I recently visited the Coffee Collective in Copenhagen, and one of the the things I loved was how they were paying about 300% over the base commodity value to a farmer they'd known for close to 10 years. It makes tons of sense to consider the time and effort Kenyan producers put into fermenting and washing their coffee as a factor in how much payment they receive. When a producer invests time to showcase the spectrum of flavor coffee is capable of, you want them to be paid for their efforts. As a Barista, getting someone to step out of their comfort zone and experience a good filter coffee over their usual black Americano is incredibly satisfying, but also acknowledging that I'm responsible for the last few minutes of a process beginning with producers and roasters is part of what makes specialty coffee great; instilling within your customer base that care has gone into what's in their cup practically every step of the way.
I have a platform, painfully puny compared to yours, where I talked about this video and your talk. I'm actually going to run it twice. This first one is where I agree with you specifically about power and creating a new social contract that is Equitable for all. The second time ironic I'm going to be focusing on conscious consumerism. I am so grateful to have found that talk thank you for linking it. And thank you so much for all of your content. We talk about different things on the surface; you are about coffee, and I am about relational ethics and racial Justice, but there are some places where we dovetail, and I am always tickled pink when they do. Gratitude.
Hello James, thank you for bringing this topic to the table. My family has been producing coffee in Colombia for a couple of decades and a few years ago I moved to Madrid and started working in specialty coffee. I´ve been looking for a better bussiness model that would fairly compensate the job done at the farm by having direct relations with roasters and coffee shops. Getting to know this part of the bussiness it´s become prety clear to me that there´s an abuse of power that´s perpetrating an unfair model towards coffee producers. I´d like to see that more people in the specialty coffee industry will give this topic the importance that it has and that hopefully specialty coffee can be a means to call for action in order to change the way the coffee market unfairly rewards coffee producers. Saludos.
Finally, I don't think this gets enough attention and action as it should. Coffee comes from some of the the world's most impoverished people groups. You hit the nail on the head when you said that by in large even speciality coffee contracts are self-serving. There must be a way for risk to flow up the chain, and equity to flow down. It might sound airy fairy, but at the end of the day, it's the people we affect that matter; not self wealth accumulation or popularity. There needs to be a shift in how we conduct business in the coffee industry, because for the most part producers (and cherry pickers to a greater extent) are exploited. Whether we (importers/roasters/cafe owners/ customers) truly own up to it is another thing. We think that coffee is a birth-right, when it's actually a luxury.
I definitely agree in principal, but why does coffee get so much of this attention and not cell phone manufacturers or literally any of the plethora of traded goods/industries that are propped up on the backs of the impoverished? I don't think the kind of new social contract James talks about in his speech will ever really work unless we have a radical shift in the way our entire economy works. As he mentioned, we as a society are still stuck in the colonial mindset of wealth extraction, and that's been going on in one form or another since pretty much the beginning of human existence. I don't think that's a condition that we can ultimately change (its the basis of most markets), but if we want to make any impact in coffee then it is definitely the onus of the roaster/cafe to not only build the story of the farmer and create empathy so that people are comfortable paying a well-valued sum for the beans they worked so hard to cultivate, but also to funnel their profits back into each level of the supply chain as productively as possible. I believe empathy is the key to creating a global village scenario, but its very VERY hard to create true compassion and empathy for people outside of our direct interaction and influence. Sympathy is probably the best you could hope for.
I wholeheartedly agree. What is happening with coffee happens in a plethora of industries. The problem is idea that the goal of business is only to accumulate wealth. Its an ideal that is never satisfied with the amount of money it receives, always looking to increase its year-on-year return, even at the expense of the impact on fellow human beings. The funny thing is no one can take wealth with them when they die, so why is it so important to people to become "wealthy" for the sake of it? The cynic in me says that the problem will never be solved. The altruistic in me says that if we focus on what we can do in our own spheres, maybe that's enough.
