There is neither a rulebook nor an inspection body for direct trade. There is also no definition that two roasteries would have to agree on. Yet the term appears on thousands of coffee packages, and nobody asks what direct trade actually means. Rather, it's a feeling behind which it's easy to hide. What we need is precision, otherwise the good principles will be lost.
Direct trade refers to the direct purchase of green coffee from producers, without anonymous middleman stages. The term originated in the early 2000s among some US roasteries in response to a world market price of 41 US cents per pound. A seal, a certification body, or a binding definition does not exist to this day. Each roastery decides for itself what it means by this, but no one verifies it.
"Is your coffee actually direct trade?"
The question came up in one of my roasting courses. "Your coffee must be direct trade, right?" I answered the way I have for years: with nested explanations, with caveats, with lots of ifs and buts. My answer wasn't very satisfying for my conversation partner.
"Well," I usually say then, "there's no definition of exactly how direct direct is."
When you pick up a coffee package today, you encounter terms like relationship coffee, farm direct, ethical sourcing, direct trade, fairer than Fairtrade, or all of them at once. Each of these terms sounds like closeness, but none of them means anything as long as there's no number or concrete facts behind them. Relationship coffee means little if no one takes on risk. Farm direct conceals the fact that there are almost always multiple actors between farm and roastery; someone handles logistics, someone insurance, someone financing, someone warehousing. Ethical sourcing remains just a feeling without concrete, measurable criteria.
Ask a handful of roasteries what direct trade is. The answers will be shorter or longer. But none will be the same.
Where direct trade comes from and what the term once meant
September 2001. The coffee price drops to 41 US cents per pound, the lowest real value in a hundred years. Smallholder farmers can no longer service loans, farms are abandoned.
In response to this situation, a few US roasteries argued that quality could be a way out. Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, Stumptown. They traveled to the farms, offered cupping courses so producers would learn how their own coffee tasted, and tied the price to taste and quality rather than the market. Intelligentsia set itself a rule: at least 25 percent above the Fairtrade minimum price, and fully transparent about it. Stumptown made it a rule that coffee can only be called direct trade after three consecutive years.
Why direct trade never had a rulebook
There was no audit, no paperwork, no certification body. The idea was self-regulation. Three companies defined for themselves what they meant and talked to each other about it—that was all there was to begin with. Today it's not just a handful of roasteries, but thousands worldwide. Self-regulation remained, but no one checks each other anymore.
Directly traded coffee is not the same as direct trade
Lennart Clerkx founded This Side Up in 2013 in the Netherlands. He initially just wanted to organize dialogue between producers and roasters, but transportation turned out to be the bottleneck, and so facilitation became import. Today they buy directly themselves, assume the risk, and pre-finance roasteries.
For Lennart, the central question is not who knows whom, but where the power lies. Whoever has the capital to execute the trade has the power. And the moment a middleman exists, dependency is created.
This leads to a distinction that hardly anyone in the industry makes.
What Lennart calls directwashing
When This Side Up buys coffee directly from a producer, that is direct trade. When a roastery then buys that coffee from This Side Up, they have acquired directly traded coffee. But they haven't done direct trade themselves. They're telling someone else's relationship work as if it were their own.
This is not semantic hairsplitting. Either someone buys for me, or I do it myself. Lennart calls it the most common abuse he sees, and he explains why it bothers him: whoever presents someone else's work as their own undercuts exactly those roasteries that actually do the work.
Why we don't call ourselves direct trade, even though we could
We buy through algrano, This Side Up, Falcon, Plot Coffee, Ensambles and a few others. We have pre-financed some coffees. We've also imported ourselves, complete with export papers, even though we're not logisticians. By common definitions, some of our coffees would qualify as direct trade. We just don't say so because with most of our coffees we're free riders: others organize the logistics and warehousing, and we only pay when the green coffee is delivered.
Where and how much coffee we buy is documented in our transparency report.
Coffee is prepared for export in Ocotal, Nicaragua.
Is there a direct trade seal?
No. There is no certification body, no logo, no testing standard, and from everything I hear, there won't be one either.
