Transparency and sustainability - what's the equation?

2022 marked a significant milestone for Nylon as we turned 10 years old. We look back and ask ourselves all the time, how can we do better? We built Nylon with a few underlying sourcing philosophies: relationship-driven, transparency on where the coffees are from, ethical and environmentally sustainable practices at the farm level, and of course high quality coffees. We work directly with producers in Central America, Colombia and Brazil, and we also work closely with exporters at origins where we need support in finding the coffees we want. Over the years, we have seen the evolution and maturation of the specialty coffee market. We have also seen how difficult it is for farmers to continue coffee farming as costs and risks have gone up significantly with climate change and political/economic/social crises in many coffee origins. How do we, as a specialty coffee roaster/buyer make sure they continue to receive sustainable prices to keep them going?

We’ve embarked on a couple of initiatives to grow ourselves as a coffee company that remains true to our goals and philosophy. Shortly after our 10th anniversary, we signed up to 1% for the Planet, where we commit 1% of our total revenue for the year towards environmental causes. Soon after, we became a contributing member to the World Coffee Research, a non-profit organisation that focus on collaborative research and development of the global coffee industry to grow, protect, and enhance supplies of quality coffee while improving the livelihood of the families who produce it. This year, we are pushing ourselves towards another principle that we stand by - transparency.

It is hard to define this term as the coffee chain can be quite complex with each coffee origin having their own conventions and practices. Over the last couple of years, there have been a growing movement towards price transparency in specialty coffee. Why do we want to share our green coffee costs and why does it matter?

We constantly talk about sustainability but how do we help consumers understand the challenges of coffee farming and what can we do to ensure the continuity of specialty coffee?

Publishing the prices we pay for the green coffee is the first step to put some context to what you pay for your cup of coffee versus the approximate income the coffee producers are earning in their annual harvest. For some established producers, the annual income is adequate to sustain the viability of the business as they are not earning for sustenance. On the other hand, majority of the coffee producers in many countries are small farmers and their annual income from coffee may ONLY be enough to cover the living expenses for the families, education, housing, medical, fertilizers (prices have doubled or even tripled since the start of the war in Ukraine) and pay off debts which they might have incurred to invest in their farms. There is a big difference in earning $1/lb as profits for a farmer with 2-3ha of land compared to one with a few hundred hectares of land. In this price transparency report, we try to disclose as much price information as we have.

Sometimes it’s hard for producers to breakdown the costs to third parties involved in the process, hence we are only able to provide the FOB (freight on board) prices. This is a term which is very common for coffee buyers like us. Essentially it puts a number to the costs of the coffees that we are paying for, up to the point where they are loaded onto the containers at the ports at origin prior to leaving for our roastery.

There are producers whom we work with directly and therefore what we can share the full amount which we pay that goes directly to them (in these cases, they typically operate their own dry mill). We have also included the C-market (coffee futures) price at the time of each purchase as a benchmark to what we are paying for their coffee.

Thank you for reading and hopefully it will help you, as a coffee consumer to appreciate more of the incredible amount of work that goes behind the scene to produce that one cup you enjoy everyday. We hope this can encourage more consumers to ask questions and make informed decisions about the coffee that they purchase. Quality coffee doesn’t happen by chance and it does take a lot more to produce them.

Do Good, Feel Good, Taste Good.
Drink Nylon.

Click to download our 2022 Price Transparency Report.