Long-term relationships: the formula Nomad

We have learned and grown a lot at NOMAD since Jordi Mestre opened NOMAD COFFEE LAB in Barcelona 10 years ago. Our way of buying green coffee has evolved as the company has grown.

At the beginning, all our specialty coffees were purchased through a single importer, Falcon Specialty Coffees, to whom we are absolutely grateful: both for the work they do, as well as for their magnificent coffees. Subsequently, importers were added to the list, reaching the point of working with more than 10 of them in one year.

Thanks to the trust of our customers, NOMAD started to be able to hire a container to fill it with coffee from producers we work with and bring it directly to Barcelona. The first of these was from Finca Aquiares, in Costa Rica. This year, 2024, will be the eighth time we have bought coffee from their producer, Diego Robelo, in a direct and collaborative way.

In recent years, we have reduced our partnerships with importers, focusing only on those that are aligned with our values, such as transparency in payments throughout the supply chain. As I say, importers are our allies. Without them we could not have reached this point.

We combine these alliances with our direct relationships, of which we are enormously proud. Diego Robelo from Costa Rica, Juan Felipe Restrepo from Colombia, Carlos Pola from El Salvador, Fabricio Coronel from Ecuador and as of 2024, Jhon Ortiz, from Finca Kafipamba in Ecuador, with whom we have closed our first long-term contract.

We are pleased to share the details of our collaboration agreement with Jhon with the help of Makicuna, our importer partner with the coffee we bring from Ecuador.

We have signed a contract between the 3 parties where we commit to work together for the next 3 harvests, starting with the 2023 harvest with the Cider variety and with the opportunity to extend the contract to 5 or more harvests with other varieties.

The objectives of this agreement are to offer economic security to the farm and to provide advice on improving the quality of its product in order to achieve economic sustainability. Both Makicuna and NOMAD have invested $0.50 per kilo of exportable green coffee purchased in a process technician to advise the farm during post-harvest 2024. In the contract we have also established to improve the price paid per kilo as the quality of the coffee increases, thus ensuring a fair price-quality relationship.

This is our first long-term contract signed by all parties. But as you have been able to see it is not our first case. We have been collaborating with many coffee producers for more than 5 years in a row, without any type of signed contract, nothing more than the word that they and NOMAD have kept.