Andreas Felsen, whom everyone calls Pingo, co-founded Quijote Kaffee in 2010 in Hamburg and is one of the German pioneers of direct trade. I asked him whether a direct trade certification body could ever come about. His answer was a clear no, because, according to Pingo: roasteries that have lived this culture for years have already earned their credibility. A third-party seal would not be a marketing tool for them, but rather a negative image transfer. Quijote deliberately foregoes the organic and Fairtrade seals for the same reason.
For him, a shared rulebook fails at an even earlier stage. The interests in the industry are too far apart, especially regarding the use of the term itself.
Why many people don't mind Fairtrade and don't mind direct trade either?
There are doctoral dissertations about Fairtrade, consumer magazines, newspaper articles, entire websites full of criticism. Rightfully so—that's appropriate for a system that makes a promise.
I asked Pingo if he knows a single consumer magazine that has critically examined direct trade. He doesn't know any from Europe. From the US he knows forums, but in Japan direct trade seems to be questioned much more critically than with us.
What's funny is that the explanation for this is quite straightforward: Fairtrade has a seal. A seal is a promise, a promise is verifiable, and the verifiable can be broken. Direct trade promises nothing that can be verified, so there's nothing to break.
Whoever promises nothing can't break their word.
This is the semantic black market we've settled into. I can write that I trade ethically, and no one corrects me. I can write that this coffee is fairer than Fairtrade, and no one corrects me.
Are middlemen in coffee trade really the problem?
In almost every story about direct trade, the middleman is the figure to be eliminated. They're often called coyotes, and whoever is called that doesn't get much sympathy.
Some of them are. Whoever only holds out an empty hand, adds no value, and creates dependencies is a bad deal that can be avoided.
Others master micro-economies. They do local logistics, they pay cash when no one else is buying. There are door-closers and door-openers.
What this looks like can be seen with Yulma Argueta. She started planting coffee in Baja Verapaz, Guatemala only at forty, and sold her first harvests locally without knowing how good her coffee actually was. We were able to help her export for the first time in 2025. So she wouldn't depend on us, we connected her with multiple exporters. Now she exports twice as much as last year.
Lennart said in our conversation that much of how coffee trade is structured today is based on colonialism. For more on coffee and colonialism, I recommend this podcast with Christian Cwik from the University of Graz.
The coffee chain is long. Coffee passes through many hands before it reaches the cup. Walking through a farm in the Sierra de Zongolica, Mexico.
How to recognize genuine direct trade: five questions for every roastery
Because there's no rulebook for direct coffee trade, I've created one. Not an official one, but one that emerges from what those who mean it seriously say. Here are five questions you should ask every roastery on their website.
We applied this test to ourselves. So are the Kaffeemacher direct trade?
Question 1: partly passed. While most of our coffees come through importers, the relationship is between us and the producers. Often importers like algrano then take on pre-financing, logistics, and warehousing. But we also repeatedly buy coffees from importers who offer us coffee from producers we don't know.
Question 2: so-so. Our average relationship length is 4.52 years, which sounds solid. Only 37 percent of our partnerships have been running for three years or longer. According to Stumptown's own rule, almost two-thirds of our coffees wouldn't be allowed to be called "direct trade," since Stumptown only talks about long-term relationships after three years.
Question 3: half passed. We ran Finca Santa Rita in Nicaragua ourselves from 2017 to 2025. With the Toca project in the Sierra de Zongolica, we became partners through a co-investment by buyers. With most other coffees, someone else bears the risk.
Question 4: passed. We publish our green coffee prices since 2020. In 2025/26, our average FOB price was 5.76 USD per pound unweighted and 4.81 USD weighted, across 129,110 kilograms and 43 producers in 16 countries.
Question 5: failed. But: we create criteria case by case, because each coffee partnership is different.
By this 5-point test, we would not be a direct trade roastery, and we don't say we are anywhere. But we say what we do, and if someone interprets that as direct trade, that's fine. How we work, what matters to us, how we build and nurture relationships, jointly design visions with producers—we describe all that in our transparency report.
Does coffee become better through direct trade?
