What your cup of coffee does in the world

We want a little light in that Coffee business bring. A few numbers await you in the next lines. That may be a little tiring - but with a cup of coffee it is reasonable! ;-) After all, the following numbers are the reason why we Five Good Goods have launched.

Coffee, tea, sugar, cocoa - good goods?

over 110 cups of coffee are consumed per year and person in Switzerland. Coffee is therefore a good example of the effects of global trade in agricultural products - with many opportunities and risks. Our producer Dorine lives in Uganda. From there was 2017 Coffee exported $ 555 million. It can be assumed that the majority of the total produced 210,000 tonswhen raw beans were exported. So you get a price of around $ 2,000 per ton or $ 2 to $ 3 per kilogram of raw beans. The price per kilogram of Fairtrade raw beans is about 1 dollar higher. Fairtrade is less volatile than regular coffee as minimum prices are guaranteed.

What does that have to do with Switzerland?

High-quality coffee in the Swiss shop reaches prices of CHF 30 or more - including our Suave coffee. Of course, transport costs contribute to the price, especially for small import quantities. With larger quantities, however, they become a small factor. The situation is similar in terms of packaging, design and detailed logistics. So there is the finishing of the coffee: roasting. And this is where Switzerland comes in: It is the eighth largest European coffee importer and has many small and large roasters, the raw beans worth $ 730 million refine. The value added generated in this way forms a market volume of approximately $ 3 billion, of which more than half is exported again, with a value of approximately 1.7 billion. So Switzerland does an impressive job with the coffee trade Export surplus to generate. And this although coffee does not thrive here.

And Uganda?

Compared to the Swiss figures, the market volume of Ugandan coffee $ 555 million, almost small. A country in which coffee naturally grows and which is the eighth largest coffee producer in the world does not even export a third of the coffee that the Alpine country of Switzerland exports. In our opinion, something is wrong if a large part of the added value of a domestic product is generated outside of the country of origin.

So if we, as Five Good Goods, succeed in successfully launching Suave coffee and hopefully other products soon in Switzerland, we will make a small contribution to: to shift this imbalance in favor of those peoplewho produce the coffee. You can contribute to this with every cup of coffee. We are still at the very beginning, but we are not alone: Dorine, our producer in Uganda, just got the Coffee cooperative met from Germany who imported similarly roasted coffee from Rwanda. Another company with the same goal is Solino Coffee, also from Germany. These are encouraging discoveries for our way!

In the sense: good coffee!

Kind regards

Amaru, Alain & Johannes