What the hell is going on here?
Green coffee prices hit record highs — $438.65 per pound. USAID withdrew its aid.
Trump brought tariffs back. Wall Street surged.
The Q Grader program was transferred to the SCA. Also the world’s largest trainer network was divided by region and income.
All at once. No warning.
No consultation. No dissent.
We can critique, but no one listens — not unless we speak in the language of capital.
Specialty’s global promise is broken.
We keep drinking. We keep scoring. Not because we believe — but because we’re trapped in a system that doesn’t ask, doesn’t listen, and doesn’t care.
We do what it demands — even as we dream of something better.
This isn't something new
They told us it was progress. Perhaps, mistakenly, they meant progress in environmental degradation and an increase in social problems?
40.68
million tonnes of biomass
conservative annual coffee biomass estimate — and no one’s tracking where the waste goes.
10%
U.S. imposes new coffee tariffs
trade barriers returned. Prices rose. Producing countries faced a new front — with no voice in the decision.
83%
of USAID programs cut
massive aid cuts hit coffee research, farmer training, and climate resilience — with no plan and no warning
The coffee is good.
The system is broken.
This isn’t a revolution — it’s a peaceful evolution.
You’ve just landed at its edge.
We taste. We teach. We resist.
Welcome to the shift. This is our blueprint.
Paradigm Shift
A brief history of the world of coffee — and the systems that shaped it.
Coffee has never been just a drink.
It was a signal. A system. A paradigm.
Hidden in the mountains of Ethiopia, smuggled out of Yemen, coffee appeared on the margins — sacred, mysterious, uncolonized. Then came the merchants. Then the missionaries. Then the people with maps. Coffee trees were moved by boat, by whip, and by bullet.
From sacred plant to plantation logic
Coffee quickly became a royal commodity, coveted by the bourgeoisie of the world’s great metropolises.
Grown on colonial lands, harvested by slave labor, transported to fuel empires.
It helped build Paris, Boston, and Lisbon. It financed universities and railways.
It paid for sugar, weapons, and silence.
Then came the stock exchanges.
The first futures contracts.
The C-price.
The illusion that something grown by human hands could be valued solely in numbers.
The waves were not waves. They were costumes.
The First Wave gave us immediacy.
The Second gave us branding.
The Third sold us single origin and the illusion of ethics — cup by cup.
Each wave claimed to be the last. And still, we wait for the next one: the fourth? The fifth?
Each wave said: “Now we understand coffee.”
Each was wrong.
Because the system took on new colors — but remained the same.
Its growth had already lasted too long under the capitalist vision of the world. The indicators became smarter. Marketing became gentler.
But the structure — the paradigm — remained! Labor remained cheap. Power remained centralized. Storytelling remained white.
Once in the hands of monarchs, then oligarchs, then corporate strategists, exchange brokers, supply chain architects, speculators and brand strategists.
speculators.
We want to make a movie about current coffee paradigm.
Record it with us!
Netflix hasn’t bought it (yet). But we will measure its value in the number of people who understand:
it’s not them who are broken — it’s the paradigm they’re trapped in.
We want to make a film about the current coffee system.
We can’t do it alone.
Maybe you can help.
It’s not just a film.
It’s proof we’re not the only ones who see the cracks.
We tasted it. We scored it. We decided it was “fair.”
Now, we sensed a hint of change — but we drowned in the system entirely. We don’t know how to act.
The end of history tasted like a latte
In 1992, economist Francis Fukuyama told us the game was over. Capitalism had won.
Liberal democracy would spread across the globe like foamed milk on a flat white.
A new mutation of the old paradigm. But paradigms don’t end because someone announces their death.
They end because reality breaks them.
Today, we ask whether the United States will remain a liberal democracy at all. We watch wars ignite in every direction — including here in Europe.
We talk about technocracy, oligarchy, the rule of algorithms. We discuss, but our language remains the same. We still cling to old patterns: supply chains, free trade, market access. Money, maybe crypto. Maybe we’ll track the “integrity” of the supply chain on the blockchain?
We award Nobel Peace Prizes while the planet burns and borders bleed.
Kuhn was right. Wallerstein predicted it. Huntington called the breaking points.
Paradigms change when anomalies appear.
Wars on borders of civilization? Anomalies?
Artificial intelligence may be an anomaly.
COVID may have been an anomaly.
Coffee at $9 a kilo — not enough to buy shoes for the picker — could be an anomaly that cracks the system open.
And so could this:
The Better Coffee.
It’s a way to explore emerging anomalies — but also a way to unleash anomalies in its structure.
This doesn’t require coordination. It requires action.
It requires a desire for change — and we know you share it.
A collective intelligence of coffee people.
An idea created by those who taste, teach, grow, roast, brew, and resist.
Not a revolution.
An evolution, with a raised fist.
A brief history of the world of coffee — and the systems that shaped it.
A silent refusal to pretend.
We know what we are doing.
We are building a future using money and tools from a system we no longer trust.
It has failed us. It promised an ethical world of coffee — but its only specialty lies in higher margins for the privileged.
We work within the current paradigm not because we believe in it, but because we are trapped in it.
For now.
Like every paradigm shift before, this one begins not with clarity — but with contradiction.
We don’t have to be right about the future.
We just have to live as if it were possible — and build as if it mattered.
Will we fail? Maybe. Will they want to "roast" us? Definitely!
But we will have tried to create a fairer world — one where human dignity replaces money. Where development replaces efficiency.
Where social development replaces corporate development.
We know these are not easy words.
That’s why we educate — to be understood.
That’s why we write a blog — to be understood.
We’ve also written a glossary to make the language clearer.
We’ve described all this in more detail in The Better Coffee White Paper. We’ve set values that form our canon — found in The Better Coffee Standard.
We did not arrive from another planet.
We do this because we want a voice in the debate about the future. A chance to choose.
We want a debate that the unknowing defenders of the current order will never organize.
So we are organizing it ourselves.
We are organizing a movement to shift the paradigm in coffee.
And we need you — whoever you are — to join in your own way, on your own scale.
Don’t let someone else write the next chapter for you.