Story and Photos By Rachel Apple

This article is the final installment in a five-part series that tackles green buying, financial planning, roasting and quality control, marketing, and educational initiatives, discussing the responsibilities and relationships of each department in your coffee business. You’ll see themes of communication, strategic planning and collaboration. Coffee businesses of different sizes may have fewer departments, or those departments might have slightly different responsibilities, but understanding the information each team needs to complete their tasks and the information they must communicate to other teams to support their tasks will make everyone’s job easier.

If you run a roastery, if you manage a team, if you set standards or approve systems, you are a teacher. Whether or not you claim the role, whether or not you’ve had access to strong mentorship yourself, your actions and choices inform others. The question isn’t whether people are learning from you; it’s what and how they’re learning.

Even without formal instruction, people absorb lessons. Every unclear decision, unexplained standard or inconsistent policy becomes an implicit part of your team’s curriculum. Without clear direction, your staff will inevitably make mistakes and spend more time trying to operate within ineffective systems than building mastery.

The roastery is not just a production site. It’s a point of translation. Every green coffee that arrives brings with it a chain of decisions that were made about how it was cultivated, processed, sorted, purchased and positioned. That work can be preserved and made legible, or it can be lost in translation. Whether these messages are received by the team at the weigh-and-fill station or the person training baristas on flavor, mouthfeel and extraction depends on those guiding the process.

This isn’t abstract theory. Research consistently shows that structured onboarding and clear communication reduce confusion and build early commitment. One longitudinal study titled “Socialization Tactics: Longitudinal Effects on Newcomer Adjustment,” published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2017, found that role clarity during onboarding correlates with stronger performance and retention.

But clarity requires intention, and intention requires time. Many small roasteries operate with thin margins and limited capacity. Teaching well takes effort, and effort requires space. Without it, we risk confusing exhaustion for efficiency. Acknowledging constraints doesn’t absolve their impact. It simply helps us respond with honesty.

In coffee, we often separate education from operations. We treat it like a bonus feature to revisit and develop later, once the busy season slows down. But every part of your operation is already teaching, whether or not it’s intentional. The real question is: Do those lessons align with your values, or quietly contradict them?

Employees notice how questions are answered, who gets access to information, and what behaviors are rewarded or ignored. These interactions shape what they believe about success, safety and belonging. When people are left to fill in the blanks, they don’t just learn less—they often internalize something entirely different. At best, it’s inefficient. At worst, it’s harmful.

Internalized harm doesn’t always look like a fight. Sometimes it looks like withdrawal, or your sharpest thinker going quiet. Sometimes it looks like turnover that could have been prevented with five minutes of honesty.

This article is about what we teach without trying, and what becomes possible when we teach with intention. Not as content creators but as culture builders. Not through slogans but through structure. When we treat education as infrastructure instead of afterthought, we don’t just build competence, we build clarity. And clarity is one of the keys to employee retention, personal fulfillment and long-term success.

INTENTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE

Inconsistent systems don’t just cause errors. They drive churn. Many roasting departments lose staff not due to failure but ambiguity. Promises of transparency fall flat when purchasing logic isn’t shared. Quality becomes hard to uphold when it’s never clearly defined. Growth is stunted when opportunities to learn are withheld.

This isn’t always malice. Often, it’s mimicry. People manage the way they were managed. They hold knowledge because no one modeled how to share it. They reward performance because they were never rewarded for process. And without spaces to practice better models, many fall back on the only patterns they’ve seen.

When leaders fall back on compliance, reward speed or mistake repetition for clarity, their methods often fail—and the breakdown gets misattributed to the learner.

Reports from Gallup and the Society for Human Resources Management link unstructured training and unclear expectations with disengagement and turnover. People stay in systems that make sense. Where questions are welcome. Where access doesn’t depend on proximity to power.

This doesn’t require new platforms or massive budgets. Often, complexity isn’t the barrier; proximity is. When knowledge bottlenecks at the top, no amount of good intention will make it accessible. It starts by asking: What do people need to know? How are they learning it? What’s falling through the cracks?

Even simple changes like mapping who teaches what and comparing that with who sets priorities can reveal where clarity is missing. A Post-it Note wall, a shared document, or one open meeting can start the shift.

