How can you be sure that you’re buying a coffee that doesn’t exploit the people who grew it? The good news is that it’s actually easy to support the farmer who has labored for many hours to grow and process your coffee.

There’s an enormous difference between the coffee industry as a whole and the specialty coffee sector. The coffee industry as a whole is overwhelmingly dominated by large, multinational companies which supply cheap, generic products in supermarkets. Specialty coffee roasters make up an incredibly small percentage of the industry and are intimately involved in the entire coffee cycle — from farming, to processing and roasting.

High quality coffees are almost always picked by hand. This is a laborious process, as cherries don’t ripen at the same pace, and pickers must return to each tree several times over harvest. Not only does hand picking mean higher quality coffee, but most coffee farmers would consider it terribly unethical to purchase an expensive piece of machinery that would take the jobs of dozens of local workers.