Not automatically. Pingo has drawn a clear distinction. Where Quijote really is on the ground, in Honduras, where Stephi travels two to three times a year, and in Ecuador, where he himself is regularly, quality has developed together over the years. And in both high-price years when many producers were selling their coffee expensive anyway and not particularly loyal in delivery, Quijote got its usual qualities. It's not an automatic process, he says himself. It takes commitment, constant exchange, and the roastery also has to say when something doesn't work for them.
Behind this lies a claim that I consider the weakest in the entire field: that higher quality leads to higher income. Higher selling prices, yes. But high quality requires massively more work, and who actually decides what good quality is?
For years, there was a scorecard the whole world calibrated to. The whole world? Most producers still don't know what their coffee tastes like. And this scorecard comes across as neutral but is full of subjective judgments. If a point total at the end decides whether a coffee gets bought, then the argument doesn't hold much water.
Many producers don't know what their own coffee tastes like. We brought the family Romão in Castelo, Brazil, their own coffee back. Roasted.
Direct trade was an answer to 41 cents per pound of green coffee. Today we're at many times that
Here, in my view, is the blind spot of the whole debate. The founding logic of direct trade was an answer to a market at rock bottom. Because the market wasn't giving anything, quality was supposed to be another way, at least for the few producers who had either luck or the social or cultural capital to get in touch with quality-oriented roasteries at all. Intelligentsia's 25 percent above the Fairtrade minimum price was formulated in a world where that minimum price actually mattered.
On February 12, 2025, Arabica was above 442 US cents per pound, the all-time high, more than five times the long-term average. In early June 2026, it was around 250. Over eighteen months, the C-price swung between 270 and 440.
In such a market, producers in Brazil, Mexico, India, and Indonesia prefer to sell domestically rather than for export, because quick cash flows locally. They hold coffee back and influence prices with it. They've learned how speculation works.
What need do they have for a roaster who visits once a year? I don't have a ready answer. But I think we owe them an explanation as long as we keep justifying direct trade with arguments from 2001.
What this says about coffee trade
In all fairness: something has moved, at a spot that hardly anyone is watching. Pingo says that the Transparent Trade network has developed a kind of definitional power within the industry. Roasteries approached importers and wanted to know how much of their money actually reaches origin. The demand for transparency rose significantly, though from roasteries, not from consumers.
As long as transparency is asked about backward, it works. As soon as it's sold forward, it gets fuzzy. Pingo calls it low-hanging fruit, and he's right: it takes little effort to know where your own coffee comes from.
What the EUDR changes about this
When traceability becomes legally mandatory, a term that voluntarily promises it loses its value as a unique selling point. What then remains as a distinguishing feature is the question of price and risk. But those are exactly the points that direct trade has never binding regulated.
Let's call directly what it deserves
Lennart is currently working to make himself unnecessary. This Side Up no longer just guides roasteries toward direct trade, but also producers. In Colombia, a collaboration with his local partner has been running for eight years, and he now executes the sales completely himself. The next step is him building his own import company in the Netherlands. Lennart could keep that relationship, but he's spinning it out.
I find that as clever as it is admirable, and it shows where this could go.
We're currently looking at what role rule systems can play that producers create themselves. Participatory guarantee systems work from the bottom, they adapt to local conditions, and they don't need a certification authority in Europe. Whether that works, we don't know yet.
Conclusion
There will be no direct trade bible. Special interests are too great. But what there can be are declarations of intent that cost something. And discussions that sharpen the term rather than soften it further.
Test a few roasteries that proclaim direct trade with the five questions suggested. That way we all get clarity on where more precision is still needed and where the wheat separates from the chaff.
Frequently asked questions about direct trade coffee
What does direct trade mean in coffee?
The direct purchase of green coffee from producers or cooperatives, without anonymous middleman stages. The term originated in the early 2000s among US roasteries like Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, and Stumptown. A binding definition does not exist; each roastery decides for itself what it means by this.
Is there a direct trade seal?
No. There is no unified and official direct trade logo, no certification body, and no testing standard for direct trade. Unlike Fairtrade or organic, no one verifies whether the claim is true. Whoever uses the term defines the criteria themselves.
Is direct trade better than Fairtrade?
Fair coffee trade comes from the same thinking as direct coffee trade—that the coffee price is repeatedly too low. But the two systems solve different problems. Fairtrade secures a floor price and is audited externally. Direct trade aims for quality, relationship, and higher prices, but is non-binding and not verified.