I plan on using your intro here as well as the talk in Columbia as the beginning of a conversation on my own website that talks about race and ethics. I love everything you said, I think there is a glaring omission, and I know that you know that. But I have to tease it out and that is while you were talking about the inequitable relationship between Roasters and producers, we also have to talk about the inequitable relationship between producers and their workers. That's the part I'm going to talk about and then pan out into conscious consumerism as a whole, as you said, up and down the supply chain. 20 years ago I helped run a fair trade store that featured equal exchange coffee. And I cringe at the stories we told customers about the people who produced the coffee from the bean to the bag. It was as though, no, let's tell the truth here, it was exactly because we thought that people would be neither able nor willing to look at the complex issues of the supply chain itself and the colonial history of it. We just showed a happy person with a bag of coffee beans on their head. I would do it so differently 25 years later. But the issue remains, and even though I know that this particular conversation started almost 4 years ago, the issues are still Extant. I started following James because I watched something I should not at all have been interested in, the v60, and was enthralled, but what I was also enthralled by was what he says when he does his giveaways. He is speaking particularly to those who have a hard time. It is impossible for me not to generalize to the people who have the hardest time as I consider the Americano being delivered to my table. I appreciate and admire and respect you Mr hoffman. I hope that my own efforts will do your work justice.
Hi James, inspiring speech, thought provoking and eye opening mostly. I see many roasters still saying the same phrase “but it’s fairly traded “, including me to justify to customers that the coffee they’re drinking isn’t Fairtrade certified. Quality seemed to be the answer but it’s clearly not if a drop could mean the end of the deal for the farmer. A high risk and no real security. Maybe Fairtrade is better in that case? “A system that was never meant to be fair” needs a “new social contract”. I agree. Thanks for sharing.
Hello James! I have been diving through a lot of your videos lately and I have not seen much on this topic recently during 2020. Would love to know more about where things are and idk doing our part in course correcting things in the industry
Hi James, I want to highlight the effort you're putting into creating a new kind of contract, I've been around for a while now, watching your videos and I remember you saying something similar to this before (I don't remember in which video was that though) Also interesting, is the fact that you decided to talk about it in Colombia, in an event where, producers more than anyone else where the audience (you mentioned that in this video, there were many producers...) and I'm quite sure they agree with you 100% since most of them doesn't have access to any form of financial help from banks or investors, I know that, I'm from Colombia and even though at the moment the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (Federación Colombiana de Cafeteros - FNC) is trying their best to help coffee producers, the money always will come from the buyer depending on how good the coffee is, you are an expert in all that, so I won't get in details here. I appreciate the gesture, thank you for thinking of the coffee producers and in how to create a better business partnership with them. I think it's important for the industry to have a better way to build business relationships with coffee producers, acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages they face in order to keep the Specialty Coffee industry alive.
Having gotten more into the world of specialty coffee I hear a lot about this unfair situation that we've gotten ourselves into, but I'm surprised how few people talk about market economy and how these kind of supply and demand problems seem to just automatically solve themselves for every other commodity, except coffee. For some reason coffee is special: it needs to be subsidized, fixed, helped somehow, if we let the markets do their own thing, soon we'll only produce coffee in four countries and lose all the diversity, as Mr. Hoffmann painted as the scary scenario. It seems to me the coffee market is a text book example of an oversupplied market. A characteristic of an oversupplied market is naturally that it's a so called buyer's market, where purchasers have an advantage over sellers in price negotiations and more choice in who they buy from as not all coffee is going to be sold. There's just not enough demand. How it got to this point of decades long oversupply seems to be largely due to governmental subsidies to coffee growers as more and more countries started to produce coffee as their primary export, but that's another story. The point is the markets were interfered with to detrimental effect. Does the demand for high quality coffee from diverse countries suddenly disappear if we stop subsidizing and meddling with the markets? No, of course it doesn't. Sure producers from countries able to produce coffee less efficiently than the big four will have harder time selling their lower quality coffee (seeing as there's a lot of variability in harvests and not all of the crop turns out outstanding every year despite best efforts), but eventually this, and all other aspects, will be baked into the price of the high quality coffee if we just let the markets do their job. This market driven model has worked in every other commodity, luxury or otherwise, that man has traded. In the short term some producers might be put out of business, but in the long term it'll create a more efficient, prosperous and healthier industry. This creative destruction of the market economy is necessary for any kind of evolution and development of the industry and eventual lifting from poverty for the average producer. There are a lot of actually good developments taking place: The farmers are encouraged to diversify their crop, to grow agricultural products other than coffee. The next generation in coffee producing countries is getting more and more educated, offering them opportunities outside the coffee production industry. All of this is a good thing and will over time help reduce the oversupply of coffee which is the underlying problem causing the low market prices. Now, I hear things like advocating more young people getting into coffee production and lamenting the fact that coffee production isn't seen in the producing countries as an attractive business opportunity. In doing so, with perhaps good intentions, I fear you are perpetuating the unfair system that you're aiming to fix, instead of solving it.
