Source: Starbucks

NEW YORK, May 16, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Fast Company today announced its annual ranking of the 100 Most Creative People in Business for 2016, honoring an influential and diverse group of leading thinkers around the globe.

Each year, the magazine’s editors present an all-new list of 100 visionaries chosen according to a proprietary methodology (honorees can’t repeat, and anyone previously profiled in the print magazine is excluded). The 2016 honorees hail from a vast range of industries and locales, from tech and design to entertainment, media, government and nonprofit, health care, and food, and they span the world from India to Costa Rica, Turkey, and Nigeria. Highlights on the list include:

For keeping Starbucks–and farmers everywhere–full of beans.

Carlos Mario Rodriguez is the director of global agronomy at Starbucks, a position he’s held since 2004.

In 2015, on the Starbucks R&D coffee farm in Costa Rica, Rodriguez completed crossbreeding the brand’s first-ever hybrid of a high-producing coffee plant that’s rust resistant.

Unbeknownst to most dedicated coffee drinkers, the coffee industry lay under a dark cloud in 2014, with crops throughout South America succumbing to coffee leaf rust, a fungus that renders the plant unable to grow mature beans. But Rodriguez didn’t only save the plants, he capitalized on the opportunity to improve the lives of coffee growers everywhere; Starbucks is giving away the superior seedlings to both local biodiversity organizations, including the Coffee Institute of Costa Rica.

Prior to joining Starbucks, Rodriguez studied agronomy at the University of Costa Rica, where he worked in the university’s molecular biology lab. Soon after, Rodriguez worked at the National Biodiversity Institute before leading the countrywide coffee program at Instituto del Café de Costa Rica, or iCafe.

As previously reported by The Costa Rica Star:

For over a decade, Carlos Mario Rodriguez has cultivated coffee trees he considers to be “as special as children.” From seeds to sprouts, to selected plants and finally sprawling branches, he has watched over them.  

“The only thing that competes with my family is the love I have for working with farmers to help improve the productivity and quality of their coffee crops,”