Sirinya - Transparency
Farm: Sirinya
Farmers: Oil & Goh Chaosuwanwilai
Exporter: Sirinya
Importer: Indochina coffee (ICC)
Price we paid for the landed coffee at our roastery: 27,50CAD/kg
Added cost: 5.10CAD/kg (including ICC import fees, shipping to Canada from the UK, storage, financing and warehousing fees)
FOB price: 20CAD/kg
This is the price paid to Oil and Goh for everything between the purchase of fresh cherries up to the moment the coffee is safely at the port, ready for export, (processing, milling & drying coffee, bagging and shipping locally)
Farmgate price: between 38-40THB/kg for unsorted cherries, ∼ 1,50CAD/kg
This is what the farmers were paid for cherries, not green coffee. It'll cost the Sirinya 250THB to turn those cherries into green coffee ready for export, and often more due to those cherries not all being ripe.
There is a 90% import taxe on green coffee in Thailand, meaning that it almost always too pricey for local roasters to import anything. That means that the internal demand for green coffee is very high, driving prices up (Thai roasters pay the same price FOB as the importer) and giving little incentive for farmers to focus heavily on quality since good prices are almost always assured.
But there is a new wave of young farmers who want to focus on very high quality and consistency. This is certainly the case when it comes to Sirinya.
And what is very encouraging to see is that local farmers focusing on quality often end up starting their own roasting operation. Having more producers take control of not only the green coffee, but also the roasted coffee, is a model we wish would be more easily doable at origin.