Guatemalan “El Injerto #1” at an unprecedented price, both equally unsourced.⁶ Treat all three as unverified until a matching ACE result is found — note that ¥73,000/kg is roughly $200–300 a pound depending on the year’s exchange rate, which would be an extraordinary number and should be easy to confirm if real.

The competition record

Maruyama first entered the Japanese national barista championship in 2006.⁴ From 2009 its baristas won it five years in a row — the company’s own claim, and one that no source consulted contradicts.¹

Who won which year is where it gets muddier. Sprudge, reporting in 2015, names the people by the world championship they went on to compete at rather than the national title they won:⁴

Barista	Sprudge says	Implied national title
Mie Nakahara	Advanced to the World Barista Championship in 2010	2009
Miki Suzuki	Reached WBC finals in 2011 and 2012	2010, 2011
Hidenori Izaki	Won the 2014 WBC	2012 and 2013
Yoshikazu Iwase	A “recent” national title as of 2015	2014 or later

The right-hand column is a deduction, not a citation — Japan’s champion competes at the following year’s world championship, so a 2010 WBC appearance implies a 2009 national win. It lines up exactly with the “five consecutive from 2009” claim and with the Hidenori Izaki note, which has Izaki holding the title “the last two years” before Rimini.

To verify

The year-by-year national championship list. No Specialty Coffee Association of Japan results archive was reachable from this machine, and neither Maruyama’s history page nor Sprudge states the national title years directly.¹⁴ The table above is reconciled from two sources plus one structural assumption; treat the individual years as provisional. This same gap is already flagged on Hidenori Izaki.

Hidenori Izaki’s 2014 world title is the one competition fact that is solidly documented, including on the champions table at World Barista Championship. He competed for Maruyama, using two lots from a Costa Rican micromill, and left the following year to build a training practice. His note has the detail.

Kentaro Maruyama

The founder started the business at 23, initially treating the café as “something fun, and something of worth,” and spent about ten years on home roasting before concluding that the coffee’s quality was decided long before it reached his drum.⁴⁶ That realisation is the hinge in the whole company story — it is what sent him to auctions in 2001.

He is also a past chair of the Alliance for Coffee Excellence board — ACE’s own site lists him among its former board chairs — as well as a serving Cup of Excellence international judge.¹¹¹²

He gets his own note at Kentaro Maruyama.

To verify

His judging record and the cupping claim. One profile describes him as having served as an international Cup of Excellence judge for more than 20 years.⁷ A different profile claims he has cupped more Cup of Excellence coffees than any single buyer in the world.⁶ Each rests on one secondary page, neither is confirmed by Alliance for Coffee Excellence or by Maruyama’s own site, and the second is the kind of superlative that cannot really be measured. Both are stated here as claims, not facts.

What it actually sells

Beyond the auction headlines the business is ordinary in shape: green coffee wholesale, roasted beans wholesale and retail, thirteen cafés, plus consulting and seminars.² The Nishiazabu store in Tokyo has carried something like thirty different coffees at once.⁴ That is a range that only makes sense if you are buying dozens of small named lots rather than a few container loads.

Roast style is described by third parties as balance-first, running from light to medium-dark and adjusted to the coffee rather than applied uniformly — fruity Ethiopian naturals taken light, for example.⁷ That is a third-party characterisation, not the company’s own published philosophy.

Related

• Kentaro Maruyama — the founder, auction buyer and long-serving Cup of Excellence judge
• Hidenori Izaki — the barista who won the 2014 world title competing for this company
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country — the auction system it entered in 2001 and the records it appears in
• Saza Coffee — the other Japanese roastery that habitually buys at the top of the market
• Japan coffee market · Specialty Coffee Association of Japan · Kissaten — the home market and the competition system it came up through
• World Barista Championship — the title, the format and the champions table
• Buying consortium · Green coffee auctions · Green coffee buying · Direct trade · Premiumisation — how the buying works and what it does to prices
• Catuaí · Geisha · Burundi · Rwanda · Natural process · Coffee scoring — the coffees and origins it turns up on
• Proud Mary Coffee — a consortium partner on the 2019 Brazil auction
• Coffee roasting · Cupping · Specialty coffee — the craft side

Official links

• Official site — Maruyama Coffee (丸山珈琲)
• Official — company history timeline · company overview · store locations

Footnotes

1. MARUYAMA COFFEE — official company history ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰

2. MARUYAMA COFFEE — official company overview ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. MARUYAMA COFFEE — official store locations ↩ ↩²

4. Sprudge — A brief history of Japan’s remarkable Maruyama Coffee ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

5. Travel With Intent — Tokyo Coffee Trail #1: Maruyama Coffee ↩ ↩²

6. day9.coffee — Maruyama Coffee, Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. coffee-infos.com — 丸山珈琲 Maruyama Coffee ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Brazil 2019 results and auction ↩

9. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Burundi 2019 results and auction ↩

10. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Rwanda 2018 results and auction ↩

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

12. Maruyama Coffee green-coffee division — 代表挨拶 (representative’s message) ↩