Two Cities, One Cupping Table: How a Coffee Exchange Linked Toronto and Vancouver

The premise is straightforward: pair up with another city, trade coffees, and let residents of both places sample unfamiliar roasts while linking the two communities through events held at the same time.

That premise became reality in a Cross Canada Coffee Swap pairing Toronto with Vancouver. The exchange offered a connection more substantial than scrolling social feeds—and it did not require buying a plane ticket across time zones to walk a trade show floor.

According to Vania Ling of Vancouver's Coffee Potluck, the cross-country swap started coming together around the SCA Expo held in Seattle, Washington. "The inspiration for the event sparked from a conversation I had with Ashley Tomlinson of the Little Black Coffee Cup," Ling says. "This year at SCA, we hosted a discussion panel of independent coffee media called Coffee ON:line. Ashley and I thought it would be great to share coffees from our respective cities to increase inclusivity and exposure for the lesser known local roasters. The event was a collaboration between Coffee Potluck and the newly formed Toronto Coffee Community."

Tomlinson and Coffee Potluck asked roasters to submit both "unsung heroes" and flagship representative roasters from each city. Coffee Potluck had already been running monthly tastings, but the swap let participants experience coffee on a national scale: on a single day, both cities tasted the same eight coffees, four sourced from each city.

Toronto's tasting was held at Boxcar Social's Temperance location, with local coffees from Reunion Island, Pilot Coffee Roasters, Hatch, and De Mello Palheta. Vancouver's tasting took place at Nemesis Coffee, featuring Moving Coffee, 32 Lakes Coffee Roasters, Groundswell Roasters, and Regard Coffee Roasters.

"In Vancouver, we hosted an open tasting and a triangulation competition as a way to create an understanding of the National Cup Tasters Competition, which took place on May 21 in Calgary," Ling says.

The swap set out to close the gap between the two cities and to build knowledge about Canadian coffee. The Toronto Coffee Community ran its tasting as a cupping and guided newcomers through the process step by step.

For Alfonso Tupaz, who heads Hatch Coffee—a roaster and cold-brew bottler based in Markham, outside Toronto—the event delivered on its aim of fostering community rather than rivalry. "Coffee is about bringing people together, but it's a bit strange that in Canada, coffee roasters and those in the industry rarely get together," he says. "An event like this helps to bring us together and highlights the coffee community in Toronto."

Tomlinson says organizers hope to stage similar gatherings going forward. "We'd love to do more Canadian coffee swaps, maybe with more than two cities tasting at the same time," she says. "We'd also like to swap with other local coffee communities in the United States and around the world."

Exchanges of this kind put a spotlight on the shared community underpinning specialty coffee and give consumers a way to see coffee as a differentiated product. As Tupaz of Hatch puts it: "The swap helps to adopt the view that we're all in this together, to promote the entire value chain to more people. It's hard to do in an industry where there's a lot of ego and ideas about how coffee should be. Sharing experience and knowledge strengthens the industry as a whole."