QUALITY

Blessed Grounds only buys, roasts and sells Specialty Grade coffee, free of any additives or chemical flavorings, but what exactly qualifies our coffee as "specialty"? Every coffee in the world, from the instant coffee found in your local grocery store to the rarest of exotic micro-lots can be evaluated on a 0 to 100 scale. Based on numerous criteria ranging from taste and flavor characteristics to moisture content and visible defect count, coffee professionals known as Q-graders will typically travel to origin, or the country in which the coffee is grown, to assign an overall cup score to each coffee being inspected. At the conclusion of this process, all coffees achieving a cup score of 80 or above are considered ‘Specialty Grade’, allowing them to typically be sold at a market premium. Coffees receiving a cup score of 79 or below are placed into the catch-all ‘Commercial Grade’ category and are usually sold at a market discount, due to lower quality cup characteristics. Achieving a Specialty grading is no small feat, as the highest quality standards must be applied at every level of the coffee supply chain, from farming and harvesting, processing and packaging, shipping and storage, to roasting techniques and final extraction methods. Our belief that our customers deserve only the very best compels us to work alongside our outstanding farmers, processors, importers, and local employees to improve every process, procedure, and method by which our coffees journey from field to cup, in order to guarantee that your Specialty Grade coffee experience will boast some of the most immensely satisfying tastes and aromatics you have ever encountered.

TRANSPARENCY

In talking with farmers, traders, and industry experts along our 2019 trip to the coffee farms of Honduras, we discovered that the global coffee industry has reached a point of crisis. 99% of coffee farmers around the world are categorized as Smallholder (typically family-run farms with small plots of land), and due to the interplay of varying factors across coffee’s supply chain (i.e., climate change, geographical constraints, agricultural inputs, cooperative fees, middlemen, etc.), operate at objective poverty levels. With the price of coffee hitting a 12 year low in 2018 (despite rising demand), these near-zero profit margins have been further constrained, resulting in widespread coffee farm abandonment and bankruptcy. In an effort to combat this crisis, Blessed Grounds has committed to only purchasing coffees from farmers that are sold at or in most cases, well above current Fair Trade prices and through Direct Trade opportunities. Direct Trade happens when coffee farmers trade directly with coffee roasters at origin, allowing farmers to receive up to 4x what they would otherwise be offered on the commodities market while simultaneously avoiding supply-chain obstacles that plague profitability. By only sourcing our coffees through direct trade relationships and committing to fair trade prices, we can help sustain the longevity of smallholder farms and the financial security of the honorable people and supporting communities who compose them, the world over.  

PHILANTHROPY

Blessed Grounds is about so much more than coffee and we are dedicated to being a source of positive change in both our local and international communities. As such, we pledge to give 5% of our wholesale profit to the charity of our customers choosing and 5% of our retail profit to Lighthouse in the Desert, an outreach organization aimed at combating homelessness and hopelessness in inner city Tucson. So remember that when you drink a cup of delicious Blessed Grounds Coffee, you are aiding in our Mission to inject hope, love, and tangible assistance within the lives of people, both close by and far away. So what are you waiting for? Partner with Blessed Grounds today and TASTE AND SEE what coffee can be!