Introducing Direct Access Coffee
Written by Matt Bishop, Founder, Direct Access Coffee
Don’t let your coffee be bananas… because nobody wants a steaming cup of bananas in the morning!
The coffee you likely think of as “good coffee” and certainly all of the coffee you purchase at the Boise Co-op is specialty grade Arabica coffee. Specialty coffee is booming! It is everywhere, and options abound. It’s also tasty—grown at optimal elevations, meticulously hand-picked and sorted at peak ripeness, and treated with care in processing and roasting. Many of us do not think much about where this coffee truly originates, however; at least not beyond the name of an exotic-sounding locale on the artistically-designed label that often accompanies it. I believe we can all contribute a lot more to the world and help save specialty coffee for our future enjoyment by recognizing who actually grows our coffee and gaining an understanding of the specialty coffee farmers’ current pain points—of which, there are quite a few.
What is Direct Access Coffee?
We are changing the model with Direct Access Coffee. We are hitching farmers’ financial fate to the stable and growing retail price for coffee with one simple action: we allow farmers to own their coffee from the moment they grow it until it is sold to a grocer. This is subtle, but it is powerful! We lend money to Direct Access farm partners so they can cover their cost of production, hire processing, and ship their raw coffee. We then roast and package these farmers’ coffee at a flat fee (and we are gladly transparent in our fees and all other known supply chain costs—transparency is paramount to our model).
We created the Direct Access brand to collectively represent many small farmers under a unified brand that we have developed and are securing placement for on grocery store shelves. This ensures our partners’ coffee sells, alleviating risk to these farmers. When farmers sell their coffee to a grocer in this model, the farmer keeps everything that is left over after essential supply chain fees have been paid. What they keep under the Direct Access model is compelling. In many instances a commodity price for our farmers would lead to a loss, or marginally breaking even. We offer the opportunity for a farmer to make thousands of dollars in profit in a year. Furthermore, we are offering greater means of financial opportunity for farmers than their next best options with social benefit and impact-minded cooperatives and importers.
In fact, many of these socially-minded entities are willing to work with us because of the obvious value we create for their farm partners. In coffee-growing economies even a few thousand dollars in profit is a major impact that allows farmers to pay more to pickers, replant to sustain their farms into the future, and have the ability to take on ever more ecological growing practices. We are proud of what Direct Access is doing, and we know we have a long way to go. The drinking of a thousand cups of coffee starts with but one sip, or something like that. We’ve taken that first “sip” at the Boise Co-op. Our focused goal is to grow Direct Access to a truly meaningful scale for the benefit of the world’s smallholder specialty growers. We would encourage all in our community to learn more about the specialty coffee crisis and support us in being the coffee that saves coffee… or you could just get up and drink bananas.
