Why is Troubardour coffee more expensive?
The answer to that is in the question itself because asking why some coffees are more expensive than others implies that they shouldn't be and that is that line of thought that no longer is anchored to reality anymore. This question assumes that coffee beans are a commodity that should have even prices. That could have been true in the past but the ship of great coffee has sailed and we are now in a world that is ready to invest a bit more in order to get a lot more.
Follow me; All wine bottles are the same size and the same shape, but you are free to opt for $5 dollar cheap headache wine or a $500,000 1992 Screaming Eagle Cabernet. On the same coin, iodized table salt was the only salt that people used to know and use in the past, but now it would not be uncommon to spend $25 dollars on a small 5 oz jar of French Fleur de Sel if you are someone that loves cooking (or eating). The same thing is happening this very moment in time with coffee. There is a massive growing demand for quality, for a coffee with a story and above all, for uniqueness.
Specialty coffee is a part of what the industry coined the “third wave of coffee”. In the simplest terms, it stands for the culture of coffee love. People awoke to the fact that most of the coffee they were used to drinking from giant coffee shops, or which they were buying at the market, was quite simply old, dead, burnt, cheap, boring coffee that usually had to be mixed with sugar, milk or flavor additives to make its blended commodity coffee palpable. It is a business model which focuses on profits in exchange of black liquid caffeine and it worked in a world where consumers didn't know what they didn't know.
The world of coffee evolved when home and coffee shop baristas began implementing careful brewing techniques and investing in higher quality beans. The explosion of single-origin coffee in fact, is due to the fact that the taste of coffee can be so distinctive that one farm will produce beans that have a completely different taste from the neighboring farm or region. So as market demand law applies, coffee that is amazing but scarce will cost more. Great coffee that is more expensive is not a negative, it's a positive, it's a new door of possibilities, and remember, you can always still buy cheap coffee if saving a few bucks is what you want — however, once you taste speciality coffee, your soul is very likely not going to let you do that.
Speciality coffee requires better plants that might have lower yields and which require better care and attention that regular coffee plants that are just grown for the quantity of beans they produce. The people that work speciality coffee, from the farmer to the roaster also need more training and thus higher wages. Great coffee requires good pickers that know how to grab the right beans during harvest. Troubardour Coffee is manually picked, selected, processed, dried, roasted and bagged. This means that humans, not machines, are handling every single bean for every single bag. Small details like monitoring the uniformity of the size of the beans we use in a batch as well as making sure that no grains with imperfections make it through, all add up. It’s an art and a labor-intensive process that has no shortcuts but a great part of the reason why it tastes so good. Would you rather have Kraft dinner or go the best Italian restaurant in town to have hand-made pasta?
Troubardour Coffee comes from one single farm hence the purchase of each bag goes to support the few people that work there. You can call it fair trade, sustainable farming or whatever industry term you want, but for me it just means helping our farm grow. For us, it's not about size, but about further investing in regenerative agriculture so we can grow our coffee in harmony with nature. Paying our farmers more than they would receive in regular market conditions is the only thing that makes sense and it cause-connects the purchase of a product to improving a very special place and a farm. That's why I post a lot of photos from our farm on our social channels, so our customers can see the people making their coffee and where their money is going to, and so that the farm knows that their work is being appreciated by al our customers. It gives them a great deal of pride to share their love of coffee. Our customers are not just buying coffee, they are partaking in the adventure of building up a very special coffee farm in harmony with nature.
The only way to make cheap coffee is to produce it in massive quantities and achieve economies of scale. This is not the case with small single-origin farms like Troubardour. Everything we buy, from our bags to the boxes we transport, to the shipping we use, costs premium because we don't have quantity, it's about quality. By the time our coffee bags make it to America they already have a hard-cost that I would estimate to be about double that of the competition and because we are a small company with slower inventory turnover we must have higher margins per product in order to financially exist, which is how the price gets to where it is. It’s also important to keep in mind that we also are an online coffee company and that the price of shipping, packing and warehousing is also built in to the price so that you don’t have to get in your car and go to the market every week to get your coffee.
Coffee only seems expensive when you hold the belief that coffee should be cheap. People expect all coffee at the supermarket to range from very cheap to 'normal', and when speciality coffees like Troubardour break through the artificially created price ceiling it distorts the fabric of reality, it looks like a mistake- but it is rather a new door to a new world that is optional, but highly recommended.
Once you try great coffee you will understand that the secret is out that coffee is not just coffee, in fact, its taste variance is eclectic and exciting. Coffee is its own world and it deserves to be explored so you can lose yourself in the depth of the dimensions of taste, smell, body, texture and experience. Pura Vida my friends.
