A coffee life - strategy

overview

A coffee life is a headless CMS and storytelling platform designed for the specialty coffee supply chain. It empowers coffee producers to create and own authentic stories about their region, farms and harvests, while giving coffee roasters the tools to seamlessly integrate that content into their product pages and e-commerce platforms (that they already are selling through). As demand for transparency and origin-driven branding grows, we bridge the gap between coffee producers who have stories to tell and coffee roasters who need content to market their products.

what problem are we solving?

Coffee producers have powerful stories but no easy, structured way to tell them — and roasters need authentic, high-quality content to connect with their customers, but don’t have the time or tools to create it. “A coffee life” bridges that gap with a simple, mobile-first platform that helps coffee producers craft and share their farm and harvest stories, and gives roasters ready-to-use, brand-aligned content they can embed anywhere — from product pages and packaging to QR codes and cafe menus. We’re building the storytelling layer of the specialty coffee supply chain — with producers at the center.

🍒 Up in the clouds: Coffee Farmers and producers

The life cycle of a cup of coffee is a small modern miracle — especially a cup of specialty coffee. Before it makes it to your morning routine, it begins in high-altitude farms, often in remote parts of Latin America, Africa, or Asia. A single lot of specialty coffee may take weeks of handpicking just at the right moment for peak ripeness during a harvest. From there, it’s processed and dried on raised beds — often in unpredictable weather, under constant care and attention.

This entire phase is led by producers and their families — sometimes independently, sometimes through cooperatives. Their work is seasonal, weather-dependent, and deeply skilled — yet they are often invisible in the final sale. And ironically, they are the ones who bring the most humanity to coffee. Their stories — of resilience, innovation, tradition, and passion — carry the deepest insight into how our coffee is grown and why it matters. It is these stories that should be highlighted and championed by the coffee industry.

As consumers, we are drawn to stories. And in a global market that’s increasingly values-driven, our purchasing decisions deserve to be informed through the transparency the people who make our coffee can uniquely provide.

These stories deserve to be celebrated and need to survive the entire supply chain. “A coffee life” will provide coffee producers the opportunity to create content, be paid for - and most importantly own the messaging behind their own stories and life’s work.

📦 The logistics: What happens after the farm

Once the beans are processed, the supply chain becomes far more technical — and far less human-centered. This segment is where most SaaS platforms provide the most value to the supply chain.

• Exporters handle documentation, quality control, and prepare coffee for shipment.
• Importers manage bulk purchasing, customs, storage, and pricing — bringing green coffee into consumer markets.

This phase is essential but often removes the visibility of the people who grew the coffee. By the time it reaches its destination, even a beautifully produced micro lot may be reduced to a SKU and a cupping score, with no meaningful way to share the producer’s story at scale.

☕ The last mile: Roasters & the challenge of storytelling

When the green coffee arrives, roasters select, roast, and release it to their customers. Their goal is to highlight the coffee’s unique character — often shaped by terroir, processing, and origin — and create a product that stands out in a crowded market.

But at this final mile, they face a challenge:

• How do they communicate the care that went into this coffee?
• How do they showcase the producer’s voice, without a content team or international travel?
• How do they tell a story that resonates — again and again — across every product page, bag label, or cafe shelf?

Too often, these efforts get compressed into a few words on a label, or generic tasting notes that lose the nuance and depth that specialty coffee is all about. “A coffee life” will provide them the ability to access content and stories directly from the people who produced the coffee they are now about to roast and sell. This access, and the tooling to embed it into their own websites, storefronts and in stores will greatly enhance their ability to market their product.

This added transparency into the coffee producers’ stories will empower roasters and sellers to humanize their products, and in the process champion the people who created the coffee they are selling.

Building integrations for Roasters; the Shopify generation

Why It’s Hard to Sell Coffee Online

Selling coffee is easy in theory: a great product, a loyal following, and the world’s most consumed beverage. But for small-batch roasters and producers, setting up e-commerce is far from plug-and-play.

Platforms like Shopify promise simplicity, but roasters often find themselves lost in a sea of generic templates, clunky subscription plug-ins, and checkout flows that weren’t built with storytelling or traceability in mind. What should be a tool for growth often becomes just another silo.

Some common challenges:

• Subscription fatigue: Shopify doesn’t natively support complex coffee subscriptions (e.g., rotating origins, grind sizes, seasonal offerings), forcing roasters to duct-tape together multiple apps.
• Poor storytelling tools: Roasters want to highlight origin, farmer, processing method, or harvest notes — but most Shopify themes treat coffee like any other SKU.
• Disconnect from producers: The richness of the farm-to-cup journey rarely comes through on product pages. Most e-commerce setups ignore the producer altogether.

That’s where A Coffee Life fits in — bridging the gap between commerce and craft. We're building modular tools and content systems that integrate directly into roasters' storefronts — empowering them to tell better stories, personalize experiences, and give credit where it's due.

Competitive landscape

Speciality coffee as an industry is uniquely fragmented. Unlike wine, where the producer’s brand usually is marketed as the end product, coffee production is far less vertically integrated and as a result, the coffee producer and the roaster are often significantly disconnected, with little visibility or shared storytelling between them. Due to this fragmentation, the industry has focused primarily on building tools to manage the logistics of importing and exporting green coffee. That complexity, while necessary, has left a clear gap in highlighting the human narratives that make up the coffee supply chain. And while some companies and NGO’s have focused on highlighting select stories about farmers, those platforms lack the technical integrations that modern e-commerce platforms need. A Coffee Life fills a critical gap between platforms focused on technical enablement (but lacking storytelling) and those focused on storytelling (but lacking technical integration). By offering coffee producers a robust, mobile-first CMS to create, maintain, and distribute stories — and giving roasters seamless tools to embed that content — we bring both worlds together. The diagram’s below illustrate this niche and where it falls into the broader coffee supply chain technology industry.

