What is Cuppd?
Cuppd is a specialty coffee discovery platform. Local roasters' coffees rarely make it to the shelves of big retail stores — you have to seek them out yourself, and hidden gems are easy to miss.
Cuppd makes it easier to find your next favourite coffee, or to try something completely outside your comfort zone. Our goal is to map the world's best small-batch specialty roasters and their finest offerings.
Where does the name come from?
Cuppd comes from the word cupping — the professional tasting method used to evaluate coffee. The final dimplies the past tense: the cupping is done, now it's time to rate.
Who is it for?
Cuppd is not built for industry professionals or hardcore coffee nerds. It's for enthusiastic home baristas and coffee lovers who are curious and open to discovery. You don't need to log every millilitre of your brew to leave a review. Cuppd simply helps you figure out which coffee to try next.
How do recommendations work?
Based on your past ratings and our own methodology. We look at which coffees you enjoyed and which you didn't, identify patterns in their attributes, and use that to rank similar coffees higher or lower in your personal feed.
Why we built it
I've tried a lot of coffee. Some I loved, some not so much — but I couldn't figure out what they had in common, or what to look for next time. I started building Excel spreadsheets: logging every detail, scoring each coffee. That spreadsheet was essentially the first version of Cuppd.
How we collect data
Coffees are collected using AI-powered scraping. An AI model visits each roaster's webshop and gathers the relevant data for us. We take ethical guidelines seriously: we always check robots.txt, and if a roaster asks us not to scrape their site, they won't appear in our database.
We also limit our crawl to product pages only — we don't traverse every corner of the site, so we keep server load to a minimum.
How we're progressing
We work country by country, mapping each roaster's catalogue. But this isn't a one-time job — every month we revisit and check for new products. Right now we're focused on Europe (Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, and more), but we also make a point of quickly adding winners from major international coffee competitions.