We’d love to get to know a little more about how we can best support your roasting business.
Who We Are
Behind every coffee we offer is a great deal of intention and investment — not just the work we do to find aligned partners in remote and underserved areas but to hone both the coffees and the relationships as close to perfection as we can get.
Through developing mutually beneficial relationships with the farmers, cooperatives, and communities we buy from, we are building a stronger, more resilient supply chain. Consistency and repeatability are critical for us. We aren’t in this for just one season.
Farmers + Communities
The biggest single factor that makes a coffee great is the work and dedication of farmers and communities. The altitude, the varietals, the general conditions around the growing, all these things are secondary to the approach the producer takes. We are grateful to work with some of the finest coffee producers in the world — coffee producers well off the beaten path, who need a strong link to the consuming marketplace.
The most important thing we do is to provide that link. We encourage farmers to produce the best coffee they possibly can and support their endeavors by paying higher premiums for higher quality while ensuring a high base price for all tiers that meet our standard. We tie prices to cupping scores so that they are consistent and transparent with a focus on the base price being sustainable.
Smallholder Farmers
Working with a focus on smallholder farmers for whom livable prices outside the commodities market are crucial, we take the time to taste each individual producer’s coffee and craft both producer and community lots that represent the work of each farmer, neighborhood, and family.
Whether you’re tasting a single producer’s lot or that of a community, the coffee passed through the same rigorous cupping and quality control standards and all lots are crafted to fully represent the work of those involved.
Possibly our greatest value add is in understanding the intricacies in the middle of the supply chain, ensuring that the work farmers do arrives in your hands with its fullest potential intact, ready for you to do your best work as well. Preserving the freshness and potential of the coffee and getting it into our market countries as quickly as possible is mission critical. We are invested in protecting each coffee we offer, using GrainPro bags from parchment to dry mill and working with trade partners to move coffee through ports in a timely manner so that it arrives in our market countries at its best. Just as in our cupping program, our top priority isn’t what’s easiest, it’s what best represents the work of producers from their farms to your customers’ mugs, whether it’s paying more for faster shipping routes or even going overland where we can. Building resilient supply chains is our top priority, and a lot of that work happens in the middle.
Our Headquarters
In that spirit, we’ve opened headquarters in Lima, Peru and Oaxaca, Mexico as well as our original HQ in Berkeley, California, allowing us to offer year-round producer support and manage collection, milling, and shipping logistics day-to-day throughout the entire season.
With over a decade of experience trading coffee on both ends of the specialty spectrum, we’ve learned that every roasting company can need help with their menus at times. We know that our customers, whether they’re small operations without the monster budget to travel or medium-sized roasters who understand that they can’t source everything on their own, are constantly looking for consistent high quality coffees.
Producer Relationships
We like to focus heavily on the relationships where our investment means the most, continuing to develop long-term mutually beneficial relationships while bringing on new ones in the same spirit. In addition to Peru and Mexico where we have headquarters, we currently source coffee from Ethiopia, Colombia, Rwanda, Ecuador, Guatemala, Kenya, and Yemen. We’d love to work with you, so if you’re interested, get in touch.