I want you to hold that number for a moment. Seven cents.
You walk into a specialty café. You order a pour-over — a single-origin Rwanda, let's say. You pay $2.80. The barista who made it gets a living wage. The café owner pays their rent. The roaster covered their mortgage payment on that bag. The importer took their margin. The trader took theirs. The exporter took theirs.
And the farmer who planted the tree, tended it for years, picked every cherry by hand at exact peak ripeness, floated them in water to check density, pulped them, fermented them, washed them, and dried them for weeks on raised beds in the African sun —
That farmer received approximately seven cents.
"This is not an accident. It is a structure. And structures can be changed — but only if someone is willing to say out loud that the current one is unjust."
The Numbers the Industry Doesn't Put on Its Bags
The specialty coffee industry loves numbers on bags. Altitude. Score. Variety. Process. Flavor notes. Sourced with care. Farmer relationships. Direct trade.
Here are some numbers you almost never see on a bag:
The average annual income for a smallholder Arabica coffee farmer is approximately $600. That is not a monthly salary. That is a year.
Of the roughly 12.5 million smallholder coffee farmers worldwide, at least 5.5 million live below the international poverty line — defined as $3.20 per day.
Approximately 90% of the total economic value generated by coffee flows out of coffee-producing countries to roasters, traders, and retailers in consuming countries. Ten percent stays at origin.
For a $4 specialty coffee, the farmer receives roughly 40 cents — about 10%. For a $2.80 cup, the research consistently finds the farmer's share landing between 5 and 10 cents.
These are not numbers from activist organizations with an agenda. These are from the International Trade Centre, from academic research on supply chain value distribution, from the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide itself — the industry's own price benchmarking tool.
How the Cheating Happens — Quietly
I want to be precise here, because the word "cheating" implies deliberate malice, and the reality is more systemic than that. Most roasters are not twirling their mustaches over how little to pay farmers. Most traders are operating within a system they didn't design. Most buyers would say — sincerely — that they care about farmers.
The structure cheats farmers without requiring anyone to be consciously cruel. Here is how:
Information asymmetry. A farmer in Nyanza District, Rwanda, does not know what a specialty buyer in Copenhagen is paying for their coffee. They know what the washing station or local trader offered them. They have no way to negotiate against a price they cannot see.
Volume concentration. A few large buyers control so much purchase volume that they effectively set prices. Farmers who need to sell — who have no storage, no alternative market access, no financial cushion — accept whatever is offered. The buyer who controls the alternative controls the price.
Quality costs with no quality premium. The specialty industry asks farmers to invest in expensive quality practices — selective picking, careful fermentation, precise drying — but the premium for that quality is frequently captured further up the chain, not passed back. A farmer who invests more to produce a higher-scoring lot often receives a price that doesn't justify that investment.
Debt cycles. Without working capital before harvest, farmers borrow — at rates that can reach 50–100% annualized. By the time payment arrives, debt service consumes most of it. The system maintains dependency rather than building toward it.
Why I Started LetSequoia
I did not come to Rwanda as an activist. I came as an entrepreneur who saw extraordinary coffee growing at extraordinary altitudes and thought: there is a business here. A real one. One that could be profitable and impactful at the same time.
But the more I learned about how the supply chain actually worked — the more washing stations I visited, the more farmers I sat with, the more I understood what they were earning for what they were producing — the angrier I got.
Not performatively angry. Genuinely, structurally angry. The kind of anger that makes you want to build something different rather than just talk about it.
LetSequoia was built around a simple premise: the farmer is the most important person in the coffee supply chain. Without them, there is no coffee — not specialty coffee, not commodity coffee, not any coffee. And a supply chain that treats the most essential participant as the least financially important participant is not just unjust. It is economically irrational. It destroys the very incentive structure that produces quality.
If a farmer cannot earn a living income from producing excellent coffee, they will not keep producing excellent coffee. They will plant something else. Or they will stop investing in quality. Or their children will leave the farm for the city, and a generation of agricultural knowledge will be lost.
The specialty industry is slowly destroying the goose that lays its golden eggs, and the industry mostly knows it. Which makes the slowness of change genuinely baffling.
What LetSequoia Does Differently
I want to be honest about what "differently" means — and what it doesn't.
We cannot single-handedly fix the global coffee supply chain. We are not large enough and we never will be. What we can do is build a model that proves the economics work when you prioritize farmers — and hope that proof spreads.
Concretely: we provide pre-finance working capital to our partner farmers before harvest, so they don't borrow at punishing rates. We pay premiums that are genuinely traceable back to the farms that produced the quality. We roast at origin, keeping processing jobs and value-add in Rwanda and DR Congo rather than exporting to be processed elsewhere. We invest in the Digital Centers because we believe in the next generation of these farming communities.
And we are not quiet about why we do these things. The world has too much specialty coffee marketing that speaks in the passive voice. "Farmers are supported." "Communities benefit." "Quality is prioritized."
I prefer the active voice. Farmers are being cheated. I built a company to cheat them less. I am asking you to buy that company's coffee so I can keep doing it.
Seven cents on a $2.80 cup. That number should make every coffee drinker angry. Let that anger go somewhere useful.
— Anna Kim, CEO & Founder, LetSequoia · Kigali, Rwanda
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