STiR coffee and tea magazine

60 STiR coffee and tea | 2026 Quarter 2 Summer (Jun/July/Aug) CQI 2026 Educator of the Year Javier Hoyos Garcia of Colombia, works in postharvest processing education, to strengthen individuals' coffee skills, restore confidence, and open up opportunities for producers. Photo credit: Coffee Quality Institute As long as producers understand that there's a market for whatever those other profiles are, postharvest processing innovation is really exciting and can accelerate a farm or estate's ability to break through and become price makers instead of price tak- ers in the market. STiR: During the annual CQI luncheon at World of Coffee San Diego, you spoke about the need to increase the number of educators and partners at origin. How do you plan on doing that? Sheridan: We have educators and partners. Let me talk first about educators. I men- tioned earlier that CQI is an educational and development organization. On the educa- tion side, what we did with the Q and replicated for the PHP program was effectively to create a market, an ecosystem for coffee education that involved the identification, training, testing, and certification of instructors, who are coffee education entrepreneurs. There is then a private marketplace for the CQI courses that these educators can enter. We have historically struggled to build robust market systems or coffee education ecosystems in the places where coffee grows. But we are working hard to remedy that. As we continue to build and expand our system, CQI's ability to scale will really be determined by the breadth and quality of our educator network, so we're actively working on that. It is a little different for the PHP pro- gram because there are cupping labs every- where there's coffee, but there aren't mills everywhere. There are only mills in the places where coffee is produced. So the expertise and knowledge are right there, closer to origin. We have a Global Coffee Fund that invests in expanding access to education and helps develop more coffee educators. An important part of that is the provision on the supply side, and making our system more representative, more ro- bust, and more present in the places where coffee is grown and where this education really needs to take root. On the partner side, our partnership agenda at origin is the development side of the organization. How do we identify organizations in coffee-growing regions that share our mission and values and are committed to coffee education? Over the years, we have had a partnership platform around the world, a network of In-Coun- try Partners. Most of those have been in origin countries. I think the conversations we've had around new projects for our Global Cof- fee Fund have really regarded our In- Country Partners as partners of prefer- ence as we begin to mobilize our own project investments. As more and more donor funding comes online, whether that's industry funding or a return to publicly funded international develop- ment work, we see a real role for those organizations in helping us implement and get the work done on the ground in collaboration with our educator network. Overall, CQI has a very clear focus on origin. We're unique in our mandate on origin. But we are also very clear that the coffee supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link — an old adage that's stuck around because it's true. We want to do things at origin that are relevant to producers and improve the quality of coffee they produce. But the livelihood part, the ability to translate CQI's development side works on the ground with producers to implement good practices in the field and processing centers. Photo credit: Coffee Quality Institute

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