News

We’ve been tackling the structural problems in the coffee industry, striving to improve producers’ lives and achieve sustainability. By visiting coffee origins myself and witnessing the realities faced by small-scale producers and coffee-producing countries firsthand, I’ve come to fully realize the potential of this innovative platform. I’m proud that through TYPICA, we’re taking the first step towards promoting fair trade and building a better society and a sustainable future.

Five years ago, when we founded TYPICA, our current pre-order model – where buyers reserve green coffee beans right after harvest and processing – was far from common practice. Thanks to the support and collaboration of numerous coffee producers and buyers, I’m proud to say it has now become an established option in green coffee sourcing.

As we mark our fifth anniversary, I’m thrilled to introduce even more innovative choices to our community.

Our flagship new feature, the “Wish List,” represents a groundbreaking approach to sustainable coffee sourcing. It allows buyers to list their specific coffee preferences, enabling producers to view these requests and make matching offers directly. Moreover, producers can access aggregated global demand data, empowering them to plan their production more effectively. The Wish List transforms the producer experience from uncertainty – “What should I produce? Will it sell?” – to confidence – “I know what to produce, and I know it will sell.” We believe this shift will have a profound impact on coffee-growing regions.

Additionally, other new features such as virtual tours and GHG emissions visualization offer both buyers and consumers a deeper, more transparent view of coffee’s intrinsic value.

TYPICA’s platform has grown with the invaluable input of roasters and producers since our founding. We warmly invite you to continue shaping our New Model as active participants in this journey.

Direct trade allows producers’ quality efforts to be directly reflected in pricing. However, in indirect trading, buyer demand is rarely disclosed directly to producers. Especially for large-scale transactions, prices are often set indirectly by intermediaries based on international futures markets, which are heavily influenced by speculative money.

Recognizing these issues, we developed the “Wish List” in our New Model to create a paradigm shift in information flow through reverse thinking. Aggregating and sharing global coffee company demand data with producers is a first in coffee history – a global, private-sector initiative only possible through TYPICA’s technology-driven direct trade community that we’ve been nurturing across 80 countries. Furthermore, we have begun collaborating with public institutions in coffee-producing countries through partnerships with the Japanese government and JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency). Through these global public-private partnerships, we aim to pursue innovations towards a more public-oriented industry structure.

We estimate that buyers registered with TYPICA account for about 18% of the total green coffee market. If all users’ Wish Lists – essentially, global coffee demand data – were accessible to producers worldwide, we could create a “New Commodity Market” based on actual demand. This could replace the volatile, unstable traditional market dependent on exchange rates and market conditions, potentially becoming the new standard for stable, long-term trading.

In essence, the New Model that TYPICA will nurture together with all of you as a community aims to dramatically increase the productivity of the entire industry by addressing the long-standing information asymmetry between sellers and buyers in the coffee industry. We are confident that this represents nothing less than a historic structural transformation of the coffee sector.