A 250g bag of our Ethiopian costs ₱680, and the fairest question in coffee is: why? Here is the honest arithmetic, because we think the industry hides it too often. The commodity price for coffee — the "C price" — has spent years bouncing around $2 per pound. At that price, most smallholders lose money. The coffee in that bag cost us roughly three to four times the C price, and we consider that the beginning of a fair deal, not charity.
Start at the farm gate. A washed-station lot like our Guji involves smallholders picking ripe cherry by hand — selective picking is the single biggest quality decision in the chain, and it is brutally labour-intensive. Then the station sorts, ferments, dries the coffee on raised beds for weeks, turns it hourly, and sorts again. Quality premiums are what pay for all of that care. When we pay $4.50–$6.00 per pound green, the difference over commodity is what makes meticulous work economically rational instead of saintly.
Then the unglamorous middle: export milling, bagging, certification, ocean freight, import, warehousing, finance. Green coffee loses 15–18% of its weight in the roaster as water evaporates — a kilo of green is not a kilo of roasted. Add roasting labour and energy, quality control cuppings for every batch, compostable packaging that actually protects the coffee, and the margin that keeps our lights on, and the bag lands at ₱680 with less padding in it than you might guess.
The part we care most about is what the premium buys over time: relationships. We return to the same washing stations and co-ops season after season, commit to volumes early, and pay premiums tied to cup quality. That predictability is what lets a producer invest in drying beds, better fermentation tanks, or simply next season — decisions that are impossible when your income depends on a futures market in New York.
Cheap coffee exists because someone in the chain absorbed the discount, and it is almost never the roaster or the supermarket. We would rather charge what the coffee costs and show our working. That is what a ₱680 bag is: the price of everyone in the chain being able to do this again next year, well.