Recently, our East London HQ filled up for another Cupping Club. This time we gathered people to ask a bigger question: what does it actually take to build a coffee supply chain that can survive droughts, price spikes and empty warehouses?
If you've winced at the price of a flat white lately, or had to put your own prices up, this one was for you. Our MD Nicole set out the big picture, our director Danny reported back from his recent trip to Brazil, and, as always, we finished around the cupping table. It was an honest, slightly chaotic and very nerdy evening, which is exactly how we like them.
Sustainability is a three-legged stool
Nicole kicked off with the three pillars of sustainability: environmental, social and economic. The idea that the three are connected took hold in the 1980s, with the 1987 Brundtland report, Our Common Future. She explained how moving sustainably is actually a three-legged stool: take one away and the whole thing tips over.
In theory, simple. In practice, the legs pull against each other. A few of the trade-offs she walked us through:
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Sustainable packaging cuts waste, but costs more, often has to be bought in bulk upfront, and only does its job if it ends up in the right waste stream.
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Buying the cheapest coffee available (not that there's much cheap coffee left) protects margins in the short term, but can undermine producer livelihoods, quality and the supply chain itself.
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Energy-efficient equipment, such as a Loring roaster, cuts energy use and costs over time, but needs a big investment upfront and takes a while to pay off.
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Chasing hype coffees gets everyone excited, but can come at the expense of long-term relationships, consistency and availability.
Everyone wants the most traceable coffee at the lowest price, and those two rarely line up. That's where resilience comes in. If sustainability is about balancing environmental, social and economic needs, resilience is about keeping that balance when the world goes a bit mad. The question we ask ourselves almost daily: when we can't optimise everything at once, what do we prioritise, and what are we willing to trade off?
The bigger picture
Why does any of this matter beyond our roastery? According to the Coffee Barometer demand for coffee is set to grow from around 160 million bags a year to 300 million. At the same time, rising temperatures, changing rainfall, deforestation and diseases like coffee leaf rust could cost some producing countries 30 to 60% of their suitable growing land by 2050. Meanwhile, farmers' costs for labour, fertiliser and production keep rising, and prices are often too low to make a decent living.
The value is unevenly spread, too. Around 70% of the world's coffee is grown by smallholder farmers, some 20 to 25 million families, yet less than 10% of its total value stays in producing countries.
There are tools meant to help. Certifications like Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance and organic give consumers a reliable baseline, but they're expensive for producers, largely buyer-driven, and a standard that suits a farm in Guatemala may not suit one in Kenya. A Fairtrade price also means little if there's no buyer in the first place. Private schemes and "direct trade" set their own rules, with no shared definition or accountability. Co-operatives offer strength in numbers, giving smaller farmers better access to markets, finance and training (our decaf comes from one in La Plata, Colombia). And B Corp, which we earned a few years ago (Nicole is already dreading the recertification paperwork), is a good foundation but not the be-all and end-all.
None of these is a complete answer on its own. In most of them, the farmer still carries the most risk.
How we buy coffee
There's more than one way to buy green coffee, and we use pretty much all of them:
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Spot buying: picking from an importer's list of coffee that's already in the country. People can be snobby about it, but it's ideal for smaller roasters and it's got us out of a few holes lately.
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Forward buying: agreeing volumes and prices months before the coffee arrives. It gives producers certainty that their crop is sold, and pushes us to plan two years ahead rather than one.
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Long-term relationships: the heart of how we work. Our friend Bruno Souza has been on the ground in Brazil for us for about ten years, and until recently around 90% of our coffees were repeat purchases.
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Direct trade: a slightly misleading term. Someone still has to handle logistics, insurance, customs and finance, and nobody has £150,000 lying around for a container.
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Exporters and co-ops: they do the paperwork we can't, and often represent brilliant producers too small to reach buyers on their own.
Danny also unpicked the difference between a supply chain and a value chain. The supply chain is the physical journey: trucks, boats, warehouses. The value chain is where money gets added along the way. That's why we like buying FOB ("free on board"), the price before export, shipping and import costs are added. It shows us how much actually reaches the producer.
What happened to the Baron
Then came story time. For years, The Baron came from Daterra, and we bought six to seven containers of it a year. In 2024, the farm went 150 days without rain, partly because smoke from the Amazon fires stopped clouds from forming.
The following harvest looked promising, until the coffee was weighed and came in far too light. Coffee berry borer had got into the beans, and the bad news was that Daterra could offer us just two containers.
Bruno introduced us to a new producer, and we left with the promise of a couple of containers at a good price, but no contract. By October, that coffee had vanished too. In a tight year, coffee in Brazil sells for cash to whoever turns up first.
So our friend Bruno jumped into action. We teamed up with a new importer (but an old colleague in the industry) who showed us the full breakdown of shipping costs (an eye-opener), Bruno did the sourcing, sample roasting and cupping, and we finally locked in our Brazilian coffee that December. This year, by contrast, we'd signed our last contract by May.
Back to Brazil, at harvest
This summer, Danny spent two weeks driving 1,400km across Minas Gerais with Bruno (and our colleague Matt for the first week). For the first time, we were there during harvest, to meet the producers we'd started buying from but never visited.
Daterra
Our fourth visit since 2016, and a very different sight at harvest. Machines work through the night, partly because the farm now finds around 100 pickers a season instead of 400. Since the drought, Daterra has installed irrigation, and it still grows around 10 million seedlings a year. Its resilience is being tested, but it's still pioneering.
Mariana and Humberto
Twice the size of Daterra, producing around 200,000 bags a year across several farms they fly between each week. No marketing, no fuss, just a deep commitment to their community: they've helped neighbours install irrigation and teach competitors to farm better. Their coffee is the next change to the Baron, with two containers (about 700 bags) arriving later this year. Mariana's advice to roasters? Know what you want and commit early, because good coffee won't wait.
Campos Altos
The current Baron comes from this old coffee town, from a farm right next door to the one Bruno once owned. It's rustic and generational: Bruno's dad was friends with one producer's grandfather, and Bruno trained his son as a Q grader. These are now our permanent suppliers.
Serra da Canastra
Up in the cheese-making mountains, we met a young producer making just 2,000 bags a year, including Geisha and Pacamara, who also grows grapes for wine. When coffee has a bad year, the wine carries him. Eight bags of his coffee are on their way to us.
What we took away
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Resilience means spreading the risk. A bad harvest in one part of Minas Gerais can be a good one 600km away. Buying from different regions, as Mariana does across her own farms, protects everyone.
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Relationships are still the foundation, but they need new branches. Bruno's network is what got us through, and it's how we've built new ones.
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Producers are adapting fast: irrigation, mechanisation, second crops like grapes. Most of them are surprisingly optimistic, with Brazil heading for a record harvest of around 64 million bags this year.
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There's no perfect purchasing model. We'll keep mixing them, and keep asking what we're willing to trade off.
We finished, as always, around the cupping table, tasting coffees from the producers and exporters we'd just heard about. A huge thank you to everyone who came along, asked brilliant questions and stayed for the slurping.
Want to join us next time? Keep an eye on our events page, and in the meantime, you can taste the story so far in The Baron.
