Publish it, and publish it per lot, on the product page. I started doing that because I saw Onyx Coffee Lab doing it and decided I would rather be the kind of roaster who does not gatekeep what a coffee costs. Two of the four coffees you can buy from us today carry that figure: El Salvador Finca San Luis at $7.45 a pound green, and Organic Peru Decaf at $8.90. The other two do not carry it at all, and several other places on our own site say we publish it on everything.
The decision to publish took an afternoon. Keeping the promise is the work, and we are not currently keeping all of it.
Key takeaways
- Publish a per-lot green coffee price on the product page rather than an annual aggregate, because a figure attached to one lot is specific enough for a named counterparty to contradict.
- Decide which of FOB, landed cost or invoiced price you are publishing, and say so on the page, before the first number goes live.
- Ask your importer in writing whether you may publish the price beside a named farm, and ask before the first bag ships rather than after.
- The commitment is to maintain a record on every coffee, not to publish one price once, and the failure mode is a quiet gap rather than a refusal.
- Write the sentence your page will show when a figure is missing, in advance.
- Two of the four coffees Inheritance can sell today carry a published green price; the other two do not, and several of our own pages still say all of them do.
Which of the three numbers are you publishing?
There are at least three prices attached to a lot of green coffee and they are not close to each other. There is the FOB price, agreed at the port of export. There is the landed cost, which is FOB plus ocean freight, duty, drayage and warehousing by the time the sacks are on your floor. And there is the invoiced price you actually paid your importer, which may bundle some of those and exclude others depending on how they sell.
Perfect Daily Grind has been clear since 2018 that the industry has not settled which of these a disclosure should report. Their 2018 piece on green coffee pricing transparency, written by the academic director of Transparent Trade Coffee, lists defining FOB against farm-gate as work still to be done rather than work already finished. MTPak Coffee makes the sharper point about FOB specifically: it often shows only what the exporter received, with the producer's share folded invisibly inside it. Both are right, and I am not going to pretend to have resolved something they left open.
What I can show you is why the distinction is not academic, using our own numbers. Finca San Luis publishes $7.45 a pound green. It also publishes a transportation cost of $0.36 a pound, in a separate field. Organic Peru Decaf publishes $8.90 and the same $0.36. Kenya Kiambu publishes a transportation cost of $0.99 and no green price at all. So on our own shelf, freight alone swings by nearly three times between one lot and another, and it is recorded as its own line rather than folded into the first one.
Here is my concession, and it is the one that stung to write. Our own record does not declare which of the three prices it holds. The field is called green coffee price, and a name is not a unit. Because there is a separate freight field you might reasonably guess the first number excludes freight, but a guess is what it would be, and I am not going to settle it in a blog post when the honest answer is that the label needs fixing. Pick one of the three, say on the page which one it is, and do it before you publish a single number. It costs nothing at the start and it is awkward to retrofit across a shelf.
Per lot, or once a year?
These are two different practices and they get talked about as one. A per-lot figure sits on the product page and changes when the coffee changes. An annual transparency report is a document, usually a PDF, covering a year of buying in aggregate.
Per lot is harder and worth more. It is harder because every new coffee is another number you have to go and get before the bag goes live, which puts the disclosure on the critical path of your launch rather than on a quarterly to-do list. We roast to order every Wednesday and rotate single origins through the year, so that is a recurring cost in somebody's week, and the somebody is me. It is worth more because a figure attached to one lot is specific enough to be wrong, and a named counterparty holds the same invoice. An annual average is not wrong about any particular coffee, which is another way of saying it cannot be checked against one.
And a recurring cost is where a gap like ours comes from. I cannot tell you which week Kenya Kiambu's figure was meant to be entered or what was in front of me instead, and that is rather the point: a practice resting on somebody remembering a small task while a more urgent one is in the room fails in exactly this direction, quietly, without anyone deciding anything. A roaster who builds the number into the same checklist that puts a product live has solved a problem I have not.
We do not produce an audited annual report, and I would not tell a new roaster to start with one. If you are choosing, choose the per-lot number, because it is the one a customer can act on while standing in front of the coffee.
Are you allowed to publish it?
Worth asking before you commit, because neither of the two pieces above goes near it. The price is a term of a transaction with at least two parties to it, and sometimes three once you count the producer. You are proposing to publish one side of it.
