Mercanta

Mercanta — almost always written Mercanta – The Coffee Hunters, after the web address it has used for decades — buys unroasted coffee from farms and cooperatives around the world and sells it to roasting companies. That in-between job is green coffee importing: financing the crop, shipping it, warehousing it, and carrying the risk until a roaster buys a bag. It is the same structural role Falcon Coffees, Sucafina and Cafe Imports play, at different sizes.

Two things make Mercanta worth its own note. It is one of the oldest continuously trading specialty importers in Britain, founded in 1996, back when “specialty coffee” was barely a business category in the UK.¹² And it is not independent: it is an ECOM company, listed by that Swiss commodity group as one of its two UK sales offices.³

The company on paper

The UK statutory register is the one primary, checkable record here, and it is short:

Field	Value
Registered name	MERCANTA LIMITED
Company number	03173568
Incorporated	15 March 1996
Status	Active
Registered office	Magna House, 2nd Floor, 18–32 London Road, Staines-upon-Thames, TW18 4BP
Trade classification	96090 — other service activities not elsewhere classified
Previous names	none recorded

All of the above is from Companies House.² The incorporation date is the useful part: 15 March 1996 matches, to the year, the founding date Mercanta gives on its own site and the start year ECOM gives for it.¹³ Two caveats sit under the table — see the flag below.

Who founded it, and who owns it

Stephen Hurst founded Mercanta in 1996, in a small office in southwest London.¹ Mercanta’s own history says so, and the trade press independently identifies him the same way — “Stephen Hurst is the founder of Mercanta, and a former Cup of Excellence board member and judge.”⁴ He is a recognisable voice in the green trade rather than a background owner; this wiki already quotes him arguing that the Cup of Excellence “is relevant in the industry, but not to the consumer” over on Green coffee auctions.⁴

Ownership is where the public picture and the company’s own picture diverge. ECOM’s coffee division lists Mercanta Ltd. (London) among its group companies, alongside Keynote Coffee in the UK, Bourbon Specialty Coffees and CarmoCoffees in Brazil, the Dorman businesses in East Africa and Condor in Colombia.³ That listing is the parent naming the subsidiary, which is about as good as this kind of source gets. Mercanta’s own About page, read directly here, never mentions ECOM at all — it tells the story as one founder and a growing team.¹

Neither is untrue. A roaster buying from Mercanta is dealing with a small London sourcing desk with its own relationships and its own buying decisions; that desk sits inside one of the largest coffee merchants and millers on earth. The ECOM note makes the same point from the other end, and it is the same caveat Falcon Coffees carries with respect to Westrock Coffee: read a trader’s offering page knowing whose balance sheet is behind it.

Where it operates

Mercanta’s own site dates each office, which is unusually specific for a trading company and traces the shape of specialty coffee’s own expansion:⁵

	Office	Opened
1	London (head office)	1996
2	Seattle	2006
3	Singapore	2013
4	Dubai	2018
5	Glasgow	2019
6	Berlin	2021

The pattern reads as a US specialty boom in the mid-2000s, an Asian one a decade later, and a European build-out after that. Mercanta also reports sourcing offices at origin in Guatemala, which matters more than it sounds: an importer with staff living in a producing country is buying lots, not just receiving them.¹

The company describes itself as “importers of specialty coffee, supplying roasters across the globe with the world’s finest green Arabica coffee,” working under the tagline “Sourced Locally, Distributed Globally Since 1996.”¹⁵ Its own summary of scale: a supply chain reaching over 20 producing countries, fully traceable coffees held in its warehouses, and delivery to more than 50 countries worldwide.¹⁵ The public origin list runs from Bolivia and Brazil through Ethiopia, Kenya and Panama to Vietnam.⁶

Its team, in its own words, is “over 25 employees of 13 different nationalities, located in 7 cities across 3 continents.”¹ That is a small company — smaller than most roasters assume of an importer with this reach — and it is the clearest sign that the group behind it supplies the heavy infrastructure.

What it sells besides coffee

Mercanta has always paired trading with teaching, and ECOM credits it with founding two side ventures:³

• the London School of Coffee, a professional training school;
• Mercanta Micro, its small-lot arm for buyers who cannot take a full container.

Its own service list adds cuppings and sampling, monthly market reports, and traceability and transparency programmes to the green-buying core.⁵ Business databases summarise the same three-part offer as quality assessment, education, and managing coffee portfolios on behalf of small roastery buyers.⁷

That combination — sell the coffee, teach the buyer how to judge it, publish the market commentary they read — is common among specialty importers and worth naming plainly. See Cupping and Coffee scoring for the judging language it is all conducted in, and Green coffee buying for the channel structure.

Competition record

Mercanta is an active bidder in the green competition circuit rather than a producer, so it appears in results tables as a buyer.

The one specific claim it makes is that Mercanta has purchased five number-one winning lots at Cup of Excellence — from Costa Rica, Colombia, El Salvador and Nicaragua.⁸ Winning the national number one at Cup of Excellence is the highest placement available in that competition, so five of them across four countries is a substantial buying record — but the claim is Mercanta’s own and comes without the details that would let anyone check it.

