Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters, the Sacramento-based coffee company known for its single-source beans and six Northern California cafes, just missed the top spot in a national competition that judges roasters on quality and sustainability. The company became a finalist in Roast Magazine's 2027 Micro Roaster of the Year awards, ultimately finishing just behind Michigan-based Dessert Oasis Coffee Roasters, which took the top prize.
A Narrow Miss After a Long Wait to Reapply
According to the Sacramento Bee, Chocolate Fish missed the top position by a very small margin, though Roast Magazine does not disclose final scores and does not rank non-winners, who are simply listed as finalists. The Sacramento roaster had previously been a finalist back in 2023, but paused reapplying as it adjusted to new ownership — Andy Baker and Edie Baker, who founded the company and named it after a fish-shaped confection indigenous to New Zealand, given as a thank-you, sold it to Ali Syed and Asif Alvi in July 2023, according to Chocolate Fish Coffee Roasters.
Andrew Owen, the company's director of roastery and education, told the Sacramento Bee that the business paused reapplying while settling into the new ownership structure. The decision to jump back into the competition came after a chance encounter: Maxx Leekley, Chocolate Fish's production lead and inventory manager, met Roast Magazine publisher Connie Blumhart at the World of Coffee trade show in April. Blumhart encouraged the team to apply again, telling them Roast Magazine loved Chocolate Fish and wanted to see another application, per the same report. Chocolate Fish says it plans to keep competing for the top award in future years.
How the Competition Works
Roast Magazine describes itself as a bi-monthly technical trade journal dedicated to the success and growth of the specialty coffee industry, and it runs the Micro Roaster of the Year awards annually alongside a Macro Roaster category. Micro roasters produce less than 100,000 pounds of beans per year, while macro roasters exceed that threshold — a distinction Chocolate Fish is approaching closely, given that Daily Coffee News reported the company produces approximately 93,665 pounds of coffee annually. This year's competition cycle, the outlet also noted, included four micro-roaster finalists instead of the usual three after a first-round scoring tie among judges. Indiana-based Utopian Coffee was named 2027 Macro Roaster of the Year in the same announcement.
Applications are scored on mission, sustainability, employee education, diversity, inclusion and equity policies, industry involvement, and roasting, marketing and business innovations, per the Sacramento Bee's reporting. Leekley said the application evaluates sustainable practices and the business side of roasting, including trading with producers and talking with farmers. After scores are tallied, Roast Magazine asks finalists to submit roasts for evaluation — specifically a production-standard roast, a non-espresso blend, and a wild-card roast.
What Chocolate Fish Submitted for Judging
For its production roast, Chocolate Fish submitted Purple Caturra, a natural cold process coffee processed by keeping the coffee cherry intact to ferment and dry. The company stores the cherries in a cold room for 72 hours to slow fermentation, resulting in flavor notes of coconut and tropical fruit. Owen said the coffee tastes similar regardless of brewing method.
Since Chocolate Fish offers mostly single-source coffees and rarely makes blends, the roaster's non-espresso submission, the Tatari blend, stands out as an exception. Owen and Leekley created the blend — a combination of Nicaraguan and Colombian beans whose name means filter in Maori — and it has since become a standard offering in Chocolate Fish shops. For the wild-card category, the company chose Pink Bourbon, which Leekley described as floral and well-suited to that slot. Pink Bourbon is processed by washing the cherry pulp away before cold storage for 72 hours and drying, yielding notes of lemongrass and lychee.
Roots in Sacramento's Coffee Scene
Chocolate Fish traces back to a single downtown Sacramento cafe opened in 2008 by Andy and Edie Baker, who also helped popularize the flat white espresso drink in the region, according to Saculture. That same year's arrival, following Temple Coffee Roasters' founding in 2005, helped establish Sacramento's reputation for farm-to-cup roasting. The company has since grown into six brick-and-mortar retail locations across Sacramento and the East Bay, plus two licensed airport and hotel kiosks and wholesale supply to nearly 70 stores, Daily Coffee News reported. Its reach is expanding further, too — in June, local business reporting from Comings and Goings noted that Chocolate Fish signed a lease to open a new location in Yolo County at The Davis Collection shopping center.
The roaster's sustainability record stretches back over a decade: since 2014, Chocolate Fish has donated more than 200,000 pounds of compostable coffee materials to help divert organic waste from landfills, according to Daily Coffee News. Chocolate Fish also has a history of strong showings on the competitive circuit, having placed second overall and earned five medals across milk-based espresso and pour-over categories at the 2017 Golden Bean North America competition in Portland, Oregon, per the company's own account. Winning Roast Magazine's national honor comes with a $500 cash prize and a full-length feature story in the trade publication's November/December issue, though for Chocolate Fish, this year's result lands just shy of that distinction.
