The Cost of Competing

For many, elite coffee competitions represent the pinnacle of the industry. But the huge costs to compete prevent those without financial support from participating—and harm the industry as a whole.

Lee Jong Hoon competing at the 2015 World Barista Championships. Via Flickr.

In March, María Elena Rivera won the 2024 Costa Rican Barista Championship, giving her the chance to compete at the World Barista Championship (WBC) in Busan, Korea, in May. This was her second win at the national level—five years ago, she travelled to the United States and ended up reaching the semi-finals at the 2019 WBC in Boston.

This year, however, she won’t be travelling to Busan. In a video statement posted to Instagram, Rivera explains that Costa Rica’s Specialty Coffee Association could only cover her costs but not those of her coach or the rest of her team, which would put her at a significant competitive disadvantage. Instead, Rivera has requested a deferral until next year so she has time to raise the funds required.

Although she had tried to find sponsorship that would allow her team to travel with her, there just wasn’t enough time. “It’s difficult to represent your country and also be responsible for raising money in less than two months”, Rivera tells me.

Rivera isn’t alone. The costs of competing in worldwide coffee competitions are often prohibitive for those without sufficient resources or institutional backing, giving an advantage to competitors—often from wealthier consuming countries—who can count on a big company or other sponsor to fund them. Even at the regional level, coffee workers who would love to compete are put off by high entry fees, travel expenses, and the prospect of lost wages.

These might seem like individual dilemmas, but they reveal the coffee industry’s priorities, its preference for glamorous showpiece events that welcome those who can afford to pay and shut out those who can’t. That exclusion isn’t just a problem for contestants—it ensures that coffee’s longstanding power imbalances are maintained.

Life-Changing—and Expensive

The World Barista Championship—now among the industry’s most prestigious competitions, and which is put on by Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) subsidiary World Coffee Event (WCE)—was established in 2000. Back then, it was a smaller and more informal affair. An excellent article in the SCA’s 25 Magazine recalls that “Judges scored both the technical and sensory, whose original standards were derived from horseback riding and gymnastics, and assigned scores to whether the baristas were ‘familiar’ with the machine, checked the grind, and ‘appeared confident’ when ‘frothing milk’”.

Over time, the WBC became increasingly competitive and professionalised, and helped spawn a wave of similar events, including competitions for roasting, brewing, tasting, and more. With the growth of these competitions came extensive media coverage, and the elevation of winners from coffee professionals to minor celebrities. 

Winning WBC in particular can change a contestant’s life, opening career doors and delivering a very specific type of global fame. Some of the most well-known figures in coffee, from James Hoffmann to Saša Šestić to Tim Wendelboe, leveraged their success to effectively turn themselves into coffee brands.

This is a key benefit of winning the WBC, because the actual prize money is pretty meagre compared to the costs of taking part. 2023 winner Boram Um received a cash prize of €5,000 and a trip to origin. Compare this to the overall cost that Morgan Eckroth incurred over the course of the 2022 competition season, from regionals to nationals to the WBC in Australia. Although they tell me that there’s surely a wide variance in money spent among competitors, Eckroth puts the total cost of their participation, not including coffee, at between $10-12,000.

“Throughout all my runs as a competitor, I’ve had some level of financial and resource support from my employers”, Eckroth explains—financial support in the form of entry fees and travel expenses, and resources like access to equipment, practise space, and, crucially, time. “An incalculable cost to competition is the time it takes to compete. When training for Worlds, I was putting in about as many hours as a full-time job every week”.

At the World Barista Championship, competitors and their countries’ coffee associations are responsible for covering all costs. The WBC rules state that “Licensed Competition Bodies are required to pay their Competition Body Champion’s reasonable travel and accommodations expenses to, from, and for the duration of the WBC”. Any other costs or expenses are the responsibility of the competitor, and the rules also helpfully note that “WCE shall not be liable for any competitor expenses under any circumstance”.

If you can’t afford to pay for your coach’s ticket and accommodation, or can’t afford an extra bag fee to fit all the gear and coffee you need, then sorry—you’re out of luck.

Barriers to Entry

Perhaps it’s worth comparing coffee competitions to, say, tennis. Technically, all you need to play tennis is a racquet, a ball, a net, and a friend. If you have access to a wall, you don’t really even need a friend. So on a base level, tennis is accessible to almost anyone. But to actually compete, to win the biggest tournaments and trophies, you need a lot more than a ball and a dream. You need coaching, time to practise, access to courts and clubs, and the money to travel to competitions.

Coffee competitions are the same. Yes, you can compete with a Hario V60 and a bag of beans from your local roaster, but you probably won’t get very far and you certainly won’t win the top trophies. Champion-level routines often involve time-consuming innovations like freeze-distilled milk, sourcing expensive coffees from world-famous farms, and a whole lot of practice and coaching to get to the moment when judges take their first sip.

The costs can stack up even to compete at a regional level. Travel is expensive, accommodation is expensive, taking time off work is difficult or sometimes impossible. “This year I’ve taken around three weeks off and honestly could’ve done with more, which is either the majority of my paid holiday or lost income if I decide I want some time off work to spend with friends and family on holiday”, says Andreas Harestad, the 2024 Norwegian Brewers Cup champion who will be competing at the upcoming World Brewers Cup in Chicago.

Meghan-Annette Reida, who participated as an independent competitor at the 2020 Coffee in Good Spirits regionals, spent about $3,000 in the course of their run on travel, accommodation, and equipment. “It was incredibly expensive and financially stressful”.

