A P280 cup of pour-over and a P7 sachet of instant both come from the same Philippine soil. Only one of them is treated like it means something.
That contradiction is what I kept circling back to in Quezon City, standing in a room full of people who sell milk tea and frappe for a living, watching a world barista champion launch a Filipino ingredient brand aimed at exactly none of them — and all of them, depending on how you count it.
The Collision
The champion is Boram Um: Korean family, born in Brazil, took the 2023 World Barista title in Greece. The social media version of his bio stops at “barista.” The more accurate one is economic proof of concept — he took a local agricultural product, vertically integrated the supply chain around it, and forced a global market to pay a premium for the labor of the farm as much as the skill of the extraction. That’s the thesis his championship was built on: not just pulling a great shot, but making the whole chain, from soil to cup, visible and valuable.
So watching him show up not at a high-end specialty roaster in Makati but at a launch event for EasyBrand — a company that sells liquid espresso concentrate and syrups to sari-sari store owners — felt deliberate. Two completely different economies, colliding in one room. “When I first tried Easy’s products I was very impressed with the flavor precision,” Um said of the partnership. “Working with a more commercial brand like this is important because we’re able to really scale businesses and bring consistency to what businesses want to serve in different countries, different cities.” A world champion vouching for the machinery of the Filipino micro-entrepreneur is its own kind of statement about where the real scalable industry actually lives.
Three Philippines, Three Cups
There isn’t one Philippine coffee culture. There are at least three, and they rarely talk to each other.
The first is Um’s professional world — specialty, third-wave, single-origin pour-over, P180 to P380 a cup. Yardstick Coffee in Makati holds 34th place on the World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops list for 2026, a drop from 18th the year before. It’s also the only Philippine name on this year’s list — down from four in 2025. The baristas there know the farm, the elevation, the processing method. But the daily minimum wage in Metro Manila sits around P645. A single specialty cup is close to half a day’s pay for someone at the bottom of the formal economy. That’s not an argument against the P280 cup — it’s a reminder that it isn’t a neutral object. It’s a class marker.
The second tier is where the growth story actually lives. Pickup Coffee launched in 2022 and crossed 500 branches nationwide in the first quarter of 2026, racing toward a targeted 800 by year’s end. Its core customers are BPO night-shift workers who need a good cup before midnight and can’t justify P280 for it. Average drink cost: P50 to P149. Add the independent cafe belt threading through Maginhawa, Katipunan, and Kapitolyo in Quezon City — real coffee, real atmosphere, real community, priced at P60 to P75 a cup, low enough that it never reads as a statement.
The third tier feeds the most people and gets talked about the least: the 3-in-1 sachet, the P7 cup from the corner store, barako brewed from a thermos at the wet market. This is where an estimated 60% of Filipino coffee consumption actually happens, and it’s the tier EasyBrand is building around — flavored syrups and packaged beans sourced from Atok in the Cordilleras, priced for someone starting a business with P2,000, not P2 million.
Three tiers, all drinking coffee, almost none of the money from tiers one and two making it back to the people producing the beans in the first place.
The Markup Nobody Puts on the Menu
Estimates of the Philippine coffee market’s total size vary a lot depending on who’s measuring and what’s included — one industry analysis put it at roughly $5.7 billion (around P335 billion) as of 2025, with steady growth projected through the next decade. Whatever the exact number, it’s a real industry by any measure. And yet the farm-gate price for Arabica — what a farmer is actually paid per kilogram — sat under P300 as of early 2025 per Philippine Statistics Authority data, for beans that can retail at P2,000 to P4,000 per kilogram in a specialty cafe, or roughly P280 a cup after extraction. Depending on how you account for it, that’s somewhere between a 700% and 1,300% markup. Industry reporting since then has shown some quality-grade lots fetching P500 to P800 per kilo at auction — real progress, but still a sliver of what the same beans are worth by the time they’re in a cup.
To be fair to the cafes: between the farm and the cup there’s processing, roasting, logistics, rent, labor, equipment, skill. Nobody in that chain is simply pocketing the difference. But the farmer remains the most exposed person in it — the least capital, the least fallback, and the first to lose their kids to a BPO job the moment one opens up nearby. Consumption keeps rising. Cafes keep multiplying. Pour-over content keeps flooding the feed. The farmer’s position hasn’t fundamentally moved.
EasyBrand’s decision to source directly from Atok for its Signature Beans line is worth watching precisely because it’s trying to shorten that chain. Whether the economic benefit actually reaches the farmers growing it is a harder question, and one I can’t answer yet from a single launch event. But the intent is worth tracking as the brand scales.
What Actually Needs to Change
The Philippine coffee industry doesn’t need foreign validation to succeed. It needs infrastructure, investment, fair farm-gate pricing, and the kind of domestic pride in local beans that drives consumption from the inside rather than the outside. The farms are here. The beans are here. The baristas — increasingly, the world-class ones — are here. What hasn’t been built yet is the conviction that Philippine coffee is worth the premium because the country decided that, not because a champion said so.
I had my first cup of coffee around age seven, watching my grandmother brew barako on the stove until the smell filled the whole house. I didn’t understand the bitterness yet. I understood that it meant morning, meant presence, meant home. I’ve had P7 cups since and P380 cups since, and the honest takeaway is that the best one is almost never the most expensive. It’s the one that tells you something true about where it came from. The Philippines has that story. It just needs to stop waiting for someone else to be the one who tells it.
Field Notes
A quick update since the launch event this piece is built around: Pickup Coffee’s footprint has grown fast even in the months since — north of 500 branches and climbing toward 800 by the end of the year — so the “second tier” described above is only getting bigger and more central to how most Filipinos actually drink coffee day to day.
Specialty tier: Yardstick Coffee (Makati) — ranked 34th on the World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops list, 2026, the only Philippine entry this year. Expect P180–P380 a cup, single-origin and pour-over focused.
Mid tier: Pickup Coffee locations across Metro Manila (500+ nationwide and still expanding as of mid-2026) for a fast, consistent P50–P149 cup. For something slower, the independent cafe strip along Maginhawa, Katipunan, and Kapitolyo in Quezon City.
Everyday tier: Coffee kiosks in mall areas and wet markets citywide — up to P30 for a regular kiosk cup, P7 for a 3-in-1 sachet or thermos-brewed barako.
EasyBrand: liquid espresso concentrate, flavored syrups, and packaged beans (sourced from Atok, Cordilleras) built for small business owners, not specialty roasters.
Budget (PHP)
- Specialty cafe cup: ₱180–₱380
- Mid-tier cafe cup (Pickup Coffee, QC independents): ₱50–₱149
- Sachet / kiosk / barako: ₱7–₱30
- Metro Manila daily minimum wage (for reference): ~₱645
We shot the footage from this launch event earlier this year — the full conversation with Boram Um, plus a closer look at the Metro Manila cafe scene this piece draws from. If you want the visual side of it, the video’s still up here.