What does direct trade mean for taste?
Does coffee become better through direct trade? Not automatically. Regular, honest exchange between roastery and producer can improve the quality and taste of directly traded coffee over years, if both sides invest. A direct purchase alone doesn't do this.
What is directwashing?
The term comes from Lennart Clerkx and describes roasteries that buy directly traded coffee from an importer and present their relationship work as their own. The coffee was traded directly, but the roastery itself did not conduct direct trade.
How do I recognize genuine direct trade?
By verifiable information: Who built the relationship, how long has it existed, who bears the financial risk, is an FOB price mentioned, and are the roastery's criteria published somewhere?
Podcast episode 86 transcript expand
DIRECT TRADE — WHO DOES DIRECT TRADE BENEFIT?
Kaffeemacher Podcast, edited transcript
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This is the transcript of this podcast episode, edited and cleaned of filler words. The spoken style is preserved. The English statements from Lennart Clerkx and César Marín are in the original.
I'm regularly asked whether our coffee is direct trade. My answer has always been complex and multifaceted. And I notice that I somewhat disappoint my conversation partner. So the way we communicate and present ourselves, that's already direct trade, right? Well, I say then most of the time, there's no exact definition of how direct direct actually is.
By that point in such a conversation, it becomes clear that this term has become highly charged and deeply imprecise, even misused. Ask a handful of roasteries and coffee drinkers what direct trade includes. The answers will be shorter or longer, but never the same. A common denominator might be that direct trade is based on familiarity between producers and roasteries. Okay, I'd say then, but what's your familiarity? A shared photo on Instagram? A wave from a distance, a handshake, herding pigs together, or having lived through crises together?
Direct trade is unfortunately not quick to answer. Especially when everyone has a different idea of it. So in this podcast I'm searching for the original meaning, for the rulebook, the current interpretation, the claims, and above all the question of who direct trade actually benefits and who it doesn't.
This is the Kaffeemacher Podcast. I'm Philipp Schallberger, welcome.
LET'S START WITH PRICE
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Direct trade is basically also about the question of whether the money you consumers pay and the money roasters pay actually reaches where it's intended. It's about money and prices. And that's where we have to start.
The coffee price today, in April 2026, is about 280 to 300 cents per pound. It's risen sharply over the last year and a half and has fallen back a bit now. But let's look back. In the 1980s the coffee price was about 130 cents per pound. In September 2001 it fell during the so-called Coffee Crisis to 41 US cents per pound. That was the lowest real value in a hundred years and the result of a price decline over four years.
What happened? Vietnam invested heavily and quickly in intensive Robusta production in the 1990s. Similarly, there were rapid advances in Brazil in how much coffee could be harvested and processed. This resulted around the turn of the century in a massive price drop. 41 cents per pound. The price fell because oversupply was too large. Real production costs are not reflected in the market price; they're of course much higher. And so there were job losses, poverty, and migration from rural areas. Smallholder farmers could no longer service their loans and had to abandon farms or sell possessions.
This crisis led to intensive debate about fair trade and the need for diversification in coffee growing. Fairtrade, which everyone knows today, set a minimum price in 1988, a floor protection. So whoever could sell through Fairtrade channels during the 2001 coffee crisis had price protection. According to various studies, only 13 percent of Fairtrade-certified coffee actually managed to be sold under Fairtrade conditions. Demand collapsed because for many roasteries it was clear: if cheap coffee exists anyway, why pay for it? Just because it's Fairtrade?
THE BIRTH OF DIRECT TRADE
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That was the birth of direct trade. There were a few roasteries in the US that wanted to buy and roast high-quality specialty coffees. The argument was that for the first time there was reason to invest in quality. Because when prices are that low, quality can be a way for producers with the necessary social capital to reach a different market.
These pioneer roasteries included Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, and Stumptown Coffee. These roasteries personally went to the farms and built relationships. There were others who did the same, and there were others who did it even earlier. But these three communicated loudly and clearly about their endeavor.
