What Is Third Wave Coffee? A Look at Our 100 Roasters
"Third wave coffee" gets thrown around a lot — on bags, on cafe menus, in roaster bios. Here's what the term actually means, where it came from, and a data-backed look at how many of our own 100 specialty roasters were founded during that era.
What "Third Wave" Actually Means
Coffee's "waves" are a rough historical framework, not an official standard. The first wave (roughly post-WWII through the 1960s) was about convenience and mass distribution — instant coffee, supermarket cans, coffee as a commodity. The second wave, led by chains like Starbucks from the 1970s through the 1990s, popularized espresso drinks and cafe culture, but still generally treated coffee as an interchangeable, uniformly dark-roasted ingredient.
The third wave — a term coffee roaster and writer Trish Rothgeb is widely credited with coining in a 2002 essay — reframes coffee as a differentiated agricultural product, closer to wine or craft beer: origin and processing method are treated as the main flavor drivers, roasting shifts lighter to preserve them, sourcing relationships become direct and traceable, and brewing itself becomes a precision craft rather than an afterthought.
How Many of Our Roasters Fit the Era
Using each roaster's public founding year as a rough, objective proxy — not a certification — for whether it entered the market already shaped by third-wave norms: of the 100 roasters in our database, 98 carry a public founding year (2 do not and are excluded below). 87 of those 98 (89%) were founded in 2000 or later — squarely inside the third wave's main growth period.
Our earliest-founded roaster is Cape Cod Coffee (1970); our newest is Night Swim Coffee (2021).
Every Roaster, By Founding Decade
Click through to any roaster's full profile — catalog, story, and sourcing philosophy.