We met the farmers first. The coffee came after.
Lost & Found wasn't started to make money. Two friends went to Costa Rica, met Seilyn, Andrés and Don Sergio, and learned what the people who grow coffee are up against. This is the whole story. We didn't cut it.
Anonymous coffee.
Most coffee arrives with no name on it. A country, maybe a region, a roast level. Somewhere behind the bag is a family who picked, sorted and dried every bean, and most of the time nobody who drinks it will ever know who they are. When the name disappears, so does the leverage. The people at the start of the chain carry the most risk and see the smallest share of what we all pay for a cup.
A kitchen table in Tarrazú.
On our first trip to Costa Rica, in January 2024, we sat at Seilyn and Adolfo's table in Tarrazú and met Kamila. We had breakfast by the creek. We spent a day at Don Sergio's coffee school and took the hardest road of the week to Andrés's farm in the jungle. They told us what it really costs to grow good coffee, and how little of what people pay for it makes it back to the farm. We came home different.
Oct 2024 — the second round, before we'd finished the first.
We chose to get close. Closeness changed us.
We didn't start Lost & Found to make money. We started it because we had met the people, and we realized that if people back home bought their coffee from us, lives at origin could change in an intentional way. Not by paying more. By pooling the coffee money people already spend and pointing it somewhere on purpose. We call that Intentional Coffee.
That's us.
We buy very good coffee at a fair price that supports the farmer and their community. We carry it home and roast it weekly in Old Town, Portland. Most good roasters care about craft and farmers; they don't get this close, because it isn't practical as a business. Ours only works because you choose to spend the coffee money you already spend with us.
Buying from a handful of families, visiting them every year, roasting weekly in Old Town and carrying their stories home is slow. It doesn't scale. We're doing it anyway, because the closeness is the point. Every cup tells a tale, and we want you to know whose it is.
An additional $0.25 from every bag.
On top of a fair price for the coffee, a portion of our profit — $0.25 from every bag — goes back to projects in the farmers' own communities. We go every year to work on them. How the Impact Fund works →
You holding this bag makes the rest possible.
Every year we go to one of the origin countries to work on Fund projects. If you've bought a bag or a cup, you're invited — on a mission trip or an origin tour.
— Matt & Chris