THE HIDDEN SYLLABUS

Shaa’ista Sabir didn’t enter the industry through the front door. She came in, like many do, through service roles, watching others closely, trying to bridge the gap between what was taught and what was simply expected. There’s so much we can learn from people who don’t even know they’re teaching. She remembers the barista champion who first showed her what leadership could look like, not in title but in action. What stood out wasn’t just the technical knowledge. It was the calm. The way she made space. The way she shared what she knew without needing to assert control.

Later, Sabir would seek out more formal education through Glitter Cat, PERC Coffee, and the NKG PACE program. But those early moments left a mark. They also revealed what was missing. “I realized that I don’t know enough to do this, or for this to be where this path diverges,” she says, recalling when she was offered a management role before she felt equipped. “I’m never the type of leader to be like, ‘I expect you to be able to do this when I can’t do it myself.’”

The most impactful lessons rarely appear in a handbook. They come through tone, omission and repetition. In who’s included in side conversations. In how feedback is given and where it is lacking. In who’s allowed to practice and who is labeled a “bad fit” before they’ve had a real chance to grow.

*Dukunde Kawa Cooperative, Musasa, Rwanda.*

This is the hidden syllabus—everything a team learns without formal instruction. It teaches them which mistakes are survivable, which rules are flexible, and where power resides. It shapes whether curiosity is safe, whether clarity is an accident or a standard, and whether they’re trusted to understand the why behind a process.

When explanation is withheld, the unspoken message becomes: “You don’t need to know. Just do the task.” That might keep things moving short-term, but long-term, it costs you understanding, consistency and trust. The lesson that has been taught is to make it work, even if the system doesn’t. That system might be informal. It might be incoherent. It might rely on someone’s memory or habits. And if it isn’t teachable, it isn’t stable. If it isn’t stable, you’re asking people to hold it together with context they were never given. You cannot hit a target that you do not know exists.

An article titled “Job Demands, Job Resources, and Their Relationship with Burnout and Engagement: A Multi-Sample Study,” published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior in 2004, shows a strong link between inadequate onboarding, role ambiguity and emotional exhaustion. These aren’t soft costs; they’re predictors of attrition.

People burn out when they’re asked to operate with precision while the structure around them remains unclear. When the expectations are high, but the training is shallow. When they’re held responsible for consistency they were never taught.

Too often, when someone leaves, it’s framed as their failure to thrive. But frequently, the issue isn’t difficulty, it’s confusion. Contradiction. Guesswork mistaken for initiative. Even your most engaged employees can disengage when clarity is lacking.

Retention isn’t a mystery. Gallup’s 2025 report “Why the Onboarding Experience Is Key for Retention” shows only 12 percent of employees feel their organization does onboarding well. Yet companies that invest in this process see retention improve by 50 percent. People stay when growth feels real. When they’re allowed to ask questions without fear. When leadership models knowledge-sharing instead of knowledge-hoarding.

INVITATION IS DESIGN

There are people in this industry who already know how to teach. Not just how to present a slide deck or list rules in a staff manual, but how to deliver information in a way that lands, sticks, and makes people want to stay. Carly Green is unequivocally one of those people.

Green—who served as a coffee sourcing specialist and lab manager for Blue Bottle Coffee and as head of education for Cometeer before founding her own coffee education business, Cherry Love Coffee—doesn’t lead with authority. She leads with welcome. Her workshops don’t begin with a hierarchy of who’s allowed to speak. They begin with warmth, humor and calibrated curiosity. She gives people enough context to feel capable, enough room to ask without fear, and enough precision that they leave with new tools, not just new language. And she does all of that while holding the material to an extremely high standard.

“The best educators I know first let down their own walls to create an environment where people feel comfortable exploring and asking questions,” says Green. “Then, the content should be clear and engaging, without oversimplifying, making the experience interactive and enjoyable so that learning truly sticks.”

*Seedling in a cup at Dukunde Kawa Cooperative's coffee nursery.*

None of it is accidental. She designs for uptake—teaching in layers, not bullet points. She uses metaphor not as decoration but as memory architecture. When she’s teaching about coffee extraction, she doesn’t isolate total dissolved solids from context. She anchors it in story, environment and sense memory. The format flexes while the rigor holds true. As Green puts it, “People learn better when the delivery helps them stay engaged and curious.” This is consistent with findings published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, which show that active learning strategies and contextual feedback significantly improve retention and job performance.

Green doesn’t dilute the material to make it easier; she builds the delivery to make it receivable. She doesn’t hold knowledge hostage to protect her authority. She gives it away in a way that builds more of it. That is power used well and leadership practiced through education. Offering instruction from a place of abundance instead of scarcity is a model that would behoove more people to engage with, even those who think their roastery is too busy, their job too technical, or their role too senior to include real teaching.

