Our pledge to economic transparency

It almost feels as if this has just become a trend word within coffee, but we really vow to take it seriously and take action on what we preach. It took us a couple of months to be able to publish our transparency numbers – not because we had something to hide, or because it wasn’t a high priority to us – it just took a while, sorry! 

So, what does this mean? What is Economic transparency? Admittedly we are not going to use a standard definition here, we are just going to say what this means to us. We want our consumers to understand where their money is going, how much of it goes to us, how much goes to the producer, the importer and shipping as well as other companies involved in the chain of production. Economic transparency to us means disclosing as many of the costs as we know of to ensure no secrets between us and the consumer.

This is incredibly important as it holds us accountable, it ensures that we continue to buy fair coffee, this is after all our number one priority when sourcing coffees, whenever we begin to work with a new importer we set our intentions straight. We want them to know that we will hold them accountable for fairness and if this is not a priority then the relationship probably isn’t going to work.

Calculating these numbers is difficult as many of the costs vary drastically, for the time being we are only able to do approximate numbers, however we really aim to release a full transparency report at the end of the calendar year which will show all of our true costs in roasting. Estimating costs such as rent, electricity, staff costs is difficult as it is a space shared by our café, so we did it to the best of our ability. Despite listing a lot of individual costs there are many costs that we were unable to put a price on for an abundance of reasons – but like I said, this will follow in the end of year report.

We commit to continue displaying full transparency where we can and to the best of our abilities, however, we know we can do better. At the moment the best price we can give for the purchase of the coffee is the Free on Board (FOB) price, however, we would love to dismantle this number further to see all the costs between the producer and shipment to really get an understanding of where the price of coffee is really coming from.

We will always strive to do the best we can here and continue to put pressure on the importers that we work with and continue to work with partners who hold these factors at a similar level of importance to us at Von&Vonnie.

If you have any specific questions or queries on our transparency or we are missing some numbers that may be important to you please let us know, we will be happy to answer your questions.