Our Story
We are a growing independent roastery based in St Peters, Sydney. Grace & Taylor has a strong family connection (it’s named after the middle names of Matt's two children - India Grace and Will Taylor), and we pride ourselves on growing and maintaining that connection with all of our customers, both wholesale and retail.
One of the criticisms we at G&T have received in the past is that we don't do a good job of telling our story, talking ourselves up or explaining why G&T is different to the many other coffee roasters out there. We always thought we were just quietly walking the walk rather than loudly talking the talk, but we hear you.
Last year Sprudge, a Coffee Industry news outlet, posted this article. The headline "New Study Finds The Largest Coffee Brands Aren’t Paying Producers A Living Wage" pretty much sums the article up, but if I had to pick one quote from the article, this one really describes my feeling about how our entire industry does business: "throwing a highly-public few M’s at the problem is hardly the philanthropic endeavour it might seem at first glance."
"Ethically sourced" - "Direct Trade" - "Specialty Coffee" These terms no longer mean anything, they're just buzz words that every coffee company feels they can use in their marketing copy to make themselves sound like they are at the forefront of coffee.
So, what can we do about it? Well, we've always taken the way we source our green coffee very seriously. This wasn't always easy as a small coffee roaster, you kind of get what you're given when you are starting out. We had some connections that helped us navigate this in the early days, connections that have now developed into fully formed partnerships. I refer of course to the work we do with Raw Material coffee. But once again, we can talk all day about helping rebuild roads and homes in Rwanda and Timor-Leste, none of it means anything if we don't pay producers a sustainable price for their coffee. A price that allows them to build thriving businesses like those we are trying to build ourselves. How can we prove to you that we do this? There is really only one way, and that is by some version of a transparency report. We don't have as much information to share as we would like, and this is a really difficult thing to communicate because of how many steps there are in the coffee supply chain. But we're just going to start and figure it out as we go.
How we're going to report it: on this website, you will see that after each coffee name there is a number followed by the letter 'C' in brackets. This number represents a multiple of the 'C Price' that was paid for this coffee. Eg for the new Mexico ISMAM Maragogype (2.85C).
What this means: we paid 2.85 times the C Price on the day that the container from Mexico went FOB (Free On Board) which effectively means the day the container was loaded onto the ship to leave Mexico. The C Price (usually quoted in US Cents per Pound) represents the global market value of green coffee at the point it is loaded onto a ship for export from origin (and is almost never a sustainable price). So for the Mexico ISMAM Maragogype, it went FOB on 02/06/2021. On that day, the C Price was 161.15 US Cents per pound or US$3.55/kg. Thus we paid 2.85 times C (US$3.55) or US$10.14/kg for the FOB component of this coffee.
It is important to note that the final price that we pay for the coffee is significantly higher than the FOB price as all these other costs get added to the FOB price: currency exchange, freight from Mexico to Australia, insurance, customs inspections, clearance fees, import taxes, freight to the importer's warehouse, storage, finance, importer's margin, palletisation, picking, pallet wrapping and delivery to our own roastery from the importer's warehouse. It is also worth noting that the price of a green kg of coffee is taken a long way out of context from a kg of roasted coffee. Many costs need to be factored in between the two including weightloss during roasting, labour, rent, plant & equipment, packaging, gas, electricity etc.
Problems with reporting a FOB price: the FOB price is not the price paid to the farmer. While it does include the price paid to the farmer, it also includes the transportation to the mill, the milling and storage, the bagging, transportation to the port and packing into the container. Additionally, it includes any margin for the exporter, mill and any other hands that touch the coffee at origin. But this is how the C Price is quoted. If anything, the multiple we are quoting undersells how much better off the producers of ISMAM are in this scenario. They likely receive more than 2.85 times the local market price for their coffee because Raw Material is a not-for-profit. As the exporter, Raw Material Mexico adds a transparent margin to cover their costs, but then any profit is funnelled back to producers. A coffee sold at the C Price is typically sold by a for-profit exporter who is not returning profit to producers. Here is a graph from the RM website showing the standard breakdown of the price of an RM Mexico Coffee.
So while the FOB price is not the ideal metric to measure, we feel that multiples of the C Price are the best place for us to start. And that these numbers demonstrate substantial improvement for producers over the commodity market. As you can see, we have this information for all of our decaf, most of our single origins and 3 out of 4 blend components. Our goal is to publish this information for every single coffee that we offer and to always push the multiple higher.
