The current crisis of the commodity coffee price on the futures market is perhaps the most immediate issue facing coffee as we know it (climate change may be a larger concern, but if the price isn’t rectified, there may be no farmers—and thus no coffee trees—to be deleted by climate change). We’ve made our feelings known about the current problem in no uncertain terms, and leading voices in the industry are doing their part to dive into the crisis in hopes of bringing it to the forefront of the collective coffee conscious.

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Two such individuals are Ever Meister and Chad Trewick. Through the lens of price transparency, Meister—managing editor and education director at Cafe Imports and author of New York City: A Caffeinated History—teams up with Trewick—founder of Reciprocafé, LLC and one of the project leads for the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide—for a four-part podcast series titled “A Little Podcast About Coffee Price Transparency.”

Totally just over a two-hour runtime, the four-part series was released all at once last week as part of The Discomfort Zone Podcast, Meister’s “interview-based show about a whole range of topics, beliefs, issues, anxieties, and quirks that make us uncomfortable, in the hopes that we can see each other and make real connections through open dialog.” Each episode tackles a different subject related to transparency and the price crisis. Episode One discusses the “functions of the coffee market and the C-market price, the foundations for the price crisis, and introduces the rest of a conversation about price transparency in specialty coffee and its implications in the greater movement toward long-term coffee sustainability.” Episode Two dives into ways to get farmers more money for their work, with Episode Three digging deeper into transparency and its potential impact on pricing. The series then caps off with Episode Four, about the consumer and their role.

All four episodes of A Little Podcast About Coffee Price Transparency are out now on SoundCloud. Give it a listen and continue the biggest conversation in coffee today.

Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.

Top image via A Little Podcast About Coffee Price Transparency

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