Coffee Subscription Services: A Cozy way to Buy Coffee (Part 1)

By Perry Luckett, CoffeeMan1

Our son Sean recently described the coffee service he’s subscribed to—Trade Coffee, also known as drinktrade.com—as a convenient way to experience different coffee brands and roasts without leaving his Denver loft. It sounded intriguing, so I’ve surveyed the field in the next three blog posts (with some reliance on other sources) to see how the best services work.

Today, in Part 1, I’ll cover four large businesses with the broadest choices of coffee types, origins, and roasts: Trade Coffee, MistoBox, Atlas Coffee Club, and Blue Bottle. In Part 2 I’ll look at individual heritage roasters that offer subscriptions for their own branded coffees. In Part 3 I’ll cover a few special-interest niches, such as a service that donates part of its profits to animal shelters, another that offers $1 per bag to women’s causes, a third that sources all of its beans from female Kenyan and Rwandan farmers, and yet another that invests in education and food security in farming communities who supply their coffees.

How do coffee services cozy up to your needs?

A staple of these services is the “personal-profile questionnaire,” which helps match your tastes to the service’s coffees. For example, Trade Coffee’s cozy little series of questions does a great job of determining the roaster partners who are most likely to satisfy you.

To find your ideal bean, you’ll run through Trade’s quiz, which first asks about your preferred coffee-making equipment—Chemex, AeroPress, French Press, coffee maker, etc. (You can change this selection if you move, say, from Chemex pour over to French press or espresso machine.) Then, it reviews your milk preference (or non-dairy option), whether or not you want flavored beans, and your choice of roast level: light, medium, or dark. [SG] When I took this questionnaire, I deferred to Trade’s selections based on my willingness to try something different “but not too crazy” and was able to distinguish flavor notes such as citrus and earthiness. Though not as detailed as Blue Bottle’s questionnaire (see below), Trade Coffee still could offer coffee selections with similar character.

MistoBox is similar to Trade in that the site curates hundreds of varieties of quality coffees from more than 50 artisan roasters around the US. As with Trade Coffee, to narrow down those 590 options, you’ll complete a quiz on your coffee preferences. Their sign-up quiz is interesting and straightforward. A few screens ask you for

• the types of brew you enjoy, such as drip, French press, or pour over

• the kinds of flavors you’re looking for in your coffee

• which of the three price tiers you’re interested in

• how often you want it delivered (every 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks)

The site then collects your address and payment information before moving to your recommended list of coffees for selection. [HG]

Atlas Coffee Club selects great single-origin beans from all over the world, roasts them in Austin, Texas, and gets them to your door shortly afterward. They don’t use a detailed questionnaire to get you started. Instead, you simply click on the

• number of bags you want delivered each period

• frequency—every two weeks or every four weeks

• type of roast—light to medium, medium to dark, or all roast types

• grind—whole bean or ground

Then, you sit tight as your beans are roasted to order before being shipped to your doorstep. Atlas emphasizes sampling a wide variety of coffees from different parts of the globe in order to refine your choices gradually. So they don’t need a detailed questionnaire to match coffee drinkers with more advanced tastes.

Typical packaging with informative labels. Courtesy of Cottonbro and Pexels.com.

You can start making choices for Blue Bottle Coffee’s subscription at the top of their internet home page. A first cut is whether you prefer single-origin coffee, Blue Bottle’s signature blends, or coffee custom-prepared for espresso. But they also use a detailed 10-question survey to pair you specifically with coffee you'll love. I’ll share a bit more about their questions to show how subscription services can effectively cover your coffee tastes.

One tricky (but fun) part of their questionnaire is defining terms, such as when they ask whether your favorite coffee is delicate, juicy, syrupy, or heavy. (I’m guessing this is just a novel way of checking to see whether you enjoy light, medium, or dark roasts, respectively.) The questionnaire also checks the “brightness” of your favorite java on a sliding scale from "less bright” to “very bright.” The first time I ran across this term, I had to look up what it means. Turns out, brightness helps describe a particular coffee’s flavor: simply the nutty, fruity, citrusy, or chocolatey tastes that spark across the taste buds as you sip. In general brighter coffees also tend to be more acidic, so if your system reacts negatively to acid in coffee, you may want to select less bright.

The questionnaire asks about more than coffee and whether you drink it black or with cream and sugar. For example, it includes questions about your preferred herbs and spices, ranging from cinnamon and chili to ginger and parsley. How about the type of chocolate you like: dark, milk, white, or none. And even your salad-dressing preferences, although I was a bit disappointed that blue cheese didn’t appear among the choices. If you’re wondering what chocolate and salad dressing have to do with coffee selection, you’re probably not alone. I admit I found a few of the questions strange, but subscribers are happy with the results.

