Falcon Coffees

Falcon Coffees buys unroasted coffee from farmers and cooperatives at origin and sells it to roasting companies. That job — financing the crop, shipping it, storing it and carrying the risk in between — is called green coffee trading, and it is the same structural role that Sucafina and ECOM play at larger scale.

Two things make Falcon worth its own note. It is British, which is unusual for a trader of its reach; its registered office is a high-street address in Lewes, East Sussex.¹ And it is not independent — it has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Westrock Coffee, the Arkansas company listed on the Nasdaq as WEST, since 2014.²³

The company on paper

The UK company register is the one primary, checkable record of this business, and it is short:

Field	Value
Registered name	FALCON COFFEES LIMITED
Company number	09033135
Incorporated	9 May 2014
Status	Active
Registered office	25 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, England, BN7 2LU
Trade classification	46370 — wholesale of coffee, tea, cocoa and spices

All of the above is from Companies House, the UK’s statutory company registry.¹ Note the incorporation date — it does not match the founding year the business itself gives. See the flag below.

Who owns it

Westrock Coffee acquired Falcon Coffees in 2014. Westrock’s own published company timeline records the year and describes the purchase in one line: “Acquires Falcon Coffees to expand traceability and sustainability into 20+ countries.”² Westrock’s annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission separately describes “coffee importing and trading through our wholly owned subsidiary Falcon Coffees Limited.”³

That relationship explains what Falcon is for inside a bigger group. Westrock describes itself as a vertically integrated coffee company — meaning it wants to own every step from the farm to the finished drink — and it says it reaches over a million people in smallholder farming households across more than twenty producing countries.² Falcon is the green-buying end of that chain: the part that stands at origin. Westrock’s timeline also records expanding operations in Malaysia in 2021, which lines up with Falcon’s Southeast Asian office.²⁴

Westrock’s own history begins in Rwanda in 2009, opens a roastery in Little Rock in 2010, acquires S&D Coffee & Tea in 2020, and lists on the Nasdaq in 2022.² Falcon sits inside all of that as the trading desk.

Where it operates

Falcon publishes offices in both consuming markets and producing countries — a footprint that tells you it buys at origin rather than just importing from other exporters.

Region	Entity	Location
United Kingdom (head office)	Falcon Coffees Ltd	Temple House, 25–26 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex
North America	—	East Cesar Chavez St, Austin, Texas
Europe	Falcon Coffees Europe	Adalbertstraße, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany
Southeast Asia	Falcon Coffees Asia Sdn. Bhd.	Teega Office Tower, Puteri Harbour, Iskandar Puteri, Johor, Malaysia
Ethiopia	Falcon Coffees Ethiopia	SNAP Plaza, Bole, Addis Ababa
Peru	Falcon Coffees Peru S.R.L.	Sector Linderos, Jaén, Cajamarca

These addresses come from Falcon’s own contact page, which is the right kind of source for them — a company is authoritative about where its own doors are.⁴ They could not be re-confirmed for this note, because falconcoffees.com returns HTTP 401 Unauthorized to this wiki’s fetcher, as it did when Nas Jaafar’s note was written.⁵ Treat the street numbers as reported rather than checked.

The Malaysian office is the one this wiki has already met from the other direction: Nas Jaafar, the Malaysian cup tasting competitor, is described by press and by the company’s own social posts as working for Falcon in Malaysia.⁵

What it says it does

Falcon’s public positioning is built on one word: transparency. Business databases summarising the company describe it as a green coffee trade house that “focuses on building transparent and ethical supply chains between partners and [a] global roaster client base,” and credit it with “helping pioneer transparent, traceable and collaborative coffee supply chains linking smallholder farmers to the end user.”⁶

Strip the marketing and the underlying claim is specific and testable: that a buyer can tell a roaster which farmers grew this, and what they were paid. That is the same argument behind Direct trade and the reason Coffee supply chain traceability became a selling point at all. The honest caveat is that all of the language above is the company describing itself, filtered through a paid database — no independent audit of Falcon’s traceability claims was found for this note.

Whether Falcon’s transparency claims are borne out in published, farmer-level price data is exactly the kind of thing this wiki cannot confirm from a company profile. See Green coffee buying for what the disclosure normally looks like when a trader does publish it.

