Questions we get before the first contract

The smallest commercial lot we ship is 300 kg — 5 jute bags of 60 kg from a single named lot. Below that we work in samples rather than orders: a free 300 g cupping sample, or a 30 kg trial lot by air.

Most first orders land between 300 kg and 1,000 kg — enough to run a coffee through a season's menu without committing to a container. From 5 t we quote it as a container job: groupage, or a full 20′ load of up to 19.2 t.

Split orders are fine. A 1,000 kg contract can be 600 kg AA and 400 kg AB, as long as no single grade drops below 300 kg — under that we cannot keep the lot separate through milling and bagging.

A 300 g offer sample of any lot on the current list is free, air courier included — 7–10 days door to door to Moscow or St Petersburg. It ships with the lot's cupping sheet, moisture and water activity readings, so you can check our numbers against your own roast.

We draw offer samples from the bagged lot, not from a pre-selected showpiece. If the lot is already sold out by the time you cup it, we say so rather than substituting something similar.

The only thing we ask in return is a note on how it cupped, positive or not. That is how we learn which profiles to hold for you next season.

300 g is enough to cup on a sample roaster. It is not enough to profile a coffee on a production machine, and that is where most buying decisions are actually made. So we ship a 30 kg trial lot — half a jute bag, packed in GrainPro, by air courier on the same 7–10 day timing.

The green is billed at the contract price for that lot. Air freight runs roughly USD 6–9 per kg to Moscow or St Petersburg and is charged at cost, with the airway bill attached. We credit that freight back against your first order of 300 kg or more from the same lot, so a trial that turns into business costs you nothing extra.

The trial comes out of the sealed lot we would later ship you, not from a lookalike bag. That is the entire point of sending it.

Kenya has two crops, so there are two booking windows. Main crop is picked October to December, dried and milled through November to January, and starts shipping in January. The fly crop is picked April to June and ships from July.

Main-crop samples go out in December and January, and the good named lots are spoken for by February. If you want a specific cooperative rather than whatever is left on the list, book in January. For fly crop, book in May.

If your blend needs the same profile all year, we reserve tonnage across both crops on a season contract and release it against call-offs. It is the only reliable way to hold a blend component steady through a Kenyan crop year — the auction in April looks nothing like the auction in January.

All three — your choice. The base quote is FOB Mombasa: coffee milled, graded, bagged, documented and loaded on board. CFR adds the ocean freight to Novorossiysk or St Petersburg. CIF adds marine insurance, written at the customary 110 % of invoice value.

We quote in USD per kilo of green on net shipped weight, and we break the quote into FOB, freight, insurance and charges as separate lines. You can see exactly what the logistics costs and put your own forwarder against it if theirs is cheaper. There is no margin hidden in the freight line.

DAP to a Russian warehouse we quote case by case. Customs clearance and the inland leg depend on your import setup and your broker, and most buyers run that side better than we could from Nairobi.

Four things, roughly in order of weight. The Nairobi Coffee Exchange auction, which runs weekly through the season and sets the ground price for Kenyan grades. The ICE “C” contract, which the differential is quoted against. Grade and screen — AA over AB is normally 15–25 %. And the cup: an 86+ lot from a named wet mill trades in a different market from a clean commercial 83.

Then the smaller levers — ocean freight and bunker surcharges, the shilling against the dollar, certification premiums, and how far ahead you book. A lot contracted in January against the main crop is materially cheaper than the same lot chased in April.

Quotes are firm for 7 days. After that we re-quote, because the auction will have moved and we would rather re-price than quietly downgrade the lot.

Up to 1,000 kg: 100 % T/T in advance, or 50 % on contract and 50 % against the scanned bill of lading once we have traded before.

From 1,000 kg to container volumes: 30 % T/T deposit on signature, 70 % against the scanned B/L and the full document set. Originals go by courier as soon as the balance clears.

From 5 t we also work on an irrevocable letter of credit at sight, payable in Nairobi and confirmed by a first-class bank. L/C is the normal route for a first container with a new counterparty — it protects both sides — and we pay our own half of the bank charges.

Samples and trial lots are prepaid. Everything is invoiced in USD; we do not price in KES or RUB, because neither of us wants to carry that risk across a sixty-day transit.

Contract and deposit to loaded on board in Mombasa: 10–14 days if the lot is already milled and in the warehouse. If it is still in parchment, add the milling and conditioning window — we will tell you which it is before you sign.

Sea leg: 25–32 days Mombasa to Novorossiysk, 35–45 days to St Petersburg — the gap is routing and the number of transhipments. Add 5–10 days for discharge and customs clearance, then 3–5 days by road to Moscow; the Urals and Siberia go by rail and take longer.

