Our story
Unchained began on a farm my father had to sell.
In 1975, my father bought a small coffee farm in La Vega, a village in Gigante, Huila. He was told to cut down his old trees and plant new, higher-yielding ones. He did. The harvests grew. The price didn't.
He never recovered the investment, and in 1979 he sold the farm. "Coffee isn't a good business," he told me.
Tolima, Colombia
A doctor's appointment, next year
Decades later, traveling through Colombia's coffee regions, I saw the same story everywhere: homes without sanitation, roads too rough to carry the harvest out, families living in the shadow of armed groups. In the mountains of Tolima, I met Olga.
One afternoon she told me she was happy: she finally had the doctor's appointment she had been waiting for. I asked when it was.
"Next year."
She pointed at the mountain across from her farm, where neighbors had cut down their coffee to grow illicit crops.
"That's the only way to make money here. But I'd rather live poor than grow plants that kill people."Olga, coffee farmer
Coffee was the only thing Olga knew how to do, and she loved it. What she couldn't accept was that people in other countries set the price of her work without ever seeing it. In the town square, buyers mixed her coffee with everyone else's and paid whatever they wanted. She didn't want her children to grow coffee; there was no future in it. Selling directly to someone in the United States? Impossible, she said. No knowledge, no capital, no connections.
It was the same wound my father carried, one generation later.
Bogotá
Six countries and a shipment that burst
My first attempt was to sell Colombian coffee directly to customers abroad. Small shipments of roasted coffee went to Saudi Arabia, China, the United States, Canada, South Korea and Russia, and it worked. Then came a bigger order: more than 500 kilos to China. The freshly roasted coffee released more gas than the bag valves could handle, and the bags burst on the plane. The customer didn't pay. I went bankrupt.
So I started smaller. I set up a coffee cart on the corner of Carrera 7 and Calle 65 in Bogotá, serving the Sunday ciclovía. It was the first time I stood face to face with the people who drink coffee, many of them visitors from abroad. They didn't just want good coffee. They wanted to know who grew it.
In 2016 I founded Koffietapp, the first version of Unchained, to connect farmers directly with coffee drinkers. It earned government mentorship, support from universities, and a place in a startup accelerator in South Korea. Before the trip, I had to pitch in São Paulo. I didn't speak English. The pitch fell apart, and we lost our place.
I wanted to quit.
New Jersey
The smell of roasting coffee in Hoboken
Instead, I decided to learn the market from the inside. After a trip to the United States for a global social-impact event, I moved here and started over, working construction. Every day I walked past a roastery in Hoboken, and the smell of roasting coffee reminded me what I was supposed to be doing. It was the middle of the pandemic. I walked in and asked for a job.
I worked as a roaster, then as a barista, then at a specialty coffee company where I finally saw the numbers.
In 2021 I started selling at the Jersey City farmers market while I kept my job. It cost me that job. Around the same time, my father died. He had followed my path in coffee since 2011. He never got to see Unchained, but he used to tell me:
"Everything big started small. Don't give up."My father
I took another barista job and kept going to the market every weekend. As a Colombian, I feel I owe this to my country and my people.
The 2026 pilot
6.7×
What our producers earned, on average, compared with the commodity price.
The farmers trusted me with their coffee.
I brought it to New Jersey, roasted it and sold it online, and every farmer was paid their share of every bag, with every number out in the open. In 2026, our producers earned an average of 6.7 times the commodity price, without raising what you pay for a bag of specialty coffee.
We didn't add anything. We took things away: the unnecessary intermediaries, and the logistical, knowledge and financial barriers that keep farmers out of markets like this one. We cover the freight, the roasting and the selling, and the farmer is paid for every bag we sell.
The next scene is yours
I once asked Olga what she would say to someone in the United States who bought her coffee. She answered:
"Thank you. You're helping me give my family a better life."Olga, coffee farmer, Tolima
The real protagonists of this story are the farmers and the people who drink their coffee. Together, they have the power to change a system that doesn't work. The hardest part for us is being known: we don't have a storefront, only this page. If this story means something to you, try our coffee, and tell someone about it.
Fabio GaitanFounder, Unchained Coffee