World of Coffee San Diego 2026

Alexa Romano
Researcher



Alexa Romano is an anthropologist and specialty coffee researcher focused on how consumer culture shapes value creation—and value distribution—across the coffee chain. Drawing from her graduate work at Stanford, she studied the relational ethics linking Costa Rican coffee production with U.S. (Bay Area) coffee consumption, centering how ethics are understood by women and youth coffee farmers alongside café owners and roasters. Her recent work examines equitable value distribution in specialty coffee by showing how who gets to speak, and in what language, shapes whose knowledge is treated as expertise and whose needs define value. Currently, based in Costa Rica, building a cafe.

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