Cafe Frei Tópark - Cafe Frei Tópark

Cafe Frei’s core philosophy is to try to eliminate the middlemen wherever we can. We strive to be more affordable, therefore we don’t make our customers pay the profit of foreign and Hungarian middlemen. We buy most of our raw materials directly from producers, in Hungary as well as abroad. This is what we mean by Trading With Conscience.

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“There are three ways to buy coffee in Africa, or from Africa: directly from the grower, on the plantations, which requires a lot of energy, conveniently, from so-called Cooperatives, which are the wholesale associations of farmers, or here in Europe, from buyers who use high margins and never set foot in a plantation in Africa. It's like buying wine in Hungary. You can buy it directly from the vine-grower at a lower price than the one traders offer in the shops. Vine-growers also make a better deal with us, as we share what would be the reseller's margin, so they are paid more compared to selling to the traders.“

Tamás Frei

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For Cafe Frei, Trading with Conscience means more than Fair Trade which only covers the relationship between the first world and the products of the third world. This is because we want to be fair not only to the third world, but also to our own customers, and not to burden them with the profits of the middlemen.

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When explaining our business policy, this is the reason why we use the expression “Trading with Conscience” and not “Fair Trade”.