Discover Coffee

Kentaro Maruyama, who’s both the owner of Maruyama Coffee and a buyer for the company, spends about six months of the year making visits to growing areas around the world.
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a coffee buyer with that kind of schedule. What explains his tireless, globetrotting itinerary?For Kentaro, being a buyer goes beyond just buying beans.

As a buyer, you can head to a growing area, sample coffee, and buy your favorite beans—
but that alone doesn’t guarantee that you’ll find the very best products available.
How does Kentaro go about the task? The answer is so simple that it might come off as a bit anticlimactic: he simply talks with the growers.

Kentaro’s buying philosophy revolves around the source.
Growing areas are where all the latest information converges, creating vibrant settings where Kentaro and growers can talk about recent activities, evolving cultivation methods, trends in the global coffee market, barista competitions, and all the other fluid changes affecting the industry.
At the source, thoughts and perspectives on coffee can come together with dynamic clarity and immediacy.

Talking face-to-face helps build closer, trusting friendships with growers, too—
and cultivating that confidence is a buyer’s most crucial responsibility.
If a buyer wins a grower’s trust and works to foster a fruitful partnership,
the grower will provide a supply of the finest beans possible
without the need for any careful control or supervision.
Kentaro might be halfway around the world right now, chatting with a grower
and building trust over a cup of exquisite coffee straight from the source.