What is direct trade in coffee?

Direct trade is a specialty-coffee sourcing model in which roasters negotiate straight with producers or cooperatives — with as few intermediaries as possible — on the basis of cup quality. There is no single label; rather, a cluster of practices (origin visits, transparent prices above the market, multi-year relationships) increasingly referred to today as 'relationship coffee'.

Direct trade was popularised in the early 2000s by pioneering third-wave US roasters — Intelligentsia (Chicago, founded 1995), Counter Culture (Durham, 1995) and Stumptown (Portland, 1999) are the most publicly documented examples. The promise is simple: shorten the supply chain — brokers, multi-layered exporters, anonymous traders — and build a repeating relationship with a named farm, cooperative or wet mill. In practice, a specialty importer almost always remains in the loop to handle logistics (bagging, ocean freight, customs), but the commercial transaction is anchored in a named, recurring relationship.

Unlike Fairtrade or Rainforest Alliance, direct trade has no central body, no single standard and no universal third-party audit. That is both its strength — flexibility, prices that can reward exceptional quality — and its weakness — no independent guarantee for the end buyer. Several roasters have published their own frameworks (Intelligentsia's Direct Trade Manifesto, Counter Culture's transparency documentation), typically requiring: prices at least 25 % above Fairtrade minimum or 50-100 % above the New York C-market; an annual in-person farm visit; transparent cupping; and the FOB price printed on the bag. That last item is often framed as a 'transparency report' — an annual list showing, per lot purchased, farm, variety, process, cupping score and FOB price paid to the producer in USD/lb.

The term relationship coffee has emerged more recently to describe the same logic without the marketing baggage of the word 'direct': durable, multi-year relationships (often 5-10 years), with joint investment in farm equipment (African drying beds, parabolic dryers, depulpers). One rarely noted fact: under most direct-trade setups, the farmer captures 20-45 % of the end retail price of roasted coffee — well above the 5-10 % in commercial supply chains, but still far from an ideal share. The Alliance for Coffee Excellence (through Cup of Excellence) and auction platforms such as Best of Panama and Gesha Village push even further by connecting producers directly to global bidders.

In Belgium, several specialty roasters in Brussels, Ghent, Antwerp and Liège practise direct trade in a documented way, publish transparency reports and travel to origin — notably to Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Guatemala and Brazil. It is one of the defining markers of the Belgian specialty scene that has taken shape since around 2012-2015.

Direct trade vs other sourcing models