Brewing Resilience
Across the world, coffee is a daily ritual. Learn what it takes to protect that ritual – and how illycaffè supports quality in every cup.
For billions of people across the globe, coffee is part of the rhythm of everyday life. The first cup of the morning. A moment shared with friends. A familiar ritual played out in homes, cafés, and workplaces.
Yet behind every cup is something far more complex. Before coffee reaches consumers, it begins life as a crop shaped by the conditions in which it grows. Much of it is grown within the coffee belt itself—a band of land around the equator where conditions traditionally allow coffee plants to thrive. However, today, those conditions are coming under threat. Rising temperatures, changing rainfall levels, and extreme weather are disrupting coffee-growing conditions and creating a more favorable environment for pests and diseases.
For an industry built around such a sensitive agricultural product, maintaining quality is an ever-evolving challenge. Cristina Scocchia, Chief Executive Officer of illycaffè, describes coffee as a “living agricultural product”, whose quality depends on a finely tuned balance of soil, climate, and agricultural expertise. “Quality doesn’t come for free,” she explains. “Quality doesn’t simply happen.”
The question becomes, therefore: As growing conditions change, how can the industry protect the crop – and the quality people around the world have come to expect?
The answer starts with soil. For agronomists like César Augusto Correa Candiano, protecting the future of coffee begins from the ground up. Working alongside growers, César analyzes soil, leaves, and yields to understand what coffee plants need, while increasingly looking to regenerative agriculture to strengthen the land itself.
This might mean planting cover crops around coffee plants, minimizing the use of chemicals, and recycling nutrients naturally. The goal is healthier soil and more resilient plantations—something César believes is essential to preserving coffee-growing land for generations to come.
But expertise doesn’t only travel in one direction. In Tanzania, illycaffè discovered that coffee growers have been using a certain type of deep-rooted grass to help prevent soil erosion and conserve water. A regenerative practice born from farming experience rather than scientific theory.
For David Brussa, Chief Total Quality & Sustainability Officer at illycaffè, discoveries like this demonstrate the value of looking beyond the laboratory for answers. It’s an exchange of knowledge that really matters. Because, when you’re dealing with such a complex product, ensuring quality depends on learning from every stage of its journey.
“Like olive oil and wine, the taste [of coffee is] dependent on the type of soil,” David explains. From fertility and farming practices to the way the beans themselves are roasted, numerous variables can influence the final cup.
And managing these variables has long been central to illycaffè’s approach. Coffee itself is remarkably complex—green coffee contains around 300 molecules, rising to around 1,200 after roasting. With so many variables at play, the challenge is maintaining consistent quality and taste, cup after cup. For illycaffè, that means applying scientific knowledge at every step, while drawing on expertise from across the wider network.
It’s a time-proven approach rooted in more than 90 years of illycaffè history. While the pressures faced by coffee producers have evolved, Cristina emphasizes that the company’s mission has always remained constant. “We really believe in superior, sustainable quality,” she affirms, “and we will never change the essence of the company.”
Achieving this goal in a changing climate, however, increasingly depends on the network behind every cup: The growers tending the land, the agronomists helping them adapt, and the scientists and experts working to maintain a consistent taste.
As the conditions surrounding coffee continue to change, so too must the practices that sustain it. By learning from one another and adapting together, the people behind the world’s daily ritual can help ensure that what changes in the field doesn’t change what we experience in the cup.
