About Us

Welcome to Just Us!

Just Us! is Canada’s first Fair Trade coffee roaster, founded in 1995. It is built on the three pillars of quality products, social and environmental responsibility. We are proud to be a worker owned cooperative. Our mission is “People and the planet before profits.” We are primarily a wholesale coffee roaster, but also carry tea, sugar and chocolate products – all Fair Trade and organic.

Satisfaction is guaranteed. If you are not completely happy with your Just Us! products, we will replace or refund the full price. We also guarantee freshness. Our coffees are roasted to order and our state of the art packaging ensures maximum freshness is maintained.

Fair Trade and Organic coffee, roasted and shipped to you the same day.

It doesn't get any fresher!  

 “Just Us!” was the first name that came up. It seemed to fit. It was a play on the word “justice” which we liked. It also captured the notion that we were just a small group of people who were going to try, against all odds, to make a difference in the way coffee and other products were produced and traded.

Our Story – Getting Started

The story of how Just Us! got started is rather wild and wonderful. Unable to get any information on Fair Trade in Canada, Jeff jumped on a plane to Mexico in December, 1995. He ended up in Chiapas which was in the middle of a civil war which was being fought over who should profit from coffee production.

Traditionally, indigenous communities in Latin America were given the “worst” lands, high in the mountains. As fate would have it, these ended up being the best places to grow good organic coffee. They had begun in the 1970’s to form cooperatives with the help of church development workers and were increasingly able to process and export their own coffee without depending on the agents for the big coffee companies (called “coyotes”) who for generations had taken advantage of them. Now they were fighting it out. The government and the U.S. sided with the “coyotes” while BIG COFFEE tried to eliminate the small coffee farmers, whom they labelled as 'rebels' and  even 'communists', and who were trying desperately to improve their lives.

Jeff managed to get through the military road blocks and past all the huge trees cut down by the Zapatista rebels to block the movement of the army. He travelled far up into the mountains to the coffee growing areas. There, he was able to see first hand the pride that the coffee farmers took in growing their coffee organically and the empowerment and dignity they derived from being members of a co-op. They said Fair Trade was the first thing that had given them real hope for a better future.

Jeff came home with “good news” and “bad news”. The good news was he had found a great Fair Trade co-op that would be thrilled to sell their coffee to Canada but the “bad news” was that he and Debbie would have to put their house up as security to finance a minimum shipment of 10 tons of coffee without having a single customer.

They didn’t really lose much sleep over the decision. They had such a strong belief in the combination of high quality shade grown coffee and Fair Trade – that they plunged ahead and Just Us! has never looked back.