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For those who want to create their own coffee brand without the significant costs involved, “toll roasting” has become an increasingly popular alternative. Also known as “slot roasting”, it involves purchasing green beans and sending them to a roaster who will roast them to your specifications.

Align Your Prices with Your Costs

In other words, raise prices. Historically, and adjusted for inflation, green coffee prices are not high, but they are higher than what you’re used to paying, especially if you started buying green coffee after 2015. The C-Market has been ranging in the neighborhood of twice what it was a year ago. You have to raise your prices to reflect this reality. Read more about Coffee Prices and Coffee History.

Coffee is an agricultural product, after all, and although it can usually be found among the center aisles in a grocery store, it belongs on the perimeter along with produce, meat, and dairy products. Week-to-week, consumers should be as uncertain about the prices they’ll find on the coffee aisle as they are about the price of milk or ribeye or avocadoes. As roasters, we’ve not done coffee drinkers any favors by shielding them from fluctuations in prices by waiting too long to raise prices.

Although women make up as much as half of the agricultural workforce worldwide[1] and, in most sectors, do the majority of the hardest work, they rarely participate in the business of agriculture to a degree that reflects their contribution. With relatively few exceptions, all key aspects of coffee as an agricultural endeavor around the world are owned and/or controlled by men. Stakeholders correctly observe that the circumstances of women in coffee production are complex, deeply structural, and often rooted in cultures where social transformation is slow. Nevertheless, to be excluded from opportunity and denied rights because of gender is a simple and outright injustice that calls for constant change, however challenging and incremental.

Des Moines -- From all of us at Clear Lake Coffee Roasters we are pleased to announce you can now find our coffees at Fareway Grocery Store #183. Our top-selling, four most popular coffee blends and single origin gourmet Arabica coffee is now available at Fareway Grocery Store #183, located at 4313 Fleur Drive, Des Moines, IA

We select only the finest fair-trade, Rain Forest Alliance, green arabica coffee beans from the top 1% of producers awarded the prestigious Cup of Excellence honor and we roast the beans to perfection, locally, in Clear Lake, Iowa. 

The first attempt at planting coffee failed due to flooding, but Hendrick Zwaardecroon, an ambitious and agriculturally minded employee of the VOC, tried again in 1699 and the plantings were successful. By the time H.Z. retired as Governor-General of the VOC in 1725, over 1 million pounds of coffee from Java were being sold annually at auction in Amsterdam. The volume would increase to 2.5 million pounds by the end of that decade and over 5 million pounds a year by 1780.

This continues, your appetizer, for a long time that you do not know how to measure, until that beautiful moment when their inability to speak or lift their cups anymore coincides with the zenith of your giddy anticipation. They have fallen to the floor, but you continue to pour coffee into their mouths to watch the temporary relief bloom on their faces.