Existing tools

Competitive matrix

The quadrants are split between Storytelling / CMS functionality and “technical integration” (which would categorize platforms that focus on providing operational tooling). The most similar product we’ve identified is ifinca’s - “Meet the farmer” service, which allows roasters to embed a QR code on their products that links to information and media about the farmer who produced it. (A similar storytelling concept, yet more narrow scope to “a coffee life” - as “a coffee life” avoids the QR code packaging as a sole solution).

what we are building?

Our product will have two core interfaces…

• The first will be a coffee producer facing CMS dashboard. This dashboard will guide coffee producers to produce and manage the stories and content that will be used by coffee roasters to market / sell the coffee produced by them. This dashboard will allow coffee producers to provide the following information (that will be used to create their story):
• Create a story about their
• Region - (i.e like Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia)
• Farm or collective
• Harvest or lot
• For each story, upload the following (relevant) information:
• About
• Farm level
• Identity & Context
• Full Name (or farm name / cooperative name)
• Farm Name (if different from producer’s name)
• Country / Region / Town
• GPS Coordinates or map pin (optional for traceability)
• Languages Spoken
• Years Producing Coffee
• Farm Size (in hectares) (optional)
• Altitude
• Sustainability or climate change insight (optional prompt: “Has your farm changed due to weather in recent years?”)
• Personal Story (this is the most important for storytelling) ⭐ 
• How did you start growing coffee? (text or voice input)
• Local traditions or challenges (optional field — great for AI-enhanced storytelling)
• What does coffee mean to you? (optional personal prompt)
• What makes your farm or approach unique? (drying beds, fermentation, shade-grown, family tradition, etc.)
• Who works with you? (multi-select or short freeform)
• Quote to feature (e.g. “What are you proudest of this season?”)
• What do you want people drinking your coffee to know about you?
• What is special about your farm?
• What do you hope people feel when they drink your coffee?
• Qualifiers
• Certifications (e.g. Organic, Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance — file or select)
• Co-op / Exporter / Importer affiliation (name, contact if relevant)
• Harvest level
• Varietals used (multi-select or searchable list)
• Processing method(s) (washed, natural, honey, anaerobic, etc.)
• Fermentation style / duration (optional open field)
• Drying method (raised beds, patio, mechanical)
• Harvest period (start and end dates or month range)
• What was unique about this harvest?
• Was there unusual weather this harvest?
• Was this harvest fun?
• Lot ID / Harvest Code (if tracked by an exporter or importer)
• QR Code / Traceability Link (if exists) (optional paste field)
• Images
• Portrait photo (of the producer or team)
• Farm photos (landscape, harvest, processing stations)
• Video
• Short video clips (30–60 seconds; guided or optional)
• Audio
• Voice Greeting / Intro: “Say hello to the people drinking your coffee!” (15–30s)
• Optional Story Voice Note: Describe your farm, your process, or a memorable moment (great for AI transcription + authenticity)
• Socials
• Coffee producers will be able to view their content library, like any traditional CMS and coffee producers will also be able to manage and edit their Farm stories content.
• This dashboard will be a mobile-first, browser-based experience with offline support. This ensures accessibility even in low-connectivity environments. By avoiding app store dependencies and heavy device requirements, we’re optimizing for the conditions producers actually face — high Android usage, limited memory, and a preference for tools that require no installation.
• The second core interface will be a dashboard for roasters. Roasters will be able to search for a specific region or producer to view available content that they can access and embed in their product pages, online storefront or cafe. The core user story for a roaster is, that as a roaster interested in marketing their products, they can browse a list of available coffee producing regions, identify a specific farm or coffee producer they have purchased beans from, and then select which content they want to embed into one of their own products or easily integrate with Shopify to display the coffee producers’ content. Pro tier roasters, can have the option to integrate the content to their e-commerce sites via API. Roasters will have the following set of options in their dashboard:
• Access producer stories
• searchable catalog of regions, farms and specific harvests
• Set notifications
• Alerts when producers update or publish new harvest stories
• Integrations (Shopify)
• Seamlessly embed and sync content to product pages
• to launch, this will be the core integration needed
• Embeddable widgets
• copy embed link, add to custom website
• QR code generator
• can use to link to producer stories for packaging, roast cards, and in cafe experience
• Usage monitoring
• track which products are using which content from each producer
• Permission and Licensing
• Transparent terms; content available for use only while under platform subscription.
• API access
• For larger roasters to pull content into custom e-commerce platforms

The resulting diagram outlines the navigation of the application and the content that is produced and accessible by both coffee producers and coffee roasters through their dashboards.

Research from the coffee industry

• Questions -
• how can we validate whether this is influential to purchasing decisions?
• we can see there are some examples of highlight producers in larger brands
• blue bottle
• la cabra
• make the document clearer about the user behavior, so far the reactions have been
• I do not understand the technical aspects of this
• that is fair, however the user should take a away that this is going to be something people selling coffee via e-commerce can use to enhance their product listings.
• does “joe schmoe” want to scan a QR code before they purchase
• I do not think so, so we need to emphasize this will be an integration within e-commerce platforms.
• “founder needs to be deep into coffee with domain experience”
• “Will people create content” ?
• big lingering questions, will need to leverage connections, advisors etc.
• “Will consumers change their purchasing habits” - this we need to establish is not a expected case
• if it is just through e-commerce then I do not believe there is going to be any purchasing changes
• TikTok - how can we leverage / do research to see whether there are producers on tiktok
• Does our database have as much value as one without seasonal data?
• for example, if a producer makes content about a lot… does that have value next year? Is there any use of this data?