15/11/2024 –, Finney Stage
Who hasn't read or heard the argument "You can't buy coffee with Bitcoin!" It's such an outdated cliche, but as of today it's something most people around the world still believe. Bitcoin helped us as a small coffee stand in a Salvadoran strip mall reach a worldwide audience and break a 150+ year old paradigm that producing countries can only export green coffee.
Green Arabica coffee is a raw commodity, its price set at the NYSE's Intercontinental Exchange. While they are price differentials for different coffee qualities and origins, in general coffee worldwide is priced as a commodity. Most people worldwide don't realize coffee is a fruit, a bright cherry of a tropical tree which seeds we dry, process, roast and grind to produce a beverage most of us consume worldwide. After water and tea it's the most consumed drink by humans worldwide.
I've always (half) jokingly said that everything in the planet has experienced inflation, but green coffee. A product that takes one year to make, and the riskiest part of the entire chain, with the least reward. Disease, plagues, floods, droughts, internal and external market forces have pushed the growers of this plant to economic hardship and poverty. Adjusted for inflation the price for green arabica coffee is under 1990 levels, and way below its 1977 peak. Even not adjusting for inflation, in nominal dollar terms green coffee was worth more 50 years ago than it is today and the dollar is not even close to being worth the same today than it was in 1977.
In El Salvador, and basically all producing countries, for the past 150 years there hasn't been a way to export roasted coffee direct to distributor or direct to consumer. Bitcoin has allowed us to break this paradigm and today Good Beans is one of a handful coffee businesses in the planet selling coffee direct to consumer from the origin to the door allowing all the profits from the chain to stay where coffee is grown while maintaining a competitive price for the consumer. We grow, harvest, process, dry, age, roast, pack, label, and ship the coffee directly from El Salvador to a worldwide marketplace in exchange for sats since 2021.
Gabe formally started his career in coffee in 2009 in a small Swiss coffee shop, but even as a child was immersed in coffee farms and mills in his native El Salvador. After working in the hospitality industry and tech in 2021 he started GoodBeans El Salvador Specialty Coffee with the goal of sharing some of the best Salvadoran coffees to a worldwide audience.