What is Brewing Behind the Coffee Industry?

Unveiling the journey behind every sip — from farm to cup.

Every Cup Tells a Story ☕

Behind every sip lies a narrative of labor, inequality, and history.
Explore the journey from bean to cup.


The Birth of a Coffee Bean

Why every 6 seconds? Coffee Bean

Each coffee bean appearing every 6 seconds symbolizes the average amount of manual labor involved in its production — from harvesting and drying to sorting and packaging. While many stages happen in bulk, this estimate reflects the time and effort that goes into every single bean before it reaches your cup.

How Long Did You Really Watch?

The truth is that we often lack the patience to appreciate the significant labour that goes into the coffee we enjoy every day. While an espresso takes only 25 to 30 seconds to brew, only three out of the required 64 coffee beans have been harvested during that brief period. Behind every sip lies hours of physically demanding work. This involves planting, hand-picking, drying, sorting, and roasting. Most of this work is executed by underpaid workers in the Global South, while the largest coffee consumers remain in the Global North. The gap between the swift consumption of coffee and the tedious, labour-intensive production process represents the disregarded inequality and invisibility of labour in the global coffee supply chain.

Meeting the Benchmark

Fair trade associations have long worked to define a living income benchmark defined as “the net annual income required for a household in a particular place to afford a decent standard of living for all members.” This benchmark is central to address one of key challenges that coffee farmers face: poverty. Its aim is to ensure that families earn enough to meet their basic needs and have a decent standard of living.

However, as this visualization shows, most households in the world’s top five coffee-producing countries are still showing a significant income gap.

The same beans that fuel productivity and wealth around the world are harvested by families trapped in poverty, exposing a serious imbalance at the core of the coffee industry. Acknowledging this disparity is the first step towards building a fairer system that values the people behind the product.

Coffee Beans

From Seed to Sip: A Story of Inequality

Today's coffee industry has a complex and deeply rooted history which links back to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. Also known as the triangular trade, the transatlantic slave trade forcibly took enslaved Africans to work on plantations in the Americas. This system of trade operated in three stages:

Europe to Africa

European merchants transported manufactured items, including textiles, alcohol, and weapons, to Africa in exchange for enslaved individuals.

Africa to the Americas

This stage, also referred to as the Middle Passage, transported enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean under brutal conditions.

The Americas to Europe

This final stage transported plantation products such as coffee, sugar, cotton, and tobacco, all produced by enslaved labour, to Europe for sale.

The slave trade set the foundation of today's global trade habits, which we can see through today's coffee distribution. These events shifted global power, distinguishing the Global North as more dominant. When comparing the two maps, a distinct pattern between the transatlantic slave trade and global coffee distribution becomes apparent. The same regions that once enslaved individuals to work on plantations now obtain major coffee-consuming markets. Those countries import large quantities of coffee produced in the same areas where enslaved people were once forced to work on plantations. People of colour continue to be exploited within the supply chain, supplying demanding labour while often receiving very little compensation. The sector continues to reflect deep economic disparities, characterised by a clear racial and ethnic divide between those who profit and those who perform extensive labour.

Transatlantic Slave Trade VS Coffee Trade