Guido van Staveren dreamt of a world where the commercial market for coffee and the social cause for distributing more (and well deserved) value and profit to coffee producers could merge together seamlessly. That was how Moyee Coffee came about.
2 years later, Moyee Coffee, based in Amsterdam, is still the first Fair Chain coffee brand in the world. What exactly is Fair Chain coffee? How different is it from fair trade coffee?
“Fair trade pays famers 10% more for the beans and then brings the beans to Europe for roasting and packaging. We pay the farmers 20% more for the beans and we also roast and package the beans in the country that they come from, in this case, Ethiopia. So that’s what we call Fair Chain,” explains Sjoerd, the B2B guru at Moyee Coffee.
Moyee Coffee delivers premium coffee to the doorstep of consumers at a lower price than other companies. At the same time, they restore balance in the global coffee chain, by creating more economic value in coffee producing countries and leaving a lot more money at the hands of coffee farmers. So there is definitely a commercial side to this story that also supports a social cause.
Coffee in general, is a very competitive market. Moyee Coffee is the first enterprise to buy and sell coffee with a Fair Chain principle in Europe, giving them a competitive advantage over other companies. Furthermore, the Fair Chain process gives rise to finer-tasting coffee that allows Moyee Coffee to have little problem in retaining customers. Hence, their real difficulty lies in gathering new consumers and bringing their inspiring idea across to them.
“Our message is relatively hard to grasp; people really need to invest their time to understand our story. Nowadays consumers are constantly distracted by social media platforms and fast advertising so we have to grab their attention and convince them to invest more time to understand our story. We were struggling but we are getting better at it.”
This explains Moyee Coffee’s active updates on its social platforms and its very candid website that presents comprehensive information and interesting graphics on what the company does. Passionate “crowd speeches” are also their strategy for engaging the masses and mobilising customers to join in their radical revolution.
“Word of mouth is very important. We prefer not to spend the money like how other companies spend on George Clooney in advertising; we prefer to give it back to the Ethiopian people. And because we believe our story is interesting, we get people to talk about it, to ‘crowd speak’ about our idea.”
Moyee Coffee has a WordPress website that is also its e-commerce platform. They were originally doing their invoicing on a different system but decided to combine the e-commerce and invoicing functionalities by trying out the TradeGecko system.
“We see TradeGecko as an order management system that also tracks activities in our inventory. It meets our current requirements and is working well so far. It has some limitations, but that’s also one of the reasons why we decided to work with TradeGecko – we understand that it’s TradeGecko’s interest to learn from the companies they work with to expand the functionality the system has. That, for us, is an added advantage of working with TradeGecko over other systems and companies. We hope we can continue to build our business on the platform and would like to work together with TradeGecko as partners to make the system better for everyone using it.”
And we too, at TradeGecko, foresee a fruitful and progressive partnership with Moyee Coffee, Superhero of the coffee world.