Is Coffee Good For The World?
Feb 03, 2025
That’s a great question. We’re so glad you asked. While there is not a really clear, straightforward answer, we’ll give you some nuggets here to chew on.
Coffee, in totality, is an almost 500 billion-dollar industry, and it keeps growing each year. There’s a lot of money changing hands around this crop/beverage. However, we are also hearing about how climate change is affecting coffee production and how coffee farms are being developed into residential and commercial spaces due to the lack of economic impact being driven by coffee production in many countries. In spite of its industrial growth, coffee has a sustainability problem.
Coffee as a plant spread across the world as the result of colonial expansion and cultivation utilizing forced labor. Through these types of practices, the beverage achieved ubiquity across the Western world. The final consumers of the product never had to think too much about how they got it. They were too far removed from coffee production to care too much about the socio-economic factors that brought it to them so cheaply. In reality, the coffee industry largely benefited only those who traded it multi-nationally. It didn’t really serve the indigenous farming community who often had no other choice than to produce what they could and sell at the “market rate.”
With the advent of Starbucks, a subsection of Western culture began to care more about coffee as a craft product. Those folks also took a keen interest in the socio-economic implications of their consumption. General awareness around the plight of coffee farmers has grown over the last 4 decades.
The hope of the “Specialty Coffee” industry (which really got rolling in the early 2000s) was to accelerate the appreciation for coffee as a craft product and ultimately drive positive economic impact for the coffee-producing communities in origin countries. This desire has been at the heart of Stone Creek Coffee since our founding in 1993. However, up until very recently, quantifying the actual impact of our coffee buying has been difficult for several reasons.
1) Getting coffee from farms around the world usually requires roasters to utilize exporters AND importers (two middling entities) which has made financial traceability really hard to attain.
2) Very few people have been able to track and understand the farmers’ production costs.
3) In the event production costs are understood, the concept of a “Living Wage” has only recently entered the conversation.
1) Stone Creek Coffee does 80% of its own importation. While many roasters utilize importers, we’ve chosen to import and warehouse coffee ourselves whenever possible. This allows us to both eliminate an intermediary and work directly with farmers and exporters to achieve greater clarity about how the dollars are flowing.
2) Caravela Coffee works as a coffee exporter in many producing countries where they’re tracking the cost of production (COP) for the farmers, communities, and countries they work in.
3) In addition to understanding the COP, Caravela has established a benchmark they’re calling “Minimum Prosperity Price” (MPP) which factors in the necessary sale price to foster farm upkeep, employee benefits, and reinvestments. This MPP serves as a realistic benchmark for sustainable coffee pricing.
