When talking about coffee growing companies, there is actually a potential alternative to just a single corporation, and that’s with cooperatives. That is, when a large group of individual coffee growers band together to form a sort of unified collective. The benefits of this is that there’s a certain safety net that each member has to fall back on, as profits are shared throughout the community. This, of course, comes at the cost of a certain amount of reduced freedom, as everyone in the cooperative has to more or less be in agreement for any large decisions.

These cooperatives often form a sort of community around them when they start, and through the cooperatives, they allow the community to thrive in a number of ways. They provide things like schools, senior centers, and even jobs for a large number of the population.