There was no audit. There was no paperwork. There was no certification body. The roasteries argued that regular purchasing creates a relationship. Stumptown made it a rule for itself that coffee can only be called direct trade after three consecutive years. You had to know each other. And so the pioneers of direct trade traveled to the coffee-growing countries. From the US it's quick to Central America, so it's no surprise that the first direct trade relationships were with Central American producers.
So the basic idea was to connect quality and direct contact. Cupping, the evaluation of quality through tasting, became the key to understanding quality. And so many direct trade pioneers offered free cupping courses so producers would learn their own coffee's quality. They tied price to quality rather than the market. Intelligentsia set its own benchmark early on, saying they wanted to buy at least 25 percent above the Fairtrade minimum price and be fully transparent about it.
You see: Fairtrade provided price protection from below as a reaction to the low market price. And then there was the idea that quality should be rewarded. That would be protection from above—in quotation marks. It's really more of an escape route, because not everyone could produce really good quality. I'll come back to that. But nothing was certified or verified. The idea was self-regulation. These pioneers set their own standards.
When I look at the coffee world today, I don't see just a handful of US roasteries, but thousands worldwide who are committed to buying coffee as directly as possible—directly from the producer. Some say this is fairer and the coffee becomes better because of it. The problem: who can actually verify this and what exactly can be verified?
To this day there is no universally accepted definition of what direct trade is. This means suddenly a lot of people are doing direct trade even though they're buying coffee very indirectly. So: what relevance does direct trade still have today? What's true, what's copied, what's marketing—and who actually benefits from direct trade? Might roasteries, in the end, be the ones profiting from an undefined concept, while producers just go along?
I'm trying to approach this topic as objectively as possible. But you can already see: it's really multifaceted. We ourselves roast coffee and we avoid the term direct trade in our communications. Even though I'd say much of what we do would qualify as direct trade by common definitions.
THE VOCABULARY OF CLOSENESS
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Straight from the farm. Relationship coffee. Fairer than Fairtrade. When you pick up a coffee package these days, you probably encounter one of these terms or all three at once. Direct trade is part of the basic vocabulary of specialty. And that's exactly the problem. Because what's really being communicated as direct today?
It's an incomplete list of terms that say a lot but actually nothing if they're not backed up with numbers. Relationship coffee sounds human but means nothing if there's no price and risk behind it. Farm direct obscures the fact that there are usually several actors between farm and roastery. Someone has to do logistics. Someone has to do insurance and financing. And someone might have to warehouse. Ethical sourcing sounds really good but without criteria is not a concept but a feeling. Transparency, on the other hand, is a term that's used very frequently. That matters if it's backed up with numbers and not just used as a term.
You see the central pattern: it's about suggesting closeness. But often responsibility is simply avoided with transparent information.
WHO HAS THE POWER?
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I spoke with Lennart Clerkx from This Side Up, a Dutch green coffee importer. Lennart founded it in 2013. His idea was that direct dialogue between producers and roasters could improve coffee quality, create fair treatment, and ultimately deliver competitive products. He also saw the bottleneck: transport. It's expensive if you buy little. And so This Side Up became an importer, even though they didn't want to at first. They now buy coffee themselves, assume risk, and help pre-finance roasteries. If you buy coffee from This Side Up, according to Lennart, you're buying directly traded coffee.
"The definition is hard. Whether somebody does the transport, or whether somebody owns the relationship – all of that, I think, is secondary to who has the power in the relationship. Any middleman, however much freedom and however much transparency they give: because they have the financial means to execute the trade, they hold the power in the end. So you create dependency the moment there is a middleman there. Direct trade is when that power is dispersed between the roaster and the grower equally, when they become dependent on each other for each other's success.
That is actually the reason I started This Side Up as a direct trade facilitator: being a development economist, power was the most interesting aspect I saw. That's the problem in the industry. We can talk about living income and fair trade and all this crap, but in the end – who is allowing more money to go to origin? Who, by the grace of their goodness and good deeds, is allowing a bit more money to go there? There is nobody willing to give up power in the industry, and that is why direct trade is so important."
For Lennart it's about power distribution. Who has power in the coffee chain? And he speaks of the middleman, a figure that in many narratives must be eliminated. But that's far too short-sighted and unfortunately goes unquestioned. Often it's said: middlemen are bad, so you must work directly with producers. But who can actually work truly directly with producers in a way that benefits them? And are middlemen always bad?