i actually dream of helping to re imagine the coffee supply chain, as a roaster and lover of the bean and of the people who farm it for us. i did some research on my own and found that coffee prices have been scrubbed from the internet (or were never uploaded) pre 1971... but i did find a table that had prices from 71 onward, and the results were flabberghasting. coffee farmers were getting paid MORE then inflation adjusted than they are now, by a large amount. adjusted, theyd be getting about 3.50 a pound based on the prices in the early 70s. with c market being at about a dollar ten, that means theyre getting between 30 and 70 cents/lb. which is basically lets be short about it- just about as bad as what hershey corp has done with chocolate production and contractual slave labour. much needs to change in this industry. i am not in a position to do this yet, but i dream of working with farmer to negotiate contract direct, and being an importer that cuts out the milling agents, and so on, and other overhead, and enables the farmers to build mills directly on their properties, like some of the more organized operations currently do. yielding higher profit and re investment in communities and farms. i registered coffeesource.net in hopes that i can pull this off some day, and help facilitate a more equitable and dynamic model for producers in this wonderful industry that affects so many people. as an aside, it seems that something happened when ICE took over coffee prices, but thats really neither here nor there... producers can be swayed away from dealing with them if they know their beans will be sold...
Isn't part of the challenge, that specialty coffee is only a fairly small part of the overall coffee market? I mean, on average, what percentage of a typical grower's total coffee production is sold to specialty coffee buyers at specialty coffee prices? How much of a difference does this make to their overall financial situation? And how much additional time and money does it cost them to produce specialty coffee (considering that processing may be more involved), and is it actually worth it to them? Or is it more of a nuisance? Who are truly the major players in terms of buyers of coffee? They hold the real potential to change things for the farmers. What if the largest buyers of coffee (the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and McDonald's and Costa, etc.) could be convinced to pay more? If they did so, wouldn't it have a much bigger impact for farmers than if only specialty coffee were talking about this? Are they talking about it? Perhaps they are.
Hi James, I was in Colombia as well and I got to visit a small coffee farm, it was an amazing experience and I got to ask a ton of questions, they are extremely organized and well informed. There I learned a little bit about cupping and the Q grader certification and I was wondering what are your thoughts on the whole process in general. Thanks for posting, I'll check out the link and look forward for your response. Regards!
Have you done more with this since then? This video was pretty light on details. An enormous amount of work has been done on producer empowerment and other associated efforts, so I'd be curious to hear how your thoughts fit into that work, particularly if you think you have something new to add.
What can coffee farmers do as an alternative to growing coffee in order to make money for their families? Do they even have a choice? If no choice, then they have no power. Do they have the power NOT to grow coffee or NOT to sell their coffee if the price is too low? Do they have the power to negotiate a fair price? Are they educated enough to even know what a fair price is or how to run a profitable farm? We don't need better quality coffee, better washing stations and bigger corporate run coffee farms...we need our coffee farmers to be educated so they can make informed decisions about running their businesses.
I wonder if there are any parallels with other agricultural products that come from similar regions of the world and that are consumed in rich countries that might be looked at for inspiration? I don't know, but, are there any where there are examples of producers having better contracts and getting paid in a more just way as compared to coffee--situations where they consistently make a sustainable income above mere subsistence? I am just tossing out an idea. This is probably not a new idea. Cocoa? Beans? Palm oil? Rubber? Chili peppers? Tea? Flowers? Tropical fruits? I don't know. Are there models to be learned from in other types of agricultural regions? (tea, perhaps?)
The disparity between music volume and spoken content volume is just baffling in this channel's videos which are otherwise produced quite professionally.
this how problem of being expert appeals. You are looking for a problem to solve. There is none. At least not here. 1st we as a customers want to certified for pollution free coffee, pesticides and mold as well as any other harmful substances. Than look at the data: not so many coffee growers going out of business, but roasteries and coffee shops are being closed every day. 2nd talk with plantation manager how many manhours they put into tone of coffee( divide it by 2 at least - they always exaggerate ;). You'll be surprised how cheap coffee can be. it is a comodity.
I recently visited the Coffee Collective in Copenhagen, and one of the the things I loved was how they were paying about 300% over the base commodity value to a farmer they'd known for close to 10 years. It makes tons of sense to consider the time and effort Kenyan producers put into fermenting and washing their coffee as a factor in how much payment they receive. When a producer invests time to showcase the spectrum of flavor coffee is capable of, you want them to be paid for their efforts. As a Barista, getting someone to step out of their comfort zone and experience a good filter coffee over their usual black Americano is incredibly satisfying, but also acknowledging that I'm responsible for the last few minutes of a process beginning with producers and roasters is part of what makes specialty coffee great; instilling within your customer base that care has gone into what's in their cup practically every step of the way.
