Coffee sourcing, online

Where did your coffee come from?

By Culinate staff

September 2, 2010

If you’re a diehard coffee lover, you probably know exactly where your coffee comes from; you buy your green beans online from, say, Sweet Maria's, where founder Tom Owen will tell you just where he bought those beans for you. But if you’re not into home coffee roasting and your local supplier doesn’t give you the exact Guatemalan finca where your beans were born, you’ve got other options.

Check out TraceableCoffee.org, for example, where you can enter the ID info on your bag of Traceable Coffee (available at certain stores around the country) and find out which farmer grew the beans.

Other importers and roasters, such as Crop to Cup, San Cristobal, Café Campesino, and Utz Certified, are also making it easier for customers to track coffee origins online. (If you bought coffee at IKEA, for example, the Utz Certified website will track it for you.) And print publications such as Barista Magazine spread awareness through their frequent articles about coffee sourcing. We’ll drink to that.