It's like this: if a link in the chain only holds out an empty hand, adds no value, and creates dependencies, then it's certainly a bad deal. That kind of middleman can be avoided, if that's possible. But often these middlemen simply fill a gap, and they understand micro-economies. They might do local logistics or buy coffee for cash, giving cash when no one else would buy it. Or they might cause harm. These middlemen are often called coyotes—and by being disparaged by name, they can barely receive sympathy. Sure, there are those who close doors. But others might open doors. And there are roasteries that are grateful when someone fills a gap somewhere in the chain.
Lennart says that This Side Up sees itself as "The Good Middleman" because they take risk and pre-finance the roaster. So I asked him further what he wouldn't qualify as direct trade.
"I have a kind of split opinion. The obvious answer would be: if there is any kind of middleman there. But what qualifies as a middleman can get quite grey, because the work that we do and the work a roaster does is very similar in its execution. When a farmer and a roaster completely own the relationship and have all the communication, agree all the prices together, and they rely on a third party to finance them and to execute the trade in an equal partnership – that is a healthy situation. But I'm not sure whether it's direct trade. In my very strictest definition, even that would not be direct trade, because of the dependency that the financial middleman creates.
So in an ideal world, direct trade would have a capital source to execute the trade that is regenerative, one where the power of the capital is shared between all the parties, between both ends of the value chain. And that hardly exists today. In my more easy-going definition I would say: if you do not own the relationship, if somebody else is doing the hard work of maintaining that relationship and you are basically just copy-pasting their work and saying 'this is direct trade' – that is the most common abuse that we see. That is also how a lot of people abuse the work of This Side Up. Because yes, we trade directly with them, and what we do together is something to be proud of. But then to use the term direct trade for it…"
So if a roastery buys directly traded coffee like at Lennart's for six euros and then says "We as roasterers do direct trade," then the term gets watered down. Yes, according to Lennart the coffee is direct trade when This Side Up buys from producers. But if a roastery then buys that directly traded coffee, it's a coffee that was previously traded directly. The roastery bought directly traded coffee, but it didn't conduct direct trade itself.
That's not a trifle or semantic quibbling, but a completely different scenario. You're more of a free rider here. Not that that's good or bad. It's just different. Either someone buys for me or I do everything myself. From the perspective of the early 2000s visionaries, a roastery buying coffee through This Side Up wouldn't be a direct trade roastery. But you know what so many say? That they do exactly that and that's exactly what they are.
"There are many people who show it as direct trade, which I disagree with, because basically they showcase the work that we do. Them being proud of buying that coffee because of all the work that is done in the partnership between This Side Up and the grower – that is fantastic, that makes everyone proud. But then to go one step ahead and call it direct trade means you are undercutting all the roasters who are doing that work. And that is what is so special about direct trade. That's also where we see the frustration of roasters who are doing this work and really involving themselves intimately in the reality of the producer, and then seeing that people are basically copy-pasting the good middleman's messages."
And that happens because there's no strict definition and no measurable comparisons, let alone a rulebook everyone could refer to.
I know a few roasteries that truly do direct trade the way Lennart would define it. There's Quijote in Hamburg. There's Muyu from Locarno, they import coffee from Bolivia. There are brokers and a few others who do everything themselves: select the coffee themselves, import themselves, finance themselves, year after year after year. These roasteries are very close to the ideal communicated in the early 2000s. Other roasteries then buy from the direct trade roasteries and adapt the model.
I asked Lennart whether direct trade was an advantage for him and for working with This Side Up.
"There could be, if you look at it from a monetary perspective, because some larger companies might use us to direct-wash their coffees. But in the end it doesn't benefit us at all, because we exist to facilitate direct trade. Our top ten roasters, if you look at it year on year, they switch all the time, because we help people move towards direct trade. That's why we exist, that's the objective of our company. People showing our work and calling it direct trade – it might sell. It's a good question. I don't know whether it actually sells, or whether it's the pride that sells. So they should stay away from the term if it is not true. But then again, we have not been very vocal about what is and isn't direct trade. We just showcase what we do. We're not in the term-defining business, as it were."
