Three Entrepreneurs from Innsbruck Built a Global Coffee Software Company. Then They Took Their Team Back to Where It All Began.
There are stories you photograph and stories you are honoured to witness. The Cropster anniversary in Colombia was both.
Fifteen years ago, three young entrepreneurs from Austria — Norbert Niederhauser, Martin Wiesinger, and Andreas Idl — set out to solve a problem that the specialty coffee industry didn't yet know how to name. They understood that the gap between a coffee farmer and the cup in someone's hand was filled with invisible, untracked data. Quality was being lost. Stories were being lost. So they built software to change that.
Today, Cropster is the world's leading software for specialty coffee — a platform that makes information easy to collect, access and analyze from farmers at origin to roasters, exporters, and cafés across more than 100 countries. What began as an idea born in Colombia now sits at the heart of the global specialty coffee movement.
Norbert Niederhauser, Martin Wiesinger and Andreas Idl, Founders of Cropster
To mark their 15th anniversary, the founders made a decision that says everything about the kind of company they have built: they took their entire global team to Colombia — to La Zona Cafetera, one of the most iconic coffee regions in Latin America, and to the very lands where Cropster's story first took root. This was not a corporate retreat. This was a homecoming.
They came from everywhere. They gathered in one valley. Behind them, the wax palms of El Valle del Cocora — tall enough to touch the clouds, old enough to have witnessed the very first coffee harvest in this land.
The celebration included a farm tour at Finca Buenos Aires in Salento, where the team learned about coffee production from seed to harvest — post-harvest processing, quality control, the long and careful work that goes into every cup. They visited Cropster customers in the field, watching the software being used in real time, from inventory and roasting to cupping. For many team members based around the world, it was their first time standing in a coffee field. For the founders, it was a return to the place where they first understood what they were building.
I was invited to document all of it.
Coffee Farm Tour - Finca Buenos Aires, Salento
Having the Cropster team and their customers in the same place was a rare and extraordinary opportunity. I produced action shots and team portraits that the company will use across their marketing — newsletters, website, press, social media, brochures. Here are some action shots of the Azahar Coffee team at work — doing inventory, roasting, cupping, or simply being extraordinary at what they do.
Action shots of Azahar Coffee team, doing inventory, roasting, cupping or just being awesome :-)
It is not often that a globally distributed team is in the same place at the same time. The Colombian landscape offered something no office could — a backdrop as alive and layered as the company itself. We used it fully. Group portraits against the Valle del Cocora, team photos at the farm, the mountains and coffee trees as witnesses.
For many, this was the first time they had stood side by side with colleagues they had only ever known through screens. These photographs are not just marketing assets. They are proof that something real was built — by real people, who crossed oceans to stand together.
With the full team together for the first time, it was also the perfect moment to produce professional headshots for each team member — clean, consistent, and worthy of the global company they represent. Cropster will use these across internal communications, customer support, press and social media.
What a group of people. What a privilege to spend time with them in that beautiful country.
Thank you, Cropster, for trusting me with this story — and for choosing me as your photographer, again.
Are you an entrepreneur or business owner in Innsbruck or Tirol ready to invest in photography that tells the real story of what you have built? Whether it is a studio session, an on-location shoot, or a team event — I would love to hear about your vision.
Visit my PERSONAL BRANDING and HEADSHOTS pages for more, or write to me directly at photography@mayumiacosta.com