Who We Are

Timothy J. O’Conner, Founder

Tim O’Connor began his coffee career in 1980 as an espresso machine repair technician, and built his company, Pacific Espresso into a national brand of equipment sales and full beverage platform service for select national coffee brands.  He brought Illycaffe to the Central California Coast in 1983 and developed Puro Caff, a globally recognized espresso machine cleaner in 1986. That same year, he met Piero Bambi of La Marzocco, and began selling their espresso products.  In 1994 he and several partners purchased La Marzocco from the Bambi family.  O’Connor was president in 2011-2012 of the Specialty Coffee Association of America and was a member of the board as 2004, (now known as Specialty Coffee Association (SCA)).  He has traveled extensively to coffee growing regions where he has had personal exposure to the challenges that global coffee producers live and work within, to bring a daily desired beverage to global consumers reliably.  Tim is well accomplished in leadership, networking, sensory, and technical aspects of the global coffee industry. 

Jan Anderson, Director

With over 25 years of experience in the specialty coffee industry in the areas of strategic planning, business and brand strategy, market analysis, and primary research for clients as well as for her own study of industry trends, Jan has gained long perspective and deep experience in the North American coffee market.  As a coffee entrepreneur, she founded and served as CEO of several importing, distribution, and tech companies, including  illy caffe-New York Inc., EspressoWorks Inc., FrancisFrancis! USA Inc., and her current company Premium Quality Consulting LLC, which specializes in consulting and coffee-specific software, i.e., CYA Cover Your Assets. She is a published writer and industry speaker.

Jan is honored to offer her experience and efforts to the goals of the Calderia O’Connor DeFaria Foundation.

Timothy Schilling, Director

Timothy Schilling is the founder and former Chief Executive Officer of World Coffee Research, the world’s first global, collaborative agricultural R&D organisation for coffee. A scientist and development expert, Dr. Schilling was the first to bring widespread attention in the coffee industry to the fact that coffee is an orphan crop: grown in poor countries, consumed in rich countries, and researched in neither.

Dr. Schilling galvanized the world coffee industry, worth $174 billion dollars per year, to recognize the potentially disastrous vulnerabilities it faced due to the lack of functional, global, open-source research and development programs that create new knowledge and technologies for the benefit of farmers.

World Coffee Research was thus born in 2012. The same year, when the first reports of a massive epidemic of a fungal disease called coffee leaf rust were circulating in Central America, Dr. Schilling sounded alarms and organized the first Coffee Leaf Rust Summit in Guatemala. That summit resulted in concrete actions including development bank support loans to national governments for fungicides and access to credit for farmers through guarantees from USAID. The most sustainable result, however, was the launch of World Coffee Research’s global coffee breeding program for rust resistance and climate resilience, and the establishment of a global network of trial sites to advance knowledge on coffee variety performance.

In the few short years since World Coffee Research was founded, Dr. Schilling has delivered tangible, pragmatic results to shore up the coffee industry’s goal to secure long-term sustainable supplies of high quality coffee. He has grown the nonprofit organization to encompass offices in France, the United States, and El Salvador, where WCR has also established a research farm.

Dr. Schilling stepped down as CEO of WCR in 2019 and retired from WCR in 2020. He continues to work with the coffee industry in different scientific and development contexts.