Welcome to

Welcome to Fair For All, Olympia Coffees sourcing standard designed to create a better life for farmers.

Fair For All is Olympia Coffee's sourcing standard. Designed to create better lives for our farmers and communities through coffee.

Explore our 2024 Transparency Report ⭳

We're a Quality of Life company.

At Olympia Coffee, high-quality coffee is our passion, but seeking a higher quality of life for our farmers, staff, and customers is our mission. Fair For All is our commitment to improve the world through coffee sourcing.

We believe that everyone in the story of our coffees—from farm laborers to cafe customers and all those in between—should find satisfaction by being a part of what we do.

Through Fair For All we seek to remove the mysteries surrounding your coffee's origins, its producers, and its economics and give you the opportunity to know that your purchase truly benefited everyone who had a hand in its story.

Olympia Coffee
Transit center in Burundi

We've witnessed that the coffee trade at origin has the most room for improve-ment in the Quality of Life story.

Historically and currently, the global coffee trade has exploited the poorest and most vulnerable people in the supply chain to benefit those who wield power.

While Fair Trade and Direct Trade have both helped address these issues - with higher pay and better opportunities for producers - we believe both fall short of our producer's needs.

Sorting the day's harvest

Fair Trade only offers farmers about 20 cents more than commodity pricing.  

Fair Trade only offers farmers about 20 cents more than commodity pricing for every pound of coffee sold, a small increase for even the largest producers. Fair Trade is also only available to cooperatives and large estates, leaving out small-scale individual farmers. It also lacks the level of transparency and traceability back to the producers that we value. Fair Trade fails to incentivize high-quality coffee or innovation at the farm level, paying farmers the same rate no matter the quality.
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Direct Trade, on the other hand, typically implies that a coffee buyer agrees to a fair price directly with the coffee farmer based on quality. In 2010, Olympia Coffee became an early-adopter of this model, developing our own standards to ensure that farmers were rewarded for high-quality coffee.

Currently all of our farmers are paid more than double the Fair Trade rate according to our own Direct Trade standards. However, while Direct Trade answers the injustice of sustainability for the farm owner, and creates higher quality coffees for our line-up, we still believe that something has been missing.

Simply put, no Direct Trade system has ever ensured a minimum wage or safe working conditions for coffee pickers, processors, or other laborers within the farm itself.

El Aguila, El Salvador
Harvesting ripe coffee cherries at El Aguila, El Salvador.

In 2018 we became the first roaster in our industry to ensure that 100% our coffee is Fair For All.

We now go beyond our own Direct Trade standards to include every individual who contributes to our coffees in our quality of life efforts. This means ensuring that our producers and Co-Ops set a sustainable minimum wage for their own workers, and requiring that our farms and partnering facilities provide working conditions that are free of unnecessary danger, with access to clean drinking water, for all their workers. We ensure these policies like we always have, by visiting our producers in-person throughout the year and building partnerships based on their needs.
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We seek to be pioneers in this effort, setting an example we hope that other companies emulate.

Benefit Corporations, or simply "B Corps", are companies that are audited by a third-party organization to help them verify and communicate the ways they benefit their stakeholders over their shareholder's interests. This means B Corps prioritize benefiting their suppliers, employees, customers, community, and environment over simply benefiting share value or profits like traditional businesses. We spent most of 2018 providing documentation and working with B Lab to verify that our Fair For All efforts are trustworthy for our customers. Learn more about their standards at bcorporation.net

In 2019, we went to the next level with our Fair For All program by becoming certified as a B Corporation.

Olympia Coffee is a Certified B Corporation

Better Pay

We pay more than double the Fair Trade rate for all of our coffees. We set coffee prices directly with our farmers to ensure they earn more per pound. In 2023 our average (F.O.B.) was $4.54 per pound.

As a comparison, the C Market closed in 2023 at $1.73/lb and the median FOB for Arabica Natural in the specialty industry was $3.51/lb.

Living Wage

We guarantee a sustainable minimum wage to all laborers involved the production of our coffees, including pickers, processors, and farm workers, set seasonally with the farm owner or co-op board.

Farm Workers Safety

We work exclusively with farmers who provide safe working conditions free of oppression, violence, and unnecessary danger, and who also provide access to clean water and healthy food.

Transparency

We publish the precise quantities and prices paid for all coffees in our annual transparency report.

Highest Quality

We only purchase coffees with quality standards of 84 points or higher, according to SCA cupping standards for specialty coffee.

Benefits of Fair For All

This is our commitment to our customers, producers, and all who are involved in the production of our Fair for All coffees:

Continuous Improvement

We visit each farm or producer group at least once per year (international travel conditions permitting) to provide feedback for improved quality and opportunity for growth.