Australia's Coffee Transparency Problem

What the products actually disclose

• 52.9% list the origin country. That's the baseline — and even that's not universal.
• 50.1% name the processing method (washed, natural, honey, anaerobic).
• 63.2% include tasting notes.
• 39.2% name the farm or producer.
• 40.2% list the coffee variety (Gesha, Bourbon, Catuai, etc.).
• 28.5% include altitude data.

What “specialty” actually means in practice

The specialty coffee industry positions itself as the transparent alternative to commodity coffee. But the data suggests most products don't back that promise with information. When 60.8% of products don't name the farm and 49.9% don't list the processing method, “specialty” becomes a price point, not a standard of disclosure.

The full breakdown

Here's the field-by-field view across all 12,779 products:

The roasters who show their work

Not every roaster is opaque. Among the 836 roasters in our dataset, a handful stand out for consistently disclosing farm names, varieties, altitude, and processing on their product pages. These roasters treat transparency as a feature, not an afterthought.