Our different approach
We’re committed to designing a better coffee system. For over a decade, we’ve refined our sourcing, operations, and retail experience to ensure every pound of coffee we sell drives a positive social and environmental impact. Our ambition is to make our responsible business standards not just an available option, but the status quo. Scroll down to learn how we’re building a more equitable, sustainable future for coffee.

Supporting Smallscale Farmers
Smallholder farmers sustain the industry but remain the most economically marginalized and least rewarded in coffee’s retail price. We prioritize sourcing from countries where smallholder farms are the majority and stand to gain the most economically from international market access. We champion agricultural models that promote biodiversity and support indigenous and rural communities, helping protect their land and livelihoods.

Paying More For Coffee
Conversations about coffee prices can be complex, but ethical pricing is simple to us: farmers deserve to earn above their cost of production and have a say in the profits they keep. That’s not the status quo in our industry, and despite great strides in ethical certifications lifting the bar for prices to growers, a cetification is not a replacement for price transparency, or a guarantee of a profit for a farmer. We pay 60%-100% more than Fair Trade Minimum prices and we are committed to paying prices that surpass the regional cost of production. Commercial coffee prices ("C Price"), and sometimes Fair Trade minimums, fall below the well researched cost to produce coffee sustainably. We make our prices, and the latest industry research on farm profitability transparent to our customers in an annual transparency report, the latest version is at the top of this page.

Reducing Our Environmental Impact
Coffee is a high intensity carbon impact food. Most GHG emissions and landfill waste occur in the final phases of coffee's lifecycle (roasting, distributing, retailing, brewing and consuming). We are committed to delivering a lower carbon impact cup. Today some commitments towards this include using 100% biodegradable packaging for our coffee bags, composting in 2 on 4 of our cafés, incentivising the use of reusable cups in our cafés by offering $0.25c rebate on drinks.
FAQ
In short, no, and we do not associate this phrase with a high(er) impact way of purchasing coffee than how we currently do. We will try to unpack this further here:
“Direct Trade” is a model that favours the elimination of intermediaries between producers and roasters. It is important to highlight that “eliminating intermediaries” does NOT necessarily means more money goes to the farmers than when coffee is traded through intermediaries like importers:
“Direct Trade” has been commonly defined in our industry as an approach to purchasing coffee from the farmer to the roaster. This may be possible in certain producing countries, and with certain farm archetypes where farmers have the foundational structures in place to export their own coffee and access markets abroad. However, there are many millions of farmers who rely on cooperatives, collection centres, mills and exporters to move to the roasting phase of the distribution chain. This is the prevalent structure in most of the producing countries where our coffees come from..
Decreasing intermediaries does not inherently lead to increasing income for farmers
In some form, all coffee is traded through intermediaries. Not only is there a wide variety of “farm archetypes”, but there are also a myriad of intermediary structures between farmers and roasters. All coffee must move through four primary steps before final consumption, and in each of these stages, there can be multiple local actors or agents required to move coffee from one step to the next: from cultivation (in producing country), to processing into green coffee (in producing country), to roasting (generally in consuming country), and, finally, to d) packaging/retailing (generally in consuming country).
We choose to purchase most of our coffee from smallholder farmers (holding less than 10 hectares of land) because research supports that this is where we can have the greatest impact, both economically and socially. Smallholder farmers tend to be the most vulnerable coffee producers, and those with the least market access in the traditional coffee supply chain. They are also plentiful - over 25 million of them produce 80% of our world’s coffee.
In order to access smallholder farmers, informal producers associations, and cooperatives, we need to work with intermediaries. Importers, the intermediaries that we most frequently communicate with, are carefully selected business partners. We require that they share key aspects of our vision toward increasing farmers’ economic agency, and they often have long standing relationships with cooperatives and smallholder farmers. All of our importers have active, on-the-ground presence in the producing countries they represent, allowing them to provide pricing and impact traceability to buyers like us, and to better understand the personalized needs of each farming community.
The positive impacts of "Direct trade” are only as effective as the roaster who is buying the coffee. Traditionally, roasters hold the largest margins of any intermediary in the coffee supply chain. If direct trade is able to transmit more of the roaster’s costs directly to the farmer, thereby increasing the farmer income, this is good, in principle, but direct trade can just as easily enable roasters to simply keep more of the total margin without meaningfully increasing the farmer income, and furthermore without supporting the operations of value-driven importers like those we choose to work with.
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