Fresh from being honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Coffee Industry Heroes 2025, Scott Bennett reflects on more than 40 years in green coffee and the future of the industry in Australia and beyond.
Scott Bennett could fill a book with his intrepid stories of visiting coffee farms around the world. From tear-jerking to terrifying moments, the now Chairman of green coffee trader H.A. Bennett & Sons has spent the past four decades traversing the globe to source the best beans for Australia’s prospering coffee sector.
“I have had some fantastic experiences over the years, but there have also been life-threatening moments – I’ve seen crazy things happen,” Scott tells BeanScene.
“When I go back to countries, the first impressions are very enduring and each origin is unique. Take Brazil, for example, it’s something to behold because it’s so modern in a lot of respects. The lineage of coffee growers runs through generations of families, and they are so passionate and knowledgeable about their craft. It is quite extraordinary.”
New Guinea in 1984. Image: Bennets Coffee
Starting young
For Scott, an adventurous spirit for travel was instilled at an early age. As a young child in the late 1960s, his first overseas trips were to Sri Lanka, India, and Indonesia, accompanying his father William (Bill) Bennett on business trips. In 1960, Bill had taken over the family tea and coffee trading company from his father Horace Albert Bennett, who started trading in 1918 at the end of the First World War.
One of six sons, in the 1960s Bill forged a relationship with historic tea brand Lipton, which had established its first Australian tea-packing factory in Melbourne. While the company introduced Australia to the teabag, as its tea broker Bennetts continued to build on the sourcing legacy Horace Albert Bennett had established after the war.
“Visiting places such as India and Sri Lanka at the age of five or six was completely eye opening. The sights, smells, and hectic nature of those countries was exciting and so different to home,” Scott says.
“Yet, it didn’t seem so extraordinary to me as I was used to people from those countries coming to visit us in Australia. As a young child, I was exposed to the business in a lot of ways and over my childhood there was a subtle education in tea and coffee trading.”
While there was always the option for Scott to join the family business, it wasn’t until he turned 17 that he decided he would try working with his father. At the time in the 1980s, Bennetts was still trading more tea than coffee, but the coffee bean side of the business was starting to grow. After a year or so working alongside his father, at the age of 19 Scott was given the opportunity to work at an exporting company in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
“As a 19 year old I was doing something very different from most of my friends. Although I’d spent time in places such as Fiji and Vanuatu, stepping off the plane in PNG it was very different,” he says.
“I was working for the largest coffee exporter at the time and the idea was to go out there for three months and help during the coffee season. I was based at the head office where we did all the blending for export and quality testing.”
With a bigger coffee harvest than expected, Scott’s three-month stint turned into three years. During that time, he got involved with buying beans at the warehouse door as well as from producers and coffee mills all over the country. He also cupped and graded coffees, and developed an understanding of the industry at all levels. It was a truly hands-on experience.
Homecoming
In 1986, Scott and Bill decided it was time for him to come home and help run the family business. In the time he’d been away, Bennetts had lost a significant amount of its tea business through multinational takeovers and tea-packing moving overseas. However, coffee was starting to take off in Australia.
“The big change happened in the late 1980s when the International Coffee Agreement was disbanded and coffee became a free market globally. It meant we could import coffee from anywhere in the world,” says Scott.
Another pivotal moment for the Australian coffee industry, according to Scott, was the Sydney Summer Olympics in 2000.
“Until this point, people in Australia were mainly drinking instant coffee or filter coffee. But the late 1990s/early 2000s is when espresso really started to kick off. At this time, we imported most of our coffee from PNG because of the contacts we had there, but we were also importing from India and Indonesia through Dad’s tea contacts,” he says.
“In those days, the idea of Brazilian coffee was quite foreign – as was Colombian, which traders wouldn’t have dared travel to because of security issues. Air travel to South and Central America didn’t really become commonplace until the late 1990s, and meeting the producers was a huge part of business in those days. We didn’t have email or instant messenger apps to communicate with them – fax was our main method other than visiting origin.”
In the late 2000s, the industry started to open up to a whole range of international origins. As third-wave coffee started to take root in cafés in Melbourne and Sydney, Scott and team began to broaden their sourcing horizons.
“In the early 2010s, we started to see the rise of specialty coffee and single origins. People wanted to try something unique and roast differently,” Scott says.
