Meinl’s tenure as President officially started on 1 January, replacing her predecessor Heather Perry who acted as President for 2019.
The SCA is a global membership-based non-profit organization with offices based in the UK and the US. Its purpose is to provide a voice and substance to the opportunities for specialty coffee worldwide while increasing the sustainable global specialty coffee community and supporting activities to make specialty coffee an equitable, thriving, and sustainable venture for the whole value chain.
The organization was created in 2017 following the merger of the Specialty Coffee Associations of America and Europe (SCAA and SCAE) and now contains 14,000 members across 35 chapters. Meinl will work as the SCA’s third President, having served as Vice President in 2019, following her election to the SCAE board of directors in 2014.
For this year, Meinl intends to increase the sustainable specialty coffee program, enlarge the SCA’s global network that supports local communities, and increase diversity within the organization.
She started her career as both a clinical tropical microbiologist and medical doctor practicing in Austria, Tanzania, and England; it was Meinl’s constant passion and her enthusiasm for coffee, which led her to join the Julius Meinl team in 2010. She will proceed in her duty as Head of Innovations at Julius Meinl, in addition to her new responsibilities as SCA President.
