From sensory science to soil traceability, Philippine barista champion Gio Visitacion of Cebu’s Good Cup Coffee Co sets his sights on Manila and beyond
In the throes of the pandemic, Good Cup Coffee Co founder Gio Visitacion was welcoming a handful of people at a private Makati home—social distancing, masks, and all—indulging in an intimate and interactive coffee omakase session.
The touted experience would see guests savoring a bespoke menu of coffees made with specialty beans around the world, from delicate pour-overs to robust espresso drinks, each choice tailored to guests’ preferences.
Around the same time, Good Cup Coffee Co, Visitacion’s coffee company in Cebu, shifted its business focus to an e-commerce model, where most of its orders were coming from Manila. With lockdowns bringing online convenience to the fore, the omakase sessions were a way for Visitacion and his guests to connect personally over coffee.
Much has changed in 2024. People and coffee lovers have ventured back into the outdoors, eager to compensate for closed quarters by immersing themselves back into social spaces, trading quiet for community in the city’s food and beverage scene.
Yet the changes to Visitacion’s business are here to stay for good—and have informed an exciting set of plans.
Today, the coffee founder divides his time between Manila and Cebu twice a month as he gears up for The Good Cup Coffee Studio, Visitacion’s upcoming Makati outpost that he describes as a 200-sq.m. “highly interactive space” segmented into the following: a fast bar, a slow bar, and an academy.
Visitacion says that the upcoming coffee studio in Manila is “an extension of what we’ve been doing at the height of COVID, which was doing omakase coffee tasting.”
Today, the coffee founder divides his time between Manila and Cebu twice a month as he gears up for The Good Cup Coffee Studio, Gio Visitacion’s upcoming Makati outpost that he describes as a 200-sq.m. “highly interactive space.”
“We saw that there was a very high level of interest for people looking for a more curated coffee experience. And since we carry so much of these limited coffees, and we do all of these micro roasting, we try to also do all of these experiential coffee tasting concepts,” Visitacion explains.
Customers will be greeted by the fast bar in front—The Good Cup’s grab-and-go coffee operation where Visitacion aims for each drink to be done in under two minutes.
At the back will be the more intentional slow bar, a sit-down experience where people can also indulge in a coffee omakase as well as a micro-roastery and academy that seeks to train its wholesale clients as well as coffee aficionados who want to elevate their everyday cup.
“We saw that there was a very high level of interest for people looking for a more curated coffee experience. And since we carry so much of these limited coffees, and we do all of these micro roasting, we try to also do all of these experiential coffee tasting concepts.”
Visitacion hopes to open this December yet the idea of a Manila space has loomed large since 2020 when their Manila customer base grew, first among homebrewers then with F&B establishments.
“People have been asking like, ‘When are you guys opening here? When are you guys opening here’” What drove us to do an omakase tasting service before was to connect with our customers in person.”
“But then we were able to find the right space. We were able to, it was also at the time when we were more focused on strengthening the roasting and the roasting process and the quality together with the supply chain. So we were really waiting for the right time. And as our customer base grew, our volume grew also for our hosting business,” Visitacion says.
The Good Cup Coffee Co founder explains that the Manila space will be true to the spirit of the original Cebu shop. “A coffee bean selling shop with a coffee experience. It’s not a coffee shop.”
While Good Cup’s Cebu outlet delivers a fast yet elevated coffee experience, Visitacion adds that the Manila studio will be more segmented “because of how diverse the market is.”
“So if you want your coffee fast, a portion of our Cebu existing swag of operation will be there for fast service. But if you want your coffee undisturbed, you want to listen to the barista, then you can experience that in the omakase bar,” he shares, adding that he will be manning the slow bar along with his team.
Bridging Cebu and Manila coffee cultures
Visitacion has come a long way since trying his first Yardstick coffee for the first time in 2018, calling it a “Eureka” moment that saw him sent to Singapore to take up the entire specialty coffee association module and work in various coffee shops to gain experience.
After starting out as a micro-roastery in August 2018, in November that year, he and his late partner, John Hermoso, opened Good Cup Coffee Co on Ramos St. in Cebu. “We were roasting in a one-kilo machine in an apartment, and we were roasting for 12 hours a day. It was a very exciting phase because [John and I] were the ones who pitched, roasted, delivered, invoiced end to end.”
At the time, the pair were targeting Cebu’s bustling cafes for their roasting business, and only acquired one cafe as a client as it already maxed out their capacity. Soon, their capabilities expanded and so did their clientele— extending to their friends, home consumers, and other establishments.
“We realized that it’s actually a business that we can really get into and there’s great room for growth and a great opportunity because there is a market for it. So that’s the time we started thinking, ‘Okay, let’s integrate the roastery in the cafe.’ And then how do we add value to our customers? Have an academy,” he narrates, which led to Good Cup Coffee Co’s current format of a cafe, roastery, and academy.
“I would say at a certain point, Cebu concepts were more high-quality driven in comparison to Manila [taking out volume and revenue].”
Having divided his time between Cebu and Manila, Visitacion has made astute observations about the uniqueness and similarities between either coffee scene.
“I would say at a certain point, Cebu concepts were more high-quality driven in comparison to Manila [taking out volume and revenue]. Multiple brands, like Current Coffee and Tightrope, were pushing the boundaries in terms of what can be done from a quality perspective,” Visitacion reflects.
“Then after COVID, Manila concepts just exploded. So now, at the height of COVID, we were serving thousands of individual customers at home. And a lot of these customers started roasting their coffee, opening their cafes. So at some point of time, we were also lucky that we were able to either jumpstart a customer’s love for coffee to take it to another level… But Manila is where we see that concepts just opening left and right and concepts are challenging the existing direction of the industry. So pushing the boundaries of what quality can taste like—Deuces is an honorable mention,” he adds.
