For us at UCC, coffee is more than a beverage. We are moved and excited by the delicious taste of coffee. We love this drink and want to share it with the world. That passion is at the origin of UCC's business.We continue to communicate this message with the world in a range of ways, broadcasting the news about the coffee culture and contributing to its ongoing creation.
We want as many people as possible to appreciate the wonders of coffee, so we opened the UCC Coffee Museum in Kobe on October 1, 1987, and have used it to educate and promote coffee culture. The museum’s key concept is “creating a rich lifestyle with coffee,” and it is the world’s only museum specializing exclusively in all aspects of coffee “from cup to seed.”
The museum explains everything from the origins of coffee to its cultivation and coffee culture, together with coffee extraction devices and documentary records, among other artifacts. The explanations are easy to understand, enabling anybody to enjoy learning about the complex appeal of coffee.
In April 2007, UCC opened its UCC Coffee Academy, Japan’s only comprehensive educational institution specializing in coffee. The academy, which enables its students to learn about all aspects of coffee systematically and at their own level, is the repository of the coffee-related information, expertise, knowledge and skills accumulated over the years since UCC was first founded. It offers a variety of programs catering to all sorts of students, from those who simply have an interest in coffee to those who want to open their own coffee shops. Thus UCC has endeavored to foster coffee specialists who can play active roles in our company and elsewhere. And by offering correspondence courses as well, the academy provides an environment in which anybody can enjoy learning, whatever their age.
A UCC Coffee Academy newly opened in Tokyo in 2015, adding to our roster of schools. In addition to our standard curriculum, which offers things like coffee seminars that begin after working hours at 7:00 PM on weekdays, we regularly host latte art workshops and roasting sessions, as well as special sweet and bakery seminars featuring famous patissiers and others from the world of desserts.
The 80th anniversary of UCC’s founding in 2013 was also the year in which we opened the UCC Training Center (the “Ueshima dojo”) as a center where UCC Group employees and other professionals and experts working in coffee-oriented food and drinks service could polish their practical skills.
By training a large number of outstanding individuals to develop exceptional specialized knowledge and skills, we intend to play a leading role in the further advancement of coffee culture in the next generation.
The UCC Training Center at the Kobe site is designed for practical training geared at not only UCC staff, but franchise owners and clients who wish to improve their expertise in various areas.
The Tokyo location offers services supporting the continuous improvement of coffee shops of various styles. The site houses the Group Showroom, completed in 2015 and acting as a space offering complete solutions to the UCC Group.
The Group Showroom exhibits over one hundred types of the finest coffee from the world over, along with UCC Group's most notable coffee products, and over fifty types of coffee machines, ranging from single-cup types to high volume devices.
The machines can be tested out and coffee can be selected from a vast lineup. A tasting counter offers a wide array of coffee dripping tools for the user to compare. This space acts as a combined showroom and learning space for clients from a range of industries to sample coffee dripping and serving methods in person.
