About Human Coffee
Human Coffee is a non-profit coffee roastery. Based in Mechelen, we curate delicious lots of specialty coffee and roast them, aiming to let the coffee tell its story. We want to showcase these exceptional coffees while investing in a sustainable future for coffee - environmentally, economically and socially.
We believe transparency is key to our mission. It's hard to improve what you can't see.
We use transparency as a tool to elucidate and educate: how does the coffee value chain work, and how does money flow through that system? What costs are involved, who pays for them, and how can those situations be improved?
Through transparency, we also navigate complexity. The industry is full of imperfect solutions in a wholly imperfect world. Such decisions come with trade-offs, and those are often not clear without some insight into the realities the industry has to deal with.
We want to grant those insights, so the decisions make sense.
The way we calculate our pricing is based on a few factors. We can split these factors into two categories: those that depend on the specific coffee, and those that don't. Our final price is the result of a straightforward calculation that takes these factors into consideration, giving us a price for both retail and wholesale.
In other words, our price is based solely on our costs, rather than our opinion. As such, cost is not necessarily reflective of quality: we won't inflate the price of a coffee because we think it's great.
The primary driver for our prices is the cost of the green. That, in turn, can depend on many factors: airfreight is typically more expensive than sea freight, more labour intensive processing affects pricing, different origins, harvest conditions, species, varietals, etc.
A second coffee-specific driver is the losses incurred by the roasting process. Roasting inevitably means some watercontent is evaporated and some volatile organic compounds are released. As a result, 1kg of green coffee does not result in 1kg of roasted coffee. On top of that, we dial in the roast of our coffees which incurs some loss, and we keep samples for quality assurance of some number of roasting batches. This all add ups, but varies for different coffees.
Factoring in the lost weight gives us a conversion from "green cost" to "roasted cost".
Then we have fixed costs - roasting requires machinery and energy, packaging materials, and labour. We amortize these costs and boil it down to a "cost per kg" that we update every so often. Currently, that cost is set at €5,25/kg.
Finally, we apply fixed margins for our retail and wholesale sales: 65% and 40% respectively. These allow us to cover unforeseen costs, invest in delivering a better product, and of course, donate to beneficiaries.
It used to be the case that specialty coffee was any coffee that received an 80+ score from a Q-grader, which is a score based on technical and sensory attributes. The Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) currently uses the following definition:
Specialty coffee is a coffee or coffee experience recognized for its distinctive attributes, and because of these attributes, it has significant extra value in the marketplace.
In practical terms, specialty coffee tends to mostly be about traceability and quality, and often position itself in opposition to commodity coffee.
Direct trade sounds inherently better, and sometimes it can be. It can bring producers and roasters closer together, improve transparency and leave fewer parties taking a share along the way. But direct does not automatically mean better, and an intermediary is not automatically someone who should be cut out.
A good importer does more than move coffee around. They buy meaningful volumes, handle complex logistics and foster long-term relationships with producers. As a small roastery, we simply cannot offer that ourselves. We cannot buy a container of coffee from one producer, spread that commitment across several origins and promise to keep doing so year after year.
Could we buy directly from a producer? Definitely. But buying a few bags once is not the same as building a meaningful, long-term trading relationship. We'd rather work with importers who have the scale and commitment to do that well, while being critical about who those importers are and how they operate.
For us, the question isn't how many steps there are between a farm and our roastery. It's what each of those steps does, who benefits from it and whether it adds value to the people on either side.
Human Coffee is primarily Ilias Van Peer.