I have a platform, painfully puny compared to yours, where I talked about this video and your talk. I'm actually going to run it twice. This first one is where I agree with you specifically about power and creating a new social contract that is Equitable for all. The second time ironic I'm going to be focusing on conscious consumerism. I am so grateful to have found that talk thank you for linking it. And thank you so much for all of your content. We talk about different things on the surface; you are about coffee, and I am about relational ethics and racial Justice, but there are some places where we dovetail, and I am always tickled pink when they do. Gratitude.
Hello James, thank you for bringing this topic to the table. My family has been producing coffee in Colombia for a couple of decades and a few years ago I moved to Madrid and started working in specialty coffee. I´ve been looking for a better bussiness model that would fairly compensate the job done at the farm by having direct relations with roasters and coffee shops. Getting to know this part of the bussiness it´s become prety clear to me that there´s an abuse of power that´s perpetrating an unfair model towards coffee producers. I´d like to see that more people in the specialty coffee industry will give this topic the importance that it has and that hopefully specialty coffee can be a means to call for action in order to change the way the coffee market unfairly rewards coffee producers. Saludos.
Important message! It's a shame that this is one of your least viewed videos, it should be at the top.
Finally, I don't think this gets enough attention and action as it should. Coffee comes from some of the the world's most impoverished people groups. You hit the nail on the head when you said that by in large even speciality coffee contracts are self-serving. There must be a way for risk to flow up the chain, and equity to flow down. It might sound airy fairy, but at the end of the day, it's the people we affect that matter; not self wealth accumulation or popularity. There needs to be a shift in how we conduct business in the coffee industry, because for the most part producers (and cherry pickers to a greater extent) are exploited. Whether we (importers/roasters/cafe owners/ customers) truly own up to it is another thing. We think that coffee is a birth-right, when it's actually a luxury.
I definitely agree in principal, but why does coffee get so much of this attention and not cell phone manufacturers or literally any of the plethora of traded goods/industries that are propped up on the backs of the impoverished? I don't think the kind of new social contract James talks about in his speech will ever really work unless we have a radical shift in the way our entire economy works. As he mentioned, we as a society are still stuck in the colonial mindset of wealth extraction, and that's been going on in one form or another since pretty much the beginning of human existence. I don't think that's a condition that we can ultimately change (its the basis of most markets), but if we want to make any impact in coffee then it is definitely the onus of the roaster/cafe to not only build the story of the farmer and create empathy so that people are comfortable paying a well-valued sum for the beans they worked so hard to cultivate, but also to funnel their profits back into each level of the supply chain as productively as possible. I believe empathy is the key to creating a global village scenario, but its very VERY hard to create true compassion and empathy for people outside of our direct interaction and influence. Sympathy is probably the best you could hope for.
I wholeheartedly agree. What is happening with coffee happens in a plethora of industries. The problem is idea that the goal of business is only to accumulate wealth. Its an ideal that is never satisfied with the amount of money it receives, always looking to increase its year-on-year return, even at the expense of the impact on fellow human beings. The funny thing is no one can take wealth with them when they die, so why is it so important to people to become "wealthy" for the sake of it?
The cynic in me says that the problem will never be solved. The altruistic in me says that if we focus on what we can do in our own spheres, maybe that's enough.
I plan on using your intro here as well as the talk in Columbia as the beginning of a conversation on my own website that talks about race and ethics. I love everything you said, I think there is a glaring omission, and I know that you know that. But I have to tease it out and that is while you were talking about the inequitable relationship between Roasters and producers, we also have to talk about the inequitable relationship between producers and their workers. That's the part I'm going to talk about and then pan out into conscious consumerism as a whole, as you said, up and down the supply chain. 20 years ago I helped run a fair trade store that featured equal exchange coffee. And I cringe at the stories we told customers about the people who produced the coffee from the bean to the bag. It was as though, no, let's tell the truth here, it was exactly because we thought that people would be neither able nor willing to look at the complex issues of the supply chain itself and the colonial history of it. We just showed a happy person with a bag of coffee beans on their head. I would do it so differently 25 years later. But the issue remains, and even though I know that this particular conversation started almost 4 years ago, the issues are still Extant. I started following James because I watched something I should not at all have been interested in, the v60, and was enthralled, but what I was also enthralled by was what he says when he does his giveaways. He is speaking particularly to those who have a hard time. It is impossible for me not to generalize to the people who have the hardest time as I consider the Americano being delivered to my table. I appreciate and admire and respect you Mr hoffman. I hope that my own efforts will do your work justice.
