Cultural Integrity Standards
How
We Work
Standards we hold ourselves to, and why.
In 2022, a Vietnamese coffee farmer named Linh asked us a question we couldn't answer. We had no idea at the time what that question would open up, what it would demand of us, or where it would lead.
What we found along the way, in the history behind coffee, in Ethiopia, in the economics visible to anyone who looks closely enough, is what shaped how we operate. These standards weren't brought to the journey. The journey produced them. And they are still being produced.
01
Some of what we discovered was extraordinary. Some of it was not.
The deeper you go into the story of coffee, where it comes from, how it moves, who profits and who doesn't, the more the picture shifts. The Kaffa region of Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee. That fact sits alongside another: the farmers who grow it there operate within a global trade system whose terms they did not set and cannot easily change. What that produces in a place, in the daily economics of a farming family, in what gets built and what doesn't, is visible if you spend time there and pay attention.
We are not economists. We are not campaigners. We are a company that went somewhere, saw something, and felt the weight of it. That weight is what made us think seriously about how we tell these stories and whose interests we serve in the telling.
02
Linh didn't give us a framework. He gave us a question.
We didn't arrive in Vietnam with consent protocols and attribution standards. We arrived curious, and we met a farmer who made us realise how little we understood about what we were holding in our hands every morning.
The more that question settled, the more we understood that telling these stories carried a responsibility. Not a legal one, a human one. The people behind the coffee were not background detail. They were the point. And that realisation, more than any policy decision, is what produced the way we now work.
As the expeditions continued, the standards followed.
Written consent before we tell anyone's story.
Producer approval before anything goes public.
The right to withdraw at any time. Their stories come down.
These aren't bureaucratic safeguards. They are what honest practice looks like when you take seriously the fact that someone's life is the material.
We amplify.
We don't appropriate.
03
We don't know everything. We act accordingly.
When we enter communities with deep traditional knowledge, ceremonies, oral histories, practices passed down across generations, we seek guidance before we do anything else. Solomon, who has spent 38 years working in the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, is one of those guides. His expertise shapes how we approach everything we document there.
We attribute explicitly. If a story involves a specific person's knowledge or perspective, their name and community appear in the work, prominently, as part of the story.
On Community Investment
Our commitment to allocate 20% of subscription revenue to producer community projects is where we intend to be. We are not there yet. We will show the numbers when they exist.
04
How we tell stories.
Linh's story is Linh's story. Almaz singing to her trees in the Kaffa highlands is Almaz's story. Our job is to carry those stories to people who would never otherwise hear them, not to reframe them as atmosphere for selling coffee. Cultural context comes before product. Every time.
We don't invent. Every cultural and historical claim we make is verified. When we're uncertain, we say so or leave it out.
We don't stage. The photography and video we publish show real moments from real expeditions.
We don't flatten. These are complex cultures with complex histories. We won't make them tidy or picturesque at the expense of accuracy.
These standards exist because of what we encountered, in Vietnam, in Ethiopia, in the history behind both. We expect them to keep evolving. When we reach South America, something else will probably move us, and we will have to think harder again about how we operate.
We are not a charity.
We are not a cause.
We are a company that sells exceptional coffee and takes seriously the responsibility that comes with telling the stories behind it. That is the whole of it.
If you are a producer, a community, or a partner considering working with us, this is how we operate. If we fall short of it, we expect to be held to account.