More Than a Label
Certifications matter. When a coffee carries an organic or Fairtrade mark, it means something — a third party has verified that real standards are being met, and that's not nothing. We buy certified coffees when we can find ones that meet our quality bar.
What a label can't tell you is whether a farmer is thinking about the next harvest or the next generation. It can't tell you what they do with wastewater, whether their workers enjoy their jobs, or whether the land they farm will still be fertile in fifty years. For that, you have to go and see.
So we do. We visit our farmers, because the best coffees we've ever found came from producers who are doing things quietly, without fanfare, that no certification body is keeping track of.
Tesfaye Bekele, Guji, Ethiopia
In the late 1990s, a series of wildfires tore through the forests of the Guji highlands in southern Ethiopia, destroying more than five thousand acres of forest. Tesfaye Bekele was working for Ethiopia's national forestry service at the time, watching locals return to the scorched land to plant corn and wheat — crops that would feed families in the short term, but do nothing to restore what had been lost.
Tesfaye had a different idea. He began campaigning for coffee — a native species that could grow under existing forest cover, providing income for farmers without clearing what remained. The community wasn't convinced. Coffee takes years to produce anything, and Guji wasn't known as a coffee-growing region. Nobody wanted to wait.
So Tesfaye resigned from his government job and started farming himself. After his first harvest, the community that had turned him away came back asking for seedlings.
That was 2000. Today, Suke Quto Farm spans over 750 hectares, works with 171 outgrower farmers, and employs two thousand seasonal workers at peak harvest. The farm is certified organic and Rainforest Alliance — but the organic philosophy came first. Tesfaye doesn't use chemical fertilizers because he doesn't believe in them, not because an auditor told him not to. Fallen trees and plant matter are left to decay freely across the entire farm, building the organic layer that feeds the volcanic soil underneath. The wastewater from coffee processing is managed in purpose-built lagoons. Tesfaye recently funded the construction of a new school in the neighbouring village.
We've been buying his coffee for five years. It is, year after year, one of the most beautiful things on our cupping table.
Eduardo Ferreira de Souza, Mantiqueira de Minas, Brazil
Eduardo's father was a conventional coffee farmer — good guy, old school. Eduardo convinced him to let him experiment with regenerative agroforestry on a small section of the farm. When it worked, his father handed him the keys to the whole operation.
Now the entire farm runs on agroforestry principles. Instead of monoculture rows of coffee in open sun, the coffee grows within a biodiverse system of shade trees, fruit trees, and native species that mimics the structure of a natural forest. The trees protect the soil from erosion and temperature extremes, support the insects and birds that keep pests in check, and generate the organic matter that feeds the microorganisms in the ground. Those microorganisms express the farm's terroir in the cup — and the Mantiqueira region has won more Cup of Excellence competitions than almost anywhere else in Brazil. Eduardo will tell you the two things are connected.
Fazenda Pedra Preta has been in the family for a century. Eduardo is making decisions today — planting trees, rebuilding soil, converting land — that won't fully pay off for decades. We spent a night at his farm, walked the fields at sunset, and came back through the dark among fireflies. By the time we got back to the house, we knew we wanted to be his European partner.
We are now the exclusive European roaster and distributor of Fazenda Pedra Preta coffee, which you'll find in our Flora and Maya.
Adolfo Vieira Ferreira, Sul de Minas, Brazil
In Brazil, vast mechanized combines roll through coffee farms stripping ripe and unripe cherries in a single pass. Adolfo picks every cherry by hand. His workers move through the rows targeting only the ripe fruit — better coffee, and real employment for the people who live nearby.
The farm sits in a natural valley with a spring-fed river running through it, surrounded by forest. A few years ago Adolfo introduced solar-powered hand pickers across the whole operation. Workers start each shift by lifting a charged unit off a solar battery wall and heading out into the rows. The old gas-powered hand pickers were extremely loud — exhausting for workers, disruptive to the birds and wildlife in the surrounding forest. The new ones are silent. Adolfo didn't apply for a grant to do it or put a sticker on the bag. He just thought it was better.
We've been visiting Passeio every year since 2021. In 2023, Adolfo came to Amsterdam for the Coffee Festival and we got to serve him his own coffee — one of the better moments in recent memory. The same green coffee becomes our Paz, our Sol, and the Brazilian component of our Ayu blend.
Every Coffee We Carry
Those three farms are where our deepest roots are. But there are others.
When we source the Colombia coffee for our Isa, we work with the Los Osos project in the Santa Maria region of Huila — a collaboration between farmers and Colombia's national parks authority to create forest buffer zones around the Nevado del Huila, protecting the habitat of the endangered Andean spectacled bear. When we buy Sironko from Uganda, it comes from Mountain Harvest, whose CEO Kenneth Barigye we met at a trade show in Madrid. Kenneth took a bag of our Sironko back to Uganda with him and sent us about thirty photographs of himself holding it proudly, surrounded by family and friends.
We want to know who grew every coffee we sell, and we want to feel good about going back next year. That's the standard we hold ourselves to.
