The London Coffee Festival has been postponed. Originally scheduled for April 2nd through 5th, the LCFโand with it Coffee Mastersโhas been moved to late July due to concerns over the spread of COVID-19.
The announcement was made today, Monday, March 9th and comes on the heels of some other high-profile festivals making similar moves; the RAW WINE Fair in London has been postponed to a date to be announced later and Austinโs South by Southwest has been cancelled entirely. There are a lot of moving parts that go into putting on a three-day event with over 250 exhibitors and some 30,000 total attendees and itโs not easy turning a ship this big on a dime, but thatโs what Allegra Events, the company that puts on the LCF every year has chosen to do.
The news was made public via an Instagram post from Socratic Coffee, in which an email from the event is reproduced. It reads:
After a thorough assessment of the current Coronavirus situation in the UK and globally, and in the interest of good event management and the safety of all our stakeholders, we have taken the difficult decision to postpone The London Coffee Festival 2020 to 23-26 July.
In order to minimize disruption, all bookings and the full event programme will be automatically transferred to the new dates.
We would like to express our sincere appreciation for your continuous commitment and flexibility in these challenging times. We are confident that with your on-going support, LCF 2020 will be a resounding success and a festival well worth the wait.
In an email to Sprudge, Allegraโs Managing Director Jeffrey Young states, โWhile we have a near sell-out event, we prefer to take the lead on this decision in the best interests of the coffee community and the safety of all our visitors.โ
While we here at Sprudge are personally disappointed to learn that we won’t be making our yearly London pilgrimage this April, we have a great deal of respect for Allegra making the call this far in advance instead of, say, waiting until the city effectively shut down the event days before it was scheduled to happen. Nonetheless, it will make the return to coverage all the more sweet when we find our way across the pond in July. For more information on the postponement, visit the London Coffee Festival’s official website.
Zac Cadwaladerย is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.ย Read more Zac Cadwaladerย on Sprudge.
