Cancellation of Mystery Coffee Vacation 2025

2025-04-02

Over the years producing The Barista League we have believed that the reason to compete shouldn’t be defined by the prize involved in winning, but in wanting to learn, connect, have a great time and push yourself.  Despite that, we have had high ambitions to also be able to offer wild prizes.  Thanks to our amazing partners we have offered espresso machines, scales, grinders, brewing + cocktail kits, subscriptions and so much cool swag.  The capstone of the prize in the past few years has been our Mystery Coffee Vacation – a trip for our winners to meet each other, visit a country (often a producing origin) and learn together as a community of champions.

Funding and delivering this trip has been a challenge and it is a testament to the patience, generosity and commitment to baristas of our amazing partners and local hosts that we have been able to offer this at all.

In 2025 however we have made the very tough decision to cancel this trip for the champions of 2024.  It was a decision made only after every other alternative was exhausted and was made so that we can continue producing our events and champion’s trips in the future. In the letter below, we explain the details behind the decision and the prize that we offered as a replacement to our champions.  The majority of the champions have been outstandingly gracious and understanding despite the disappointment. Their reaction and support reminds us why we love to work in this industry with such great people. Some of our champs have taken it less well and we have been met with our share of well deserved frustration, disappointment and (less appreciated) threats of social media and legal action.

The situation in the world right now, between political instability, wars, climate change and a coffee price crisis has affected everyone and we are not immune. The fact that this has come at the expense of a prize trip for our champions pains us. We hope that our actions in the past 10 years as well as our commitment to our values over the coming 10 years will contribute to repairing the loss of confidence in us.

-Steve Moloney. Founder of The Barista League and CEO of Ordna Event Agency AB.

This is the letter sent to our 2024 Champions

Dear  winner of The Barista League 2024,

First and foremost, congratulations again on winning The Barista League! Your engagement with The Barista League and the community is what makes our events so special and we are so proud to have you as part of it.

We were so excited to celebrate with you on this year’s Mystery Coffee Vacation. However, after months of planning and exploring all possible options, we have made the incredibly difficult decision to cancel this year’s trip.

What are we offering instead?

Our commitment to your development as coffee professionals is still our priority, and though we cannot offer a trip this year, we do want to offer you a prize that we hope will scratch the same itch.  So, we have the following alternatives for you:

1. A 7500 SEK stipend per person – This is yours, no strings attached, though we hope it supports your growth as a coffee professional. See below for more details.

2. A trip to a Barista League event – An Invite to any The Barista League event in the coming 18 months with costs covered up to 7,500 SEK per person.

3. A donation to Grounds for Health – We will donate 7500 SEK in your name to support their incredible work.

Why have we made this decision?

1.         The Financial Factor

Purely due to the number of winners – the trip has become almost prohibitively expensive to produce. We have, over the past 2 years, found it very difficult to procure partners to help share the costs of this trip.  While we have great local partners, just the cost of international flights for all of you equals more than 30,000 EUR. [Va2]  On top of that we have the costs in country of travel, accommodation, food, activities and more. 

If money was unlimited, then this would not be a problem, but we have to maintain our priority to producing our events and keeping them free for you all to compete and cheap to attend.  The reality is that today there is more uncertainty in the market today (politics, wars and C price crisis) which is leading much reduced marketing spend and a general lack of confidence in future spending.

We have never charged to compete at The Barista League or put the cost of our events on baristas, but without an unlimited bucket of cash we need to make tough decisions to make sure we can maintain that commitment to keeping the events financially accessible.

2.       The Environmental Factor

As people and as a company, one of our values is to reduce our environmental impact on the world as much as possible.  The mystery coffee vacation, flying 30 people around the world, is one of our biggest contributors to carbon emissions as a company and contributes around 24t of C02.  This equates to the equivalent of the whole carbon footprint from 3-4 TBL events. This is something that we struggle to balance between the experience we want to deliver and our commitment to sustainability.

3.       The Team Factor

The past two years have stretched our team significantly.  We produced 21+ events in 2023 and 16 events in 2024 with a team of just 10-12 people.  The consequence of this has been that our team has been under extreme pressure to deliver this quantity of events at the quality that we strive for. The responsibility of this is purely mine, but I do not want to run a company that isn’t sustainable for my colleagues and friends that pour their energy and passion into these projects for you all.  Therefore, we have been making a bunch of changes both to our projects and organization in order to be able to produce the absolute best version of each of our projects.    The Mystery Coffee Vacation is a project that brings so much joy to our competitors and the participants on the trip, but has caused a lot of stress and difficulties to our internal team.  We hope that these changes will allow us to bring the MCV back in a more sustainable form in the future.

We know this is disappointing, and I take full responsibility for this decision as I try and ensure we have a sustainable company and team of people that can continue to deliver The Barista League into the future.  If you would like to discuss this further, we would love to talk to you – please respond to this email and we will schedule a time to chat.

Thank you for being part of The Barista League, and we hope to see you at an event soon.

Steve Moloney

Founder of The Barista League