Firaol Ahmed is particular about his coffee.
It must be well sourced. No cream. No sugar. And definitely no Starbucks.
“If you have bad coffee, the best thing you can do is roast it dark,” Ahmed said. “No one will be able to tell if it's bad coffee then. If you have good coffee, the best thing you can do is roast it light because all of the complexity in the flavor of the coffee shows when it’s a light roast.”
The St. Louis University senior is a coffee connoisseur with an impeccable sense of taste and smell. Twice a week, he comes into First Crack, a roasting facility in St. Louis, to "cup" high-quality Ethiopian coffee.
Cupping is the multiday, multistep process of tasting and evaluating coffee that starts with light roasting several batches of green coffee beans 48 hours in advance.
“We’re tasting these coffees, giving them a score, giving them a tasting note that we find in a coffee so that it’s easier for our customers here to make a decision in purchasing these coffees from producers in Ethiopia,” Ahmed said.
He weighs each sample of beans on a food scale, grinds them separately and pours each sample into a cup. Next he uses his most important tool — his nose. He smells the fresh grounds. Then he steeps the samples in hot water to brew.
He smells it again. This time he’s searching for that signature fruity smell that’s common for Ethiopian coffee. The coffee smells and tastes this way because the coffee trees are grown at elevations as high as 7,000 feet.
“That gives it this complex flavor and fruit-forward taste that a lot of roasters love,” Ahmed said.
He quickly slurps down a spoonful. It passes the test.
All of this attention to detail is for his startup company, Moii Coffee. Ahmed has been on a mission to fix a broken supply chain that leaves coffee farmers and producers in Ethiopia with little to no selling power. He started the company from his SLU dorm, driven in part by his family’s own story of no longer being able to rely on the profits from their coffee as their sole source of income.
No more exploitation
Coffee farmers in Ethiopia often fall prey to middlemen who only agree to buy their coffee well below its value.
“As a farmer you have to make a choice,” Ahmed said. “You say, ‘Goodness, do I wait for another buyer who is going to give me the right price? But I don’t know when that buyer is going to come or if it’s going to come. Or do I just take this and make sure my family is not going to struggle?’”
Coffee is big business in Ethiopia. The country is the largest coffee producer on the continent of Africa — bringing in more than $1 billion in 2022. A 2023 report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service found that roughly 25% of Ethiopians depend directly or indirectly on the coffee supply chain to survive.
Moii Coffee is personal to Ahmed. His great-grandfather and grandfather were coffee farmers. His grandfather started working on the farm at a very young age. He eventually took it over but almost immediately was met with an impossible decision: Wait for a buyer to accept his price or go with the buyer’s lowball offer.
“They need that cash to survive,” Ahmed said. “That actually led my grandpa to start actually looking at different opportunities and become a merchant and kind of not be a coffee farmer anymore.”
It would be decades before his grandfather could go back to coffee farming. These experiences would set the framework for Moii Coffee when Ahmed launched the startup business. The online platform connects Ethiopian coffee farmers and producers with independent roasters in the U.S.
“Moii means ‘win,'’’ Ahmed said. “I think with what we’re working on currently, we’re helping out the producers by giving them access [directly to the] international market. We’re also helping out the roasters by allowing them to buy directly from the source.”
The goal is to expand Moii Coffee beyond Ethiopia. Andy Irakoze, a cofounder of Moii Coffee, said the broken coffee supply chain goes well beyond Ethiopia. It’s global.
“They also have to sell through multiple middlemen and not even get paid their fair price,” Irakoze said. “That’s something that if you go to Colombia, if you go to Brazil, all of the farmers there will tell you they all have the same sort of story.”
Irakoze hails from the small south-central African country of Burundi, another coffee producer. The duo have taken steps to safeguard their platform from greedy middlemen vying for access to the international market. Each farmer and roaster that creates an account on Moii’s website goes through a background check.
“Building that step of verification ensures that the people that are on the platform are actually trustworthy,” Irakoze said. “All the roasters, they actually own businesses. They actually want to buy coffee. The farmers there, they are actually the farmers who produce the coffee that they want to sell.”
Moii Coffee makes money by charging a service fee to buyers. In exchange for the fee, the pair collects the coffee beans from the producers and farmers in Ethiopia, brings them to the U.S. and distributes them to the independent roasters.
But the prices are set by the farmers and producers. Everything the farmers and producers earn goes directly to them through the platform. Ahmed says their company puts the selling power back in the hands of farmers and producers.
“We just allow producers to give price to their coffees themselves,” Ahmed said. “So you produce this coffee. You know the coffee’s value more than anyone else. If you think it’s worth 100 bucks a pound, go for it. And if someone is willing to pay the free market, it’s not our business to tell you what your coffee is worth because you produced it.”