Two things about that. First: I see myself and I see us as Kaffeemacher. We avoid using direct trade. But we tell what we do. There are cases where we pre-finance coffee early. We've also imported coffee ourselves, done all the export papers, even though we're not logisticians. But usually we work with importers who do direct trade, and we buy their directly traded coffee. This includes GEPA, Algrano, Quijote, and others. Because we're free riders here, at least we avoid saying we do direct trade ourselves.
Second: Lennart says he's not in the business of defining definitions. And yet we're discussing this. To put it in context again: if everyone uses a term that's so fuzzy but at the same time so positively framed and represents a sales and positioning argument, then we have to define it instead of softening it. Because if we keep softening it, the term loses power.
WHAT THE PRODUCER SAYS ABOUT IT
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The discussion goes in circles if I only ask the processing side of the industry. So I asked a friend and coffee producer in Peru what he thinks about direct trade and what this approach brings him. Here's César Marín from Chacra de Dago in Peru.
"Direct trade to me is not only about selling coffee without intermediaries, but about building a real relationship between producer and roasters. At the end of the day it's about speaking honestly about quality, price, climate, harvest, logistics and the many challenges that stay invisible behind the cup. In my case I travel often to Europe, because we believe the producer also needs to show a new face. We cannot only send the coffee and wait for feedback. We need to be present, explain our reality, understand the language of the roasters, have market knowledge and create trust and communication. In the end it is a relationship that we can build with time, transparency and mutual responsibility."
Great, right? Honest exchange. Trust. Responsibility. Things that are really important to him. I just wonder: isn't that simply a good approach to how one can understand and practice trustworthy entrepreneurship? Being honest, trusting each other, and taking responsibility for others—those are actually fundamental things. But apparently that's so far away that we need a name for it.
I then asked César whether direct trade was better than other systems—the prevailing systems through which he would normally sell coffee.
"I think it depends on an honest and serious relationship. A direct relationship can be beautiful if both sides are committed. But sometimes other partners also play an important role, especially when they help with financing and contracts and communication. For me it's not about saying direct trade is better than everything else. It's more about asking whether this business model creates more trust, more stability and more value for everyone involved. I think it's better, because it creates more of a human connection. When the relationship is strong, the roaster does not only buy big quantities, but they understand the process, they understand that the coffee they are buying is connected to the farm, to the family, to the territory and to decisions that started long before the coffee arrived at its destination. For producers, direct trade definitely helps us grow. It pushes us to improve quality, to understand the market, to communicate better and to show a more complete version of who we are."
Through exchange and visits we learn about each other's ideas and challenges. And that's really exciting. Honestly, I wish every roastery could earn the opportunity to work so closely with producers that their respective wishes can be expressed at the same table and then discussed together as partners.
So we're dealing with a term that's been floating around for twenty years, maybe longer. This term can be narrower, as Lennart does, who even speaks of directwashing when someone buys their directly traded coffee, roasts it, and then communicates it as direct trade. And we've heard an understanding that's much broader: for César, direct trade is a different form of trade, but above all of acting—because direct trade for him is based on trust, exchange, and honesty.
Maybe it would sometimes help if instead of direct trade we talked more about direct action. Actually get to work and just do it, and less play into the varied notions of coffee consumers that direct is always better. It's really about bringing transparency to coffee trade and leveling power and knowledge asymmetries. The question is just: how do we get there? It will be difficult if we don't have a common language, grammar, and shared vocabulary.
A DETOUR: WHY THERE IS NO DIRECT TRADE BIBLE
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Let me take a quick detour here. Warning, a break is coming. But trust me, I'll come back. Religions.
Religions with holy books solved a central problem: canonization. At some point an authority said: this is in here, this now applies. And deviations are heresy. That's verifiable, it's nameable, it's sanctionable. When someone quotes a holy book, they quote the same document as everyone else.
