Peter Giuliano, above, the director of coffee for the influential roaster Counter Culture Coffee, announced to his staff yesterday that he is leaving the company to become the director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Symposium, an annual ideas conference for the industry. He is one of the pioneers of direct trade, a practice that revolutionized how coffee is sourced: if you ever had a coffee from a particular farm or micro-lot, direct trade gets some of the credit.
“I’m continually inspired by what Peter has done,” said James Freeman, the founder of Blue Bottle Coffee. “What he has implemented is a guidepost for all of us, and it’s something we aspire to do as well. I’ll also say that he’s done more than anybody. Nobody’s a close second.”
Mr. Giuliano, 40, has been in the business since 1988, when he was asked to pull a shift as a barista after a co-worker failed to show up for work. He went to Counter Culture Coffee, based in Durham, N.C., in 2000. The following year, he started visiting the farms that supplied Counter Culture as the company’s buyer — a highly unusual practice at the time for a small regional roaster.
“I was on a mission that year to really figure out what made coffee taste like it did,” Mr. Giuliano said. “After having worked in coffee for 13 years already, I was finally understanding coffee preparation, roasting and tasting, and I was finally ready to go deeper into agriculture. I had experienced other food epiphanies in my own front-yard farm, and I knew that there was something to discover by spending time working on coffee farms. Turns out, that was the beginning of an entirely new rabbit hole.”
The rabbit hole was direct trade, a practice in which small-batch roasters establish personal relationships with coffee farms and cooperatives. By opening up what had historically been an opaque system in which prices were largely set by the commodity market, Counter Culture Coffee, Intelligentsia Coffee and Tea and a handful of other roasters were trying to improve quality by paying more for better products — and by making sure that the increased income went to the growers — while giving feedback and sharing technical expertise.
“It’s a coffee trading paradigm that emphasizes direct interaction, transparency, quality and equity between coffee roaster and farmer,” said Mr. Giuliano.
By 2003, he had established the practices for Counter Culture Coffee’s direct trade program. It set a standard for how coffee is ethically sourced.
Mr. Giuliano sees a clear link between his work with direct trade and new role with the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Symposium, a series of lectures and discussions that is attended by coffee professionals from around the world. It will next be held in Boston in 2013. (Disclosure: earlier this year, I participated in a panel discussion at Symposium 2012 on coffee and the media.)
“Great coffee is this magical thing, a culinary network that connects farmers in developing countries to craft roasters here to drinkers in homes and coffee shops all over the world,” Mr. Giuliano said. “Symposium is the place where that network comes together to understand each other, and the shared challenges we face. It’s also where those with industry-changing ideas come to share their work.”