Emi Fukahori worked in tourism. Mathieu Theis was an engineer at Siemens. Nothing destined them for coffee, let alone for founding one of the most respected addresses on the European specialty scene. Yet it was in Zurich, in 2016, that the two of them opened MAME, a coffee shop whose name, which means "beans" in Japanese, carries a philosophy borrowed from Japanese culture: the constant pursuit of improvement, precision in every gesture, the refusal to compromise. Today, MAME has six addresses in Switzerland, its own roastery and a competition record that would put many long-established roasters to shame.
Their paths into coffee follow the same pattern: a decisive sensory encounter, then an obsession that never left them. For Emi, it was a flat white discovered in London in 2006, ordered to copy her friends, without understanding anything about what was in the cup. Years later, living in Switzerland, she walked into a local roastery out of curiosity. There she met Nina Rimpl, then Swiss Barista Champion, in the middle of rehearsing her competition routine. Nina made her a cappuccino with strawberry notes, from a natural process Ethiopian coffee. Emi could not understand how coffee could taste like that, but it clicked immediately. Philip, Nina's coach, suggested she enter the Swiss championship if she really wanted to understand coffee. She signed up, trained every evening after her tourism job, and won the title in 2015, her first year of competition. For Mathieu, the turning point was an espresso served in a Zurich coffee shop, one he calls unforgettable. The engineer who made espressos at home dived into the world of specialty coffee, and in turn won the Swiss Barista Championship in 2016. It was at that very competition that Emi and Mathieu met. They became partners in life as in coffee, and opened MAME the same year.
Competition as a Way of Learning
At MAME, competition is not a trophy hung on the wall: it is a tool for continuous progress, almost a way of operating. Emi won the World Brewers Cup in 2018 in Brazil, becoming the first woman to take the title. She had chosen to leave the Barista category so as not to compete directly with Mathieu on the same ground, a decision as strategic as it was personal. Mathieu, for his part, reached third place at the World Barista Championship in Amsterdam in 2018, then sixth in Boston in 2019. A four-time Swiss Barista Champion, he has also become a sought-after coach on the world circuit, supporting WBC finalists in 2021, 2022 and 2023, including a world runner-up among his protégés in 2023. In 2026, he won another Swiss title and worked with Acaia on the development of the "Horizon", a tool designed to preserve the coffee's aromatic complexity right after extraction. What competition gives them, they bring into the daily life of their cafés: a sense of service, precision in every gesture, the ability to guide each customer towards the flavour profile that suits them. As Emi puts it, judges are customers, and customers deserve the same attention as judges.
From Competition to Roasting
In 2020, MAME took a decisive step by launching its own sourcing and roasting programme. Until then, the duo served coffees roasted by others. From then on, they selected their own green coffee lots and roasted them in Zurich, with a clear guideline: find the perfect balance for espresso and favour juicy vibrancy in filter. Their menu is designed to cover a wide spectrum of flavours, from chocolatey to fruity to floral, so that every customer can find their cup. This inclusive approach, far from the elitism specialty coffee is sometimes accused of, reflects their deep conviction: specialty coffee can change the lives of those who discover it, as it changed theirs. Mathieu likes to cite Jiro Ono, the legendary Tokyo sushi chef, as an inspiration, dreaming of making him a coffee and talking all night about their shared approach to the craft: the patient repetition of a gesture, the pursuit of an ideal that recedes as you approach it. Perhaps that is where MAME's true signature lies, in this tension between Japanese rigour and European indulgence.
