Boss Barista and the Women-in-Coffee Equity Movement: A Brief History

How the Boss Barista podcast, The Coffeewoman's panels, Michelle Johnson's The Chocolate Barista and two 2017 critiques of barista competition pushed specialty coffee to talk about equity.

By Jay Arr Updated

The Boss Barista podcast

Barista Magazine covered the show in May 2017, five months in. It reported that Wilde and Rodriguez had started work on it in August 2016, that episodes ran 30 to 75 minutes and came out weekly or every two weeks, and that it was billed as a “feminist coffee podcast”. Wilde was then a coffee educator at Ritual Coffee Roasters and Rodriguez managed a café in Oakland. (The magazine disclosed that Rodriguez was also its online editor.)

“We weren’t hearing a variety of voices reflective of the coffee community,” Rodriguez told the magazine. Wilde named the problems they wanted to get to the root of: “high industry turnover, lack of diversity, unsustainable wages, and barista burnout.”

Rodriguez looked back in an April 2022 post. She and her co-host had wanted to explore topics they weren’t hearing about elsewhere, “like stagnant wages, how to handle aggressive customers, and the emotional labor of service work”, and had set February 1, 2017, as the date they would start publishing no matter what. By 2022, she wrote, she was “flying solo” and was bringing Boss Barista’s platforms together on Substack, where she had started a newsletter in 2019.

When checked on October 18, 2026, the Substack archive ran from May 2019 to a last post on June 26, 2025. Its About page said the newsletter had been on hiatus since June 2025, with paid subscriptions paused and the archive open to read.

The Coffeewoman

The Coffeewoman began as a set of panels in Kansas City on February 2, 2016. Sprudge, which filmed them, named Laila Willbur of Cherry Street Coffee House as its founder; Barista Magazine later placed that first event at the US Coffee Championships qualifying event. There were two panels: one on the coffee professional, moderated by Sarah Allen of Barista Magazine, and one on the coffee competitor, moderated by Willbur.

At the SCA’s Global Coffee Expo in Seattle, on April 22, 2017, The Coffeewoman ran a panel called “Building Influence and Changing Power Structures”, moderated by Michelle Johnson and Tracy Ging, The Coffeewoman’s co-founder. Sprudge listed seven participants, including the moderators: Michelle Johnson of The Chocolate Barista; Ging; Tymika Lawrence of Genuine Origin; Phyllis Johnson of BD Imports; Liz S. Dean of Irving Farm Coffee Roasters; Jenn Chen, a freelance coffee marketer; and Meister of Cafe Imports.

Sprudge’s write-up quoted Phyllis Johnson: “Brown and black hands pick beans. White hands trade beans.” Michelle Johnson’s message to the room was “If you have that privilege, use it for good.”

A May 29, 2017 preview in Barista Magazine announced a Coffeewoman event for Friday, June 2, at the Bay Area CoRo co-roasting space in Berkeley. The magazine, which was hosting it, listed a planned keynote by Helen Russell of Equator Coffees & Teas, a coffee-career panel led by Sarah Allen, and an intersectionality panel led by Rodriguez. By then, the magazine said, The Coffeewoman had also held events in Seattle, Sacramento, Portland and Providence.

Michelle Johnson and The Chocolate Barista

Johnson’s own site says she founded The Chocolate Barista in 2016, as a platform for Black coffee professionals that began as a directory of Black-owned coffee businesses. In a March 2017 Sprudge interview, which introduced her as a Phoenix coffee professional, she said she’d had the idea since late 2014 and pointed to the support she received after a 2016 post, “The Black Cup of Excellence.” She had spoken at Tamper Tantrum in New York about laying the groundwork for diversity to grow in the coffee industry.

Sprudge’s readers gave her its 2016 Sprudgie Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence; Sprudge noted it had never before gone to a working barista.

2017: questions about barista competition

Two pieces in 2017 took competition itself to task, for different reasons.

Pete Licata, May 2017. Licata, the 2013 World Barista Champion, wrote “Barista competition needs a refresh” on his consulting blog after judging and coaching at that year’s US Barista Championship. He argued that judges were volunteers while the stakes for competitors kept rising, and that the scoring rewarded “loud” coffees whose flavors are easy to call: the top three at the 2017 US championship all used geisha coffees. Because those coffees are expensive, he wrote, a smaller company or an independent barista “cannot pay to play”. He said the post wasn’t prompted by anyone in particular.

Narrative Coffee, November 10, 2017. The Everett, Washington café withdrew indefinitely from the US Barista and Brewers Cup qualifying competitions, in response to the SCA’s Deferred Candidacy Policy. Its statement said the policy put the burden of safety on LGBTQI competitors at events held in countries that endanger them, delayed their chance to compete and continued “the systemic disenfranchisement of minority members.” It urged the SCA’s board to drop the policy.

Laila Willbur, The Coffeewoman’s founder, was also a guest on James Hoffmann’s 2016 Coffee Jobs Podcast; our page on whether coffee is a dead-end job lists all nine episodes, with US barista pay from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the wider history, see our third-wave history.

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