If you haven’t thought about it yet, your pursuit of and passion for specialty coffee is more than just trendy—you’re leading the path forward for the global coffee community!

By supporting and engaging with specialty coffees, you and the rest of our coffee community are enabling greater sustainability and enriching a global community of coffee appreciation, coffee countries, and country culture.
 

How Your Support Makes a Difference

MORE THAN FAIR TRADE

sourcing and supporting the world’s best

First, a little background on what fair trade means. The fair-trade movement is an amazing movement that really helped move the needle for mass producers of coffee, ensuring fair wage for large coffee growers where the cost / quality of coffee was traditionally lower.

It’s intended as a price floor, or a bottom limit for coffee prices. The farmers it protects are usually those growing for the mass coffee market — which is important! But because Atlas sources specialty grade coffee, by definition we buy coffee at above fair-trade prices.

At Atlas, we source premium single-origin coffee from farms around the world and pay well above market prices for the beans.

By paying above market prices, we’re able to help farmers develop and support sustainable practices. Shade growing, for example, means that trees are not cleared in order to grow the coffee. This leaves less land available for coffee plants, which would usually mean a lower yield and thus a lower profit for the farmer.

But, shade growing has massive benefits. It protects the environment and, because the shade creates cooler temperatures for the coffee plants beneath the canopy of the trees, this method also causes the coffee to develop and ripen more slowly, resulting in higher quality coffee.

Because we pay coffee farmers significantly more for their delicious, high quality beans, they’re able to earn more with lower yields, and they can continue to produce some of the world’s best coffee year after year.

     

A WIN-WIN-WIN

specialty coffee is good for everyone

Specialty coffee is a win for the farmers, who gain access to resources like education on techniques for water conservation, like the flexibility to diversify their crops to protect themselves against a bad harvest, and even like the opportunity to share their hard-won coffee beans, with a community that will appreciate both the beans and their journey.

It’s a win for us at Atlas Coffee Club because we get to source and share more and more exciting coffees with our subscribers, from countries that you just can’t find on the shelves.

We go out of our way to highlight and support coffee countries like Malawi, Ecuador, Congo, and Myanmar – countries that produce much less coffee than others, and that don’t always have the infrastructure in place to make sourcing and transporting the coffee easy. But, their incredibly unique, high quality beans make the extra effort more than worth it.

Finally, it’s a win for coffee drinkers and coffee lovers everywhere, who get to enjoy the vast, complex world of coffee. Your support is yielding the world’s best coffee, and for that we thank you!

Want to explore and engage with the world of coffee?

With a subscription to Atlas Coffee Club, each month you’ll receive a new coffee from a new incredible country, along with tasting notes, brew tips, and more. Connect to coffee and culture from around the world, and continue leading the path forward…