Producer Profile: Alo Coffee

Tamiru Tadesse is the founder of Alo Coffee, a speciality coffee exporting company based in the highlands of Ethiopia. With a background in engineering, teaching, and coffee export, Tamiru brings a unique and analytical perspective to coffee cultivation and business. This combination of skills and industry insight helped him build a solid foundation of experience for establishing Alo Coffee alongside his wife Messi in 2020.

Driven by a mission to prove that Sidama’s finest coffees could stand among the world’s best, Alo Coffee’s very first submission won Ethiopia’s Cup of Excellence in 2021, with a lot from their home village of Alo in Bensa. Since then, the team has remained focused on cultivating speciality coffee of outstanding quality. Alo Coffee has gone from strength to strength, now operating an impressive network of high-end coffee processing stations across Sidama, including Bensa, Bona, and Burra zones, as well as West Arsi Nensebo.

While renowned for classic natural and washed process coffees, Tamiru has embraced and refined experimental processing that have placed Alo’s coffees on competition stages worldwide. This includes fermentation techniques and utilising coffee-derived materials such as mossto, cascara and mucilage to craft distinctive, micro lots that push boundaries of flavour, all underscored by a commitment to sustainable practice. Now widely regarded as some of the finest coffee the country has to offer, he continues to raise the bar for quality and innovation in the industry, and the global reputation of Ethiopian speciality coffee.

Growing up in rural Ethiopia shaped Tamiru’s values, instilling in him a strong sense of community and collaboration. He remains deeply committed to empowering those around him and approaches his work with humility. Collaborating with sixty farmers at the Alo Washing Station and an additional eight hundred across other stations, the company reinvests profits into community development projects, including the establishment of schools and seedling nurseries. Quality bonuses are also distributed during periods when farming families face financial challenges, ensuring sustained support and empowerment. These gestures are a reflection of Tamiru’s philosophy—that exceptional coffee begins with well-supported, knowledgeable producers.

Today, Alo Coffee remains guided by the same ambition: to challenge expectations, honour the farmers who make great coffee possible, and share the untapped potential of Ethiopian coffee with the world. We’re proud to be embarking on this new partnership that we hope will be part of our coffee programme for years to come.