The Potential of Sustainable Economics in Specialty Coffee: The Story of Fuglen | Einar Holthe | Coffee Retail Summit
Visiting Fuglen’s retail shops in Oslo, Norway or Tokyo, Japan, you’re met with beautiful design and delicious coffee.
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You might never guess that these shops drive a business committed to transparency and sustainability in the coffee value chain. Einar Holthe, Founder and CEO of Fuglen, will show us how retail can serve as a model for ways to improve cityscapes and build sustainable value chains beyond coffee.
About the Presenter
Einar Holthe, Founder and CEO
Fuglen
Einar K. Holthe is the Founder of Fuglen, both in Oslo and Tokyo, becoming CEO in 2002, at the age of 20. Einar still owns the company to this day, and he’s cited as a key figure in the rise of Oslo as one of the major direct trade coffee cities in the world.
Einar started his coffee career in 2001, working alongside Tim Wendelboe at Stockfleths, Oslo, a small specialty coffee chain of which he became CEO in 2006. By 2007, Einar had become the Norwegian Barista Champion, and in 2008 he bought what was formerly Kaffefuglen and founded Fuglen, before going on to open the company’s first Tokyo-based store in 2012, serving to establish the brand as a home of key specialty coffee locations in both Europe and East Asia.
Building on the company’s continued growth in the late 2000s, Fuglen Coffee Roasters Tokyo was established in 2014, becoming the first of the brand’s three Japan-based roasteries, coupling with two Oslo-based roasting operations.
In 2017 Einar founded the strategic development company Natural State, and this year he delivered a sustainability strategy to the Norwegian Coffee Association, outlining a 10-year plan focused on value chain equitability and sustainability. Einar claims that everything he learned about value chains and the practical economics of the market comes from working with trade transparency in the coffee industry.
Find all of the presentations from this event in the freely available Coffee Retail Summit Resource Library or learn more about our upcoming Coffee Retail Summits at retail.sca.coffee.