About us
Our journey into specialty coffee
DABOV Specialty Coffee is not just a product. It is a project — one that begins on a named farm and ends in your cup, and where our job is to be a faithful link between the two.
It started in 2008, when we set out to address a single, narrow problem: the absence of genuinely high-quality coffee, tea, and hot chocolate in the Bulgarian market. The opening intent was straightforward — bring in the best raw material we could find, and refuse to compromise on it.
In the years that followed, the customers who shared that intent became something more than a market. They became friends and collaborators — people who cared about origins and processing and roast curves the same way we did. The conversations got deeper, the questions got harder, and our work narrowed in response.
In 2014 we launched DABOV Specialty Coffee, the brand you know today, to make that focus explicit.
Coffee as a cause
Not a product — a project
Over time, we came to see DABOV Specialty Coffee less as a thing we sell and more as a chain of relationships we maintain. The chain begins on the farm and ends in your cup, and we are the connection between the two ends.
That framing changes the work. We hold ourselves accountable to both sides — to present the producer's labour with the respect it deserves, and to deliver the customer a coffee whose quality matches the price. Either failure is unacceptable; both are avoidable.
How we buy
A fair price, not a haggled one
Our purchasing approach is built on respect for the farmer's work. We do not negotiate downward; we do not squeeze margins. We offer an honest, dignified price for the highest-quality green coffee — a price that often exceeds what producers had been led to expect.
When a farmer is paid properly, the rest follows: the family is supported, the workers are paid, the next harvest's investments get made. That is not romanticism. It is supply-chain math.
From farm to cup
Every step matters
We store, transport, and roast our coffee with deliberate care, because every detail along the way affects the cup at the other end. We work with green beans scored above 86 points by international Q-graders — coffees offered exclusively at specialised online auctions. These are the lots we choose: the best of the best.
The green coffee arrives in GrainPro hermetic liners that preserve the freshness and aromatic compounds during shipping and warehousing. The roasting profile is built per lot, not per category. The packaging is chosen for both freshness preservation and end-of-life impact (we go into detail on the sustainability page). None of these are unique innovations — they are the established practices of serious specialty roasters worldwide. We name them here because the consistency of doing all of them, every time, is where most of the value is.
Expertise that travels
On the world's most demanding jury since 2013
Since 2013, our founder Jordan Dabov has been the only Bulgarian invited to sit on the international jury of the Cup of Excellence — the most respected competition in specialty coffee. He has had the privilege of evaluating coffees from farms in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Mexico.
The Cup of Excellence, organised by the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, encourages farmers to produce coffee at exceptional quality — for which they receive multiples of the standard market price at international auction. We are proud to be part of that community, and to bring its winning lots home to our customers. Read more about the Cup of Excellence programme and Jordan's role on the jury at his profile.
"Coffee is a chain of trust. Every link is held by a person whose work depends on the next one being honest. Our job is to be honest in our link, and to be picky about whose links we connect to."
Our mission
A sustainable bridge between two ends of the chain
To build a durable connection between farmers and the people who genuinely care about coffee. To help create a coffee culture in which every bean carries a story, every cup carries weight, and every step along the way is taken with attention and accountability.
That is what we are working on. We hope, when you next pour a cup of one of our coffees, that you can taste the work behind it.
The work is in the cup
Every coffee we sell is the result of the chain described above. Browse the current catalog — or read about the people who grew it.