Now Serving! Olympia Coffee Roasters

After roasting our own coffee for over two decades, the Co-op is proud to announce a new partnership with Olympia Coffee Roasters! Starting November 2022, our Deli espresso station will be serving Olympia Coffee, roasted right here in Western Washington and brewed by us, just for you. Both the Co-op and OCR understand what makes a cup of coffee great: how it’s grown, how it’s sourced, how it’s prepared, how it tastes, and last but not least, how the many hands that have touched the coffee are treated.

The partnership with Olympia comes as a new chapter in the Co-op’s longstanding mission to provide good food (and coffee) at a good price. The Co-op started roasting its own coffee in the late 90s as the popularity of coffee surged, to fill a very important need: a delicious cup of coffee that was also ethically and sustainably sourced. Believe it or not, there was a time when espresso stands didn’t dot every other street corner in Western Washington, so cruisin’ through the drive-thru to order your usual, wasn’t so usual. Beyond that, sourcing Fair Trade organic shade-grown coffee beans was almost unheard of.

The Co-op answered the call and began sourcing coffee beans that adhered to our buying guidelines and aligned with our principles of treating people and planet fairly. We’ve been hand-roasting our coffee in small batches for your enjoyment ever since.

Which brings us to the question, why are we switching? There are several factors, but simply put, the Co-op is not a roastery. We set out to roast coffee because finding Fair-Trade organic coffee was hard to do; it is much more common now. Our tiny little roaster isn’t equipped for the volume we need to produce for our customers – you certainly do love your coffee! Our space is also limited, for roasting and for storing beans. The Co-op’s storage situation has always been a tricky one, and as the store continues to grow, we’re running out of room to store the appropriate amount of coffee beans we need to have on hand.

Along with some internal limitations, shipping costs for a large load of green beans have sky rocketed. The ripple effect of the pandemic and political unrest in coffee-growing regions continue to impact supply chains across the globe, including coffee. So, the Fair Trade organic beans we’ve come to rely on, are unfortunately, not as reliable we need them to be to continue to serve you a consistently good cup of coffee day in and day out.

With these challenges in mind, we set out to find a coffee roasting company. Like the original search for good beans way-back-when, we spent time researching, interviewing, discussing, and, of course, tasting beans from roasters around the region. There are several quality coffee companies in the area, all with different areas of specialty, but after much due diligence, we decided to team up with Olympia Coffee Roasters, and we are so excited to share their coffee and their story with you!

And the Olympia Coffee story is now our story, and yours, too. We’re delighted to embrace yet another opportunity to partner with a local company with shared values. The goal is to provide high quality coffee, sourced with the highest standards of fairness and equality to Co-op customers and community. Together, we are creating a unique coffee experience, from seed to sip, and every touchpoint along the way.

Olympia is a Certified B Corp committed to Fair For All, a set of standards designed to create a better life for farmers, staff, and customers through coffee. In 2018, Olympia Coffee became the first roaster to ensure that 100% of their coffee is Fair For All. The benefits of Fair For All include: better pay (more than double the Fair Trade rate for all coffees), transparency, living wage, farm workers safety, continuous improvement, highest quality (OCR only purchases coffee with quality standards of 85 points or higher according to the Specialty Coffee Association’s cupping standards).

What else could you ask for from a reliable roasting partner? Amazing specialty coffee with distinct flavor! So, next time you pop into the Co-op, you can get exactly what you’ve come to expect over the years: your usual cup of goodness.

Learn more about Fair For All and view Olympia Coffee’s 2022 Transparency Report.