A pallet of green coffee is about a tonne. For a single café roasting twenty kilos a week, that is a year of stock, a year of storage, and a year of financing somebody else's harvest.

The alternative, until recently, was a distributor: smaller quantities, worse prices, and a list of whatever the distributor happened to have.

The arrangement

Four cafés in the same city now buy together. One order, one container share, one customs declaration, and a rota for who collects from the dock and who drives the split around on a Tuesday.

Each of them gets the farm and the lot they actually wanted, at close to pallet pricing, in quantities that fit on a shelf. The cost is a standing commitment: they have to agree the order six months ahead, and they have to keep buying when a harvest is bad.

“The reason it works is that we stopped pretending to be four businesses and started being one customer.” — one of the four roasters

What it costs

Administration, mostly. Somebody has to do the paperwork, and that somebody is a person who would rather be roasting. Two of the four have hired a shared part-time bookkeeper since they started.

Still cheaper than the distributor. Still better coffee. And, as one of them put it, the only supply chain they have ever had that they could explain from the cup back to the farm gate without looking anything up.