Plan on 45–60 days order to warehouse via Novorossiysk and 55–75 days via St Petersburg. Air freight collapses that to 7–10 days, but the economics only work up to about 30 kg.

You get a written update at three points — lot sealed, container loaded, B/L issued — plus the vessel and booking reference. You should never have to ask us where your coffee is.

Standard packing is a 60 kg jute bag with a GrainPro liner inside. The liner is what holds moisture and water activity at the values we measured in Nairobi, through the equator and through a Russian winter — jute alone will not do it.

We also pack 30 kg and 15 kg bags to order. Small bags cost more per kilo — more liners, more labour, more pallet space — but they save a great deal of decanting if your roastery works in 15 kg batches.

A 20′ container takes 320 bags of 60 kg loose-stowed, so 19.2 t. Palletised stow costs about 15 % of that bag count but unloads with a forklift instead of a crew; the exact figure goes on the packing list before loading.

Every bag is stencilled with the lot number, grade, crop year, net weight and the ICO mark, so a bag on your floor can still be traced back to a wet mill in Nyeri.

The standard set travels with every container: commercial invoice, packing list, certificate of origin, phytosanitary certificate from KEPHIS, the ICO certificate of origin and marks, bill of lading, the Coffee Directorate weight and quality certificate, and the lot's cupping sheet with its moisture and water activity readings. Under CIF, the marine insurance certificate goes with it.

On request we add a fumigation certificate and a certificate of analysis covering ochratoxin A, moisture and pesticide residues. Some Russian importers want them in the customs file and some do not — tell us at contract stage, because a few of them cannot be issued retrospectively.

Scans go out the day the B/L is issued. Originals follow by courier, normally 4–6 days to Moscow. We keep a complete set on file for 7 years, so a re-issue is a phone call rather than a problem.

Traceability first, because it is the part we can promise on every single lot: cooperative or estate, wet mill, region, altitude, variety, harvest date and milling date, printed on the lot passport that ships with the coffee. Ask us about LOT KE-25/NY-0147 and we can name the wet mill in Nyeri it came off and the week it was picked.

Certification is lot by lot, not company-wide. We have Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade lots from several of the cooperatives we buy through, normally at a premium of USD 0.10–0.30 per lb over the conventional price. Certified organic is genuinely scarce in Kenya and we will not pretend otherwise — where it exists the volumes are small and booked early.

We also collect GPS polygons for the plots behind our main-crop lots. That work started as EU deforestation-regulation compliance, but it is useful to any buyer: it is the difference between saying a coffee is traceable and being able to show where it grew.

We keep a sealed pre-shipment sample of every lot, drawn from the bagged coffee rather than from the offer. If your arrival sample does not match ours, that is our problem to fix, and the retained sample is what we both argue from.

Contracts are written on European Contract for Coffee terms. Quality claims are raised within 14 days of discharge, on an arrival sample drawn to the same standard. If the cup is more than 1.0 SCA point off the sample you approved, or moisture reads above 12.5 %, or the defect count exceeds the contract, you have a claim.

The remedies are the usual three: a price allowance against the invoice, replacement out of the next shipment, or return of the lot at our cost. We would far rather settle it directly, and in practice that is what happens. Where we genuinely cannot agree, quality arbitration goes to the European coffee trade arbitration in Hamburg and both of us live with the finding.

One thing worth saying plainly: a lot that fails our own pre-shipment cupping never leaves Mombasa. Claims should be rare, and they are — but the mechanism exists because the sea is long.

15–20 °C, 50–60 % relative humidity, off the floor on pallets, away from anything aromatic. Green coffee takes up the smell of spices, cleaning chemicals and diesel, and it does not give them back.

Stored like that in the GrainPro it arrived in, a Kenyan lot cups at its best for 3–6 months from arrival and stays commercially good for around 12 months. After that it flattens — acidity goes first, then sweetness — and by 14–18 months you are roasting past crop and your customers will taste it.

Two practical points. Do not open the liner until you are working through the bag: once it is open the coffee equilibrates to your warehouse, not to the water activity of 0.55 we shipped it at. And rotate strictly by lot number — losing a good lot at the back of the rack is the most common way an expensive coffee gets wasted.

Commercial questions — price, availability, samples, contracts — go to info@kenyacoffee.co.ke, or to our Russian number +7 929 640 11 62, which takes calls and WhatsApp through Moscow working hours. We answer within one working day, and when the answer is “that lot is gone”, we say that instead of offering you something else.

Documents, shipping and everything after the container is booked are handled by the export office in Nairobi on +254 700 000 000. Timezones are not an issue: Kenya runs UTC+3, the same clock as Moscow.

If you already know what you want, the price-list request form is the fastest route in. Tell us the grade, the volume and the port, and you will have a firm quote and a sample offer back the same or the next working day.