Sucafina Adds Rehm & Co. to Its Group, Boosting European Specialty Coffee Reach
July 10 - 2026
Coffee Geography Magazine
For a hundred years, the scent of freshly unloaded coffee has drifted through the red-brick canyons of Hamburg’s Speicherstadt. It is here, among the canals and warehouses that once stored half the world’s green coffee, that two companies born a generation apart have decided their futures belong together.
On July 7, 2026, Sucafina, the sprawling “Farm to Roaster” coffee company with roots stretching back to 1905, quietly welcomed Rehm & Co., one of Germany’s most cherished specialty importers, into its global family. It is a union not of strangers, but of two houses that have long watched each other across the coffee map — one building a planetary network from Geneva and Antwerp, the other cultivating an almost artisanal intimacy from its Hamburg home.
Rehm & Co.’s story began in 1923, when Johann Rehm set up shop in the Speicherstadt at a time when coffee was still counted in sacks and trusted handshakes. Hamburg was Europe’s coffee capital, a city whose exchange floor could make or break a season’s crop prices. Rehm built a name on fine Arabicas from Latin America and East Africa. Then came the war, and the bombs that crushed so much of the warehouse district. In the quiet stubbornness of the post-war years, the firm rebuilt sack by sack, eventually steering toward the emerging specialty movement in the 1990s. Today, its roaster clients know Rehm for something rare: the ability to trace a micro-lot back to a single hillside in Ethiopia or a family farm in Colombia, wrapped in the personal attention that only a small, seasoned team can give.
Three decades before Rehm’s founding, the Sucafina family began trading coffee in Antwerp, another great European port where the world’s beans arrived in endless procession. That family venture would morph across generations into a quiet giant. Now headquartered in Switzerland, Sucafina employs more than 1,500 people in 42 countries, sourcing from nearly every producing origin. Its driving philosophy, “Farm to Roaster,” is a promise to bridge the distance between grower and cup — investing in sustainability programs, logistics, and traceability at a scale few can match. Early in 2026, Sucafina launched a dedicated German arm to serve the commercial market, a signal that Hamburg’s gravitational pull had not gone unnoticed.
The tie-up with Rehm & Co. completes that picture. Rehm will continue to operate under its own name from its Hamburg headquarters, with its team and quality standards fully intact. The difference now is the depth of the toolkit behind them. Specialty roasters who depend on Rehm’s cupping table will gain access to Sucafina’s vast origin network and its IMPACT sustainability programs. In turn, the larger group absorbs something less tangible but equally valuable: a century of Hamburg know-how and the trust of a tight-knit roasting community that values craft over volume.
Claudia Fries, Rehm’s Communications Manager, captured the spirit of continuity that both sides are eager to project. “Joining the Sucafina Group brings together the specialty expertise and personal service our customers know with the strength of a global network,” she said. “Together, we can create even more opportunities for roasters while staying true to what defines us.”
From Sucafina’s leadership, the tone is one of admiration and ambition. Tom Swinkels, Managing Director of Sucafina NV, together with Bastian Fülles and Tobias Schwind, who head the newly formed Sucafina Germany, noted: “By combining Rehm’s local expertise and longstanding customer relationships with Sucafina’s global sourcing network, we see a clear opportunity to further strengthen our service offering to clients across Europe.”
The alliance maps neatly onto the geography of the modern coffee trade. Hamburg remains the spiritual and logistical heart of European coffee, a city where futures contracts and micro-lot cupping scores coexist. Now, within that same Speicherstadt air, a global platform and a local institution are sharing an address, blending the scale of 42 countries with the nuance of a single warehouse-turned-office where the phone is still answered by name.
For producers in origin countries, the partnership promises deeper market access and more stable relationships. For roasters, it means a spectrum of green coffee options — from container-load commercial blends to an 87-point Ethiopian washed lot — all under one roof. The story of coffee has always been a story of connection between distant worlds. In Hamburg, that connection just grew a little stronger, and a lot more personal.