From Roast Magazine: 

      The company’s mission is two-fold, says Stumptown owner and founder Duane Sorenson. First and foremost is to provide people with an unsurpassed coffee experience. “Rather than focusing on marketing, we focus on unbelievable quality, not just something good,” says Sorenson. “And we’re not even close to the quality we want yet.” ?     

      The second half of the company’s mission statement has a much larger purpose: to spread Stumptown’s knowledge and passion for specialty coffee as far as possible. “We want to take what we know and learn and use it to help improve the state of specialty coffee in the world today,” Sorenson says.

Others talk about working with coffee producers and in many cases that’s all it is, talk. Intelligentsia’s buying team cumulatively spends over 365 days each year at source. We do not just buy coffees; we actually develop them while working alongside our growers. Our coffees are unlike any others, and they are exclusive to Intelligentsia. We take insights, practices and expertise in preparation and processing garnered from our work around the globe and apply them to each of our Direct Trade coffees to make them the absolute best they can be. We also want the growers we work with to prosper so we guarantee a price that is paid directly to them, which is set far above international fair trade standards. By combining focused attention at source with cup-quality price incentives, we continuously expand economic opportunity and culinary possibility.

www.intelligentsiacoffee.com

Strongly supportive of the sustainable efforts of farmers and organic farming techniques, Ecco is committed to paying top premiums based on quality. To source these coffees, Andrew Barnett spends a great deal of his time tasting and rating coffees with the best tasters (cuppers) in the world at annual Cup of Excellence tastings, and building personal relationships with top growers in Brazil, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Guatemala, El Salvador and Ethiopia. 

A master roaster, Barnett and his staff carefully roast each batch of coffee beans. His goal is to produce coffees that are rich and smooth, while also being sweet, complex and elegant. “I like to introduce to people flavors that open them to the world of exemplary coffee” says Barnett. “Premium coffees that are roasted properly taste great and leave a pleasant sweet aftertaste, similar to great wines and chocolates.”