My head went straight to new Orders album power, corruption and lies reading the title of this video
Hi James,
inspiring speech, thought provoking and eye opening mostly. I see many roasters still saying the same phrase “but it’s fairly traded “, including me to justify to customers that the coffee they’re drinking isn’t Fairtrade certified. Quality seemed to be the answer but it’s clearly not if a drop could mean the end of the deal for the farmer. A high risk and no real security. Maybe Fairtrade is better in that case? “A system that was never meant to be fair” needs a “new social contract”. I agree.
Thanks for sharing.
Great talk James, hopefully more people see it and it sparks some great discussions. Here's to a sustainable and profitable future for all.
Hello James! I have been diving through a lot of your videos lately and I have not seen much on this topic recently during 2020. Would love to know more about where things are and idk doing our part in course correcting things in the industry
Hi James, I want to highlight the effort you're putting into creating a new kind of contract, I've been around for a while now, watching your videos and I remember you saying something similar to this before (I don't remember in which video was that though)
Also interesting, is the fact that you decided to talk about it in Colombia, in an event where, producers more than anyone else where the audience (you mentioned that in this video, there were many producers...) and I'm quite sure they agree with you 100% since most of them doesn't have access to any form of financial help from banks or investors, I know that, I'm from Colombia and even though at the moment the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia (Federación Colombiana de Cafeteros - FNC) is trying their best to help coffee producers, the money always will come from the buyer depending on how good the coffee is, you are an expert in all that, so I won't get in details here.
I appreciate the gesture, thank you for thinking of the coffee producers and in how to create a better business partnership with them. I think it's important for the industry to have a better way to build business relationships with coffee producers, acknowledging the advantages and disadvantages they face in order to keep the Specialty Coffee industry alive.
Having gotten more into the world of specialty coffee I hear a lot about this unfair situation that we've gotten ourselves into, but I'm surprised how few people talk about market economy and how these kind of supply and demand problems seem to just automatically solve themselves for every other commodity, except coffee. For some reason coffee is special: it needs to be subsidized, fixed, helped somehow, if we let the markets do their own thing, soon we'll only produce coffee in four countries and lose all the diversity, as Mr. Hoffmann painted as the scary scenario.
It seems to me the coffee market is a text book example of an oversupplied market. A characteristic of an oversupplied market is naturally that it's a so called buyer's market, where purchasers have an advantage over sellers in price negotiations and more choice in who they buy from as not all coffee is going to be sold. There's just not enough demand. How it got to this point of decades long oversupply seems to be largely due to governmental subsidies to coffee growers as more and more countries started to produce coffee as their primary export, but that's another story. The point is the markets were interfered with to detrimental effect.
Does the demand for high quality coffee from diverse countries suddenly disappear if we stop subsidizing and meddling with the markets? No, of course it doesn't. Sure producers from countries able to produce coffee less efficiently than the big four will have harder time selling their lower quality coffee (seeing as there's a lot of variability in harvests and not all of the crop turns out outstanding every year despite best efforts), but eventually this, and all other aspects, will be baked into the price of the high quality coffee if we just let the markets do their job. This market driven model has worked in every other commodity, luxury or otherwise, that man has traded. In the short term some producers might be put out of business, but in the long term it'll create a more efficient, prosperous and healthier industry. This creative destruction of the market economy is necessary for any kind of evolution and development of the industry and eventual lifting from poverty for the average producer.
There are a lot of actually good developments taking place: The farmers are encouraged to diversify their crop, to grow agricultural products other than coffee. The next generation in coffee producing countries is getting more and more educated, offering them opportunities outside the coffee production industry. All of this is a good thing and will over time help reduce the oversupply of coffee which is the underlying problem causing the low market prices. Now, I hear things like advocating more young people getting into coffee production and lamenting the fact that coffee production isn't seen in the producing countries as an attractive business opportunity. In doing so, with perhaps good intentions, I fear you are perpetuating the unfair system that you're aiming to fix, instead of solving it.
