Coffee starts with people
A cup of “proper good coffee” is the result of many people trusting each other and working together. That idea has become clearer and clearer to me since I started working at Ray&Jules. Maybe it is even a condition for doing this job with so much enthusiasm.
But it goes beyond idealism alone. In the end, it also has to make sense. For the farmer, that means a fair income for years of craftsmanship and hard work. For the coffee drinker, a delicious cup of top-quality coffee at a fair price. It is precisely between those two that we try to play our role every day.
That is why we very consciously choose partners who think along with us about that chain. Partners who do not simply want to be links between farmer and coffee drinker, but only take their place if they truly create added value. Partners who are constantly looking for ways to ensure that as much value as possible reaches the people who are at the very foundation of our coffee every single day. And we are quite proud of that.
Over the past few years, I have had the chance to join several coffee trips, often together with those same partners. I saw how important trust, transparency and long-term relationships are. We want to know the people in our chain. We want to meet them. We want to be able to think together, negotiate together and build something for the long term.
This Side Up on tour
And then, all of a sudden, a question came up.
Could This Side Up, together with a delegation of coffee farmers who were travelling to Belgium for World of Coffee, visit our roastery?
Of course.
And why not share that encounter with a few Ray&Jules customers?
So that is what happened.
We gave a short introduction to Ray&Jules, Koen passionately explained our unique roasting technology, we ate Belgian fries together and, more than anything, hoped the rest would unfold naturally.
“Our coffee should stand for itself.”
And then came perhaps the most beautiful insight of the afternoon. The Indonesian farmers put it very simply:
“Our coffee should stand for itself.”
Their coffee should first and foremost speak through its quality. They want to be seen as craftspeople. As entrepreneurs. As coffee experts. Not as people who need pity, or as a form of development aid where a wealthy European eases their conscience by buying a bag of coffee.
That statement stayed with us.
What stayed with us
Perhaps our Ray&Jules customers summed up the day most beautifully afterwards.
One of them wrote to us: “I learned that a cup of coffee is so much more than a few roasted beans.”
Another customer noticed something we had never really thought about ourselves: “The photos on your website are not stock photos. They are simply Sarah and Lieze, with the people who grow our coffee.”
When we wrapped up that afternoon under the oak tree, we had not come up with a new marketing strategy. We had gained a whole lot of new insights. And above all, the confirmation that the most beautiful stories are not written behind a laptop, but come to life when people meet.
