About Big Year Coffee
Big Year Coffee is a Smithsonian Bird Friendly® certified coffee company made by a birder, for birders. Founded by avian ecologist and UBC PhD student Avery Meeker, Big Year grew out of a simple conviction: the way our coffee is grown matters to the birds that live where it’s grown. The business is rooted in the Pacific Northwest, where Avery was born and raised. It began in Seattle and now serves customers across both the United States and Canada.
Avery’s path to sustainable coffee started in the tropics, as a University of Washington student on a study abroad in Costa Rica. Standing between fields of sun-grown coffee monoculture and the lush, bird-filled forest beside them, he started rethinking everything he consumed, coffee included. That shift crystallized at a small family-owned finca growing shade coffee, where Avery and avian ecologist Professor John Marzluff ran bird counts that showed a stark difference in bird abundance and diversity between shaded and sun-grown plots. Research from scientists like Ruth Bennett and Çağan H. Şekercioğlu has since reinforced what those counts suggested: shade-grown coffee keeps tropical bird habitat intact and supports healthy bird populations, including many of the migrants that spend their summers in our own backyards.
That experience became the foundation for Big Year Coffee. Every coffee we carry is shade-grown, Bird Friendly® certified, and USDA Organic, grown under a living forest canopy without synthetic pesticides or GMOs. Each origin is paired with a bird that calls that landscape home, and you’ll find it on the bag: the Resplendent Quetzal for Guatemala, the White-cheeked Turaco for Ethiopia, the Santa Marta Antbird for Colombia, the Long-tailed Manakin for Nicaragua, the Black-throated Magpie-Jay for Mexico, and the Yellow-tufted Woodpecker for Peru.
Yes, the name comes from the classic birding quest: a Big Year, the challenge of seeing as many species as possible in a single calendar year, brought to the big screen in the comedy The Big Year. For Avery, a Big Year captures the spirit of adventure, exploration, and chasing a goal, and the name reflects what starting this business felt like: setting out into new territory and enjoying the journey, ideally with great birds along the way. Also, Avery was doing his first big year when he started the business.
In 2024, Avery moved to Vancouver to begin his PhD in Forestry at UBC, and Big Year Coffee came with him. Our Canadian coffee is roasted in East Vancouver from Bird Friendly® green coffee imported directly into Canada, while our US coffee continues to be roasted and shipped from the Seattle area, so orders on both sides of the border arrive fresh. This fall you can find us at the UBC Farm Saturday Farmers’ Market, sampling coffee and talking about the birds behind each bag.
At its core, Big Year Coffee is about bringing together a great cup of coffee and the joy of birding, exploring, and protecting the places birds depend on. Whether you’re chasing a rarity across the continent or enjoying a slow morning at the feeder, we hope Big Year is along for the ride. Follow along on our blog or Instagram, and share your own Big Year moments with us.
- Avery