Intelligentsia Direct Trade

We began building Intelligentsia Direct Trade nearly 20 years ago to identify and source the world's best coffees. Since then, the coffee trade has changed dramatically, but the essence of our approach to buying coffee hasn't. Traveling tirelessly to the communities where our coffees are grown, and building direct and lasting relationships with the people who grow them, is still the best way we know to source the best coffees in the world. In fact, it is the only way we know.

Over the years, we have refined our Direct Trade model, giving it steadily more direction, clarity, breadth, and depth. Today, our Direct Trade Charter embodies the five core principles of our approach to coffee buying and shapes the way we do business.

From the beginning, Intelligentsia has been driven by a relentless pursuit of quality. We believe the coffee experience belongs to the culinary world. We also believed from the very start that quality was the best way the company could differentiate itself in a marketplace crowded with mediocre coffee, which is why we took an obsessively experimental approach to roasting and brewing right out of the gate. As it turns out, a select few coffee growers had the same idea about quality and were as fanatical about growing coffee as we were about roasting and brewing it. Our model is designed to help us find one another and to turn our shared commitment to quality into delicious coffee and mutual commercial advantage.

Extraordinary coffee does not happen by chance. It can only be achieved by design, the result of deliberate and sustained effort by skilled professionals coordinating their work all along the coffee supply stream.

That work begins on the farm, which is why we visit the coffee growers, processors, and exporters in our global Direct Trade network. Our regular sourcing visits are central to our vision of relationship-driven trade and essential to ensuring that we are all doing what is necessary to make coffee extraordinary. It is also why we created the Extraordinary Coffee Workshop (ECW) in 2009, an event for our Direct Trade partners focused on coffee quality, and why we have convened the ECW community in eight different countries.

During our sourcing visits and at ECW, we pore over data from the previous season, together with our partners, to understand how our coffees performed and why, as well as how we can make them better. We identify specific innovations on the farm or at the mill that can unlock improvements in productivity, consistency, and quality. And we make mutual commitments to implement those measures in ways that balance risks and rewards.

Today, there are more companies investing in sustainability than ever before. One prominent observer of the sustainability movement has noted that there appears to be an arms race to see who can do the most good, while relatively few companies are asking the more important question: How can we do the least harm?

The same can be said for the transparency movement in the coffee industry: a growing number of companies are proudly publishing the prices they pay for their coffees, with the ones paying the highest prices attracting the most attention. Paying high prices is important, no doubt, which is why we are committed to rewarding our Direct Trade partners for quality. But even more important than the rewards we offer to growers are the ways our Direct Trade practices help to protect them from risk.

Not every part of a pig deserves to stand at the center of a chef's culinary creation, but every part of a pig can be incorporated into a recipe for something tasty, as every fan of nose-to-tail dining knows. We apply this approach to our coffee purchasing, selling the finest lots we can find as single-origins worthy of standing alone, while marrying coffees with slightly less range and nuance in recipes that create delicious, approachable blends for equal enjoyment. Our single-origins, and the higher prices they command, tend to steal the spotlight, but the premiums we pay for our "blending" coffees may create even more value for our Direct Trade partners by helping them earn profits on coffees that aren't the headliners.

We borrow from the credit-rating agencies when talking about the quality of our coffees in shorthand: the more As, the better the coffee. Good coffee is A-grade, better coffee is AA, and the best is AAA. We refer to those small, truly extraordinary AAA lots that are among the very best in the world as "microlots." The most important aspect of our model is that we purchase them all, from the award-winning nanolot to the single-A blender, and everything in between. This creates a dynamic menu, with a broad range of profiles and possibilities.

The essence of our Direct Trade purchasing philosophy feels intuitive today, but it was nothing short of revolutionary when we introduced it to the growers we worked with nearly two decades ago: the better your coffee, the more you earn.

Think of coffee like a pyramid, with the most abundant, lowest-quality coffees at the base, and the rarest, highest-quality coffees at the peak. Climbing the pyramid is hard, and we believe it is only fair to reward people for the effort they put into making it to the top.

We don't start at the base of the pyramid — the lowest-quality coffees we buy are pretty darn good — but we buy five different grades of coffee quality, and pay more as we climb together with our partners.

For every pound of coffee we buy, we are proud to make a contribution to the nonprofit organization World Coffee Research to support the field research, breeding programs, and new technologies coffee growers need to thrive. We think every roaster should do the same. It's the best way we know to help coffee growers cope with increased production risk in an era of accelerated climate change.

Transparency in the marketplace is important, which is why we are proud to support the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide project at Emory University as financial backers, and data donors. But transparency within our Direct Trade supply chains is even more important, essential to creating clear rules of engagement and building the trust necessary for co-investment, risk-sharing, and long-term relationships.

Our approach to coffee buying works best in the context of what we call patient partnership: stable, long-term relationships with the people who produce our coffees. In fact, it is hard to imagine it working any other way.

The risks our partners take by experimenting with new farming or processing practices are easier to bear, and investments in farm or infrastructure upgrades are easier to make, when they know we will show up year after year, as committed to successful outcomes as they are. The opposite is also true. The investments we make in our partners and the coffees we buy involve some risk and can take years to generate returns. Naturally, we feel better making those investments when we see our partners make clear, long-term commitments to a shared vision of quality. For everyone involved, the incentives are aligned for stable, lasting relationships.

We think it is working.

We created our Direct Trade model as a way for Intelligentsia to ensure its access to extraordinary coffee. Over time, however, we have come to appreciate that doing business in this way is an end in itself, given all the benefits it creates for growers.

There is a popular misconception that Direct Trade is all about buying microlots, the best coffees around. At Intelligentsia, Direct Trade is how we buy coffee, period.

The two most vulnerable groups of participants in the coffee trade are coffee farmworkers and small-scale family farmers. Intelligentsia has begun investing to better understand opportunities for farmworker empowerment in our supply chains. In the meantime, we have committed to creating more opportunities for smallholder coffee growers.

Our signature innovation as part of that effort is ECWx, an adaptation of our ECW event designed to catalyze smallholder participation in specialty coffee supply chains, beginning with our own. Since we hosted our first ECWx event in 2020, the proportion of coffee we source from smallholders has increased by 25%.

Coffee is a forest crop that first appeared in the understory of ancient forests in Ethiopia, and it continues to grow wild there. Coffee likes shade, and shade is good for the planet. Forests sequester carbon, replenish water sources, improve water quality, prevent soil erosion, increase soil fertility, and foster biodiversity, among other things. When coffee is grown under shade, it contributes to these worthy environmental outcomes. We love shade, so we love organic coffee! In 2024, 20% of all the coffee we bought was certified organic.