At Atomic, we take pride in offering coffee drinkers the best beans, consistently and without compromise. This ethos translates into how we go about sourcing our raw material: green coffee beans. As the price of commodity coffee surges to new heights this year, with direct consequences for our industry, we thought it important to be transparent about how we source our specialty-grade coffee, both for our blends and across our single origin offering.
What is specialty coffee?
Specialty coffee is the highest grade for coffee. Technically speaking, coffee is graded by qualified tasters called Q-Graders, who analyse and score out of 100 the attributes of coffee, such as sweetness, acidity, mouthfeel, balance or clarity. Coffees scoring above 80 out of 100 are considered specialty-grade, while those scoring below 80 are commodity-grade.
Practically, this translates to better tasting coffee, because more care is applied to growing and harvesting methods. The coffee cherries tend to be hand-picked at perfect ripeness, and then processed with extra care via innovative techniques, creating more complexity of flavour. Ultimately, specialty-grade coffee requires more care, skills and investment overall, which explains the higher price-point.
At Atomic, we only source specialty-grade coffee, as we believe in creating unique drinking experiences. We believe in supporting producers in their quest to grow and craft special offerings, which means our range is priced accordingly, at a premium.
Blends
A 100% of our blend components are purchased via Trade Aid, New Zealand’s largest fair-trade organisation and a member of the World Fair Trade Organisation. This means we pay a fair-trade premium of 20c USD on every pound of coffee but elect not to pay for the rights to the official Fair Trade logo, nor to market ourselves as a specifically ‘Fair Trade’ brand.
Trade Aid works with small-scale farmers and their cooperatives through direct trading relationships. It commits to purchasing a set quantity of coffee at a minimum but sustainable (and higher than market-rate) price, thus creating a stable and sustainable trading relationship, irrespective of how global markets may fluctuate. These co-ops are run democratically, with members voting on where to direct extra funds. This ensures that our contribution supports initiatives that are truly beneficial to the livelihood of not only the farmers and their families, but the larger local community. These range from funding education scholarships to soft loan finance or employing agronomists to train farm members in better production methods.
Atomic started working with Trade Aid as a primary sourcing partner 20 years ago and we have since imported more than 2,000 tonnes of green coffee from 11 coffee cooperatives across the globe.
Single Origin
When it comes to single origin sourcing, our ethos is to explore the world of coffee and offer our customers a range of exciting, tasty, unusual, complex coffees – always with quality in mind. This means we purchase higher-grade coffees through trading partners who have established direct relationships with producers. These coffees are usually traceable to a specific farm and farmer. Check out our labels – we give each coffee the name of its producer. We get the good, exciting stuff – innovative processing methods, new varieties or emerging origin, or just quality expression of a coffee’s terroir.