We’re serving direct trade specialty coffee.
With our coffee, our goal is to create a traceable relationship with our producers, to share their challenges and to create a relationship that is fair and beneficial to all.
Our Brazilian coffee is from a company in Machado, Minas Gerais whose business model differs from that of majority of Brazilian coffee because our focus is on quality. And it is this quality sets that sets the price. This means that our farmers are focused on creating the highest quality coffee instead of creating much coffee as possible.
Although most Brazilian coffee producers work in massive scale, because of the hilly region where our coffee comes from, mechanical picking is not viable and their small production volumes meant that they must focus on quality and not quantity. Our coffee’s average altitude is 1200 meters above sea level (MASL).
What is specialty coffee?
Coined by Erna Knutsen of Knutsen Coffee, specialty coffee refers to coffee from special geographic micro-climates which will produce a unique flavor profile specific to that region. This is opposed to majority of the coffee which is mass produced, blended and sold in bulk which creates a generic coffee taste.
With our specialty coffee, we aim to give you a taste that you can’t find anywhere else and we hope that this is the best tasting coffee you’ll find.
Direct trade? What about fair trade and organic coffee?
Fair trade coffee aims to create sustainability and respect for the farmers by creating a baseline coffee price which the buyers must adhere to. To a degree, this equalizes the strengths between the large buyers and the small sellers in order to create a fair deal and has worked very well in countries like Guatemala and Honduras. We believe this is a highly respectable goal and has achieved great things in the coffee industry, but it is not enough.
However, fair trade coffee pricing often fails to neglect the quality and quantity of production. Due to the sheer scale that many Brazilian producer produces coffee and driving the price down, the premium price fair trade demanded is not very well adopted.
On the other hand, small producers like ours would have much lower volumes and selling it at a fair trade price would actually put them at risk instead. Higher quality coffee has no price difference in fair trade. So our producer wouldn’t even sell to fair trade since they know how great their coffee is.
As a small producer working in low volumes, creating organic coffee becomes a challenge as well. The increased costs, paperwork and reduced volume on top of already a small yield would not necessarily be beneficial.
We, at Gabe Coffee, pay 50 to 100% above market price which brings higher benefit than fair trade to the farmers, and in turn we procure higher quality coffee.