“At this point, Melbourne and Sydney bought different types of coffees. Sydney used a lot of Colombian coffee while Melbourne still used a lot of PNG and lighter balanced coffees because of the different water qualities. The water in Sydney is a bit limier, whereas Victoria has clean water coming out of its hills. Nowadays, the two cities are much more aligned with the types of coffees used in blends.”
The global nature of the world today means almost all coffee origins have been explored, with coffee fans in Australia being able to choose from a globetrotting selection. While Scott doesn’t believe there are any truly untapped gems left to be discovered, there are four producing countries that still “blow his mind”.
“From Ethiopia, you can get some incredibly delicate floral coffees, which can be very distinctive based on the region in which they’re grown. I’ve always been a fan of Guatemalan coffees too, as their regions are also unique in the cup” he says.
“PNG is still a long-time favourite, as very well grown, managed, and produced coffees can be exceptional – although they are incredibly hard to find nowadays. And finally, in Colombia we are starting to see a lot of coffee regions that are re-emerging after being lost for decades.”
Rollercoaster economics
While the coffee industry in Australia continued to prosper in the late 2010s, the turn of the decade saw a number of hurdles challenge its growth. Following COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis, coffee now faces market volatility never seen before. Scott believes there’s not enough discussion in the industry about what’s really happening to the value of coffee.
“If you look at the export statistics for Vietnam, the world’s second biggest producer of coffee, over the past five to six years their production numbers are flat lining, if not trending down. In the late 1990s/early 2000s, the country received a lot of investment through the World Bank to plant a huge amount of coffee trees, which saw production skyrocket,” he says.
“However, we’re now 30-35 years on and many of those trees haven’t been replaced. Like humans, coffee trees get less productive over time. Many of those trees are now towards the end of their lifespan, which will need huge investment to replant them.
Scott believes production in Vietnam has peaked as the world’s demand for coffee continues to grow by millions of bags each year. Many people look to Brazil to fill the gap, yet he says the country has its own production issues.
“There are also a lot of things that need to be invested in in Brazil, such as labour issues, the cost of planting new coffee farms, and climate change, to name a few,” he says.
“And when you look at the other producing countries around the world, I don’t think there are any that are up to the challenge. Ten years ago, it was said Colombia would be producing 20 million bags per year by now, but today it’s only at around 14 million.”
From a production point of view, Scott believes the market volatility will continue as coffee producing countries struggle to keep up with international demand. However, he doesn’t believe it will greatly impact the cost for consumers.
“The vast majority of the money is made at the cup end of the supply chain. Focusing purely on the coffee ingredient – not considering milk, labour, and such – the cost of the coffee hasn’t gone up hugely when considering the whole price of the final cup,” he says.
“What we need to do is incentivise farmers. They need to receive more money for their product and be able to make a living out of it. Without that, they won’t replant trees, and their children won’t want to follow in their footsteps. If a coffee tree is removed from the ground in a producing country, it’s very rare that it goes back in – it will be replaced with sugarcane, bananas, or something else that’s less labour intensive and more productive.”
Reasons for optimism
Despite the huge shared challenge the international coffee industry faces, Scott believes there are still plenty of reasons
to be optimistic about the future in Australia and beyond.
“Global coffee consumption is going up and in Australia it’s now a daily habit – and that’s hard to break. The coffee industry isn’t going to disappear,” he says.
“There’s a huge amount of work being done in the coffee producing sector to develop new coffee varieties and processing methods. There is good news out there, but these projects take years to develop, scale up, and then roll out, so people aren’t talking about them as much as something immediate like the price of Arabica on the coffee market that day.”
As Scott approaches four and a half decades at Bennetts and in the green coffee business, he says there have been many highlights – including being awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Coffee Industry Heroes in March 2025.
“It took me back as I wasn’t expecting it at all,” he says.
“Over my time, one thing I’ve really enjoyed is bringing new coffees to Australia and introducing them to the industry here. It was amazing to introduce roasters to origins they’d never tried before and being able to open their eyes to something new. Today, many roasters still have those coffees as part of their offering.”
Scott is now starting to hand over the reins of the business to his three sons – Alex, Tom, and Sam – who have all spent time at the company.
“The fourth generation is starting to come through, which is incredible to witness,” he says. “The generational nature of the coffee industry is something you see at every point in the supply chain – from growers to traders – which is a nice tradition to continue.”
This article appears in the June 2025 edition of BeanScene. Subscribe HERE.
