The MCC origin story

When Jim and I founded MCC, I had lived in Madagascar for about 15 years, and during that time I kept hearing stories about high-quality Malagasy coffee. People talked about unique varieties, exceptional flavor, and a history of coffee that was much richer than what you could see in daily life.

Because, honestly, living here day to day, you did not taste, drink nor see it. It was always a 'myth'. This was unfortunate as I love coffee.

The coffee sold on the side of the road was often roasted until it is carbonized. It is roasted so dark that people needed a lot of milk and sugar just to make it drinkable. To be honest, with enough milk and sugar, it tastes like candy. 

When you wanted a genuinely good cup of coffee, you often had to look for imported coffee. And even that was usually stale and outdated by the time it reached the supermarket shelf.

There was a disconnect.

On one hand, there were these stories about extraordinary Malagasy coffee. On the other, there was the reality of what people were drinking.

I wanted to chase those stories down.

Looking for Coffee Without Knowing What I Was Looking At

I began driving to different coffee-growing regions around Madagascar.

I would arrive in a commune or a village and start asking questions.

Who grows coffee here?

Who still has coffee trees?

Who has coffee that I can buy?

I asked farmers if they would sell me small samples. Then I collected whatever I could find and brought it back with me.

The truth is, I knew almost nothing about coffee at the time. (Fake it until you make it....)

People would show me green coffee, and I could not tell whether it was good quality or defective.

They would take me into their fields and show me coffee trees, and I could not tell whether the trees were healthy, productive, diseased, or dying.

I had no idea what I was looking at.

When I started, I did not even know that coffee came from a red cherry.

But I kept collecting samples.

Taking Malagasy Coffee to Kenya

Eventually, I flew to Kenya with the samples I had collected.

There, I visited a coffee laboratory and met Mbula from Utake coffee, and her team. They hosted me for several days and took the coffee through a proper evaluation process.

They analyzed the green coffee.

They roasted the samples.

Then we cupped them together.

It was an amazing experience.

For the first time, I began to understand how coffee is evaluated. I started to understand what coffee buyers were looking for and what they actually meant by sweetness, acidity, body, balance, and flavor. Maybe most important I started to learn how can a sensory experience reveal what happened on the farm and during processing.

We spent three days analyzing and tasting about a dozen samples.

By the end, I was filled with excitement and caffeine.

Then Mbula gave me the feedback.

She said:

There is good news, and there is bad news.

The good news was that the coffee varieties had real potential. There was natural sweetness, flavor, and complexity. The coffee already contained a lot of interesting attributes.

The bad news was that the post-harvest processing was extremely poor.

That was the lightbulb moment.

Finding MCC’s Role

The problem was not that Madagascar lacked good coffee.

The potential was already there.

The problem was that the quality was being lost after harvest.

Coffee can begin with an interesting variety and good natural flavor, but if the cherries are harvested poorly, dried incorrectly, mixed with defects, or stored badly, much of that potential disappears before the coffee ever reaches a roaster.

That was where we began to see a role for MCC.

This was a place where we could add value.

We could help preserve what was already naturally present in the coffee.

So that is what we did.

We invested in post-harvest processing equipment and imported machinery from abroad. We watched YouTube videos. We called coffee experts. We asked basic questions and tried to learn as quickly as we could.

How should the coffee be sorted?

How should it be dried?

How do we prevent defects?

How do we establish basic quality control?

We were learning as we went.

And the results came quickly.

In one year, we went from coffees scoring around 78 to 82 points to producing coffees scoring between 84 and 87.

That changed everything.

All of a sudden, specialty coffee importers and roasters began paying attention.

There was demand.

There was excitement.

And, for the first time, we had real proof that high-quality Malagasy coffee was not just a story from the past.

It was something that could be built again.

From Proof to Scale

Those early results gave us the vision—and the faith—to keep going.

We now knew that the market existed.

We knew that buyers would respond to the coffee if we could deliver quality consistently.

The next question became much bigger:

How do we scale it?

How do we produce more coffee without losing the quality that made people pay attention in the first place?

And just as importantly, how do we build that same confidence and motivation among farmers?

For MCC, the long-term opportunity is not simply to produce a few exceptional lots.

It is to help create a coffee sector in which farmers can see coffee as a viable livelihood again.

That means connecting better agricultural practices, better post-harvest processing, stronger quality control, and real market access.

It means showing farmers that the additional work required to improve quality can lead to better prices and more dependable income.

And it means building a system in which the story of high-quality Malagasy coffee is no longer something people only remember or talk about.

It becomes something farmers can grow, buyers can purchase, and coffee drinkers can experience for themselves.

MCC began with an investigation.

It began with driving through coffee-growing regions, asking questions, collecting samples, and admitting that I did not know what I was looking at.

What we found was simple but powerful:

The potential had been there all along.

Our job was to help bring it forward.