The Cup of Excellence is an annual competition held in several countries to identify the highest quality coffees produced.
[1] The Cup of Excellence has worked to fundamentally change the high quality coffee industry and has supported advances in farming and premiums to farmers that would have been impossible without it[citation needed].
This project was devised by Pablo Dubois, Head of Operations of the ICO and Frans Bolvenkel, of the International Trade Centre (ITC) at a meeting in Geneva in late 1994.
This project, supervised by the ICO, managed by the ITC and largely financed by the Common Fund for Commodities, ran from 1995 to 2000, and aimed to develop methodologies for the creation of new "gourmet" or high-quality speciality coffees.
[2] As of 2020, competitions are held in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Burundi, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Rwanda.