After I completed Blue Bottle’s questionnaire, they recommended I start with two coffees: Bella Donovan and Three Africas. The former has cozy raspberry, chocolate, and molasses flavor notes, whereas the latter carries flavors of golden raisin, winey blueberry, and lemon zest. Can you tell how I answered some of the questions? Right: juicy, more bright, cinnamon and ginger, dark chocolate, and ranch dressing. So the company’s choices for me appear to be right on target!

How does the subscription service work?

If we use Trade Coffee as a first example, they’ll confirm your order with the selected roasters, who will then roast your selected beans and ship them directly to you for best freshness. If you want to receive ground coffee instead of whole beans, Trade will arrange that too, although I recommend whole beans and grinding at home for the best experience. And you can rest easy knowing the company works with roasters who pay farmers a fair price for their beans.

Because Trade doesn’t roast its own beans, you’re not limited to a small inventory. Instead, they make it easy for you to get beans from boutique roasters around the U.S. Typically, they have more than 450 possible curated blends or single-origin coffees from which to choose, so you’ll be glad to have a questionnaire on file that aligns the field to their particular tastes. If you prefer “unleaded” over caffeinated coffee, Trade also has a good selection of delicious decafs—such as Common Voice’s Perennial, Madcap Coffee’s Placebo Decaf, or Portrait’s Columbia Valle de Cauca—from small roasters around the US.

A few of Trade’s 450+ selections. Courtesy Trade Coffee, 2021.

Flexibility and freshness are Trade’s two towers of service to you. Their plan enables you to adjust your delivery dates, swap coffees from a shipment’s recommended pick, or cancel your subscription at any time. Meanwhile, you’ll receive coffees roasted to order and delivered at peak freshness on your schedule. You’ll also appreciate having Trade’s in-house coffee expert handpicking and tasting coffees before putting them in your selection queue.

As with Trade, MistoBox emphasizes direct trade coffee—coffee with as short a supply chain as possible so few (or no) middlemen are between growers and roasters. Of course, roasters vary on what they mean by direct trade, so levels of transparency, sustainability, and even ethics can also vary. That’s where a service like MistoBox can be especially helpful by setting higher standards and choosing roasters such as Olympia Coffee and Onyx Coffee, both of which publish annual reports detailing how much they pay farmers for their beans. [LJ]

A special feature of the MistoBox subscription is the personal curator they assign to each customer, so you can continue to ask questions and refine your tastes as you go. Knowledge is important to your ability to get a perfect cup of artisan coffee. Buying great coffee beans gets you only part of the way there. You need information on brewing methods and how to prepare different kinds of coffees depending on origin, roast types, and so on. Your coffee curator will ask you about the kinds of brew you like—such as pour over, drip, French press, or espresso—to help choose a coffee that matches your preferences.

Mistobox starter box sampler plus typical subscription bag from Verve Roasters. Courtesy mistobox.com.

If initial choices seem challenging, you can start by getting Mistobox’s discovery box, which includes a few samples to help you narrow your preferences. After that, they roast each batch of coffee to order based on what they know you like, pack it up in their cozy subscription boxes, and then ship those boxes to you quickly. Of course, you can change frequency or pause your subscription at any time—and with their recent addition of the downloadable skill for Alexa, you can check or change your delivery by voice command. [HG]

Each bag is roasted to order, and arrives with either whole beans or ground coffee for drip brewing. One way to reduce your cost is to choose more than one bag per order and share coffee with nearby friends or workmates who pay you a share of the subscription price.

Atlas Coffee Club is an excellent choice if you’re curious about trying new coffee and not too focused on brew methods and results. The information Atlas puts in each box focuses more on sources than on flavor details, thus putting more geographical variety into your coffee drinking. Or, as Atlas says on their website, “think of us as your coffee tour guides, sending you amazing and exotic coffees you can't find anywhere online or on the shelf.” They also point out their fair practices concerning coffee growers: “We pay well above market prices for the beans, helping to ensure ethically sustainable farming practices and the highest quality coffee year after year.” For example, they’re presently featuring

• coffees from the cozy Tarrazu region of Costa Rica

• Cerrado coffee from Brazil

• Sumatra from Indonesia

• fruity and floral coffees from the Sidamo region of Ethiopia

Atlas Coffee Club shows emphasis on geographical variety in their subscription offerings. Courtesy atlascoffeeclub.com

Every two or four weeks, Atlas ships out a bag of single-origin beans from a different country, each with a little card about the growing region and a few brewing tips. [SG]

Unlike Trade Coffee and Mistobox, Atlas roasts these beans itself in Austin, Texas, and gets them to your door shortly afterward. The subscription options are also simpler than Trade. You can choose between light-to-medium or medium-to-dark roasts—or if you feel like exploring, choose both. Because Atlas is more exploratory in its approach to coffee selection, you may infrequently receive a roast you’re not as fond of. So if you're looking for a subscription that exactly matches your tastes, this may not be the best choice. Still, each order arrives on time and nicely packaged, complete with some notes about the country of origin. [LJ]

Blue Bottle Coffee Company was founded in 2002 and, through several rounds of venture-capital financing, has expanded to become an international company. [Swiss giant Nestlé S.A. owns a majority stake (68%) in Blue Bottle as of 2017, apparently for an approximate price of $500 million.] They now have more than 99 retail stores in the U.S., Japan, Korea, and China plus an established coffee-subscription service.

