Walking into a coffee shop for a quick pick-me-up, you’re comforted with the familiar scent of freshly ground beans and the low hum of the espresso machine. After adjusting your order to fit your preferences, including milk, sweetness, and ice preferences, you’re hit with the frustration of paying, on average, $5.84 for your latte. 

While the coffee shop reaps the benefits of your payment, the very farmer that produced the beans will receive only 10% of the profit, according to the International Trade Center. 

In 2020, the coffee industry in the United States alone was valued at $102 billion according to the International Institute for Sustainable Development. Further, of the 12.5 million coffee farms in the world, it is estimated that 73 to 80% of them are smallholder farmer-owned.

“We can’t forget that coffee is an affordable luxury,” said Andytown Coffee Roasters Director of Coffee Quality and Sourcing Corazon Padilla. 

From bean to brew

Although coffee is widely regarded as simply a drink, the plant and bean undergo a lengthy process, fueled by the physical work of farmers, before brewing itself. 

Shawn Steinman owns Coffea Consulting, which advises coffee quality at every stage of its production. 

“Coffee starts as a bush, then flowers and becomes a fruit. The flower is not what we care about, but the seed inside is what we drink. After the fruit ripens and gets taken off the bush, we have to get the seed to the stage where all layers are removed. Once you have the dry-greenish seed, that’s the coffee of commerce shipped around the world before it gets into the hands of a roaster who applies heat over time, turning it from the hard, undesirable green seed to the brown bean we know and love before it’s ground and blended with water to eventually produce the drink,” Steinman said. 

Third wave coffee and sustainability

The concept of coffee shops is nothing new: they began in 1555 in Constantinople, according to the Library of Congress. However, in the past century, waves have characterized the coffee industry, grouping an ever-expanding landscape of shops. While the first wave of coffee focused on widespread accessibility, often through factory production, and the second wave introduced quality control with the emergence of shops like Peet’s and Starbucks, the third wave, beginning in the 1990s, focuses on the craft of the coffee itself and the shift in focus on the impacts of coffee, beyond simply its flavor.  

“There was this groundswell in the mid-90s with the third wave of coffee that coffee should be traceable, we should work with the same farmers every year, and these farmers should be empowered to be a part of the price conversation,” said Equator Coffees Director of Coffee Culture Devorah Freudinger. 

According to Enveritas, 44% of the world’s smallholder coffee farmers, or 5.5 million out of 12.5 million total live in poverty, below the international poverty line of making $3.20 per day. 

Founded in Marin County in 1995, Equator Coffees became California’s first Fair Trade-certified coffee roaster in 1999. 

As a global movement, Fair Trade works to ensure putting people and the planet at the forefront of priorities, especially emphasizing the lives and wellbeing of farmers. 

“There’s such a legacy of exploitation and abuse in coffee. Fair Trade helps organize small landowners into cooperatives, which then allows them to sell larger quantities of coffee to larger-sized roasters,” Freudinger said. “There are a lot of protections within the Fair Trade system for labor rights, environmental considerations, and gender rights.” 

Since its founding in 1998, Fair Trade USA has delivered over $1 billion in financial benefit to over 1.6 million farmers within their producer communities, according to its website. 

After a Fair Trade Certified product is sold, the business pays an additional sum of money above the purchasing price that goes back to the product’s respective community. From there, the community votes on how it spends its funds, promoting a system of autonomy and agency often overlooked in the wholesale scene of coffee production. 

“Humans have been farming for as long as humans have had agriculture. There are lots of ways to do it to get by, but we don’t want people just getting by — we want them to thrive,” Steinman said. “Coffee farmers in other countries don’t have the same access to resources that Americans have, and I feel strongly about helping people farm coffee more sustainably by creating a life for those growing it.”  

Andytown specifically hones in on the customer experience while simultaneously sourcing and creating long-term relationships with farmers. While it doesn’t exclusively limit its sources to being Fair Trade partners so as to widen its sourcing options, it nevertheless strives to execute goals aligned with Fair Trade principles. 

“We work closely with importers, who are able to go to these farmers, see how they’re doing things, and verify how they’re farming,” Padilla said. 

However, geographic location also plays a significant role in farmers’ lives, oftentimes making individual operations difficult to manage. Rather, it’s common for individual farmers to come together to form cooperatives. 

“Fair Trade helps organize small landowners into cooperatives, and then as a cooperative, there’s a larger lot of coffee that can be sold directly to roasters of larger sizes,” Freudinger said. 

In turn, the import and export process is streamlined, becoming mutually beneficial for both the farmers as well as roasters seeking traceable, higher-quality beans.

“There’s some 60 or 70 countries that commercially produce coffee, and within those countries, there are lots of different areas, so you’re not calling a farmer up directly and asking for coffee. Rather, a vast majority of roasters talk to an importer than manages the acquisition of the beans,” Steinman said. 

Similarly to Andytown, Equator prioritizes sustained and direct relationships with farms, often directly visiting farming cooperatives abroad, ranging in countries from all across South America to Central Africa.  to directly interact with farmers and immerse themselves in the everyday production of coffee. 

“We buy the same coffee year after year, and that’s important because we want to have sustainable business relationships with those we’re purchasing from, keeping people on their land and keeping them secure. Our coffee is traceable and we’ve visited all of the farms our coffee comes from,” Freudinger said. 

Looking ahead

While third-wave coffee could be characterized by its heightened prioritization of ethics within the coffee industry, previous coffee waves set standards for the new era to learn from and build upon. 

“The reality is, without those companies that came before small specialty companies, specialty companies wouldn’t exist, so the likes of Starbucks and Peet’s, kind of set the standard for us on how we can be better,” Padilla said. 

Although a commitment to sustainability can often be costly to a business model, this is a sacrifice many small, quality-driven shops and roasters decide to make: disregarding financial prioritization in lieu of a commitment to unwavering morals. 

“We make less money per latte than someone like Starbucks or someone with a more traditional business model, but it’s so important to us that we’re willing to sacrifice that little bit because, on the bottom line, the environment should be just as important as profits. People need to be weighted the same as profit,” Freudinger said. 

Making a conscious effort to go beyond the physical drink and rather prioritize the real-world impacts of purchasing a commodity like coffee can be difficult, but overall meaningful and developmental in the betterment of the lives of others.

“Coffee is something people love and it brings us so much joy, so you can drink coffee that was grown by people sustainably on their land that are making a living wage, or you can buy and drink coffee that keeps people in cycles of poverty and food insecure – it’s that drastic of a difference,” Freudinger said.