Armed with a language degree, Richard entered the green coffee business in 1986 as a trader at African specialist Edm Schluter & Co in the City of London. He was attracted by coffee’s roots in mountainous regions of rural Africa and the prospect of engaging with coffee farming communities. He moved to Development through Trade organisation Twin and Twin Trading in 1992, which gave him the opportunity to develop his passions for travel to regions off the beaten track, and for pursuing practical social justice. He led Twin’s coffee work for 26 years.

As coffee markets were liberalised in the 1990s Richard worked with smallholder coffee cooperatives in Latin America and Africa to export and market their own coffees for the first time. He also had responsibility for product development, coffee sourcing, and managing the producer partnership programme of UK fairtrade pioneer Cafédirect. He developed Cafédirect’s flagship Machu Picchu coffee with COCLA co-operative in 1998. This was Peru’s first ever smallholder specialty coffee, grown at altitudes up to 2200 metres in the mountains adjacent to the legendary site, and remains the company’s best-selling line today.

From 2004 Richard’s strategic focus moved to arabica coffee farmers in hitherto neglected regions of East Africa. Here he identified the potential for specialty coffees with strong social and environmental credentials. The programme that ensued encompassed cooperatives in Uganda, on the slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains and of Mount Elgon; on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania; in the Mzuzu region of Northern Malawi; in Rwanda, Burundi and, from 2008, Eastern DRCongo. An important component was the Joint Marketing Initiative, an international platform for coffee cooperatives, and the precursor of African Coffee Connect.

This work attracted support from the UK Department for International Development, Comic Relief, and Dutch funders. The programme, with co-operative partners in DRCongo and Uganda, was the recipient of the Specialty Coffee Association’s Sustainability Award two years running, in 2012 and in 2013.

Since leaving Twin in 2018 Richard has continued to provide business advice and international marketing support to several East African co-operatives. He has worked extensively with agricultural value chain specialist Farm Africa, notably in their partnership with the Virunga National Park Agriculture programme in DR Congo, and with Participatory Forest Management Cooperatives in Ethiopia; with Solidaridad on their Kenya and Tanzania programmes; and with the Progreso cooperative support programmes in Uganda and Rwanda. In 2023 he founded African Coffee Connect as an international marketing platform to represent and accompany affiliated cooperatives.

Richard believes passionately in the transformational power of connecting farmer organisations, importers and roasters, and other key actors including banks and certification bodies, across the value chain. In that spirit in 2015 he co-founded the Saveur du Kivu, bringing buyers from across the world to discover the coffees and coffee farmers of DRCongo. In 2024 he similarly initiated the Best of Congo Cooperatives coffee quality competition with Goma based CongoAgri Platform. This event was hosted in parallel in Goma and London, with the second 2025 edition being held in Goma and New York. He regularly accompanies coffee buyers to visit cooperatives, and cooperative leaders to visit buyers and trade shows.

Richard sees the engagement of women and young people, production based on agroforestry/agro-ecology, and working towards a living income for farmers, as important to developing long term sustainability in the coffee sector. This can be achieved, but only through all actors working together.