The distinctive Blue Bottle package. Courtesy Blue Bottle.com.

Blue Bottle’s name derives from a historic shop called The Blue Bottle—established in Vienna, Austria, in 1683. Some 319 years later, the modern founder began his Blue Bottle in Oakland, California, with the “simple purpose of getting great coffee to everyone who asks for it.” Rather than trying to create the founder’s vision in my words, let’s listen in to his description on bluebottlecoffee.com:

“The first method of selling coffee we tried was enjoyable but short-lived:

We would call our customers, have a conversation about what kind of coffee they liked, and how much they tended to drink, and, if it was a good conversation, we would take their credit card number and make them a promise: to drive to their homes once a week and drop coffee on their doorstep.

This turned out to be a fraught business model for a number of reasons—and besides, there is only so much coffee you can pack into your Peugeot 505 wagon—but it is still, more or less, what we are trying to do.

We work directly with farmers around the world to source the most delicious and sustainable coffees we can find. Then, we roast them to our exacting flavor standards, and serve them to you at peak deliciousness, hopefully alongside a good conversation and some friendly advice. We think it’s a privilege to deliver the coffees we love, by farmers we admire, into your hands or onto your doorstep.” [BBC]

Blue Bottle is still one of the best subscriptions available, though its coffee selection isn’t as extensive as some of the newcomers and its prices are a bit higher. Where Blue Bottle stands out is freshness: even in the present Covid-19 pandemic era, the company promises to ship your coffee within 48 hours of roasting.

What prices and order frequency are typical for coffee subscriptions?

Most coffee subscription services ask you to define a range of coffee prices per bag that you prefer. For example, Trade Coffee has choices from the cozy $10.17-$14.75 range to premium beans at $15-$22 a bag. A common price is $12 for a 12-ounce bag. You can get deliveries every 1, 2, 3, 4, or 6 weeks. Note: As of December 2021 they’re offering $25 off your first order and deep discounts on gift sets.

Like several other coffee subscription services, MistoBox offers you a deal to get started: $25 off on your first order. Their typical subscription is for one 12-ounce bag of coffee every two weeks, with prices starting at $10.16/bag. You can get discounts from MistoBox if you sign up for larger amounts of coffee at the start. For example, if you commit to a dozen bags in advance, you receive 15% off.

Atlas Coffee Club is offering a first bag free as of December 2021. Their coffee of the month club is the most affordable subscription available—a monthly half bag (6 ounces), which makes about 15 cups of coffee, is $9. More typically, customers select the 12-ounce bag at $14, with deliveries every 2 or 4 weeks.

For their US subscriptions, Blue Bottle offers four options: half bag (6oz), standard bag (12oz), double bag (24oz), and triple bag (36oz). For international subscriptions, they offer half bag (6oz) and standard bag (12oz) sizes. Subscriptions cost $22 for a 12-ounce bag (customers’ most common choice) and $13 for a 6-ounce bag. Double bags (24 oz.) are $38, and triple bags (36 oz.) are $52. You can receive deliveries every 1, 2, 3, or 4 weeks. You get significant discounts for double and triple bags (three separate bags would cost $66, for example). So some customers join up to receive a larger bag at one location and split the coffee after it arrives. [BBC]

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Resources

“Blue Bottle Coffee,” Wikipedia.com, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Bottle_Coffee, January 1, 2022. [Wiki]

“Five best coffee subscriptions 2021,” Favy.com, December 18, 2021. [Favy]

“The Mistobox Coffee Review,” HomeGrounds.com, https://www.homegrounds.co/mistobox-review/, 2021.  [HG]

Scott Gilbertson, The Best Coffee Subscription Boxes We've Tasted,  https://www.wired.com/story/best-coffee-subscriptions/, Nov. 5, 2020. [SG]

Matt Giovanisci, “19 Best Coffee Subscription Boxes,” Roasty Coffee, https://bit.ly/3FBZnEG, November 15, 2021. [MG] Note: Quick summaries with links to fuller reviews

Lauren Joseph, “The Best Coffee Subscriptions to Buy Online Right Now,” https://www.bonappetit.com/story/best-coffee-subscriptions, Sep 24, 2021.  [LJ]

“Our Story,” www.bluebottlecoffee.com/our-story, 2022. [BBC]