Download Our 2023 Transparency Report.

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.

Some of the founders of Turihamwe washing station

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.

Some of our impacts in 2024

$84,000

premiums paid to farmers in 2024 above Fair Trade minimum prices

We calculate this taking the average exporter price ("FOB") across 25 contracts in 2024, for 65687 pounds of coffee contracted, above the minimum $1.80 per pound Fair Trade certified price paid to exporter ("FOB").

36%

of coffees were purchased from women

We define a Women-Driven coffee as one that drives direct income into the hands of women coffee producers, women-owned mills or exporters, or supports businesses where women have decision-making power. Learn about why we prioritize this here. *Represents data from 25 coffees contracted in 2024.

100%

coffees bought with transparent farmer payments

Financial transparency between value chain actors is not industry status quo. We align with exporters, importers and producer groups who wish to increase the transparency of price and market information. This is known to improve trust and empower smallholder farmers, often left out of the conversation on value, to make more informed selling decisions.

We partner with these change-making organizations

We are annual members of SCA whose purpose is to support activities to make coffee a more sustainable, equitable, and thriving activity for the whole value chain.

Our pricing data is donated to the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide project working to empower farmers and buyers to look beyond the unsustainable commodity reference price for coffee.

FAQ

– Responsibility

+ Where does your coffee come from?

+ Is your packaging compostable/biodegradable?

+ Is your coffee organic?

In short, no, because we do not believe Organic Certification to be the highest impact way to improve farm-level and coffees carbon footprint (to read the nitty gritty that forms this opinion, scroll down below). We consider the environmental impact of coffee production and our entire supply chain, and stand committed to reduction of our businesses carbon footprint in the following ways:

- We donate $0.01c (USD) per pound of coffee to World Coffee Research whose mission is to create a toolbox of coffee varieties, genetic resources and accompanying technologies and to disseminate them strategically and collaboratively in producing countries to alleviate constraints to the supply chain of high quality coffee. In 2022, this contribution was $888USD. - We invest in biodegradable packaging for our coffee bags, in 2022 that was 52,483 coffee bags redirected from long term landfill. - In 2022, we composted over 7000 LBS of ground coffee from 3 on 4 of our cafes. - 46% of our e-commerce deliveries in 2022 were effected by carbon neutral shipping methods (bike courier, picked up in store or our zero-net ground ship partners Boxknight) The Nitty Gritty: To earn organic certification, coffee farmers must use an agriculture system that produces food-supporting biodiversity and enhances soil health. They can only use approved substances and organic farming methods. Many of the coffees that we buy adhere to all the principles of organic farming, but the farmer or cooperative simply has not paid to have the organization certified, or has failed to meet the criteria due to small matters that would not otherwise contradict the principles behind the certification. Achieving certification is a costly and long-term process that many farmers struggling in cyclical poverty cannot access. For this reason, we support and encourage smallholder farmers who practice ecologically sustainable farming practices, whether or not they are third-party certified, on their pathway to obtaining organic certification, or already certified.

– Is your coffee fair trade?

The short answer is - yes, we pay beyond Fair Trade minimum prices and provide you more traceability and price transparency than Fair Trade certification regulates. The long answer follows, as conversations on "ethical sourcing" are complex: In 2024, we paid 80% higher than Fair Trade minimum prices. We publish our prices in an annual transparency report available to industry and our customers. Our vision of responsible pricing and payments for coffee includes certifications, but is not limited to coffees that have them. Why? Because certified coffees can contribute to the development of a sustainable industry, but they are not the only, and not always the easiest or price accessible pathway for a farmer or farmer group to adopt, furthermore they do not guarantee transparency and a two way conversation between a farmer and a buyer like us.

First of all, what is Fair Trade? Fair Trade sets a minimum price ($1.80/lb FOB) to help protect farmers from earning low commodity market prices that are the dominant economic model in our industry. But this minimum price is just a floor—and often no longer covers the true cost of producing specialty coffee, which ranges from $1.30–$2/lb. Additionally, the minimum Fair Trade price is is paid to the exporter, and farmers may only receive 60–80% of it. We establish minimum prices paid for coffee that target a higher price than the available cost of production for a producing region, and archetypical farm structure that we buy from. Ideally, we would have cost of production information for every farm, but unfortunately, access to cost of production information is extremely complex, and its why our industry has not used it as a benchmark for building ethical price benchmarks against. We believe paying above the cost of production is the only , and there is momentum amongst a small consortium of responsible coffee roasters and exporters who agree. We are aligning with them to establish new standards for the value of coffee, and to increase

Here are a few of these thought leaders on the ethical price for coffee that we collaborate with: JNP Exporters and Importers - The exporters behind our Burundi coffees. Jeanine, the founder of JNP sits on the board of SCA, and is undergoing one of the worlds' first agile data approaches to calculating cost of production with 100 smallholder farmers.

Azahar coffee Exporters and Importers - We purchase coffees from Colombia through Azahar. They have conducted cost of production studies, and price their coffee to roasters based on a margin atop cost of production. We've never seen an importer apply this methodology, nor provide us with in house cost of production data and we are thrilled to buy their coffees and improve the transparency of the entire value chain economics for coffees we source from Colombia moving forward.

The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide - Dispatch has been donating our pricing data for coffee contracts since 2018 to this research project out of Emory University, who publishes prices paid by importers and roasters for different quality tiers and volume tiers. This report annually acts as another benchmark to the commodity market pricing model, and Fair Trade certification models.

+ Is your coffee direct trade?

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.

+ Why does our coffee cost what it does, and why does it matter?