To verify

• The five Cup of Excellence number-one lots. The figure comes from a single post on Mercanta’s own website celebrating Cup of Excellence’s nineteenth birthday, and it gives no years, no farm names, no cupping scores and no hammer prices — confirmed by reading the post directly.⁸ Verifying it would mean matching buyer names against the Alliance for Coffee Excellence auction archives country by country and year by year, which was not done here. Treat “five number-one lots from four countries” as the company’s account of itself, not an audited record. No score, altitude, processing method or price can be attached to any specific Mercanta lot from the sources consulted.
• The registered company versus the trading business. MERCANTA LIMITED (03173568) was incorporated on 15 March 1996, which matches the founding year exactly, and no previous company name is recorded.² But its registered office is a company-services address in Staines-upon-Thames, not a coffee address, and its trade classification is the catch-all 96090 “other service activities” rather than the coffee wholesale code Falcon Coffees files under.² Both are ordinary for a subsidiary whose filings are handled centrally by a parent group — but no filing consulted here explicitly links company 03173568 to the coffee business. The name, country and 1996 date match; the identification is not formally confirmed.
• Which address is the office. Business databases and an exhibitor listing give Mercanta’s head office as 167–169 London Road, 2 Princeton Mews, Kingston upon Thames, KT2 6PT, with a Seattle address at 2012 East Union St. and a Singapore address at **24 Duxton Hill 03-01.⁷⁹¹⁰ None of these were confirmed against the company’s own contact page here, and none match the registered office above. Treat street addresses as reported.
• The office and warehouse counts do not agree with each other. Mercanta’s homepage says 8 warehouses across 3 continents and lists six named cities; its About page says 7 cities across 3 continents and a supply chain running through 7 warehouses.¹⁵ The two pages are the same company describing itself on the same site, so the difference is most likely a stale page rather than a real dispute — but do not quote a warehouse count as fact.
• How many countries it serves. Mercanta’s own pages say more than 50 countries; a LinkedIn company profile cited in the research behind this note says more than 40.¹⁵¹⁰ The higher, more recent figure on the company’s own site is the better one; the gap is probably time.
• Offices this note does not list. The research report behind this note also placed Colombia among Mercanta’s sourcing offices, sourced to LinkedIn.¹⁰ Mercanta’s own About page names Guatemala but not Colombia.¹ Single-sourced, unconfirmed.
• Ownership beyond the group listing. ECOM’s own page names Mercanta as a group company, and that is the whole of what is documented.³ When ECOM acquired it, on what terms, and what shareholding Stephen Hurst or anyone else retains is not published anywhere consulted — that would need Companies House filings history or a deal announcement. Do not state an acquisition date.

Why an importer this size matters

Specialty coffee’s public story is farms, auctions and record prices. Importers are almost invisible in it, and they are the reason most of those coffees exist in a warehouse a roaster can actually buy from. Mercanta’s particular contribution is longevity and access: a British roaster starting up in 2005 or 2015 could buy a single pallet of a traceable, named-farm lot from a company that had already spent a decade building the relationship at origin, without flying anywhere or committing to a container.

That is the practical meaning of the Direct trade and Coffee supply chain arguments for most of the market. Very few roasters buy directly from farms; they buy from a desk like this one, which did. Whether the transparency claim holds — who was paid what, and how much of the price reached the farm — is exactly what an importer’s own offering page cannot tell you, here as at Falcon Coffees and Sucafina.

Related

• ECOM — the Swiss commodity group Mercanta belongs to, and the note to read beside this one
• Falcon Coffees — the other British green trade house owned by a larger foreign parent, an almost exact structural mirror
• Sucafina · Cafe Imports · M-Cultivo — peer importers and green-buying platforms
• Green coffee buying · Coffee supply chain · Direct trade · C-market · Green coffee grading — the trade it sits in the middle of
• Cup of Excellence · Alliance for Coffee Excellence · Green coffee auctions · Buying consortium — the competition circuit it buys in
• Cupping · Coffee scoring · Q Grader · Specialty coffee — the quality language its offers and its school are written in
• Guatemala · Colombia · Costa Rica · El Salvador · Nicaragua · Brazil · Honduras · Kenya · Rwanda · Peru · Ethiopia · Panama — origins in its sourcing network
• Premiumisation — the end of the market its positioning targets

Official links

• Official site — Mercanta, The Coffee Hunters
• Companies House — MERCANTA LIMITED (03173568)
• Official site — ECOM Coffee division (parent group)

Footnotes

1. Mercanta — About Us ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. Companies House — MERCANTA LIMITED, company number 03173568 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. ECOM — Coffee division (group companies by country, including Mercanta Ltd., London) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Private auctions are killing off Cup of Excellence — Coffee Intelligence ↩ ↩²

5. Mercanta — homepage (office opening years, warehouses, tagline) ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

6. Mercanta — Our Origins ↩

7. CB Insights — Mercanta company profile ↩ ↩²

8. Mercanta — Happy 19th Birthday to Cup of Excellence ↩ ↩²

9. Seoul International Cafe Show — Mercanta exhibitor listing ↩

10. Mercanta Ltd. — LinkedIn company page ↩ ↩² ↩³