What we’re about, in a nutshell.

In the world economy, the appetite for coffee is second only to that of oil in the commodities markets. Consequently, there’s no shortage of beans being grown on farmland all around the globe. But in the vast majority of those regions, local growers — the ones who toil and sweat in their fields every day — rarely see any real profits from their efforts.

Enter ideas like “fair trade,” “direct trade” and “farmer co-op.” They’ve gone a long way to help improve the price paid to farmers and to make sure they’re more fairly compensated for their hard work and for their product.

At Kabum, we think it’s time to quite literally take things up a notch. Or several notches. Whereas fair trade raises the floor of what local farmers are paid, we blow the ceiling off — by sending the vast majority of profits back to the individual growers. We also pay retroactive bonuses for a quality product after harvest time and administer micro-loans so that individual farmers can own their own land and their own equipment and aren't beholden to others in the harvesting process.

We call this truly humanitarian-based way of doing things “true trade.”