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People

FOURTH STEP ︳ THOSE WHO WITNESSED HISTORY

Erna Knutsen

Coffee for life

A life of successful women usually looks like this:neutral
clothes and makeup, wide thinking, fast speaking, bossiness,
career became the main part of life, personal feelings are
always seen as pointless. These seem to become Chinese char-
acteristics of a “successful woman”. But on the other side of
the globe, people have a totally different perception of success.
Successful women there can still have feelings and combine
work and family. Known in coffee world as the mother of
specialty coffee, 95-year-old Erna Knutsen, is exactly this kind
of woman.
USA during 60s and 70s were not like today with gender
and racial equality. In coffee world, women were locked in
tasting rooms and behind the factories’ doors, and the only
reason was: “What do you, women, know about business?”
Erna experienced this kind of sexism herself. She was born
in Norway, then moved to the United States, but in a male
dominating coffee world, with her model look, she could only
find a job of a secretary. This kind of rudeness and shallow
judgments made Erna to show what she was worth. One day, 300 bags); unexpectedly, in a bit more than a month, she sold
she came across people, who were bringing Mandheling coffee it out, and this was the moment when she broke the glass ceil-
beans from Sumatra to the US, then she had a brilliant idea to ing of coffee industry and Mandheling became her favorite
invite those people to roast their beans and those beans tasted sort of beans. Those coffee industry men who looked down
amazing, so she decided to buy the whole container (around on women in the workplace were jobless after Erna bought
their company.
This story seems like a TV-script: 30 years ago, when
Erna was 65 and had achieved everything she ever wanted
in the industry, she was already divorced, living with her
daughter; one night she went to a party, where she met John
Rapinchuk, and even the two had 30 years gap, it did not stop
them to become life partners. While they were interviewed
by CTI, they both seemed like love birds, making jokes all
the time, and after all these years you could still see how af-
fectionately Erna looked at her husband.

She had a brilliant idea to invite

those people to roast their beans

and those beans tasted amazing.

Erna Knutsen

• One of the organizers of SCAA • Founder of Knutsen’s Coffee • First person awarded with SCAA Lifetime
Achievement Award. • First who proposed the concept of specialty coffee.

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