A Coffee Shop in Mariatorget, 2009

Joanna Alm opened a coffee shop near Mariatorget — one of Stockholm's most beloved neighbourhood squares — in 2009. Sweden's coffee scene at that point was not yet the globally celebrated specialty hub it has since become. Filter coffee was considered cheap and refillable; the language of terroir, processing, and direct trade was largely confined to a small circle of professionals who had been travelling to Oslo, London, and Copenhagen and returning with new ideas. Joanna was one of them, having worked as a barista in Oslo and competed at championships that exposed her to the ideas driving the Nordic specialty revolution.

She began roasting in 2010 — on a small one-pound roaster in the back of the café. The scale was minimal but the intention was absolute: every coffee would be roasted to express its origin as cleanly and completely as possible. "Life is too short for bad coffee," Drop's maxim, is not a slogan. It is a literal operational principle that has driven every sourcing decision, every roast development, and every transparency report the company has produced in fifteen years.

Joanna Alm: Champion, Author, Pioneer

Joanna Alm Leighton is one of the most decorated roasters in European specialty coffee history. She is a three-time Swedish Coffee Roasting Champion — winning in 2014, 2015, and 2018 — and placed second at the World Coffee Roasting Championship. She has also won Swedish titles in Barista (2011, 2013, 2015, 2018), Latte Art (2013, 2014), and Brewers Cup (2013, 2014) competitions. The breadth of her competition success reflects the breadth of her knowledge: she understands specialty coffee from cherry to cup, from sourcing to extraction, better than almost anyone in the industry.

In addition to competition, she authored Manifest För Bättre Kaffe (Manifest for Better Coffee) — a book that articulates the Drop Coffee philosophy in full and serves as a reference for specialty coffee professionals across Scandinavia. The book's existence is characteristic of Joanna's approach: not just roasting excellent coffee but building the knowledge infrastructure that allows others to understand and appreciate it.

Co-owner Stephen Leighton — who also co-owns 3FE in Dublin and founded Hasbean in the UK — brought his own extensive sourcing experience to the partnership when he and Joanna became business partners in 2015. They are now married and run Drop together from Stockholm. Stephen's prior decade of relationship-building with producers across Central America, Africa, and Asia extended Drop's sourcing network and gave the company access to relationships that a Stockholm-only operation would have taken years to develop independently.

The 2015 Decision: Only Buy From Producers You Know Personally

In 2015, Joanna made the sourcing decision that defines Drop Coffee's identity more than any other: she would buy green coffee only from producers whom Drop had personally visited. This was not a gradual evolution. It was a deliberate cut — one that immediately reduced Drop's origin portfolio by more than half, as every relationship that had been built through importers and brokers rather than through in-person farm visits was discontinued.

"We are looking at the cup profile — for coffees that score over 87 — and for people who are doing incredible work in sustainability," she has explained. The double criterion — cup quality and verified sustainable practice — means that Drop's sourcing list is, by design, short. They source from Bolivia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ethiopia, and Kenya. Every producer on that list has been visited. Many of the partnerships are over a decade old.

One of these long-standing relationships is with Ernesto Menéndez's Finca Los Andes in El Salvador — the same farm featured in Blog #93 at BrewFusion. Drop Coffee's description of Los Andes is characteristic of their approach: "A light but well-balanced coffee in the El Salvador style. Lime juice and red apples, with an aftertaste of lime peel. Light and juicy."

FOB Price Transparency: Radical Honesty

Drop publishes the FOB (Free On Board) price paid for every green coffee on every product page. FOB price is the price paid at the origin country's port of export — after the farmer, the cooperative, and the exporter have been paid, before shipping, import duties, and roaster margin are added. It is the most meaningful single number for understanding how much of a coffee's value reaches the producing country.

Publishing these numbers is unusual. Most roasters, even highly transparent ones, do not disclose what they pay for green coffee because it reveals their margin structure to competitors and exposes the wide variation in what different buyers pay for the same or similar coffees. Drop publishes them anyway, along with annual sustainability reports, because they believe that informed consumers are the most powerful force for improving industry-wide sourcing standards.

"We only purchase fully transparent coffee from single farms and cooperatives. All the coffees we source have an SCA cupping score of 86 or higher and we always publish the FOB prices paid." — Drop Coffee Roasters