Ian Clark

Background

About Ian Clark

A creative and adaptive leader, learner, builder and problem solver with a focus on leveraging data and technology to drive operational impact. I come from a 20 year background in the Specialty Coffee business. I become deeply involved in the burgeoning third wave coffee community in 2003 and I successfully helped to implement World Barista Championship and Specialty Coffee Association standards for execution of all elements of the coffee program across what eventually became 20+ locations with Bridgehead in Ottawa. At this time I also became the second person in Canada to achieve the certification of Licensed Q Grader (for specialty arabica green coffee) and served for several years as a Technical Judge with the World Barista Championship. In 2012 I help to open a roasting facility for the company and I continued to manage the operations of this facility for 8 years while also serving as the company's Director of Coffee and Green Coffee Buyer. A distinct pleasure of this role was the building and maintenance of long term relationships with small-scale organic coffee producers throughout Latin America and in Uganda. I enjoyed a period of 10 years and 20+ trips working directly with producers, purchasing coffee, and building relationships. In addition to coffee, I took on the responsibility of developing organization-wide technology and data capabilities beginning in 2015. I created impactful full stack and highly integrated software solutions for employee scheduling & labour management, inventory, order & fulfillment, business intelligence & data analytics, AP automation, accounting system integrations, cost of sales management, and more. The deployment of these technologies had very significant positive impact on company operations and financial performance. Throughout this process I became proficient with a range of technologies: AWS & GCP data engineering and full stack web services, Javascript/NodeJS/VueJS web development, and web based business intelligence libraries. I also developed strong experience working with APIs, developing integrations, and data wrangling.