EDUCATION AND TRAINING PROGRAMS

Formal education doesn’t replace lived example, but it can reinforce it, strengthen it, and give it language and context. The best companies treat in-house training and external learning as complementary, not competing. A staff-led calibration session can sit alongside an Illy continuing education course. A roaster’s morning notes can dovetail with an online class in water chemistry. These are not mutually exclusive tools. They’re part of the same infrastructure.

Internal training is intimate. It carries your company’s values, your bar for excellence, your sense of pace and scale. It also requires time, documentation and presence. And when the pressure hits, it’s often the first thing to get cut.

External programs offer perspective. They expose your team to other standards, other vocabularies, other ways of moving. They can validate what someone’s already doing well or unlock what they couldn’t see on their own. But they’re often costly, and they take planning to align with your actual roles and goals.

However, not every class needs a budget. Sometimes development means giving someone time to attend a lecture, debrief a competition, or follow through on a goal they named during their review. As Green puts it, good educators create environments where people feel comfortable exploring. From there, clarity, rigor and joy do the real work of retention.

Sabir saw this modeled by a former operations director at PERC. “She always came into the shops and hopped on POS [point-of-sale equipment], or hopped on bar, and presented what she wanted people to experience,” Sabir recalls. “She was very, ‘This is how we treat our customers. This is how we treat each other.’... I saw how she interacted with people and interacted with customers. I was like, ‘Okay, that’s something that I can give. That’s something I want to do.’”

Teams grow fastest when they’re taught how to keep growing. When knowledge doesn’t bottleneck at the top. When staff can say what they’re interested in and know it won’t be ignored. As reflected in Sabir’s experience, the most formative leadership isn’t about asserting power. It is about showing up and showing how.

If you want a culture of learning, you have to build systems that make learning visible. Not just for the new hire but for everyone. That’s what turns one moment of instruction into something sustainable. That’s what tells your team, “Growth lives here.”

EMBODIED VISION

Imagine walking into a roastery where clarity is embedded in the atmosphere.

A new production assistant has been shadowing a more experienced team member for two weeks. They already understand the sealer, the workflow and the charge temperature, not because they memorized it, but because someone showed them thoughtfully, checked their understanding, and gave them time to connect the dots. They’re not guessing. They’re learning. And they’re staying.

In the cupping lab, the green buyer is walking the team through a purchase. The logic is transparent. Questions are welcome. Everyone can see the spreadsheet. No one is gatekeeping the language. Rigor and accessibility coexist.

On the wall, there’s a visible three-month roast plan. Everyone can see it. Everyone contributes. Nobody is left wondering what’s next.

And in the break room, someone is explaining why a coffee smells like green bell pepper. It could be variety, process, water activity, roast curve, or all of the above. The listener might never have visited a farm, but they walk away understanding something new about where coffee comes from and how it evolves.

Your space might not look like this yet. Maybe your company is paper based. Maybe you’re constantly triaging. That’s okay. What matters is direction, not perfection. Even the smallest choices, explaining the why, inviting instead of assuming, can change a learning curve.

You don’t have to be a trainer to teach well. You just have to care what gets carried on by the people learning from your lead. This is not a fantasy. This is not the result of a six-figure training center. This is what it looks like when education is seen as essential, not seasonal.

If you hold authority, you’re already teaching—in what you say, what you model, and what you leave unsaid. Your staff is learning from what you say and what you dismiss. What you document and share versus what you quietly revise without explanation. So, ask yourself: If someone spent a month in your orbit, what would they walk away having learned? Would they feel equipped for success, or just compliant? Would they know how to think, or just how to execute? Would they stay?

If the answer is no, you don’t have to start from scratch. Just start where you are. Walk your floor. Ask your team what needs clarification. Where have they been guessing? Rewrite one system so it educates. Share the why behind one decision. Begin one conversation you’ve been putting off.

Let’s teach like it matters. Because it does.

* * *

RACHEL APPLE has been in specialty coffee for 19 years. Her resume includes roles in quality control for George Howell, global supply chain manager for Cometeer, and head judge and sensory education training instructor at Cup of Excellence. Apple is also a U.S. Barista Championship head judge, sensory lead and committee member.

Raise The Bar (Part Five): Education by Design

Issue 131: September | October 2025

Column: Building a Sustainable Career in Coffee Roasting