The Dutch start-up Moyee introduces the first FairChain coffee. FairChain like Fairtrade 2.0.
What is Fairchain? And why?
Right now this very minute 85% of total coffee value disappears into the pockets of a few big multinationals. We call them the Big Coffee. At the same time it means for farmers that they are left with only 15% of the added value. Actually, there’s nothing ‘added’ about it—only 2% of that amount is actual profit. We may be entrepreneurs, but there’s no way to justify this imbalance.
Big coffee squeezes all the value out of producing countries. To keep their costs low, they pick the beans massively, randomly and mechanically—actually, there’s nothing random about it. They pick entire fields whether the beans are ready to be picked or not. And remember this, coffee beans are cherries, some of which are ripe, many not. People can distinguish between the two, whereas machines cannot. We only pick the best cherries of the best beans—the Limu bean, the most flavourful bean of Africa! And naturally we pick all our beans only by hand.
As soon Big Coffee picks the beans, they export them— still green and unroasted —to Big Coffee countries where they fire up the heat of their enormous ovens. Roasting time? 6 minutes flat. My god, these big boys are always in such a hurry to make money. Instead of exporting away all those lovely green beans—and the added value with them—FairChain roasts them in the country of origin. This is the holy grill of FairChain: roast local! By roasting local we increase the amount of money that stays in producing countries by 300%. Next to this, we don’t fry our beans, but roast our little princesses very slowly—between 12 to 13 minutes. It goes without saying that our well-treated beans look down on Big Coffee’s shock and awe approach to roasting beans.
From Fairtrade to Fairchain
‘Fairtrade coffee is a honourable idea. It guarantees local growers a minimum price to grow and export unroasted beans to coffee-drinking countries. Fairtrade is a great first step, but its impact is less significant than we had originally hoped. It reduces poverty, but on a very modest scale. In a global coffee bean export market worth €80 billion, Fairtrade generates just €17.5 million extra for local growers’
‘By cutting out the middleman muddle, celebrity endorsements and management bonuses, we’re able to pay farmers more and have you pay less. Of course we toy with marketing, invest in packaging and all that brand stuff, but we do these things within reason—and we’re 100% transparent about how we spend our money. Besides, we don’t need a famous face…we have you and all your friends to help us. We have a name for that: crowdspeak.’
FairChain isn’t just a social revolution, but a quality one—the coffee that comes out of this chain is freaking awesome. ‘We’ve worked with some serious coffee heavyweights to help us achieve our goal to create high quality, very fair coffee for everyday coffee fans’, as Guido van Staveren, the founder says.
The Moyee founders together with the coffee farmers in Africa