Madcap’s Dito Coffee Casts a Wider Sourcing Net for Lower Prices

Dito Coffee bags. All images courtesy of Madcap Coffee.

Michigan-based quality-focused roasting company Madcap Coffee recently launched a sibling brand called Dito Coffee, featuring playful pink branding and a more comfortable price point for many consumers.

The Grand Rapids company is leveraging its already established direct-sourcing relationships with producers to buy higher volumes of coffees, with Dito offerings generally scoring a point or two lower on the 100-point Specialty Coffee Association legacy cupping scale.

While perhaps not boasting some of the complexity or flavors of some of Madcap’s offerings — which tend to score 85 or higher, according to the company’s standards — they are nonetheless intended to be balanced and positively flavorful.

At the Madcap roastery in Grand Rapids.

“There are some fantastic ‘specialty coffees’ scoring in the 80-84 range that haven’t historically been a good fit for us,” Madcap Coffee Founder Trevor Corlett recently told Daily Coffee News. “The point of creating the Dito brand was to provide a creative way to reach a broader audience, buy deeper from our partners and expand on what is delicious.”

Casey Routledge, Madcap’s head of coffee operations, now sources coffees for both brands. The inaugural Dito selection consists of two blends called Weekend and Spark, with coffees coming from producers in Guatemala, Colombia and Brazil.

Both blends include coffees from José Arturo Alarcón in Huehuetenango, with whom Madcap has worked for the past three years. Next year, Corlett said Dito will incorporate coffees from Madcap’s longest-standing partners, the Rodriguez family, in El Salvador.

“The great part about the difference in sourcing structure from how we source coffees for Madcap is that we’re able to buy deeper from our current producing partners,” said Corlett. “Dito becomes an outlet for coffees that weren’t a fit for Madcap’s lineup.”

The project comes amid widespread concern throughout the U.S. about the rising price of green coffee, with many roasters raising prices to cover costs, and fresh concerns over tariffs on goods from coffee-producing countries.

“The state of the market has forced us to be even more creative with our back-end pricing structure, because our goal with Dito was to offer some more affordable coffees than what Madcap offers,” said Corlett. “We’re blessed to be able to have the ability to look at how we can creatively blend our margins to continue providing a more affordable product to folks. For now. We’ll see how long it lasts.”

The Dito model is not without precedent. In 2019, a time when commodity coffee prices were historically low, Pennsylvania-based Passenger Coffee launched a sibling brand called Necessary Coffee, seeking to support producers more through higher-volume purchasing.

At Madcap, which Corlett founded in 2008, the Dito brand is part of a broader effort to engage customers. The company continues to operate four cafe locations, while more may be in the works.

“Madcap’s cafes have been performing really well post COVID and we’d love to expand that,” said Corlett. “Plus, we (read: me) have a special place in our heart for creating cafe spaces.”

Anyone interested in hearing more of Corlett’s thoughts on coffee prices, the retail landscape or anything else coffee-related will soon have access to “The Proper Cap: A Madcap Coffee Podcast.” Featuring Corlett and Madcap L&D Manager Josiah DeBoer, the podcast is launching later this month.

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