08/24/2026
Last week, we sat down with Arnoldo and Tomás from The Coffee Source for a progress update on our latest project at origin — providing access to free, safe drinking water for over 200 students in Peru. We looked through photographs of people drinking clean water. There were smiling faces. It was, by any measure, good news.
Our founder, Mark Stell, looked around the room and paused before he calmly spoke. "Do you know why we do this?" he asked. A few of us ventured answers. “We’re rooted in relationships.” “Our mission is to build a socially responsible company.” These weren't wrong answers. But Mark was after something else.
Thirty years ago, when Portland Coffee Roasters was founded, the specialty coffee world operated on a different set of assumptions. Roasters didn't travel to origin. Origin didn't know much about roasting — "literally nothing," Arnoldo told us, with the particular candor of someone who was there. The global sustainability frameworks were freshly minted, C-market prices were a fraction of today’s, and most farms ran on rural labor and the quiet inheritance of people who had grown coffee their whole lives, on farms passed down from their families.
That world is fading, and what's replacing it is more complicated. Hardly any of the sustainable development goals set by world leaders in 1992 are on track. Coffee cultivation is creeping to higher elevations as the climate narrows the viable range lower down. Young people — and this is true across nearly every coffee-producing country — are leaving for cities, trading the uncertainty of farming for wages, services, and security. The pipeline of knowledge and labor that sustained these communities for generations is thinning.
Which brings us back to Mark's question. Our Pennies per Pound program began as a philosophy, a way of doing business that we believed was right. It still is both of those things. But it has also become something more urgent: an economic argument for the survival of the very supply chains that make coffee possible. If the infrastructure isn't there — the water, the plumbing, the basic conditions for life — farms will continue to fail, prices will rise, and the environmental stewardship that comes with invested, rooted communities will erode along with everything else.
Our mission hasn't changed. We still believe that great coffee and responsible business are not in tension. But our understanding of what responsibility demands has. The stakes are clearer now, and so is the cost of inaction. We're grateful to everyone who sees it too.
