Coffee’s valuation should start with the gross profit on its cost of production.

Cost of Production Covered (CoPC) Project

I co-founded the CoPC Project in 2017 and managed it until 2024. Originally part of my graduate research on climate change impacts at the farm level, it grew into the sourcing model for Junior’s Roasted Coffee, the small business I owned and operated from 2014 to 2024. Instead of relying on volatile commodity prices that often fail to cover farmers’ costs, the CoPC Project paid coffee producers based on their gross profit margin. I shared the project’s methods and outcomes with customers, the coffee industry, and the wider community using diverse approaches (see the Ask Me About Cost of Production Comic Book), gaining firsthand experience in how small businesses can drive change in local and global economies.

Community Funded Coffee (CFC) Project

Funded by Oatly’s “Big Idea” Sustainability Grant, the CFC Project was a quarterly coffee subscription service that was structured after a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) model and ran from fall 2021 to fall 2022. As Junior’s Roasted Coffee, we created this project to pre-finance coffee harvests (intending to help mitigate risk for coffee producers) and better advocate for CoPC coffee to our customers and to the coffee industry as a whole. We worked with customers and wholesale customers through 2022 to secure pre-financing for farms’ harvests. In exchange customers received updates before receiving regular shipments of a farm’s landed coffee harvest.