To verify

• “Founded in 2008” versus incorporated in 2014. Business-intelligence profiles state Falcon Coffees was founded in 2008, and a further profile gives an acquisition date of 27 August 2014.⁶ But FALCON COFFEES LIMITED (09033135) was incorporated on 9 May 2014 — three and a half months before that acquisition date.¹ The ordinary explanation is that the business started trading in 2008 under a different or predecessor legal entity and the current company was incorporated in 2014 as part of the Westrock deal; the registry shows no previous company names for 09033135.¹ No source consulted actually explains the gap. Do not state 2008 as the founding date of the registered company, and do not state 2014 as the start of the business.
• Konrad Brits as founder and CEO. Search results consistently name Konrad Brits as founder and chief executive, say he spent about fifteen years with the WM Cahn / CTCS group before starting Falcon, began his coffee career in Africa, and moved to the UK in 2000; one snippet dates a directorship appointment to 31 July 2014.⁷ These all trace back through a single search pass and no officer record or interview was read at source here. Very likely true, but treated as a claim.
• How many producing countries. Falcon is described as sourcing from eighteen producing countries “from the Congo to Peru”;⁷ Westrock’s timeline says the Falcon purchase extended it into “20+ countries.”² These may be two different counts of two different things — Falcon’s origins versus Westrock’s group footprint — at two different dates. Don’t reconcile them into one number.
• Named roaster customers. One search summary states Falcon sells to “major brands like Starbucks and Stumptown.”⁷ No customer list is published by Falcon, and neither roaster was confirmed as a customer at source. Single, weak source.
• How many staff. Reported headcounts are 60 employees in one profile and 51–100 in another.⁶⁸ Both are database estimates, not a filed figure. Read it as “a medium-sized trading company,” nothing finer.
• No competition, auction or cupping record. No consulted results table from Best of Panama, Cup of Excellence, the Alliance for Coffee Excellence, the Specialty Coffee Association or the Coffee Quality Institute names Falcon Coffees as a winning bidder, and no cup score, lot price, farm altitude or processing method could be attributed to a specific Falcon lot.⁹⁶ Absence from published tables is not proof it has never bought at auction — buyer lists are patchy — but nothing specific can be stated.

Why a subsidiary trader is worth reading about

The interesting fact about Falcon is the ownership, not the trading. A roaster buying a “transparent, traceable” lot from a Lewes trading house is, in corporate terms, buying from a Nasdaq-listed American beverage manufacturer. Neither thing cancels the other — plenty of good sourcing work happens inside large groups, and Westrock’s traceability milestones (a digitally traceable container from Rwanda in 2018, a blockchain transaction from Colombia in 2019) are the group’s own headline achievements.²

But it does change how you read the sourcing story. When the same group owns the buying desk, the mill relationships, the roastery and the ready-to-drink plant, “traceable” is a claim the group is making about itself end to end, with no independent party in the middle. That is the structural point Direct trade and Coffee supply chain both circle around, and Falcon is a clean example of it.

Related

• Sucafina · ECOM — the closest peers: larger green coffee trading groups doing the same job, and the notes to read beside this one
• Westrock Coffee — its parent since 2014, and the reason its footprint looks the way it does
• Nas Jaafar — the Malaysian competitor connected to Falcon’s Johor office
• Green coffee buying · Coffee supply chain · Direct trade · C-market · Green coffee grading — the trade Falcon sits in the middle of
• Ethiopia · Peru — origins where Falcon runs its own offices
• Specialty coffee · Premiumisation — the end of the market its positioning targets
• Best of Panama · Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Buying consortium — the auction world it is not recorded in

Official links

• Official site — Falcon Coffees — returns HTTP 401 to this machine, so the homepage could not be confirmed here
• Companies House — FALCON COFFEES LIMITED (09033135)
• Official site — Westrock Coffee (parent company)

Footnotes

1. Companies House — FALCON COFFEES LIMITED, company number 09033135 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Westrock Coffee — Who We Are: history and timeline ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

3. Search aggregate — Westrock Coffee’s acquisition of Falcon Coffees, including its SEC annual-report wording ↩ ↩²

4. Falcon Coffees — Contact page (office addresses) ↩ ↩²

5. Falcon Coffees — company site ↩ ↩²

6. PitchBook — Falcon Coffees company profile ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

7. Search aggregate — Konrad Brits and Falcon Coffees ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Prospeo — Falcon Coffees overview, address and contact ↩

9. Search aggregate — Falcon Coffees founding, headquarters and leadership ↩