Trade Coffee Reviews 157

Terrible customer support. They'll give you an attitude and push you to cancel your subscription. They clearly hate their customers!

The coffee was fresh, and the variety is fairly extensive. However, I had multiple technical issues from signing up initially (subscription never kicked off and had to do my taste profile all over again), to the subscription reverting to an expensive non-free shipping version without any warning after my starter pack. Then finally a shipping delay of over a week past the expected date.

That, coupled with the fact that no bag I ever received (out of 3) was more than 310 grams - usually was 300g. That creates a quite expensive situation for a $17-18 bag of coffee. But you are getting access to small craft roasters and paying for the ease of access.

Finally, I decided to go with Intelligentsia for a bigger box, more consistent subscription experience.

If you want info re cawfeee caughfy, ciwfee no, wait I mean cougheee (I haven’t had my coffee yet, sorry) get Samuel on the phone and ask whatever you need to know. He will likely refuse to help and hang up. I AM LYING ALL YOU BUTTONED UP PEOPLE! HE IS VERY SMART AND VERY NICE… ok, so he picked my cawfee the first time and it was poifect. These people are nice people who answer the phone like real people, as in back in ancient times when things were a helluva lot easier and I only needed one cup of ciffeee to get through the same number of passwords per day. It’s enough of a reason for me to keep drinking their coffee besides the fact it tastes great. I could go on and on for hours for no good reason, but I assure you I am sincere about the following: the company, the coffee and Samuel are the perfect combination. If you are a Trade supervisor reading this please give him a brand new BMW, a house in Santa Monica and a 500k raise immediately. He deserves that for being so helpful and fun while putting up with me chitter-chattering at him way too long on the phone. I did that without having had any caffeine as well, which is scary. S for Smarty will also correct your brewing technique if you are failing Cawfickle 101 as I was before he straightened things out, and said they would send me free coffee for life and, yes, that was a lie too.

Missleading advertisement and signup tricks. They will advertise a $20 voucher if you sign up for their email newsletter over text message. I signed up, and then received a message with a link to sign up for a $120/month subscription.

I emailed them to ask about the voucher and they said that it is actually for a subscription.

For starters: I'll never buy coffee on a subscription. I think the idea of getting everything on a subscription is ridiculous. I was seriously considering getting a wide variety of beans as I am looking to switch over from buying from Blue Bottle, these misleading tricks will keep me far away.

What is the purpose of this company? IMO, they leech of good roasteries. They have no product themselves, they serve no purpose. Besides that, the bags I got were very stale and I suspect the roast date to be wrong. No way a fresh bag can be that stale, but obviously I can't know for sure. They take out 30 grams per bag to make money.
0/10, would never recommend. Buy from roasteries directly people instead of supporting companies like this.

If you appreciate the taste of coffee, STAY AWAY. I love making pour over coffees each morning, and I really appreciate good beans from local roasters. I genuinely am into the intricacies of taste. My only problem is that I sometimes run out of beans and am forced to rush to a local coffee shop to buy beans before the headache starts in :). So I thought drinktrade would be perfect. WRONG. I'm not kidding - I got 3 bags of coffee, and every single one of them was bad. Not as in bad taste (that, too) - but bad as in not fresh. The roast date appeared to be fine, but I can guarantee you, the beans had lost all of their flavor, and they tasted old. I stopped drinking it quickly.
AND Bad customer service - I reached out to customer service 3 times, and they would not even give me a refund for even one bag nor credit me another bag after my huge dissatisfaction. Finally, they agreed to send one more bag. Guess what? Not fresh. If you actually like what you drink, then don't use this service. I hope they go down because it seems they are trying to commercialize a local phenomenon. I like the idea - poor implementation. Though I can't confirm, seems more like a money grab.

The coffee was terrible and probably bad. It was sour and did not smell pleasant, but no one from customer service cares to write back so I cancelled. Go to whole foods and pick something there because it will be better than this junk.
Edit: I finally heard back from the company and they replaced the bag with an amazing coffee! They asked some questions about flavor profile and sent the perfect bean! I am keeping the subscription and and happy they finally reached out.

I've never even tried the coffee but the fact that Eric Girouard was involved with this company tells me to stay away !

People who have Trade subscriptions should note that they have started requesting roasters to under fill bags (even when packaging doesn’t match the weight) in order to save costs while charging the same price. When support was contacted, they did fess up to it, saying they are having “conversations” and offered credit for the next bag. What was requested is that they communicate clearly up front these changes to subscribers. After waiting 30 days for a response, I have canceled my subscription and have encouraged others to do so. There’s an active thread on r/coffee of Reddit.

Great coffee from a huge variety of roasters and origins.

Would be 5 stars if there were better options to get the coffee ground to the right size for you. Not everybody has a high quality burr grinder at home and my initial experience trying to order ground coffee could have been better.

That being said if you are getting whole beans there are not many better options out there

I've been on the subscription plan for over a year. I receive prompt shipments of the most wonderful coffees I've ever had. Even during the height of the pandemic, shipments were timely. Never had an issue with billing. Definitely gourmet coffee and well worth every penny.

I've been a Trade subscriber for 6 months now, and I'm in love with Trade! I love the blog resources and the community. It's also a super user-friendly site that's perfect for me to find the coffee with the notes and processing style I want (you can filter for honey processed!) Great network of third wave coffee roasters. Never been late for an order (you can pick roasters that roast on your wish date!) Love, love LOVE Trade.

I did not have a good experience with this company. I went into my account and set our brew preference to espresso. The company then continued to send the wrong coffee grind. Apparently there is a whole other section for grind (the website is not user friendly). Reaching the company is a challenge if you work 9 -5 EST since those are their only business hours. The email link on their website also doesn’t open properly and I had to call them after work hours to even get an email contact from their answering service. They have since refused to give me a refund on $50 worth of coffee I can’t use in my coffee maker. Don’t waste your money on this kind of service. It’s not customer focused, and it’s much nicer to support the small coffee businesses in your area.

Hello,

I join your coffee plan to try but also I am a member of tapjoy and do get a reward when I purchased some products. My order in on the way to my home but still waiting for my reward from tapjoy. Please do understand, I could either spend the money on what I wanted for my game or give yourself a try and gave you some of that money every month, however tapjoy has not make good on the reward yet. Who do I contact??? You or tapjoy? In the meantime I will not reorder until I find a answer
Thank You
Francoise McIlwain

After my first shipment, I changed my subscription frequency to every six weeks, but the company still shipped my second coffee bag after 3 weeks. They didn't send any confirmation to even see if I liked my first bag and make sure I wanted to continue. They won't refund me for the second bag of coffee even though this was clearly a terrible customer experience.

Lousy website, took it's time arriving, inferior coffee, better options out there, I ended up going with black rifle coffee instead.

Great place to order freshly roasted coffee online. Excellent selection, fast delivery, and coffee shop quality at a reasonable price.