Our own product pages put the figure next to a named farm and a named origin, and I am the one who chose to put them next to each other. That pairing is the part worth thinking about, because a price on its own is a number and a price beside a farm name is a statement about a specific household's income. Producers have reasons to be careful here that have nothing to do with modesty. The Perfect Daily Grind piece quotes Merling Preza of PRODECOOP in Nicaragua making the point that transparency only does its job if it runs the whole length of the chain rather than stopping wherever it is most flattering, and it notes plainly that a farmer earning a better price than a neighbor may not want that published.
So ask your importer, and be specific: are you comfortable with me publishing the price I paid, on a page that also names the farm? A yes costs you one email. Finding out afterwards that the answer was no costs you a relationship that took years to build.
What do you do when you do not have the number?
This is where our own practice currently falls down, and it fell down quietly.
Kenya Kiambu is on the shelf right now. It cups 91.5, which makes it the highest-scoring single origin a customer can buy from us, and its record carries that $0.99 of freight and no green price. The cheap half of the number is published and the expensive half is missing. ASCENT carries neither a green price nor an origin record. So of the four coffees a customer can put in a basket today, the count is two and two, and I only know that because I went and counted this morning rather than because anything told me.
The way it disappears is worth knowing, because it is designed to be invisible. The block that renders our financial figures is built to render nothing at all when a product carries no financial data. That is sensible engineering and it is a poor disclosure policy: a page missing its price looks exactly like a page that never promised one, and only a person holding both pages at once can tell the difference. Several of our collection pages and a line in our own site header say we publish what we paid on every listing. That was true enough when it was written and it is not true now. Nothing broke; a coffee sold through, another arrived without its paperwork, and the promise stayed on the page while the shelf moved underneath it. Those sentences are being corrected rather than defended, and the reason I am telling you instead of quietly fixing them is that the mechanism is the lesson.
What I would tell a roaster starting this: the commitment you are making is not to publish a price. It is to maintain a record, on every coffee, indefinitely, including the ones where the number is embarrassing and the ones where your importer's paperwork never arrived. Decide in advance what the page says when the figure is missing. Not published for this lot is a defensible sentence. Silence, on a site that promises the number everywhere else, is not, and it is the failure you will actually hit, because unlike the other two it requires no decision at all.
What does publishing it cost you?
The Perfect Daily Grind piece enumerates the risks better than I could and I am not going to restate them as though I found them: disclosure can weaken your position in a negotiation, it can be misread by customers who do not know why one origin costs more than another, it can be used by competitors, and some producers do not want their earnings published. Jon Allen of Onyx says in the same piece that almost nobody shares anything about buying green, so most people have no idea what a coffee is worth. That was true in 2018 and it is mostly still true.
The cost I would add sits downstream of theirs. Once the green price is on the page, a reader holding your retail bag has one end of an arithmetic problem and will finish it in their head, correctly or otherwise. I am not going to do that sum here, because what sits between a green cost and a shelf price is roasting loss, packaging, labor, freight, spoilage and rent, and a number that skips all of it is worse than no number at all. But you should know the sum is going to be attempted, and you should be ready to answer it in your own words rather than hearing it asked for the first time by a stranger. Why coffee costs what it does is the long version of that answer.
The honest counterweight is that it has cost me less than I expected. Most customers never look. The value has shown up in the occasional conversation where somebody arrives suspicious and leaves satisfied, which is not a return I can put in a spreadsheet and is still the reason I would do it again.
Where should a new roaster start?
Get a price you can stand behind before you get a shelf. That means knowing what your green actually costs you by the time it is on your floor, which is a different exercise from reading an offer list, and it is cheaper to learn on somebody else's machine than on your own. Minimum order sizes and how sampling actually works both sit upstream of this decision, and getting either wrong hands you a cost you would rather not publish.
Then start narrow. One number, on one coffee, with the basis stated on the page. Add the next lot when you have the paperwork for it. A shelf where two coffees carry a labeled figure and two say plainly that they do not is more credible than a shelf where four carry unlabeled figures, and it is a great deal more credible than a site promising the number everywhere and delivering it half the time. I know which of those three I would rather be and I know which one we are.
If you want the buyer's side of this rather than the roaster's, what direct trade actually means takes the same figure from the other end of the counter and works through what a published price is and is not evidence of. It is the parent of this piece and the better read if you are holding the bag rather than filling it. There is more on standing a roasting business up without buying equipment in how to start a coffee brand without buying a roaster.
Where to see it done, and where to see it not done. El Salvador Finca San Luis publishes $7.45 a pound green on its own product page, next to an 86.8 cup score, and is in stock in 250g and 2lb. Kenya Kiambu, on the same shelf, does not publish one yet. If you are working out what your own green costs before you commit to buying a roaster, the co-roasting room in Pensacola rents by the hour and you bring your own green.
