Every roaster’s website has a page about this and most of them say the same things, so we’ll try to be honest about where we actually are with it.
“Direct trade” isn’t a certified term. Anyone can put it on a bag. For us it means that for a handful of the coffees we buy each year, we have a direct relationship with the producer or the co-op — we’ve visited, we know what we paid, and the money went to them rather than through several hands. Right now that’s true for our Ethiopia and for one of the Colombians. For the rest, we buy through importers, and the good importers are transparent about farmgate prices and we choose them for that.
The reason we bother is partly quality — if a farmer knows you’ll come back next year and pay properly for the good stuff, they’ll do the extra work at the mill. And partly it’s just that the alternative, buying purely on price through a broker, pushes all the risk downhill onto the people with the least ability to carry it.
We’re a small company and we can’t do this for everything. But we’re trying to move more of our buying that way each year.
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