Mexico
Speaker
Mario Fernández
Technical Officer, Specialty Coffee Association (Mexico)
Mario Fernández is the eighth generation of a coffee-growing family that has been involved in the crop since 1830 in Coatepec, Veracruz (Mexico), one of the municipalities with the longest coffee-growing tradition in the country.
A food technologist by training, with a Master's degree in Food Science from the University of Montpellier II (France) and a PhD in Food Science from the University of Otago (New Zealand), Mario has dedicated his 30-year career to understanding the relationships between coffee taste, the factors that determine it, and the way it is perceived and interpreted by humans.
He has worked as a technical expert in non-profit organisations such as the Consejo Regulador del Café-Veracruz, the Universidad Veracruzana, the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) and, most recently, the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA), where he has been Technical Director for the past three years.
In his current role, he is responsible for the development of standards for the specialty coffee sector and is working on the development of the Coffee Evaluation System, a new methodology for analysing and evaluating the many attributes that can be important in a specialty coffee.
