How Stone Creek Coffee Supports Living Wages in Coffee Farming

Coffee is sweet, clean, and juicy when everything goes right. But coffee is also… complicated. Because behind every great cup is a global supply chain that’s been historically optimized for cheapness, not fairness.

At Stone Creek Coffee, we’re trying to do what we always do: geek out, learn aggressively, and build something better; progress, not perfection. That includes one big question we keep coming back to:

What does it actually take for coffee farming families to earn a living wage?

The Challenge of Living Wages in Coffee

Coffee pricing is squeezed from both ends.

On one side, the cost of producing coffee keeps rising: labor shortages, climate change, unpredictable weather events, and pests/disease pressures all hit farms first (and hardest). On the other side, the market has often treated coffee like a commodity, not a craft. When coffee is priced like a basic raw material, it becomes easier for the system to ignore the human realities behind it.

Historic market highs… and why that’s not the whole story

Even when commodity prices spike, it doesn’t automatically translate to prosperity at origin. Price volatility can create chaos: one year of “high prices” doesn’t fix decades of instability, debt dependency, and power imbalances.

There’s also the “Brazil & Vietnam effect”: high-volume, low-cost production helped create massive surplus in earlier eras, which contributed to market crashes and long stretches of painfully low prices. The result is a system where many producers have been forced to operate below living standards for generations.

The broken parts (aka: why we can’t just “shop our way out”)

The coffee trade didn’t become unequal by accident. It’s tangled up in exploitation, colonization, unfair trade practices, and an imbalance of power where the people doing the hardest work often have the least leverage. That can lead to outcomes like: wages below living standards, debt cycles and dependency, deforestation and extractive farming pressures, and systemic inequity that reproduces itself year after year

If you want a deeper, economics-forward dive into this reality, we recommend The Coffee Paradox by Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte.

Our Commitment to Paying Farmers Fairly

We’re not interested in “ethical sourcing” as a tagline. We’re interested in the gritty operational question:

How do we structure buying so more value reaches producers, and does so consistently?

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

1) We prioritize direct purchasing with real price commitments

In our 2024 Impact Report, we shared that 92.4% of our green coffee purchasing was direct, meaning we try to buy with direct price commitments to producers and handle importation ourselves. We work with exporting partners at origin to move coffee from farms and co-ops, but we aim to keep the relationship and the economics clear. 

2) We lean into multi-year relationships

Because the long game is where living-wage progress becomes possible. In 2024, 96.08% of our coffees were purchased through multi-year partners. Stability is the underrated ingredient in sustainability.

3) We partner with people who track the hard stuff

We’re doing deeper analysis on our green coffee buying to understand how much of what we pay per pound actually reaches producers and how that aligns with a living wage at origin. That’s part of our “put up or shut up” energy as we gear up for B Corp recertification.

Caravela Coffee calls the origin sustainability threshold the Minimum Prosperity Price (MPP): a price intended to exceed cost of production and allow for farm and family upkeep. We’re grateful to work with partners like Caravela (also a B Corp), whose data systems make this kind of analysis possible. Read more about our Farm to Cup Ethos.

The honest truth: this is hard

We’re balancing multiple commitments at once: paying fairly at origin, paying living wages here at home, and keeping the business healthy enough to keep doing both next year.

Coffee prices are rising across the board. Cost of living is rising. And we’re not a massive corporation with endless margin to absorb everything.

But the goal doesn’t change: move the system toward dignity, one purchasing decision at a time.

Measuring Our Impact

We’re coffee geeks, which means: if we care about it, we measure it.

Here are a few key datapoints we’ve shared in our Impact Reports: numbers that help us stay grounded in reality and highlight where we need to improve.

Origin Economics (2024)

 • 14% of our coffees purchased met or exceeded the Minimum Prosperity Price (living wage) threshold (per the MPP framework and available data).

 • On average, our coffee purchases exceeded the Fair Trade Minimum by 71.6%.

 • Stone Creek Coffee average price paid: $3.09/lb

 • Fair Trade Minimum: $2.35/lb (and we agree this benchmark must continue to rise as costs rise)

Our Sourcing Structure (2024)

 • 92.4% direct purchasing

 • 96.08% purchased through multi-year partners

A Path Forward

If we want to keep enjoying coffee in the future, we need an industry that values farmers in the present.

That means confronting the asymmetry of power in the global coffee chain, because without changing the structure, the inequity persists no matter how many well-meaning people are involved.

If you want to listen and learn with us, there are some excellent conversations on the MAP IT FORWARD podcast about these exact challenges (1331, 1332, 1333, 1334, & 1335).

How You Can Help

You don’t need to memorize commodity market history to make an impact. Your choices still matter, especially when they support companies investing in transparency, long-term partnerships, and measurable progress.

If you want to vote for a better coffee system with your daily ritual:

• Explore coffees sourced through our long-term partnerships

• Dig into the details

• Learn how our #FarmToCup model works

We’re not claiming we’ve solved it. We’re saying we’re in it: learning, measuring, iterating, and pushing forward. Because remarkable care doesn’t stop at the cafe door.