- Rewarding individual skill in roasting competitions no longer reflects how value is added in modern specialty coffee
- As roasting becomes more collaborative, recognising brands over individuals may better reflect how excellence is created and sustained
- Competitions like the Global Coffee Awards exist to celebrate this paradigm shift
Roasting competitions have traditionally celebrated individual skill, awarding titles to head roasters or competitors rather than the businesses they represent. This format reflects coffee roasting as a craft – one that values technical precision, consistency, and experience.
However, as specialty coffee has grown and matured, roasting has become increasingly collaborative. From sourcing and logistics to profiling and service, quality is now shaped by multiple actors across the value chain.
As a result, the relevance of individual recognition in roasting competitions is increasingly being questioned, particularly in terms of how accurately it reflects quality and excellence.
Roasting is not an individual pursuit
In commercial settings, roasting no longer exists in isolation. Instead, it sits within a broader system of decisions and interactions that begin long before coffee enters the roaster and continue after it leaves.
For many specialty coffee businesses, this system is structured around teams rather than individuals. Green buying decisions, storage setups, production workflows, and service all influence the final results – often in ways that are not visible in competition settings.
Vytautas Kratulis is the Founder and Owner of Huracán Coffee, which was recently announced as the winner of the Global Coffee Awards World Championships. He believes the increasing recognition of brands over individuals reflects the reality of how coffee is produced today.
“Awarding the individual roaster, of course, celebrates the understanding of what to do with coffee – you need to know how to roast it well, how to repeat it, how to control the curve, how to read the machine,” he says. “But if we’re honest – in the real world, that’s only one chapter of the story.”
Within the wider framework, the act of roasting itself is link in a longer chain, rather than the defining act.
“Recognising an individual roaster, of course, captures something real. But it’s a bit like praising the drummer and forgetting the band,” he says. “It reflects the craft, but not quite the whole picture of how coffee is actually appreciated today.”
The reality of recognising quality in coffee
This reflects a broader shift in specialty coffee, where quality is increasingly coming to be recognised as the outcome of systems, rather than individuals. Despite this, most competitions continue to recognise individual success.
“When recognition goes to a single individual, something important gets left out,” Vytautas says. “A result like this is never built by one person; it comes from many layers – sourcing, decisions, tasting, and preparation.”
In short – individual recognition can reinforce the idea of mastery, but it may also simplify a process that is inherently collective. Competitions that reward individuals may not fully account for the systems (and other people) that enable consistent quality at scale.
“That’s why, in reality, a competition result carries more weight for the brand – for the team – than for the individual. Because the individual stands there for a moment. But the routine that made it possible is what stays,” Vytautas adds.
At the same time, individual expertise remains important. Roasters bring their acquired skills and a point of view – interpreting coffee, managing variables, and maintaining consistency.
“It matters to recognise the individual. Not because they own the result – but because they carry a point of view; they set a line others can follow, or question,” Vytautas says.
This balance suggests that the issue is not whether individuals should be recognised, but whether that recognition is sufficient on its own.
A shift toward brand-based recognition
As the industry evolves, some competition formats are beginning to reflect this broader reality. Rather than focusing solely on individuals, they aim to recognise the systems, teams, and environments that produce quality.
The Global Coffee Awards – which recently recognised Huracán Coffee as the world’s best roaster – is one such awards competition. It seeks to award both producers and brands across a number of categories, rather than award individual roasters for coffee preparation or knowledge.
“What matters – and what I see in formats like the Global Coffee Awards – is the attempt to connect more of the chain in one place. Because that’s closer to reality, and that’s where it starts to make sense,” Vytautas says. “Expertise is not just what one person knows. It’s what a system is able to sustain.”
This perspective aligns with emerging competition and scoring models that attempt to incorporate more of the value chain into evaluation. By doing so, they move closer to how quality is created in practice, rather than how it is traditionally represented.
Looking ahead, this may change how success is understood across the industry – where expertise becomes less about a single performer, and more about what a team or organisation can consistently deliver.
This reflects a maturing sector, where consistency, repeatability, and collaboration are increasingly valued alongside individual skill. At the same time, it allows brands to reap the benefits from competition success in the long term, rather than being attributed solely to one person.
“A medal is never the achievement of one person. A barista or a roaster is a hero – but only within a much longer story,” Vytautas says. “Champions move on, build their careers. They take their titles with them. The brand, the team, stays with what was built.”
Roasting competitions have long played a role in shaping how excellence is defined in specialty coffee. In doing so, they have also influenced how success is perceived across the industry, often reinforcing individual achievement over collective effort.
As the industry continues to evolve, they may also need to adapt – not by abandoning the individual, but by increasingly recognising brands and the systems they use that make excellence possible.