A legacy of sharing
It was nearly three years ago when Ahmed cofounded the startup in his dorm room with the coffee beans from his family’s farm in Ethiopia. His mother brought him back some from a trip, and he decided to share them with his SLU track coaches and teammates.
“It’s a part of being Ethiopian,” Ahmed said. “Wanting to give. We’re a very service-based community and always wanting to share. ... I thought, ‘OK, a better way to enjoy this is actually to let someone else also enjoy it.'”
It was a hit.
“It was like, ‘Where can I buy this? I want a whole bag,’” Ahmed said.
Everything took off quickly after that. He roasted 22 bags that weighed 30 pounds and stored them under his dorm room bed.
“The only thing I was thinking is, ‘How the heck do I get rid of this coffee?’” Ahmed recalled with a smile.
He made posts across multiple social media platforms that he had Ethiopian coffee to sell. He quickly sold out, paused and restocked. He even tried to put the coffee in St. Louis coffee shops, which they declined. The rejection sparked a fire in him to keep going.
“I thought, I actually have a competitive advantage compared to the big companies just going to Ethiopia to import,” Ahmed said. “I have a better story to tell, and I have better connections with the people behind the coffees being produced.”
Irakoze also got in on the action. The SLU grad quit his full-time job to help build the startup's digital platform.
“When you’re young, you look at yourself, and it’s like, ‘What could go worse?’” Irakoze said.
Lots of labor for a single cup
Moii Coffee amplifies the voices of the Ethiopian coffee farmers and producers on its platform. Sharing their stories is one way Ahmed is working to put humanity back into coffee.
He witnessed himself the time, labor and dedication that goes into a single cup of coffee when visiting Ethiopia in December during peak harvest season.
One farmer spoke of his devotion to his trade, saying that to Ethiopian farmers, coffee is life — literally.
“They will say, ‘Coffee is like a child,’” Ahmed said. “‘You have to take care of it. Coffee is like your child.' They don’t take coffee trees lightly. They’re getting up every morning. Watering it if they need to water it. Taking care of it. Then picking cherries that are ripe and ready to be picked."
Some farmers take coffee so seriously that they paint their fingernails with polish the same color as the cherries to ensure the fruit is ripe enough to pick. Ahmed passed along this tip to his family.
“I came back to my family and said, ‘You guys are doing it wrong,’” Ahmed said. “We need some nail polish in this house.”
He visited Alo Coffee’s Bona Station, a coffee site in Sidama. This location has a nursery to protect the coffee trees and cherries from burning in the hot sun. Coffee cherries are red berry clusters that grow from coffee trees. In the coffee world, those berries are known as “coffee cherries.” Inside the cherry is the seed that we all know as the coffee bean.
The cherries go through a vigorous wash in a machine that separates the cherry from the seed. In a separate section of the site, there’s a group of young women in a shed scooping out fermented coffee cherries out of large blue plastic drums. The cherries are added to one of the many long wooden beds to dry out in the sun. They do this work singing.
The singing left a strong impression on Ahmed.
“It’s so amazing,” he said. “They’re so good at it as well. Like one of them would just start a new song and three to five seconds [later] the entire group has picked it up.”
He also visited the Herefa coffee station in Bensa Sidama. This site is deep in the mountains. The view is breathtaking. Here there are rows of coffee beans spread out on the wood beds. Wet coffee cherries can be purchased and processed on site.
Here he met Yusana Yure, a coffee farmer for 12 years.
“I used to be a merchant, but I met a person who came back from the states and since I had about seven acres of land he convinced me to become a coffee farmer,” Yure said.
He had one simple message for coffee lovers.
“What would make me really happy is if people who buy our coffees learn more about the effort we put into producing these coffees,” Yure said. “And how much care we put into it.”
Ahmed also connected with Samson Zi, the cofounder of And Coffee, as well as a coffee producer. His business works with roughly 400 farmers, including Yure.
Zi comes from a long line of coffee farmers.
“Most of my family still lives in Harar,” Zi said. “It’s another beautiful coffee region in Ethiopia. But as a coffee farmer, they don’t get much out of it. Their life never changes.”
Zi is working to change that for them and future farmers to come. He decided to partner with Moii Coffee because its vision perfectly aligned with his.
“I want to give a chance to the local farmers,” Zi said. “That way they be known by the world for what they have in their hand. It’s going to be a fair shake.”
Change is slow, but Zi said farmers in Ethiopia are finally securing a win of their own.
“It’s selling [coffee] with a better price,” Zi said. “Even producers, they are building schools. They’re partnering with roasters — buyers from different parts of the world. And they’re changing the livelihood of farmers.”
Firaol Ahmed has secured some wins of his own. Independent roasters, like St. Louis' Northwest and Sump, are seeing the value of Moii's mission and are carrying high-quality Ethiopian coffee sourced in partnership with his company.
