Earth’s General Store tries to offer socially and environmental products at a reasonable and fair price. This is one of the reasons why we started to roast our own Fair Trade Certified and Certified Organic coffee in the store. We could deliver freshly roasted coffee that was ethically/socially superior with minimal environmental impact PLUS being produced by artisans here in Edmonton – adding value to our community.

We find that we need to change the prices for our coffee. Since we started to roast coffee in 2004 we have only raised the prices once – to go from $12.00 per pound to $12.50 per pound. It has been over 4 years since we raised our prices and today we are raising the price to $13.50 per pound ($29.70/kg) for our roasted coffee beans.

Many people are roasting their own at home (either with a small countertop commercial roaster) or in a popcorn maker (yes this is possible). AS far as I know Earth’s General Store is the only place in Edmonton that offers Certified Fair Trade and Certified Organic green coffee beans for retail sale. The new price for green beans are $9.50/pound ($20.90/kg) – regardless of country of origin.

As an after note the new price of decaffeinated green beans are $10.00/pound and roasted is $14.50/pound.

Neal has embarked on being trained as a roastmaster by Eric Filpula (Eric has been roasting our coffee since 2004). Eric and Stephen Talman (the other roastmaster) are getting too busy in their lives and need to share this task so Neal has stepped up to the challenge.

Just so that you can do some price comparison when you are out shopping elsewhere. Our $29.70/kg works out to $8.91 for a 300gm bag and of course a 454gm bag would cost you $13.50. Our coffee is still a few dollars less per pound than most comparable products (small batch roasted/artisanal, Fair Trade Certified, Certified Organic, local, etc). The new price of our roasted and green (not roasted) coffee beans still make them the lowest Certified Fair Trade and Certified Organic green on the market.

Since our coffee is only offered in bulk it has less of an environmental footprint than the coffee that gets shipped around our country in disposable multi layered bags that are not recyclable (though they are reusable if you come to Earth’s General Store to refill the bags).

Most stores would not highlight a change in price to their customers since customers are used to prices changing (usually an increase) but we want to be upfront with people about these kinds of things. When there was a large price increase for quinoa earlier this year we put a sign on the bin – “Attention – Large Price Increase”. Do you know any other grocery store that does this?