Coffee Transparency Report: What Roasters Publish and Why

A coffee transparency report is a document, usually published once a year, in which a roaster lists the green coffees it bought, who it bought them from, how much it paid (most often the FOB price), and how much it bought. Its purpose is to let customers, peers and producers check buying claims against real numbers rather than marketing language.

What is in a coffee transparency report?

There is no legal format, but most reports cover the same core fields:

• Producer or supplier. The farm, producer, cooperative or washing station, plus the exporter or importer where one was involved.
• Price paid. Usually the FOB price per pound or kilogram. Some roasters add the farmgate price, the price that reached the producer, when they know it.
• Volume. How many kilograms or bags of each coffee were bought.
• Quality. A cupping score, a grade, or both.
• Length of relationship. How many years the roaster has bought from that producer.
• Share of transparent purchases. What portion of total green volume the report covers.

Many also add context, such as a market price comparison or the roaster's own costs.

FOB price vs farmgate price: which should a roaster publish?

The two prices measure different things, and a good report says which one it is using.

FOB (free on board) is the price for coffee loaded at the port in the producing country. Drop Coffee defines it in its 2020 report as "the price we pay for the coffee before the coffee leaves the port in the coffee producing country", and quotes it in US dollars per pound so it can be compared with the arabica C-market price.

Farmgate is what the producer receives at the farm. It is lower than FOB, because FOB includes milling, transport, export fees and any intermediary margins along the way.

FOB is more common because roasters can verify it from their own contracts. Drop Coffee is explicit about which price it reports: its report shows the FOB price, not the farmgate or landed price, and it notes which coffees were bought from producers who also export their own coffee, where the FOB price goes to the producer.

Examples of coffee transparency reports

These are published by the roasters themselves. Each was checked to exist as of October 2026.

Tim Wendelboe (Norway). The roaster's transparency page says it has published the prices it pays for green coffee since 2010, and lists annual reports from 2021 to 2024. It also explains how it buys in each origin: directly from farmers in Central and South America, through an importer in Ethiopia, and from cooperative wet mills in Kenya. It says it now sets prices based on production costs rather than cup score.

Drop Coffee (Sweden). The 2020 report lists the FOB price of all coffees bought that year and the length of each producer relationship. Drop also prints the FOB price on its coffee labels, so the number travels with the bag rather than staying in an annual PDF.

NOMAD Coffee (Spain). NOMAD says it has published a transparency report since 2020. Its 2025 edition lists the FOB price for each lot, price trends over time, a breakdown of the company's costs, and total volume by origin and processing method.

What is the coffee transparency pledge?

In 2019, a group of roasters and one importer signed "The Pledge: A Common Code for Transparency in Coffee Buying." Daily Coffee News reported at the time that seventeen companies had signed, and that each committed to publishing purchasing reports listing the producer's name, the FOB price paid, the quality score or grade, the volume bought, the length of the relationship, and the share of transparent coffees in total volume for the year. Tim Wendelboe, one of the signatories, describes the minimum as publishing the price for at least one coffee each year, and says it reports all of its annual purchases.

The pledge grew out of conversations at a symposium run by Transparent Trade Coffee, an Emory University-based project. According to the same Daily Coffee News article, that group had earlier released the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide, a set of price benchmarks built from contract data that buyers donated. The two are often confused. The guide is a pricing dataset. The pledge is a reporting commitment. One caution: the web address the pledge originally used no longer appears to host the pledge text, so check any link before you cite it.

How do batch-level trace pages complement a transparency report?

An annual report answers "how does this company buy?" It does not answer "where did the coffee in this bag come from?" Those are separate questions, and a customer holding a bag usually cares about the second.

A trace page per roast batch fills that gap. A QR code on the bag opens a web page for that batch. The page shows the producer, region, process, the route from origin to roastery on a map, the dates the coffee changed hands, and documents such as an arrival report or certificate. IndiTrace builds this kind of page. Each batch gets one, and anyone can open it in a browser with no app or login. The coffee page shows how it is set up for roasters.

The two work best together:

They work together. Attach the transparency report (or the page of it covering that coffee) to the batch as a document, so a customer who scans the bag sees both where the coffee came from and what was paid for it.

Can a transparency report be verified?

Partly. Pledge signers described a peer review process, but there is no formal audit standard. Trust comes from detail others can cross-check: named producers who can confirm a relationship, and prices consistent across years.

Some systems also fingerprint records on a blockchain so that nobody can quietly edit them after publication. IndiTrace does this for each confirmed record. That shows a record has not changed since it was confirmed. It does not prove the price or origin entered was true. We explain the limits in what blockchain traceability actually verifies.

How to start your first transparency report

1. Pick a scope. Every coffee you bought last year is ideal, but one coffee is a start.
2. Collect contracts and invoices, and state clearly whether each price is FOB, farmgate or landed.
3. Ask producers before publishing their names and prices. Some prefer not to be named.
4. Add volume and relationship length for each coffee.
5. Write a short paragraph on how you set prices, including any limits in your data.
6. Publish it as a web page, not only a PDF, so bags and trace pages can link to it.

If you also want a trace page per batch, the pricing page lists the plans, including a free starter option.

Questions

Q: What is a coffee transparency report? It is a public document, usually annual, where a roaster lists the green coffees it bought, the producers, the price paid (often FOB) and the volumes.

Q: What is the difference between FOB and farmgate price in coffee? FOB is the price for coffee loaded at the export port and includes milling, transport and export costs. Farmgate is what the producer receives at the farm, so it is lower.

Q: What is the coffee transparency pledge? "The Pledge: A Common Code for Transparency in Coffee Buying" is a 2019 commitment by roasters and one importer to publish purchasing reports with producer names, FOB prices, quality, volumes and relationship length.

Q: Is the Specialty Coffee Transaction Guide the same as the pledge? No. The Transaction Guide is a set of price benchmarks built from donated contract data by Transparent Trade Coffee. The pledge is a separate commitment to publish your own buying data.

Q: Does a transparency report replace batch traceability? No. A report covers a year of buying. Batch traceability links a specific bag to its lot, producer and route. Most roasters who want both use a report and a per-batch trace page.