OUR IKIGAI
Rethinking Coffee: From "Orphan Crop" to a Regenerative Future.
Coffee is woven into cultures, livelihoods, and daily rituals worldwide. Yet as a crop it’s long been treated as an orphan crop, overlooked in science, investments, policy, and farmer support.
In the dominant trade models, many producers are paid below their cost of production. Survival pressure pushes cost-cutting over quality, eroding soils, ecosystems, and dignity. The vast majority of coffee still moves through this degenerative system, where short-term fixes outrun long-term resilience.
Change is needed. When we pay fairly, build direct relationships, reward quality, share knowledge, and connect farmers into global networks, the results compound. Producers can invest, adopt regenerative practices, and focus on excellence. Cupping scores rise. Farms and communities become more resilient. Value flows more equitably across the chain.
This is how coffee gets better for everyone: better flavor, better livelihoods and a better future.
It’s simply necessary.
What is QUALITY
About Ikigai Coffee
Our Ikigai.
Better coffee. Better livelihoods. A better future.
We connect coffee quality, people and market opportunities. Through intelligence, equipment and stories, we help good work move forward.
Our purpose
Rethinking coffee.
From an overlooked crop to a regenerative future.
This is how coffee gets better for everyone: better flavour, better livelihoods and a better future.
It’s simply necessary.Our principles
What is quality?
We let quality lead the way. But first, we need to understand what quality means.
John Locke (1632–1704) distinguished between primary qualities, such as size, shape and motion, and secondary qualities, such as colour, taste and smell. The first belong to the object; the second concern how its properties affect our senses.That distinction matters in coffee. What tastes exceptional to one person may not appeal to another. We focus on the underlying qualities we can examine and improve: the coffee itself, processing, consistency and the conditions in which it is produced.Our assessment brings together cupping, collaboration throughout the value chain, and agricultural and economic development. A cupping score helps describe sensory quality. It does not, on its own, tell the whole story.Taste is personal. The care behind it should be demonstrable.
Our principles
What is ethics?
Good intentions only matter when they shape how we act.
For Aristotle, ethical character develops through practice. We become just by acting justly. His idea of practical wisdom asks us to judge what a situation calls for, rather than follow a rule without considering its consequences.Plato’s concern with justice and the good, and the Hippocratic tradition’s duty to benefit others and avoid harm, offer further points of reflection.For Ikigai, these ideas become a practical responsibility: to question who benefits, who carries the risk, and whether a decision strengthens the people and places behind the coffee.That means fair relationships, honest advice, shared knowledge and attention to the long term. We do not claim to have every answer. We do commit to examining our choices and improving how we work.Quality asks how well something is made. Ethics asks how, for whom, and at what cost.
The person behind Ikigai
Meet Jeroen.
Ikigai Coffee was founded by Jeroen Brugman. His work brings together coffee expertise, relationships at origin, market development and visual storytelling.The ambition is shared across everything Ikigai does: connect knowledge with practical progress, and build relationships that create lasting value.Let’s talk