Not having the support of a company puts independents at a significant disadvantage, Reida says. “One of the biggest advantages people with a company have is a team to support you. I was fortunate to have competition vets I counted among my friends and to be able to call on them for assistance. But I had no coach, director of coffee, director of training, or coworker to bounce things off of regularly”.

Eckroth agrees. “The cost to compete with a high level of success is almost entirely prohibitive for a competitor to take on without the support of sponsors and/or their employer”, they tell me. “Between the price of competition coffee, repeated travel, wares, practice space, and registration fees, it’s hard to imagine a person working on a barista salary managing it all”.

Some competitors face additional barriers to access, even after logging countless hours or spending significant sums. Multiple national champions have been denied visas to compete in the United States, for instance, including those from Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran’s first-ever barista champion. While some of those visas were finally granted on appeal, it adds another layer of complication and stress to an already daunting process.

Less Elite, More Accessible?

Veronika Bolduc’s experience mirrors that of Rivera: competition success on the national stage but no institutional support to take the next step. Early in her career, Bolduc twice missed out on the World Barista Championship: She won the Czech Coffee in Good Spirits competition in 2014 and the Slovak Barista Championship the next year, but both times was unable to raise the funds to go further.

“Usually, when you win a national championship, the national SCA chapter would sponsor your flight for the world stage”, Bolduc explains. However, “our chapters barely raised enough money to run the championships, so flight tickets would have been a luxury. As a barista, full-time studying at university, I wasn’t ready to become a project manager for my world-stage attendance”.

Having started her own business, which gave her more financial freedom, Bolduc made it on her third attempt, winning the Slovak Brewers Cup and travelling to Dublin for the 2016 World Championship. She followed that up with appearances in Budapest and Belo Horizonte over the next two years. However, despite all this success, she ended up feeling disheartened.

“More and more, I started to feel like there is something wrong with this system. Wasn’t this supposed to be a competition for baristas and coffee people at every part of the supply chain to have fun, inspire the industry and push it forward?” Bolduc says. “How could other baristas with their barista salary and limited resources even afford this? What about baristas from producing countries or developing countries? Shouldn’t the association provide more support and change the competition format to be less elite but more accessible?”

Lots of Money but None to Spare

Events like the World Coffee Championships (WCC) are a great recruitment tool for the specialty coffee industry. They showcase different coffee professions, from brewing to roasting to tasting, and celebrate those who have reached the zenith of their craft. To return to our metaphor, and strain it somewhat, the WCC is like Wimbledon. Everyone wants to compete on that hallowed stage, and those who make it become role models for the next generation. And also like Wimbledon, it takes a lot of practice and a lot of funding to take part.

So what can be done? How can we make the elite coffee competitions accessible to people other than the elite? A good first place to look might be specialty coffee’s trade organisation itself. The SCA listed travel expenses of $673,502 in its 2022 tax filing. It spent over $1.5 million on conferences, conventions, and meetings, while its IT expenses came to $612,020. In the same filing document, the association states that its mission is “to create an effective, authentic and dynamic organization to give voice and substance to the possibilities for speciality coffee worldwide”. Could it not use some of that money to fund a grant program for competitors? (The SCA did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

There are a few private funding options out there. Gear-makers Fellow Products collaborated with Trans & Caffeinated and Color of Coffee Collective to offer a grant for the 2024 US Brewers Cup season to “provide robust competition support to marginalized coffee professionals in order to level the playing field on the competition stage”. At a more grassroots level, organisations like Getchusomegear fundraise to support individual competitors, while Glitter Cat Barista provided competition bootcamps to hundreds of hopefuls over its five-year lifespan.

“I do find it encouraging that there seem to be more and more institutions and grants popping up within the coffee space to support competitors”, says Eckroth. “They’re few and far between, but they’re a great start to providing resources to folks who aren’t able to navigate the intricacies of sourcing sponsorships”.

But in an industry where a full season of competing can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and where support is either conditional on finding sponsorship or individual coffee associations’ financial health, participating can seem out of reach for most. “I won’t lie, it makes zero sense financially for me to do this, beyond that I really want to and enjoy it”, Harestad says. “There are times where I’ve had to think hard if I actually want to dedicate this much resources to competing, as it usually means I have to give up on something else”.

Sustainable, Equitable, and Thriving

Rivera believes the individual countries should do more to secure sponsorships to enable their winners to compete internationally. “It is a challenge for me to be able to change the way these competitions are supported in my country”, she tells me. “I believe that we have a lot of potential, just like any country, but it is a matter of working as a team, which must be made up of different professionals and entities. And it is something that motivates me to continue competing”.

“I think the SCA expense report is where the answers are and where the change should start”, says Bolduc. “I know the change I am seeking is not going to happen, but I would appreciate having support programs for those who cannot afford it. So they could apply for something like a scholarship from the SCA. I believe there is a way to find rules on who could apply for it. Wouldn’t that be great?”

The current system, where coffee institutions host glamorous, globe-trotting competitions built on the skill and tenacity of professionals who shoulder all the pressure and much of the cost, is clearly unfair on competitors. But zooming out, it’s also bad for coffee as a whole—it constrains innovation and keeps the industry from attracting new talent.

On its About page, the SCA’s stated aim is “to foster global coffee communities to support activities to make coffee a more sustainable, equitable, and thriving activity for the whole value chain”. But is coffee really equitable if competitors from producing countries struggle to participate? Is it really sustainable if talented individuals become disenchanted and stop competing? Coffee competitions are an important part of the industry, and they may be thriving, but with their current structure and rules they are far from equitable or sustainable.