In Conversation with Orange Brown (and more!)

So I grew up with sugar cane, and I worked with my father on sugar cane farms in Brazil, but coffee was always part of our family history. I would go to my grandmother’s house and she would make coffee. She used to roast coffee when they harvested it themselves.

So coffee was always part of the culture, but not in a specialty sense. It was more like very dark coffee with a lot of sugar. It was also about sitting at the table in the afternoon and chatting over coffee. That’s how I grew up, and I always loved it. It was always in the back of my mind.

When I was thinking about coming back to Canada, I was talking to Victor. He was moving from Winnipeg to Toronto and said, “Let’s try to bring something from Brazil to Canada.” I said, “Victor, I really like coffee. Let’s try to work with coffee.”

So we went to Brazil and visited as many farmers as we could. We got samples and brought them to Canada to figure out which coffees would work. Then in 2014 we brought our first container to Canada.

At that time we were doing barista courses, roasting courses, working as baristas—basically trying to understand the coffee industry while selling the container we brought. And that’s how Orange Brown started. It was partly family history, but also the opportunity for two Brazilians living in Canada to bring something we loved from our home country to Canada.

— Andre: Brazil is a huge country—basically the size of the U.S. without Alaska. Obviously there is the Amazon, which is a huge part of Brazil, but there is very little farming there. If you look at the other regions, it’s a huge piece of land. Most of it is good for agriculture year-round. You can have two crops a year in Brazil, while in Canada or the U.S. you might only have one because of winter. When coffee started in Brazil it grew very fast and became a huge boom. But historically Brazil produced a lot of coffee in terms of volume, not quality. For the longest time Brazil was used as a filler for blends. 
But, around the time we started bringing coffees, farmers in Brazil were beginning to shift toward specialty coffee. They were figuring out drying methods and processing to bring more quality and focus on quality rather than just volume. But because Brazil has so many farmers and so many farms, even if only a percentage focus on specialty, it already creates a large amount of specialty coffee.

To do that, you need a dry harvest season. If it rains during drying, the coffee can start fermenting. Controlled fermentation can produce amazing coffees, but uncontrolled fermentation can ruin them.

In Brazil the harvest starts around April or May, which matches the dry season. That makes natural processing easier and less expensive.

Other countries are doing a lot of different processing now, but the most famous one would be washed coffees, which Colombia produces a lot of. Because of their climate—they have much wetter conditions during harvest—washed coffee is a good solution for them. Washed coffees are cleaner in taste. Specialty coffee actually started more with washed coffees because they’re cleaner in the cup. But when you wash coffee, you lose a little bit of body and sweetness and gain other characteristics. So it’s not right or wrong.

— Wade: This really highlights what Orange Brown is about. Victor is a proud Brazilian, and one of the reasons we started the company was because people often joke about Brazilian coffee or dismiss it. But Brazil produces about one-third of the world’s coffee. What Brazil can do that other countries often cannot is produce high-quality, consistent profiles at scale. That allows roasters to build blends and products that remain stable for customers. There’s still room for unique lots too. Brazil can do those as well. That’s the perception we’re trying to change—that Brazil has some fantastic coffees.

— Wade:  Weather patterns are shifting across the world, and that’s a real concern for farmers. Coffee is an agricultural product, so weather plays a huge role. Rainfall predicts the flowering of the coffee cherry. If rainfall is inconsistent, cherries flower at different times and yields become inconsistent. In the past five years Brazil has also experienced frost, which kills trees. That really impacts crop yield. Historically we’ve worked closely with the Barbosa family, our biggest partner. Their region used to have perfect coffee-growing conditions every year. But the last five years have been different. Farmers have had to invest in irrigation and other infrastructure to stabilize yields. That affects coffee prices significantly. There’s also speculation in the market—prices move faster than the coffee itself sometimes—but yield remains a big factor.

—Andre:  For farming, the most important thing you can have is water. You can do everything perfectly, but if there is no water, it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to grow. So farmers are trying to protect water or make sure water is available. Farmers that have water close by are investing in irrigation systems—like the kind that goes under the ground, with small drops of water so they are not wasting water. It’s very efficient, but you need to have water nearby. Another thing that has changed a lot in farming in the last 10 or 15 years is that before, farmers used to leave the soil open between the trees. It was easier for harvesting and other things.