i actually dream of helping to re imagine the coffee supply chain, as a roaster and lover of the bean and of the people who farm it for us. i did some research on my own and found that coffee prices have been scrubbed from the internet (or were never uploaded) pre 1971... but i did find a table that had prices from 71 onward, and the results were flabberghasting. coffee farmers were getting paid MORE then inflation adjusted than they are now, by a large amount. adjusted, theyd be getting about 3.50 a pound based on the prices in the early 70s. with c market being at about a dollar ten, that means theyre getting between 30 and 70 cents/lb. which is basically lets be short about it- just about as bad as what hershey corp has done with chocolate production and contractual slave labour. much needs to change in this industry. i am not in a position to do this yet, but i dream of working with farmer to negotiate contract direct, and being an importer that cuts out the milling agents, and so on, and other overhead, and enables the farmers to build mills directly on their properties, like some of the more organized operations currently do. yielding higher profit and re investment in communities and farms. i registered coffeesource.net in hopes that i can pull this off some day, and help facilitate a more equitable and dynamic model for producers in this wonderful industry that affects so many people. as an aside, it seems that something happened when ICE took over coffee prices, but thats really neither here nor there... producers can be swayed away from dealing with them if they know their beans will be sold...
Isn't part of the challenge, that specialty coffee is only a fairly small part of the overall coffee market? I mean, on average, what percentage of a typical grower's total coffee production is sold to specialty coffee buyers at specialty coffee prices? How much of a difference does this make to their overall financial situation? And how much additional time and money does it cost them to produce specialty coffee (considering that processing may be more involved), and is it actually worth it to them? Or is it more of a nuisance? Who are truly the major players in terms of buyers of coffee? They hold the real potential to change things for the farmers. What if the largest buyers of coffee (the Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts and McDonald's and Costa, etc.) could be convinced to pay more? If they did so, wouldn't it have a much bigger impact for farmers than if only specialty coffee were talking about this? Are they talking about it? Perhaps they are.
Hi James, I was in Colombia as well and I got to visit a small coffee farm, it was an amazing experience and I got to ask a ton of questions, they are extremely organized and well informed. There I learned a little bit about cupping and the Q grader certification and I was wondering what are your thoughts on the whole process in general. Thanks for posting, I'll check out the link and look forward for your response. Regards!
Have you done more with this since then? This video was pretty light on details.
An enormous amount of work has been done on producer empowerment and other associated efforts, so I'd be curious to hear how your thoughts fit into that work, particularly if you think you have something new to add.
I really enjoyed this video. I was wondering, what do you think about Fair Trade certification and the role of producer co-operatives in the industry?
Great video as usual!
What can coffee farmers do as an alternative to growing coffee in order to make money for their families? Do they even have a choice? If no choice, then they have no power. Do they have the power NOT to grow coffee or NOT to sell their coffee if the price is too low? Do they have the power to negotiate a fair price? Are they educated enough to even know what a fair price is or how to run a profitable farm? We don't need better quality coffee, better washing stations and bigger corporate run coffee farms...we need our coffee farmers to be educated so they can make informed decisions about running their businesses.
I wonder if there are any parallels with other agricultural products that come from similar regions of the world and that are consumed in rich countries that might be looked at for inspiration? I don't know, but, are there any where there are examples of producers having better contracts and getting paid in a more just way as compared to coffee--situations where they consistently make a sustainable income above mere subsistence? I am just tossing out an idea. This is probably not a new idea. Cocoa? Beans? Palm oil? Rubber? Chili peppers? Tea? Flowers? Tropical fruits? I don't know. Are there models to be learned from in other types of agricultural regions? (tea, perhaps?)
What camera do you use? Love your videography, and love seeing the older style of vlogs
But what's the end goal? Seems it's to buy directly from plantation owners, so why not just do that?
Hi James, could you be able to make a review on Ikawa sample roaster? Pros and cons of the product or if you can suggest someone else review.
James Hoffmann For that reason I appreciate your reviews. Genuine professionalism. Thank you for quick reply.
The disparity between music volume and spoken content volume is just baffling in this channel's videos which are otherwise produced quite professionally.
this how problem of being expert appeals. You are looking for a problem to solve. There is none. At least not here. 1st we as a customers want to certified for pollution free coffee, pesticides and mold as well as any other harmful substances. Than look at the data: not so many coffee growers going out of business, but roasteries and coffee shops are being closed every day. 2nd talk with plantation manager how many manhours they put into tone of coffee( divide it by 2 at least - they always exaggerate ;). You'll be surprised how cheap coffee can be. it is a comodity.