Most of a cup of coffee's footprint is decided long before it reaches Graça, Santos, or your hotel.
So that's where we started. Here you’ll find out who grows our coffee, who buys it, how we roast it, and what we’re in the process of fixing.
We buy through Semilla
Here's how specialty coffee usually works.
A buyer flies to origin, or orders samples from an importer without leaving the office. They cup fifty lots. They take the best three and leave the rest. They pay above the commodity price, tell themselves that's the good work, and come back next year (if the score holds).
That's the model. The trade even has a name for it: Specialty Coffee Buying 101.
Semilla asked the obvious question about it. Who is that buying actually for?
The uncomfortable answer
Producing countries are full of growers, exporters, cuppers and mill managers carrying decades of skill. What limits them isn't ability. It's where they are, and who they are.
Specialty gatekeeps. It puts the burden of proof on the people already carrying the most risk, asking them to meet our timelines, our quality bar, our language, our customs. Then reserving the right to walk away if next year's score drops two points.
So the question isn't whether you paid over the C price. It's whether the buying was centred on the producer, or on you.
Semilla's answer is two words and a challenge: Follow Truth.
What they do instead
They pick groups who lack market access, or work where specialty hasn't looked, and who make good coffee anyway. Then they commit.
Café Colís Resistencia in Guatemala. Monkaaba in Colombia - which began when Brendan of Semilla spent two weeks travelling with a young producer named Esnaider Ortega-Gómez. Baho Coffee in Rwanda. Montecillos in Honduras, the fourth largest coffee exporter on earth and still invisible in specialty.
They pay the price the producer asks. They fund the infrastructure those groups need to trade on their own terms. They aim to move producers from the periphery of the supply stream toward its core (and to build toward a future where their own role as middleman isn't needed at all).
This is in the cup
Didier Ortega. Eliecer Nuñez. William Osorio. Akagera Ikizere Women Lot II.
Not blend names. People. When a coffee is named after the person who grew it, there's nowhere to hide — and no gap between the story on the bag and the paperwork behind it.
Read more about Semilla's position in their own words and check our current coffees.
If you're serving it, this is your supply chain too
The ethics and the supply security are the same fact. A buyer who cherry-picks the top lot has no relationship to fall back on in a bad harvest. Semilla don't move on. Which means we don't. Which means you don't.
We hold a profile, not a lot. The Colombian on your espresso in November won't be the identical Colombian in June. Harvests move, and we won't drop a producer to pretend otherwise. What we guarantee is the cup. Dialled to your water, your machine, every delivery.
And it survives contact with a guest. Someone can ask your barista who grew it. There's an answer, and it has a name.
We roast in-house, on electricity
Roasting accounts for up to 15% of the coffee industry's carbon footprint. Around 41 billion pounds of carbon a year. Almost all of it from gas.
Ours is a Bellwether. All-electric, ventless, closed-loop. No gas line. No flue cut through the roof. A built-in afterburner captures the smoke and VOCs before they ever reach the street, which matters when your roaster sits in nearby residential blocks in Lisbon.
The number: roughly 87% less carbon per pound roasted than a traditional gas roaster.
Cold brew, without the bin
Conventional cold brew takes 12 to 24 hours, a paper filter, and a bin at the end of it.
We use a Hardtank. Rapid recirculation extraction gets us there in 45 minutes, through a stainless steel basket that gets washed and used again. No disposable filters. Ever.
Higher extraction (up to 22%) means less coffee per litre for more cup.
It drains straight into kegs. The kegs come back, get cleaned, get refilled. Between the tank and your glass there is no can, no bottle, no plastic cup, no single-use anything.
Automated cleaning and sanitation cycles run at close, which means the machine gets cleaned properly rather than quickly.
The unglamorous half
Waste Every stream separated, grounds included. We hold to Decreto-Lei n.º 102-D/2020 on packaging, plastics and organics - and go past it where we can. Eat-in and takeaway packaging is 100% recyclable or biodegradable.
Cups Bring your own, take €0.50 off.
Energy LED throughout. Every fridge, oven and machine energy-rated. Decreto-Lei n.º 68-A/2015 is the floor, not the ambition.
Everything that isn't coffee Local first. Portuguese farmers, Lisbon suppliers, craft beer from Dois Corvos in Marvila.
What we're planning
Water. Cold brew, espresso and cleaning are thirsty. Low-flow taps and closed-loop cleaning are next, in line with Lei n.º 58/2005.
Community. The next neighbourhood cleanup - Graça or Santos - is coming. Watch this space.
Have a local environment initiative you'd like us to get involved with? Send us a DM on Instagram or come in and let's talk about it.