But you lose a lot of water when the soil is exposed. So now everyone plants a type of grass between the rows, then cuts the grass and pushes it toward the trees. There’s always grass and organic material around the trees that protects the area and prevents losing water during very hot days. There’s also a lot of work being done with organic material, even from coffee processing. There’s a lot of good stuff that comes out of that that can be reused on the farm. Farmers are using things from the farm itself and putting it back into the soil as natural fertilizer so they can reduce or even eliminate chemical fertilizers, depending on how far they go with it. It also protects the soil from losing water. The weather, I think everywhere, is becoming inconsistent. It’s not that it’s simply getting drier or raining more. It’s more like one year is really dry, the next year rains too much, and another year you get frost. This year so far has been more normal. Right now things are going well in Brazil. But it’s becoming more extreme. One year is really dry, the other year rains too much, and another year there’s frost. That inconsistency is what creates volatility in price as well.

— Wade:  Coffee is a commodity, so it’s traded daily—not just by people purchasing coffee, but by financiers and banks. There’s this element of speculation that affects people’s lives. Prices can go up just based on speculation. And the same thing is happening right now. Prices are dropping based on speculation, even though this year’s harvest hasn’t started yet. There’s optimism that this year will be great and prices will come down. Will they stay down? We hope so. If prices go down, it takes less cash and we can pass that savings through the chain. But if something happens, we don’t know.

That’s why we try to help our customers plan and have consistency. If they know what price they can pay throughout the year, they can focus on running their business. If they had to follow the C market every day, with prices changing constantly, it would be very difficult. And imagine if your costs increased that much—how do you recover and keep your business without passing it through the chain? Another reason the C market fluctuates is simply supply and demand. When I first started in coffee and visited warehouses, I had never seen so much coffee in my life. I grew up in Alberta and Saskatchewan, so I’d seen a lot of farms, but coffee farms blew my mind. What surprised me even more was how much coffee was in storage.

The last time I went to Brazil it was almost empty. A big reason prices were low five years ago was because there was a huge stock of coffee. If you needed coffee, you could find it, even if it wasn’t the freshest. But at Orange Brown we’re always looking for high quality. There are a lot of companies selling commercial coffee, which keeps prices low. Some companies still blend lower-quality Brazil with higher-end origins.

But great Brazilian coffee stands on its own. When that frost hit, coffee was still selling and global demand was rising. People in China are drinking more coffee now than tea. So demand kept going up while supply dropped. Stocks were depleted and now they’re trying to catch back up. But if you grew up farming, there’s always optimism—every year is going to be great. Sometimes the reality turns out differently.

— Andre:  For sure. That coffee specifically is a honey process coffee, which is something in between natural and washed. They remove some of the mucilage from the cherry, but not everything. So it’s a kind of balance.

In the Cup of Excellence they separate coffees into categories: naturals, washed, honey, and then experimental coffees. Experimental would include fermented coffees and other more unusual processing methods. That particular coffee won the honey category in the Cup of Excellence. If you drink it, it’s very smooth. It’s not one of those coffees where you think, “This is going to be extremely acidic or crazy.” It’s very balanced. It’s sweet, the aftertaste is great, and the tasting notes are very clear. It’s super clean. So it’s more about the coffee being extremely balanced and scoring high in every category rather than being extreme in one characteristic. That coffee comes from the Barbosa family. They have several farms in the region, and they selected one lot from there. This is actually the second time they’ve won. Since they started focusing on quality, they won once with a natural coffee, and now they’ve won again. And this year they ended up in second place. They’re always focusing on quality, and they’re always near the top. It’s very hard to win a competition like that.

— Wade:  When I first joined Orange Brown, I came on as a consultant to help Andre and Victor grow the company. They were wearing too many hats. The key message was that Brazil has amazing coffees, but they’re not always appreciated. Sometimes Brazil doesn’t sound as “sexy” as other origins. But behind those coffees are real people doing months of hard work before that coffee arrives here for us to enjoy. Andre and Victor really believed that this was important. One of the proudest moments is taking a bag of coffee back to the farmer and saying, “This is your coffee.” When their name is on the bag, it means something. Too often coffee is blended from many farms, and the farmer disappears in that process. But if we buy from one farm, that purchase supports an entire community. When we started talking to farmers about specialty coffee, some of them asked, “Should we continue doing this? It costs more money and we’re getting paid the same as everyone else?” That’s where the gap between specialty coffee and commercial coffee began.

