Narrator: To produce 1 pound of coffee beans,
farmers need to harvest more than 1,500 of these cherries.
Each one contains two seeds that will be sorted,
processed, and roasted before they reach your cup.
In 2022, the average US price
for a pound of coffee was $5.89.
But there's a specialty category
called single-origin coffee
that can easily cost over $30 per pound.
Some exclusive harvests cost over $80 per pound.
So, what makes this coffee so special?
And why is it so expensive?
It's November in Nyeri County, Kenya,
and the coffee harvest is in full swing.
There are over 12.5 million coffee farms in the world.
Almost 95% are owned by smallholders, like Joseph.
He runs a 1-acre farm,
part of which he inherited from his parents.
Coffee is all about quality.
If you produce coffee with a higher quality,
the higher prices you get for your coffee.
Narrator: Coffee grows differently
depending on the altitude, climate, soil, and sun.
Farms here sit around 1,700 meters above sea level
in rich volcanic soil.
Joseph: The coffee grow very slow.
They take a long time to mature.
And the longer coffee take time to mature,
the better the quality.
Almost everywhere, every farmer is growing coffee.
Narrator: High-altitude coffee
produces fruity and floral flavors.
Drinking coffee brewed from beans
exclusively from one region
ensures that those distinct flavors come through.
It's what's called single-origin coffee;
the quality and unique taste
are the biggest reasons it can cost so much.
But achieving that quality isn't easy.
The terrain here is too uneven for machines,
so farmers pick the coffee by hand,
one cherry at a time.
For coffee, ripeness is key.
Narrator: Mary has been growing coffee for over 25 years.
Narrator: Each branch has ripe and unripe cherries,
so she has to pay close attention while picking.
The way coffee is harvested here in Kenya
is very different from how it's done in Brazil,
the world's largest coffee producer.
On huge farms with flat terrain, the harvest is mechanized.
The trees are at a lower elevation,
and the yields are higher.
Mechanized production is more efficient,
but this efficiency can hurt quality control.
When the whole tree is picked at once,
ripe and unripe cherries are lumped together.
This is commodity coffee,
destined for mass production and industrial use.
Its price is low and volatile.
The highest-quality coffee is called specialty coffee.
This coffee has unique attributes
that expert tasters, called Q graders,
rate the highest.
Single-origin coffee is often rated
at the highest end of specialty coffee
because of its distinct flavors.
Both specialty coffee and a lot of commodity coffee
come from the same plant, Coffea arabica.
But not all arabica coffee is created equal.
This can of ground coffee is 100% arabica.
It costs around $8 a pound.
In 2022, a single-origin coffee grown in Panama
sold for over $6,000 a pound at auction —
also 100% arabica.
The better the flavor and the smaller the harvest,
the more expensive the coffee.
Back at Mary's farm, there's still work to be done.
After harvesting, workers sort the cherries
to weed out any defects.
These negatively impact the flavor
and lower the price of the coffee.
But they need to work quickly.
Processing coffee soon after harvest
is key to maintaining its quality.
Processing infrastructure is expensive,
so most farms in Kenya share centralized facilities.
Over 1,000 farmers from the region
bring their coffee here.
Each processing method has a different impact on taste,
but they all have the same end goal:
separate the seed from the fruit.
These are the five stages of coffee processing.
The red cherry, the wet parchment,
dry parchment, green coffee, and roasted coffee beans.
Narrator: This is the washed process.
It's the most common way to process coffee in Kenya.
After weighing and inspecting the coffee,
workers remove the outer skin
in a process called de-pulping.
Then they place it in fermentation tanks,
where it rests for 12 to 14 hours.
Fermentation breaks down the mucilage,
the sticky inner layer of the fruit,
so it can be washed away.
The next day, workers push coffee
through a series of channels, cleaning off the seeds.
This is also where one
of several grading processes takes place.
Workers separate lower-quality, less dense beans,
which float to the surface.
Even though these beans sell for less,
they still provide important income to producers.
The denser coffee flows to soaking tanks
to ensure any remaining mucilage is removed.
Once the seed is free, the coffee flows out of the tanks
and onto drying tables.
Roasters sell coffee
either as a blend of beans from different countries
or as single origin.
But there's no officially agreed-upon
definition of the term.
It can refer to a farm, a cooperative, or a country.
Consumers who buy this type of coffee
are usually seeking a particular flavor or aroma.
The costs of processing, transportation,
and running a roasting business
are all bundled into the price customers pay for coffee.
It's so expensive to get coffee here.
Everything from the farm to the port,
everything has gone up.
The boxes where we ship your coffee for subscriptions
or at-home consumption, that packaging has gone up.
With single origin, single producer,
when you have the producer's name,
it's an indicator that we paid more for that coffee
because of the relationship.
If you're paying in the range of $21 to $26,
it's because we've invested in these areas
that are important to us and we hope are important to them.
Narrator: Companies like Metric play an important role
in the coffee supply chain.
Most coffee is consumed outside of the country
it's produced in.
And how coffee is roasted has a big impact on its taste.
Getting the best flavor out of single-origin coffee
requires careful roasting.
Coffee is roasted in big machines like this.
Roasters take green coffee
and heat it evenly to develop its flavor.
Hara: This is 20 pounds of
Costa Rican honey-processed coffee from Solis y Cordero,
which is a husband-and-wife team in Tarrazú.
Narrator: Hara uses sight, smell, and sensors
to track how the roast is developing.
Finding the ideal roast level for each coffee
is a skill that takes years to master.
