Richard entered the green coffee business in 1986 as a trader at Schluter in the City of London. He was attracted by coffee’s roots in mountainous regions of rural Africa. He moved to Development through Trade organisation Twin and Twin Trading in 1992, which gave him the opportunity to develop his passion for travel and for social justice. He led Twin’s coffee work for 26 years. From its launch in 1992 until 2002, he was responsible for the sourcing, product development and the co-operative technical support programme of UK fairtrade pioneer Cafédirect. 

Richard worked with the leaders of smallholder coffee cooperatives in Latin America and Africa to address the opportunities and threats posed by the liberalisation of coffee markets in the 1990s, in particular supporting farmer organisations to develop the capacity to export and market their own coffees.

From 2004 Richard shifted his focus to working with smallholder farmers in remote regions of East Africa to develop and market sustainable specialty coffees. This work began in Rwanda, and eventually encompassed the slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains and Mount Elgon in Uganda, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, along with Northern Malawi, Burundi and Eastern DRCongo.

A key part of this work at Twin was the development of a Joint Marketing Initiative, in many ways the precursor of African Coffee Connect.

Since leaving Twin in 2018 Richard has worked to provide business advice and marketing support to co-operatives in South Kivu and on Mount Elgon, and has worked extensively with agricultural value chain specialist Farm Africa, notably in their partnership with Virunga National Park as well as with Solidaridad on the Kenya and Tanzania programmes, and with the Progreso cooperative business support programme in Uganda.

Across his career Richard has always been especially interested in identifying unknown and undervalued coffees, and working with the producers to realise their market potential. The first such coffee came from the tiny island of Saint Helena in 1988. A decade later he went on to the much larger scale challenge to work with farmers to develop and launch the first specialty coffees from Peru. This included Cafédirect’s flagship Machu Picchu coffee in 1998, grown at extreme altitudes in the mountains next to the ancient site.  In 2007 Richard first visited Eastern DRCongo, leading to a Twin led partnership to revive the country’s fully washed arabica coffee sector, work which was recognised by the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s Sustainability Award in 2012. Between 2016 and 2020 he visited remote forest areas of Ethiopia, and supported the marketing of high quality natural coffees including wild forest coffees from the Bale Forest.