And that's something direct trade never officially did. There is no direct trade bible we can refer to. There are action intentions and visions. Some are more precise, others more muddled or really meaningless. Some are more received because certain traders and roasteries have more trust in the industry. There are meetings and conferences, like the Coretto in July 2025 in Hamburg, where roasteries like Quijote, Coffee Collective, Flying Roasters, and GEPA took part. In circles like these it's clear what's meant by direct trade because their philosophy so deeply went into action: pre-financing, long-term partnerships, regular visits through thick and thin. They don't even have to discuss it anymore, it's just part of it for them.
For most consumers, though, direct trade just sounds good because it suggests closeness and so apparently doesn't need to be expressed precisely. And that's why there's this semantic black market. Much is allowed because it's not sanctioned. I can say anything and won't be held accountable. I can say I trade totally ethically and no one corrects me. I can say this coffee is fairer than Fairtrade and no one corrects me.
IN CONVERSATION WITH PINGO FELSEN, QUIJOTE KAFFEE
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So why is it so difficult to find a common rulebook? I asked one of the pioneers of direct coffee trade in Germany: Andreas "Pingo" Felsen from Quijote Kaffee.
THE QUESTION OF QUALITY REMAINS
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What remains is really the question of quality. What direct trade can primarily do is break through the anonymity of traditional trade. There are voices saying quality can be higher with direct trade because you're in direct exchange with producers. Maybe. But very often there's no such direct exchange, as we heard.
Direct trade must be compared with classic anonymous trade. Only then do the big breaks appear. There's no anonymity, there's direct exchange with each other. And above all, there's no substitution of the coffee because suddenly a name is on the product.
But I see another fundamental criticism of the claim that higher quality leads to higher prices. First, sales prices can be higher, yes—but that doesn't mean income rises. Because high quality requires massively more work. And that's where the issue is.
Who actually decides what good quality is? For years there was a scorecard the whole world calibrated to. The whole world? Most producers don't even know what their coffee tastes like. And that's why early direct traders were right to teach cupping skills so sellers and buyers could discuss the same impressions. What remains: this scorecard, this well-known rating form that associates coffee quality with points, comes across so neutrally and yet is full of subjective judgments. If a point award at the end decides whether a coffee gets bought, then it's a bad argument that high quality would lead to better living conditions. Because it takes more than that.
Direct trade is here to stay. Because well-intentioned direct trade changes the world in small ways and creates new room to move. But truly only when we communicate precisely and don't appeal to the diffuse feelings of coffee consumers. Because that doesn't help anyone.
DIRECT TRADE 2.0
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To wrap up, we reverse the absence of a rulebook once more. I mean: that's really great. If we don't have one, maybe one could still come. There have already been many meetings about it. But who in a world of so many roasteries is willing to step forward and say: hey, this is our new standard now?
One supporting tool for this might be the Transparent Coffee Guide, where roasteries disclose their purchase prices. That's an important step to even be able to talk about prices. But Lennart thinks about direct trade in a much broader way. And maybe what he says now is direct trade 2.0.
"This is evolving into a direct trade incubator. We have incubated a lot of roasting companies to become direct traders, but we have not really incubated producers to do the same. That is what we are working towards this year. We will start in Colombia. We have worked with a producer for the last eight years, and over time he has invited a lot of roasters to the field, they picked coffee together, they developed intimate relationships. Basically, when the coffee comes to Europe it is ninety percent sold, and he does all the selling himself. That's been going on for the last three, four years, and it kind of felt that our relationship was stagnating. So what do we do, what is the next step? That is what you see as the next step in our evolution: a kind of safe space for direct trade to develop, with the capital that we find together and in a community that we develop together.
So it is not necessarily independence – I think direct trade 2.0 is interdependent, where we do not own it, where we have the guts to share the power that we build. We have the relationship, and we gave it to Juan Pablo in Colombia. The next step is also letting the middleman function go: having him set up an actual import entity in the Netherlands, for example. Because in the end, the middleman function we have is a placeholder. If you zoom out, fair enough, we have this position in the middle because we stole it. Colonialism is the basis of all coffee trade, and that power belongs in the hands of the farmers. So yeah, direct trade should be one where the power sits comfortably with the roaster and also the growers."
So Lennart is working to build such strong relationships that he can step back out again. He could say he keeps everything in the company, but he spins out the relationships he built. And I find that as brilliant as it is admirable.