Pushing the envelope for coffee
Today, Visitacion continues to push the boundaries of being one of Cebu’s most outstanding coffee businesses to redefine what it means to create “a good cup” from start to finish.
Under his wing, Good Cup Coffee Co has begun introducing “unified traceability” among the beans they carry—particularly important for the local coffee farm communities they work with, such as in Bukidnon, to produce specialty-grade beans.
“When you buy a bag and you see a product code, it will then [show data] of when it’s coming, where it came from, when it was shipped from the farm, the farmer, the moisture content. We already have that data from the moment it departs, the moment it lands, to the moment it gets roasted,” Visitacion explains.
This system has enabled a new kind of efficiency and transparency for Good Cup Coffee Co, Visitacion adds, and allows him and his team to take care of the other aspects of the business, such as standardizing quality and taste.
“When I travel to the farms, I can just track how the roasting team is roasting their coffee and then the moment I come back, I just taste and then confirm I like this and like this one can be improved because we’re starting to have a unified language,” he explains.
“When you buy a bag and you see a product code, it will then [show data] of when it’s coming, where it came from, when it was shipped from the farm, the farmer, the moisture content. We already have that data from the moment it departs, the moment it lands, to the moment it gets roasted.”
Visitacion calls this a “company calibration” to make sure their entire team is aligned with the standards they have to meet. Coffee is subjective, the coffee honcho shares, and this allows them to move within an objective set of parameters.
This level of traceability also allows them to instantly address product and customer satisfaction issues by pinpointing the root of the issue. “If there’s a customer unhappy with their coffee, we always need to replace it because it means that we failed to deliver what the expected experience was… so when a customer complains now, or when a customer says, ‘I have an issue with my product,’ it gets traced back towards what happened in the roasting aspect, and what happened on the sourcing aspect,” he shares.
These surgical levels to detail were inspired by Visitacion’s training days for the World Barista Championship in Busan earlier this year, after having placed as this year’s Philippine barista champion.
Visitacion refers to the barista cup as the F1 of coffee, where his performance mattered down to the very last second. The competition required him to spend 15 minutes creating 12 drinks to perfection while talking to the judges and explaining what he was serving while giving them very specific instructions.
Visitacion would time his performances religiously and record them in an Excel file, drilling down to the most granular of details so they could strip off time and become more efficient.
“That drove us to start thinking about how it can be done on a business scale. Aside from training on the technical stuff, we were also measuring and tracking the sensory stuff, which is how the coffee behaves every day. So we write that down. So let’s say, roasted today and then the following day, how does it taste? So that’s where we started tasting and inputting data,” he explains.
“It’s not like David and Goliath where instant coffee has to lose for us to win. [Instant coffee] allowed us to grow. It was the driver for us to move to these products. And that’s why you have a lot of international brands coming in because they see the Philippines as a big market.”
Visitacion’s dedication to quality and innovation is reflective of his optimism in the Philippine coffee scene—80 percent of Filipinos drink two cups of coffee a day, and in the conversation between instant coffee, affordable entry-level beverages, and specialty cups, these options don’t have to cancel out each other.
“It’s not like David and Goliath where instant coffee has to lose for us to win. [Instant coffee] allowed us to grow. It was the driver for us to move to these products. And that’s why you have a lot of international brands coming in because they see the Philippines as a big market. On the global scale, I think Asia is where the growth is. That’s a very consistent message even during the world championships,” he explains.
Visitacion also studied sensory science in the past few years, honing his senses for roasting and brewing with techniques backed by science. “This is what the farmers also love about working with us—I can tell them, ‘This coffee was picked too early,’ or ‘This coffee was dried too late’ because it’s all correlated in a scientific aspect,” he explains.
“My coffee philosophy is methodical, craft-driven, [mixed with] the right amount of art, the right amount of science, and the right amount of past experiences,” he says.
These exacting standards mean constantly delivering a state of consistency, integrity, and quality that have become hallmarks for the brand. Visitacion shares that Good Cup Coffee Co ensures it doesn’t lose sight of its organizational focus, maintaining the integrity. “One of the superpowers of the company is we learn to say no. We’ve managed to say no to so many opportunities because either our hands are so full so we cannot execute the opportunity at its best potential or it’s not aligned with our direction. We could have said yes to so many things and we could have been larger as a company,” he explains.
The Good Cup’s work with their partner farm communities contributes towards uplifting their livelihoods by constantly helping them refine their production practices while purchasing their beans above market price.
Yet one that clearly stands out in Visitacion’s vision is his bold and passionate pursuit towards a “good cup”—one that not only meets an unparalleled level of quality but also benefits the hands that contribute to that process.
The Good Cup’s work with their partner farm communities contributes towards uplifting their livelihoods by constantly helping them refine their production practices while purchasing their beans above market price. Visitacion also visits the communities every quarter to touch base with their farmer partners, and help them build resilient production systems.
“Recently, a farmer that we’re working with in Bukidnon recently got donated P1 million-plus worth of a drying facility because we bridged them to a foundation and that impacts multiple families. So how do we replicate that and multiply that?” Visitacion shares, adding that their partner farmers have also sent their children to immerse with Visitacion and his team in Cebu to elevate their understanding of coffee, helping raise the quality of the farms’ output.
“Moving forward in the future, the way we see it is if things go well, we want to commit a certain percentage of the overall business net profit to give back to farmers and upskilling them,” he says.
By Sam Beltran
Photos by Jar Concengco
Creative direction and styling by Nimu Muallam
Recipe development and props by Gio Visitacion
Produced by Eric Nicole Salta