This tool that I'm using is called the trier,
and it allows us to see the color of the development
as we go through the roast
and also to smell how the coffee is smelling.
The green coffee will smell kind of like hay or grass.
And you'll smell it get sweeter and sweeter and sweeter.
You can smell some of that acidity come out.
It'll smell almost vinegary-ish.
As soon as that vinegar starts to fade just a little bit
and there's a sweet fruitiness and a sweet baked-goods-ness,
that's our finished development.
Narrator: Metric roasts coffee for an average of 11 minutes
before Hara releases it into the cooling tray
to stop the roasting process.
By comparison, commodity-coffee roasters
favor a darker roast, which can cover up defects
and make a blend of beans from different countries
taste more uniform.
While dark roasts are generally bitter,
medium and light roasts offer more sweetness
and bright acidity.
Hara: You can blast it for a minute,
and a lot of commodity coffee is just blasted
as quick as possible,
but it really rushes through all of those phases
that develop all of the flavors.
Going through those steps
to get exactly the best qualities out of that coffee.
We don't add anything to coffee.
Everything was intrinsically there
as the raw product from the farmer,
from the growing conditions.
Narrator: Light roasts also highlight
the unique flavors of a region,
allowing two single-origin coffees to taste very different.
The tricky part about single origin versus blend
is that you can achieve stellar results with blends
and sometimes really subpar with single origin.
And the same thing can be the other way around.
Narrator: How a coffee is processed
can have a big impact on its flavor and price.
The washed process produces delicious coffee,
but it's expensive and can be wasteful.
Joseph: We use a lot of water,
and the main challenge is how to dispose that wastewater,
but we are trying to work on it
by recycling the water we are using.
Narrator: After spreading out the coffee,
workers move it to a clean set of tables,
where they continuously turn it by hand.
This coffee takes around 14 days
to reach a desired moisture content of 11% to 12%.
The goal is uniform beans free of defects.
Coffee at this stage is called parchment coffee
because of the paperlike layer of material
that surrounds the seed.
Before producers ship the coffee,
they mill it to remove the parchment.
This is a small machine used for local consumption.
When milling large quantities,
the coffee goes through another round of grading.
Each country has its own methods of grading.
In Kenya, each bean is classified by size.
The shape and color of the bean also impact the grade,
but often the larger, denser beans are the most expensive.
After months of work,
producers are left with what's called green coffee.
This is the product that will be exported
and roasted in consuming countries.
But this is also when the process becomes more opaque.
Farmers don't always know how much a buyer pays an exporter,
so they don't know if they're being cut out
of potential profit.
The benchmark for the price of arabica coffee
follows what's called the C Market.
It's an exchange, like the stock market,
where traders buy and sell contracts
based on the expected future value of coffee.
But it doesn't consider the quality of the coffee.
And the price is volatile,
which makes it hard for farmers to operate sustainably.
In 2019, the average closing price
was $1.02 per pound.
Its lowest point that year: $0.87.
Despite inflation and increased cost of production,
the C Market is almost the same as it was in 1980.
Joseph is able to operate profitably,
but that isn't the case for many farmers around the world.
A 2019 study found that 44% of smallholder coffee farmers
were living in poverty.
Specialty coffee is bought at a premium
above the commodity price.
Joseph makes around $3.18 a pound.
Joseph: Due to the high quality of our coffee,
there is a lot of demand.
But our expectation is that
the demand should go with higher prices.
Narrator: He says $4.55 a pound would be more sustainable,
but his prices have actually decreased
over the past few years.
Joseph: I don't know the reason why.
Mostly we are told world market has flooded with coffee,
but we still need more explanation
on why the coffee is going down
when we are still trying our best
to maintain our quality coffee.
For those who are producing
less than 5 kilos from one tree,
they are not even breaking even.
The effort we make to produce that quality coffee,
I can say we are not well compensated by those prices.
Narrator: Growing coffee requires steep investments,
which don't always pay off for farmers.
Narrator: Many roasters in the industry
are working towards direct-trade partnerships
that benefit the coffee producer.
Xavier: I'm looking to do two things,
source high-quality coffees,
but also establish year-over-year relationships.
Narrator: Some roasters also publish
the prices they pay for green coffee,
but the level of transparency varies.
Xavier: We as roasters need to do our job
to educate consumers as to the difference
between a product from Colombia that's sourced fairly,
that's sourced with full transparency,
and a product of Colombia
that has no traceability and is cheap.
If it's cheap coffee, that means that somebody
in the supply chain is not making it,
and chances are it's going to be the producer.
They're the ones at loss.
Narrator: At retail, coffee from this region of Kenya
has sold for $22.50 for a 12-ounce bag.
That's over nine times what the farmers are paid.
But just comparing those two numbers
doesn't tell the whole story.
Even when producers are paid a premium,
there will always be a markup between coffee cherries
and roasted coffee.
Roasters typically pay more for single-origin coffee,
but there's no definitive premium.
Xavier: The real truth of it is
that you can buy coffee at commodity pricing
that actually meets specialty standards.
For so long, the market has been so low
and then the quality has been so high
that producers need to sell their coffee.
They need to earn a living.
Because if they're not earning enough
to cover the cost of production,
not earning enough to just meet the minimum requirements
to have a decent way of life,
they're going to be edged out.
That is what's happening all over the world.
Narrator: Many throughout the specialty-coffee industry
are working towards more transparency,
better pay for producers,
and more access to research and best practices.
Ultimately, when coffee prices are low,
the producers are the ones hurt the most.