Coffee Lab

Coffee Lab is a specialty roastery, barista school, and coffee consultancy operating out of São Paulo, Brazil, founded by Isabela Raposeiras. Sources disagree slightly on the founding year — TripAdvisor places it at 2004, while Sprudge's profile of Raposeiras dates the launch to 2009, after she had spent seven years consulting for coffee businesses. Either way, the operation she built has become one of the most recognized roasting names to emerge from Latin America.

Raposeiras came to Coffee Lab with a consultancy background rather than a hospitality one, and that orientation shaped what the business became: less a café that happens to roast, more an institution that uses retail as a platform for education and industry development. The three-pronged structure — roastery, school, consultancy — reflects an ambition to shape specialty coffee culture in Brazil from multiple angles simultaneously, training baristas while also supplying and advising the businesses those baristas go on to work in.

The roasting operation sits at the center of the model. Cool Hunting's profile of Coffee Lab documents Raposeiras's approach to sourcing and cupping, situating her work within the broader emergence of a serious specialty coffee scene in São Paulo. The school component means roasting decisions are also pedagogical ones — what gets on the cupping table shapes what a generation of Brazilian baristas learns to taste and evaluate. Specific varietal or processing preferences are not extensively documented in public sources, but the consultancy dimension suggests a focus on traceable, relationship-driven supply chains.