We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever. By purchase planning, you can make decisions based on the most up-to-date information on current crop offerings with expert guidance from our sales reps working closely with our green buyers at origin.
We’ve been sourcing some of our favorite coffees from Huila, Colombia, since the early 2000s, when we started developing relationships with producers farming along the verdant mountains that are home to this region. The delicate balance found within the cup profile of coffees from this area keeps us searching for more — strong, sparkling acidity with notes of clean fruit, carmalized sugars, and just enough body to hold it all together.
It is thanks to the resilience and determination of producers throughout Mexico that we are seeing quality like never before from the 2021/2022 harvest.
We all know it, that feeling of pure joy as another pallet of our favorite coffees arrives to the roastery. Watching eagerly as the pallet is lowered out of the truck and “look!”, the driver is even bringing it inside for us even though we didn’t request it — nice, right?
For all of us that exist somewhere between supply and demand, freight has become a volatile variable in the equation of expectation over the past few years.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
We couldn’t be more excited to announce the addition of two new faces to Cafe Imports, representing our Education team.
We have designed our purchase planning tools with you in mind to make buying coffee with us smoother than ever.
For all of us that work in coffee, “Happy Near Year” directly translates to “Fresh-crop Ethiopia season” — a time to taste some of the most beautiful coffees of the year.
As you have probably started to see with personal parcels and other shipments, the holiday crunch in the US is already beginning. Unfortunately, coffee pallets and samples are not exempt from the challenges this time of year during a pandemic poses. We haven’t even carved pumpkins yet and we’re finding we need to factor in longer than normal delays when getting delicious coffee to you.
Over the past few months, supply chain issues have been all over the news.
We are pairing up with Glitter Cat Barista and Ikawa in giving away a new Ikawa Pro100 sample roaster to support marginalized coffee professionals within our greater community.
In a normal February — which this is anything but — we would have staff in Nairobi with cupping spoons in hand, spending hours and hours cupping through fresh offer samples in order to put in the season’s buy plan for Kenya.
The mid-to-late 2000s saw the emergence of “direct trade” as coffee-sourcing concept that was designed to be something of an evolution of the certification programs that already existed in coffee at that time, specifically Fair Trade/Fairtrade. The benefits of those certifications seemed evident—organic certs provide environmental protection, Fair Trade provides financial protection—but lacked a component that was especially significant to specialty-coffee companies: cup quality.
This fourth post covers the Non-GMO Project Verified Product certification. While this is not a common certification for coffee products, Cafe Imports has held Non-GMO Project certification since 2016 and we thought it might be valuable to share our reasoning and the requirements for this particular mark.
In the third post of this series, we’ll take a close look at Rainforest Alliance (also known as Rainforest Alliance/UTZ or RFA/UTZ) certification, so you can explore the holistic nature of this program and its in-depth look at the environmental, social, and economic conditions coffee farmers face.
To our dearest friends, exporters, cuppers, mill managers, associations, cooperatives and most of all, to the farmers, producers and caficultores of the world — we miss you.
In the second post of this series, we’ll explore what “Fair Trade” means around the world, the potential benefits and drawbacks, and how to become certified.
