Direct trade means a roaster bought its green coffee straight from the farm or the cooperative that grew it, instead of through an exporter, an importer and a broker. It's a description of a purchase, not a standard, and nobody certifies it. We buy through importing partners, so we don't use the phrase.
Key takeaways
- Direct trade describes a purchasing arrangement: a roaster buys green coffee straight from the producer or cooperative, rather than through the conventional export and import trade.
- There's no governing body, no certification standard, no third-party verification and no agreed definition behind the term, so any roaster can print it on any bag.
- A roastery buying its green coffee through importing partners, as we do, can't honestly claim direct trade about itself.
- We publish what we paid per pound green instead: Ethiopia Buku Abel cost us $8.89, which is our side of the transaction and not the farm's.
Direct trade describes a purchase, and nobody audits it
A roaster contacts a farm, a cooperative or a producer group, agrees a price, and arranges for the coffee to move. That replaces the conventional trade, where a lot passes through an exporter, an importer and sometimes a broker before the roaster ever tastes it.
The term entered the trade in 2002 and never acquired the machinery that would make it mean one thing. CoffeeGeek, a coffee magazine that reports on the trade, states it more plainly than anyone else writing about it: direct trade has "no governing body, no certification standard, no third-party verification, and no agreed definition." It remains, in their words, "an unregistered term. Any roaster can print it on any bag."
That isn't an accusation. Plenty of roasters who use the phrase are describing something real. But the words do identical work on a bag whether the roaster stood in a wet mill in Yirgacheffe last harvest or bought a spot lot out of a warehouse, and no document separates the two.
It's worth remembering what the term was invented against. CoffeeGeek's account is that the coffee roasters bought had passed through so many intermediaries that "even importers often couldn't tell them which farm it came from." Direct trade answered that, and it just isn't a checkable answer.
Fair trade has an auditor and a floor. Direct trade has neither.
This is the comparison most people want, and it's cleaner than it looks. Fairtrade is a certification scheme with four working parts: an organization that writes the standard, a minimum price a buyer can't go below, a premium paid on top for the producer organization, and an independent auditor who checks that it happened. You can argue about whether the floor is high enough, and plenty of people do, but the four parts exist and somebody outside the transaction is looking at them.
Direct trade has none of the four. No organization writes a standard for it, no floor applies, no premium is defined, and nobody audits anything. It's a claim a roaster makes about who it bought from.
So the two aren't alternatives in the way a shelf tag implies. One is a compliance regime with an auditor attached; the other is a sentence about a relationship. Neither is a quality claim: a certified lot can cup poorly and an uncertified one can cup beautifully, because none of this machinery measures the coffee.
Every page on this subject tells you to ask a roaster. We're one, and we buy through importers.
Read the pages that rank for this question and you'll notice they all finish in the same place. Ask your roaster where the coffee came from. Look for a price breakdown. Request the transparency report. Every one is reasonable, and every one hands the work back to the seller, who decides how much of it to do.
We're a seller. So it seems fair that we answer.
Inheritance buys its green coffee through importing partners. That's ordinary for a roastery our size: we buy in pounds rather than containers, and an importer is the reason a small roaster can get a few sacks of one Guji lot instead of a whole container. It also means the phrase isn't ours to use, and we're not going to use it.
What we publish in its place is the record. On the page for any of the origins we publish a record for, you'll find the region, the estate, the producer line, the cultivar, the processing and drying methods, a cup score, and what we paid per pound green. Ethiopia Buku Abel cost us $8.89 per pound green. That is our side of the transaction and not the farm's: we don't know what the producer was paid, and any roaster buying the way we do who tells you otherwise is repeating a number somebody else handed them.
Three of the five coffees we can sell today carry that figure. On the other two the field is missing from the record rather than withheld, which is not something a certificate would tell you about itself.
A price is the only thing on the page somebody else could contradict
Look at what else sits on that page and you'll see why the price is the odd one out. The cup score is our number: we tasted the coffee, we scored it 93, and if you think that's generous there's no referee. The tasting notes are our judgment too, and the region costs us nothing to state. Even the producer line, which we've written about elsewhere, tells you what our records say, not what a third party confirmed.
The green cost is different in kind, because somebody else holds the same invoice. If we published a figure our importing partner didn't recognize, there's a named party to the transaction who could say so. It's the one line on the page capable of being wrong, and that's what makes it worth printing.
It's also why the industry's own best answer here is a dataset rather than a certificate. The Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, produced by researchers at Emory University's Goizueta Business School with a roster of cooperatives, exporters, importers and roasters, is built from almost 105,000 real contracts. Its 2024 edition reports a median FOB price of $3.50 per pound for green specialty coffee in 2023/24. FOB is measured at the port of origin, a different point in the trade from what a roaster pays an importer, so the two figures aren't readings of one quantity. No page ranking for this question cites it.
Some roasters go further and publish an audited annual transparency report. That's a more thorough instrument than a figure on a product page, and we don't produce one.
Questions we get about direct trade coffee
What is direct trade coffee?
Direct trade coffee is coffee a roaster bought straight from the farm, cooperative or producer group that grew it, rather than through the conventional export and import trade. The phrase describes how the coffee was purchased. It doesn't tell you how good the coffee is, and no certificate stands behind it.
Is direct trade coffee certified by anybody?
No. There's no certifying body, no standard, no third-party verification and no agreed definition behind the term, which is what separates it from a scheme like Fairtrade. CoffeeGeek describes it as an unregistered term any roaster can print on any bag. The claim states what a roaster says it did, and you're taking that on trust.
What is the difference between direct trade and fair trade coffee?
Fair trade is a certification and direct trade is a description. Fairtrade certification has a standard-setting organization behind it, a minimum price the buyer can't go below, a premium paid on top for the producer organization, and an independent auditor checking compliance. Direct trade has none of those four.
Why do roasters buy through importers instead of buying direct?
Volume, credit, logistics and sample access. Buying direct means committing to container quantities, financing the coffee months before it lands, and handling export paperwork, shipping and customs yourself. A small roastery buys in pounds rather than containers, so an importer is what makes a single Ethiopian lot available at a workable quantity.
Does direct trade mean the farmer was paid more?
Not necessarily, because no standard sets a price. A direct arrangement takes some parties out of the transaction, but nothing obliges the roaster to pass that difference to the producer, and nothing requires anyone to publish what was paid. Some roasters buying direct do pay well above the going rate.
How would you know a roaster's published price is true?
You can't fully verify it, and we can't fully verify what our importing partner paid the exporter either. What a published price gives you that a slogan doesn't is a named counterparty who holds the same record, a figure tied to one lot, and a claim specific enough to be wrong.
The lot where our record runs longest
Ethiopia Buku Abel is the coffee to look at if you want a record next to a slogan. Its page carries the Ethiopian region of Guji, the estate, the producer line, the cultivar, the processing and drying methods, a cup score of 93 and a green cost of $8.89 per pound. We roast it to order every Wednesday in Pensacola and ship within two business days, ground to your brewer at no charge.
Open the page and read the sourcing block against whatever a bag marked direct trade tells you. Then decide which of the two you could actually check.