— Andre: For us, we’re proud when we see how much work happens at the farm and then see someone drinking that coffee in a coffee shop afterward. So many things have to go right in the middle for that to happen.

Sometimes we bring farmers to visit cafés and see people drinking their coffee. When they see that, they realize people here drink this coffee every day. It feels like the mission is accomplished.

The farmers are happy, and they want to know more about the people drinking their coffees, because they put so much work and love into it. Most of the time they can’t see the people on the other side of the world enjoying it. Consistency is also very important for roasters. If a coffee becomes popular, customers want it again. But sometimes the coffee is gone two months later and the roaster has to start over with a new profile. We try to help roasters maintain consistency while still offering traceability. From an environmental perspective it’s also very important for us. Coming from a farming background, we want to see that farms are well taken care of. We visit farms and look at how they’re producing, harvesting, and managing the environment. We want to be the stamp on the bag that says: we were there, we checked everything, and it meets the standards. Farmers are looking for long-term relationships with partners who care about people and the environment.

When Andre described the Barbosa family's honey-process coffee, he mentioned that it had won its category in the Cup of Excellence. For most coffee drinkers, that reference might need some unpacking. So here's a quick primer.

The Cup of Excellence has been running since 1999, founded on a simple premise: that exceptional coffee should be traceable back to the farmer who grew it, and that farmer should be paid accordingly.¹ Each year, producing countries hold national competitions where top-scoring lots are auctioned to international buyers, with proceeds going directly to the growers.² It's one of the few mechanisms in the coffee world that puts the farmer's name front and centre.

The judging process is unusually rigorous. Coffees pass through multiple rounds of blind tasting, first by national panels and then by international juries, with the highest-scoring lots tasted dozens of times before a winner is declared.³ Entries are divided into categories — washed, natural, honey, and experimental — and scored on qualities like balance, clarity, and sweetness rather than intensity alone. As Andre described it, a winning coffee isn't extreme in any single direction; it's one that excels across every dimension.

Winning once is rare. Winning twice, as the Barbosa family has, is a remarkable testament to sustained, deliberate focus on quality. We’re excited to share it with you!

¹ Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence History. allianceforcoffeeexcellence.org/cup-of-excellence-history

² Mr. Bean Coffee, Cup of Excellence: The World's Most Prestigious Coffee Award Explained. mr-bean.coffee/uncategorized/cup-of-excellence-the-worlds-most-prestigious-coffee-award-explained

³ Alliance for Coffee Excellence, Cup of Excellence Competition Process. allianceforcoffeeexcellence.org/cup-of-excellence

When Andre and Wade at Orange Brown talk about the price of coffee, they're not talking about what you pay at the counter — they're talking about the C-market. It is the global pricing benchmark for Arabica coffee, traded on the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) in New York.¹ The price it produces, quoted in US cents per pound, is the baseline from which every transaction in the supply chain is negotiated. Farmers selling high-quality beans might receive the C-price plus a premium; lower-quality coffee might trade at a discount. But almost everyone anchors to that number.

What makes it complicated is that the C-market isn't just coffee buyers and sellers. Large numbers of participants — speculators, financiers, banks — trade coffee futures without ever dealing in the physical commodity at all, the same way others trade stocks.² As Wade put it, prices can move "just based on speculation" before a single bean from this year's harvest has even been picked. That has real consequences: when the C-price spikes, roasters pay more, cafés charge more, and the farmers³ who actually grew the crop often see little of the upside despite bearing the full risk of the next drought, frost, or bad guess by a trader half a world away.

The economic and social impact of the markets on farmers is a critical part of why we aim to work with importers who have deep, direct relationships with the farmers they source from. Keeping the chain as short, fair, and transparent as possible is one way to ensure that everybody — farmers, importers, and roasters — can win.

¹ ICE Futures U.S., Coffee C Futures. ice.com/products/15/Coffee-C-Futures