WHO GETS TO STEER SPECIALTY COFFEE NEXT
Coffee Culture — 20 September 2026
The SCA’s live board-election process puts representation, trade, quality and accountability at the centre of specialty coffee’s next decision.
Specialty coffee has never been short of opinions about standards. The more consequential question is who gets a formal hand in setting the agenda. This September, the Specialty Coffee Association’s election process makes that question unusually visible.
Three director seats are open for terms running from 1 January 2027 to 31 December 2029. The SCA’s initial slate names Ahmed Bin Sulayem, executive chairman and CEO of DMCC; Sunalini N. Menon, president of Coffeelab Limited; and Karsten Ranitzsch, global head of coffee at Nestlé Nespresso S.A. The names are not an outcome. They are the opening proposition in a process that remains open to candidates nominated by petition through 30 September.
That distinction is worth holding onto. A prospective petition candidate needs at least 100 signatures from eligible SCA voting members to join the ballot. The final ballot is scheduled for 13 October. Voting is planned for 1–30 November only if the candidate field exceeds the three available seats, with results scheduled for 15 December. In other words, the drama is not a personality contest imported from elsewhere. It is a procedural window in which membership decides whether the proposed slate is the final field.
For working coffee people, governance can sound distant from the daily calibration of a grinder or the logistics of a busy Saturday. Yet associations influence the forums in which quality, education, sustainability and professional standards are discussed. The candidate backgrounds on the current slate make the reach of that conversation plain: commodity-trade infrastructure, coffee quality and a global coffee company each bring different experience to the room.
Sydney’s specialty scene benefits when those discussions are not treated as abstract headquarters business. A café floor is where a customer encounters the accumulated choices of producers, importers, trainers, roasters and baristas. The vocabulary may be technical, but its effect is practical: how coffee is assessed, who shares knowledge and which parts of the chain are heard when standards evolve.
The SCA board has 15 volunteer members, and its directors serve three-year terms. Eligible voters are current Professional members or the primary contacts for company memberships as of 1 September; each company membership receives one vote. Ballots are issued by email through eBallot. That makes this a specialist democratic mechanism, not a public referendum, but it is still a live reminder that representation in coffee is constructed through participation.
There is no need to predict a winner. The sharper point is that specialty coffee is large enough to need governance, and close enough to working practice that those choices travel quickly. The petition deadline offers a brief, useful pause to ask who is represented before the ballot arrives.