165 Vendors. 1.3 Minutes Each. No Regrets.

165 Vendors. 1.3 Minutes Each. No Regrets. World of Coffee — San Diego, April 2025

San Diego in April. The Gaslamp District humming with bodies, overpriced hotel rooms, and the particular electricity that only happens when an entire industry decides to show up in the same zip code at the same time. We'd done this dance before fourteen shows over the years but this one was different. You could feel it in the handshakes. Something sharper. Something urgent. Like everyone on that floor knew something was shifting and didn't want to be the last one to figure it out.

Michael, Ly, and I set out to hit all 165 vendors. Do the math and that's 1.3 minutes per booth across two days — not counting the lines, the under roasted coffee, the surprisingly good coffee, or the twenty-minute conversation that ambushes you at booth 47 and derails your entire afternoon itinerary. We made it to roughly a hundred. I'm calling that a win.

So what does any of this actually buy you? More than you'd think. There's the obvious stuff sourcing new green bean suppliers, eyeballing new equipment, getting a read on where the industry is heading before it gets there. But the real currency is the relationships. The people you've been talking to on the phone for a year, the ones who know your roast profile and your sourcing philosophy you shake their hand, you look them in the eye, and suddenly it's real. That matters.

The gear caught our attention too. There's a new espresso tamper making the rounds that takes the guesswork out of tamping engineered for consistency, for the kind of repeatable pull that separates a good shot from a great one. The kind of thing that looks like a small detail until you realize small details are the whole game.

On the green bean side, we found suppliers doing the work we care about sustainability that isn't a marketing term, relationships with growers that actually mean something. People and product. In that order. Finding partners who operate the same way is worth every overpriced hotel night.

And then there were the syrups, the matcha, the alternative milks. The world is changing and the coffee world is changing with it. Case in point: pistachio milk. Never heard of it before. Now I have. I don't know what to do with that information yet but ignoring it would be a mistake.

That's why we go. Not for the swag bags or the free samples. We go because the industry is alive out there on that floor, and you don't get to be part of it by staying home.

See you at the next one.