Cup of Excellence partners with Siip to surface winning coffees

Cup of Excellence’s winning lots are moving out of the auction room and onto a consumer app, with Alliance for Coffee Excellence linking its member brands to Siip so elite coffees can show up where everyday drinkers actually shop. The deal is built around a simple change with big stakes for specialty coffee: if a Cup of Excellence coffee has already earned status inside the trade, Siip will help translate that status into visibility for home brewers, with an ACE member profile and ACE Member badge created automatically and no extra setup required.

That shift matters because competition coffee has long been easy to admire and hard to buy. ACE said the partnership was meant to make “the world’s best coffees” more understandable and actionable for consumers, not just top-scoring on paper. Siip organizes discovery around taste preferences, not only origin names or roaster branding, which gives a buyer a more direct path from a cup they enjoy to the farm and producer behind it. For small lots that depend on storytelling, that kind of discovery layer can be the difference between remaining a collector’s item and becoming a repeat purchase.

Siip brings a built-in audience to that effort. The company says it was founded in 2023 by Nick Spilger and now indexes more than 30,000 coffees from more than 3,000 roasters. Its subscription starts at about $18 per bag and sends two bags a month with free shipping, a model that puts competition coffees into the same kind of recurring buying behavior that has already shaped much of the specialty market. If the integration sticks, it could make Cup of Excellence coffees easier to encounter outside auction catalogs and buyer spreadsheets, which is exactly the visibility problem ACE is trying to solve.

The partnership also fits a broader history that has always tied Cup of Excellence to market access. The program began in Brazil in 1999, created the first online auction platform for coffee, and moved to the Alliance for Coffee Excellence in 2002. ACE says the competition has since involved thousands of farmers, jurors, and supporters across 17 countries, and it enters 2026 with 11 coffee-producing countries on the calendar. That same push for reach showed up again in January, when ACE and the International Women’s Coffee Alliance renewed their partnership to expand women’s participation in competitions, training, and market access. Put together, the moves suggest ACE is no longer content to crown great coffees and send them into the trade’s back rooms. It wants the cups to be seen, understood, and bought.