One of the criticisms we at G&T have received in the past is that we don't do a good job of telling our story, talking ourselves up or explaining why G&T is different to the many other coffee roasters out there. We always thought we were just quietly walking the walk rather than loudly talking the talk, but we hear you.
Last year Sprudge, a Coffee Industry news outlet, posted this article. The headline "New Study Finds The Largest Coffee Brands Aren’t Paying Producers A Living Wage" pretty much sums the article up, but if I had to pick one quote from the article, this one really describes my feeling about how our entire industry does business: "throwing a highly-public few M’s at the problem is hardly the philanthropic endeavour it might seem at first glance."
"Ethically sourced" - "Direct Trade" - "Specialty Coffee" These terms no longer mean anything, they're just buzz words that every coffee company feels they can use in their marketing copy to make themselves sound like they are at the forefront of coffee.
So, what can we do about it? Well, we've always taken the way we source our green coffee very seriously. This wasn't always easy as a small coffee roaster, you kind of get what you're given when you are starting out. We had some connections that helped us navigate this in the early days, connections that have now developed into fully formed partnerships. I refer of course to the work we do with Raw Material coffee. But once again, we can talk all day about helping rebuild roads and homes in Rwanda and Timor-Leste, none of it means anything if we don't pay producers a sustainable price for their coffee. A price that allows them to build thriving businesses like those we are trying to build ourselves. How can we prove to you that we do this? There is really only one way, and that is by some version of a transparency report. We don't have as much information to share as we would like, and this is a really difficult thing to communicate because of how many steps there are in the coffee supply chain. But we're just going to start and figure it out as we go.
How we're going to report it: on this website, you will see that after each coffee name there is a number followed by the letter 'C' in brackets. This number represents a multiple of the 'C Price' that was paid for this coffee. Eg for the new Mexico ISMAM Maragogype (2.85C).
What this means: we paid 2.85 times the C Price on the day that the container from Mexico went FOB (Free On Board) which effectively means the day the container was loaded onto the ship to leave Mexico. The C Price (usually quoted in US Cents per Pound) represents the global market value of green coffee at the point it is loaded onto a ship for export from origin (and is almost never a sustainable price). So for the Mexico ISMAM Maragogype, it went FOB on 02/06/2021. On that day, the C Price was 161.15 US Cents per pound or US$3.55/kg. Thus we paid 2.85 times C (US$3.55) or US$10.14/kg for the FOB component of this coffee.
It is important to note that the final price that we pay for the coffee is significantly higher than the FOB price as all these other costs get added to the FOB price: currency exchange, freight from Mexico to Australia, insurance, customs inspections, clearance fees, import taxes, freight to the importer's warehouse, storage, finance, importer's margin, palletisation, picking, pallet wrapping and delivery to our own roastery from the importer's warehouse. It is also worth noting that the price of a green kg of coffee is taken a long way out of context from a kg of roasted coffee. Many costs need to be factored in between the two including weightloss during roasting, labour, rent, plant & equipment, packaging, gas, electricity etc.
Problems with reporting a FOB price: the FOB price is not the price paid to the farmer. While it does include the price paid to the farmer, it also includes the transportation to the mill, the milling and storage, the bagging, transportation to the port and packing into the container. Additionally, it includes any margin for the exporter, mill and any other hands that touch the coffee at origin. But this is how the C Price is quoted. If anything, the multiple we are quoting undersells how much better off the producers of ISMAM are in this scenario. They likely receive more than 2.85 times the local market price for their coffee because Raw Material is a not-for-profit. As the exporter, Raw Material Mexico adds a transparent margin to cover their costs, but then any profit is funnelled back to producers. A coffee sold at the C Price is typically sold by a for-profit exporter who is not returning profit to producers. Here is a graph from the RM website showing the standard breakdown of the price of an RM Mexico Coffee.
So while the FOB price is not the ideal metric to measure, we feel that multiples of the C Price are the best place for us to start. And that these numbers demonstrate substantial improvement for producers over the commodity market. As you can see, we have this information for all of our decaf, most of our single origins and 3 out of 4 blend components. Our goal is to publish this information for every single coffee that we offer and to always push the multiple higher.
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