South India Coffee Company

Founded in 2017 by fifth-generation coffee producers Akshay Dashrath and Komal Sable, the South India Coffee Company is far more than a trading house or an export business. It is a movement - a deliberate, values-driven effort to bring the extraordinary diversity of Indian specialty coffee to the attention of the global roasting community. Komal and Akshay both grew up in coffee families in Coorg and spent years in the United Kingdom, where they were struck repeatedly by the near-total absence of Indian coffee from specialty menus. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, Colombian Huila, Guatemalan Antigua - all were familiar and celebrated. India, one of the world's oldest and most storied coffee-producing nations, was invisible. They returned home determined to change that.

SICC operates across a network of partner farms in Coorg, Chikmagalur, Baba Budangiri, and Odisha - sourcing, quality-checking, and exporting specialty-grade green coffee to roasters in the USA, UK, Europe, Singapore, Japan, and the Middle East. But the company's relationship with its partner farms goes well beyond commerce. SICC provides free soil testing and fertility management advice, assists with processing infrastructure investment, runs training workshops on selective harvesting and fermentation, and supplies free fertiliser to small and medium-scale producers in its network. The goal is not just to find great coffee but to help create it.

At the heart of SICC's work is a conviction that Indian coffee suffers not from a lack of quality but from a lack of visibility and a historical supply chain that flattened diversity into commodity blends. The company's solution has been to build direct, transparent relationships with individual farms and individual lots - giving roasters the traceability and story they need to present Indian coffee with the same confidence they bring to any other great origin. Their work has played a meaningful role in the growing international reputation of Indian specialty coffee over the past decade.

SICC Labs, the company's research and development wing, investigates some of the most pressing questions facing Indian coffee's future: how to breed climate-resilient varieties, how to process rare species like Excelsa to specialty standards, how to adapt fermentation methods developed in Central America and Africa to India's specific microclimates and infrastructure. It is serious, rigorous scientific work conducted in the spirit of open sharing - findings are published and discussed within the Indian specialty community rather than hoarded as competitive advantage. For El Bueno, SICC is not just a supplier but a partner in the truest sense: an organisation whose values, ambitions, and understanding of coffee align completely with our own.