Rewarding roasters for planning ahead
The Coffee Quest is introducing a new, transparent price scheme with incentives for volume purchases, helping roasters to take advantage of planning ahead whilst still ensuring we are delivering coffee with added value through Transparency, Quality and Collaboration.
Putting a price on Quality
As a start-up, The Coffee Quest has always been learning along the way. We started with a simple idea: shorten the chain between growers and roasters to help develop value chains to reward each value-adding activity honestly.
To “shorten” the chain is not the right term, as to achieve this, we do need a service-oriented “middleman”. Processors, consolidators and even us exporters and importers help ensure that the right quality reaches the right roaster. Nowadays, it is more the basic fundamentals of collaboration and transparency that help drive the correct valuation of activities, from farming to import.
This blog is to share insight into our new pricing strategy. Last year, both growers and roasters, have been dealing with higher costs to keep their businesses going. Factors such as; climate, war and inflation, are very relevant topics. So, let’s talk about pricing!
Our first love, Quality
The Coffee Quest has been importing micro-lots since the very beginning. This is the ideal coffee for a small quality minded company. Farm traceability, exclusive, high quality and good story value. Although scarcity is part of the charm, micro lots can be difficult for a farmer to repeat and challenging for a coffee roaster that needs consistency to develop a market at scale.
The pyramid
Once The Coffee Quest decided to open up our selection for lower scoring lots, the world of specialty coffee started opening up for more volume. A true pyramid of quality vs. volume.
On average, the size of an 86+ micro lot will typically range from 2 to 10 bags, while 84+ mid-range lots already consist roughly speaking out of 20-100 bags. Lots that score 82+ can even have 200-1000 bags waiting in stock, a true 10x multiplier when moving down the steps of the specialty pyramid.
Finding high-quality lots in high volumes is one of the challenges The Coffee Quest thrives on. These apparent outliers are usually the hard work of exporters who combine group lots together to offer a scalable and uniform quality.
Both combine lots from the same farming communities with similarities in physical and sensorial attributes.
Introducing volume discounts
The Coffee Quest is introducing volume discounts as a new pricing strategy, to fit the growing assortment. However, as we love the inclusivity, smaller roasters will always be able to order per bag. The time has come to start volume-based pricing, as larger lots of lower quality are easier to find, and options to source high-quality specialty at scale continue to be developed by us.
By lowering our margin and creating pricing incentives, The Coffee Quest aims to promote freshness, improve cash flow and reward volume orders. The existing “early-bird” forward price is the best way to secure fresh lots against a lower price (saving about €0,75/kg), while buying larger volumes is now newly promoted (10+/20+/50+ prices). Micro lots between 2-20 bags will therefore receive little to no discount to keep the rewards intact!
On the other side, our Quality team will be continuously cupping through our inventory to pick out ageing lots and adjust prices based on quality. Moving forward, our Q-graders will be adding recommendations to the offerlist. This will show the best applications for each of these discounted lots, allowing roasters to easily find the right deal.
The volatility in the C-market, climate, inflation (for example; 200% on fertilizer), are now at the doorstep of many coffee farmers. The Coffee Quest hopes that the above-mentioned price incentives will help the roasters plan volumes more easily and help us build up more trust across the value chains.
“Rewarding Roasters for planning ahead, The Coffee Quest believes this is the best way for us to achieve both our goal of delivering coffee with added value” – Friso Spoor, co-founder of The Coffee Quest
Read more about our farmers' stories...
Fazenda Do Salto, Mangalarga Marchador!
In 2019 we visited the 800 hectares farm “Fazenda do Salto” which has a long history that goes back 100 years ago. Coffee and horses! Otávio Reis is the 5th generation is experimenting to improve quality, we are happy to be part of it.
Cerrado Gold, closer to Brazilian farmers in Cerrado Mineiro
In the wide complex network of Brazilian coffee farms, our sister company in Brazil, Varginha, is our key to build long-term relationships with Brazilian coffee farmers. Teresa Costa and Gabriel Lessa are our two main partners behind The Coffee Quest Brasil.