Brooke McDonnell, Co-Founder of Equator Coffees, on her first trip to origin in Guatemala
This October, we’re celebrating Fair Trade Month by handing the mic to Brooke McDonnell, Co-Founder of long-standing Fair Trade brand partner Equator Coffees.
In 1999, Equator Coffees became California’s first Fair Trade Certified™ coffee roaster. More than 25 years later, Co-Founder Brooke McDonnell is still buying with the same conviction that took root on a visit to a coffee farm in Guatemala. In the piece below, she reflects on what led Equator to Fair Trade, what the partnership actually looks like on the ground, and why it still shapes how the company buys coffee today.
Why I Believed in Fair Trade Before It Was a Label
I still remember the drive out to visit a producer on a Fair Trade Certified™ coffee farm in Guatemala for the first time. It was 1997, and I went with a romantic notion of the coffee I was roasting back home – gems from distant lands, I thought. What I found instead was a farm, a mill, and an indigenous community that connected me to something much larger than a bag of green beans.
The majority of the world’s coffee is grown by small-scale family farmers who rely on subsistence crops to support themselves and their families. Without access to broader markets, they often sell their harvested coffee cherries – unmilled – to exploitative middlemen for modest sums. Farmers who form cooperatives to share a mill and reach a broader market often find themselves under-resourced and subject to the unstable swings of speculator-driven global coffee pricing. The Fair Trade movement goes to the heart of sustainability by connecting thousands of small-scale farmers to buyers like us at Equator Coffees and establishing a price structure that clears their cost of production – allowing for a more equitable trade arrangement.
That first trip changed the way I understood our business. Helen and I had started Equator two years earlier, in 1995, roasting coffee out of a garage in Marin County with more integrity than experience and more curiosity than capital. We weren’t chasing a grand vision. We were two people who loved coffee and wanted to build something with intention.
What Fair Trade Actually Does
Coffee farmers and farmworkers are among the lowest-paid people in the world. Equator doesn’t own most of the farms we buy from — Helen and I are co-owners of our own farm, Finca Sophia, in Panama, but the large majority of our coffee comes from producers we don’t control. That’s exactly why Fair Trade matters to us operationally, not just philosophically: it’s one of the few mechanisms that lets us guarantee a tangible benefit to workers even when we’re not the ones signing their paychecks.
For every Fair Trade Certified coffee we buy, we pay a premium that goes directly to the producers — and they decide how to spend it. That decision is made by a democratically elected committee of community members and farm workers, not by us and not by the farm owner. It’s not a top-down program. Workers have used those funds for healthcare programs, farm equipment, infrastructure, and education.
The Equator Coffees team in Guatemala
In 2025, through our partnership with Fair Trade, our purchases from Kayon Mountain Coffee Farm directly contributed to a community-led project that built two schools for the community: Sewala Birbirsa Meskala Primary School and Taro Mansity Primary School. This investment responded to a real need that was identified directly by the community – primary education. Previously, many children traveled long distances to the nearest school, creating barriers to regular attendance and learning.
It is not hard to do the right thing in business if you have a modicum of awareness. That’s something I’ve believed since our earliest years, when we built medical coverage and profit-sharing into our model even during the leanest years. Fair Trade was simply the version of that belief that we could extend beyond our own four walls, to the farms and cooperatives thousands of miles away.
Helen Russell and Brooke McDonnell, Co-Founders of Equator Coffees
Over Three Decades In
We’ve grown alongside some of the same producer partners for decades.
Relationships like these don’t happen because of a certification sticker. They happen because Fair Trade gave us a shared framework and a shared language for what a responsible trading relationship looks like, and then we built real trust on top of that foundation, one harvest at a time.
I’ve since passed most of the day-to-day operating decisions at Equator to a new generation of leaders, and one of the things I’m proudest of is that Fair Trade isn’t a legacy policy they inherited and left alone; it’s still core to how we buy coffee today. 2025 marked our most impactful Fair Trade year yet, generating more than $127,000 in premiums for the farmers in our supply chain to invest in the projects and solutions that matter most to their communities.
Why This Still Matters
I think about that first trip to Guatemala often; the way it collapsed the distance between “the coffee I roast” and “the people who grow it.” Fair Trade doesn’t erase every inequity in this industry. But it is a real, measurable way to put money and decision-making power directly into the hands of the people who need it most, and to do it in a way that respects their agency rather than assuming we know best from thousands of miles away.
Over thirty years into this business, that’s still the whole point, as far as I’m concerned. Coffee should taste good. But it should also mean something for the person who grew it. Fair Trade is one way we make sure it does.