Commodity vs Specialty Coffee: Do You Know the Difference?

If you’re new to the coffee world, you’ve probably come across the term specialty a lot. Confused? We’ve got you covered.

Put simply, specialty coffee is higher-quality coffee that has undergone thorough taste-testing and has been painstakingly checked for defects.

The kind of coffee that you might get off a supermarket shelf, on the other hand, is called commodity coffee. It is processed in much larger batches and sourced from many different regions.

When you drink supermarket coffee, you won’t know exactly where it’s been sourced from, unlike specialty coffee.

You’ll notice that commodity coffee is cheaper, but this is because little attention is given to the taste and sustainability of production. Commodity pricing means that each coffee farmer will get paid the same no matter the quality of the crop.

In most cases, this happens to be below the cost of production. Not only do the farmers incur losses, but the system also discourages them from continuing to produce coffee in the first place!

Specialty coffee corrects this by cutting out the middleman - the commodity market - and bridging the gap between growers, importers and roasters directly.

Farmers are incentivised to improve their crop each year, and it certainly shows! This means that every time you brew a cup of Malgudi Days coffee, you’re receiving the benefits of growers’ hard work while ensuring that they get fair wages.

The importers we work with have been leaders of the green coffee community for thirty years. Their team of experts in the field rate each coffee crop on a numerical scale in which a score of at least 80 out of 100 must be reached.

Unlike commodity coffee which is mass roasted, we’ve worked tirelessly to finetune our roasting process to bring out all those subtle notes you savour in a cuppa.

All of this combines to give you a truly special drinking experience if we do say so ourselves.

The bottom line? We, at Malgudi Days, are proud roasters of specialty coffee.

Not only is it more responsibly sourced, it just tastes better!