Event: Starbucks Annual Meeting of Shareholders 2019 

The first Starbucks annual meeting in 1993 was just a small gathering in a downtown Seattle hotel conference room, with a slide presentation and stack of tri-fold brochures. For the next few years it was hosted at the company’s new roasting plant in Kent, Wash., where rows of folding chairs lined the loading dock’s concrete floors. By 1998 the meeting went uptown, occupying the grand stage at the historic Paramount Theater for a year before moving to the Seattle Symphony’s home at Benaroya Hall from 1999-2003. Marion Oliver McCaw Hall hosted the event from 2004-2018 and was the scene of many of the event’s most iconic moments. Starbucks coffee was once even piped down to the stage from the top of the Space Needle.  This year’s annual meeting will be its first at a new venue in more than a decade. After years of overflow crowds in the 2,900-seat auditorium at Marion Oliver McCaw Hall, the event has moved to WaMu Theater with its seating for up to 3,900 attendees.

This experiential event was designed to be an immersive look into coffee from around the world. An interactive lobby lined with visual stories from coffee farms in Africa, Guatemala, China and Costa Rica focused on the humanity behind the product, while an interactive ‘coffee raking’ experience transported attendees onto a coffee farm in Guatemala where they enjoyed the sites and sounds of the farm as if they were there. For complete coverage of AMOS 2019, Click HERE.

Responsibilities: develop creative approach for event, direct and develop on stage content, creative direction for lobby activations, manage photographer and video crews at the event, develop and manage content for media.

Event Content: A Grandmothers Gift

Seven years ago, an outbreak of coffee rust began destroying crops across Central America.“Leaf rust entered the country of Guatemala in the year 2012,” says Kevin Pacheco, a coffee farmer in the Jalapa region. “Before the rust appeared, we had better coffee plantations, more vigorous. So, it is a big problem.”

“When there is no coffee, there is no business,” says Catalina Pacheco, 72, a second-generation coffee farmer. “It is what gives life to Guatemala.”

Catalina is Kevin’s grandmother. Coffee farming is the family business. She worked in coffee from the time she was young and always wanted to be “a real coffee owner.” She and her husband, Carlos Lima, bought the 12.5-hectare coffee farm that Kevin now farms. Kevin has stepped wholeheartedly into the role of fourth-generation coffee farmer, and his passion for the work is leading the way for the generation after him to learn alongside him, just as he learned beside his grandparents.

A 2016 donation to the Pacheco farm of 6,000 rust-resistant trees, as part of Starbucks’ One Bag for Every Tree initiative (now the 100 Million Trees program), is helping. So far, more than 30 million trees have been donated in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador This year in Guatemala, the trees produced their very first harvest.

Director: Luanne Dietz    Producer: Mattea Fleischner Cinematographer: Alex Pritz Sound Engineer: Sophia Rossell  Still Photographer: Celia Talbot Tobin